The image of the Jews in the Romanian collective mentality and their past and present situation in Romania

Abstract

The Jews of Romania were a particular ethnic group which, during history, had to bear a lot of discriminations. In modern epoch they could attend schools only by paying substantial fees, very few of them had the Romanian citizenship until 1918 and they could not be active in all professions. The interwar period meant for the Jews the time when they had the most rights in Romania, while, during the war, the anti-Jewish laws, forced labour, deportations in Transnistria were established, and the Jews from North-West Transylvania were sent by Hungarian authorities in German concentration camps. Romanians often displayed feelings of hostility towards the Jews, mostly in periods when the situation of their country was precarious. This paper will also present a few negative features used by Romanians in order to define the Jews. Last, but not least, the author wanted to show how the Holocaust was regarded by historians and politicians. And here, I noticed that in communist times, when the political elites had the intention to assimilate the Jews, it was considered that during the Holocaust several democratic groups were persecuted or, later, the responsability for Holocaust was put only on Germans. During post-1989 period, integral or partial negation of Holocaust, or its trivialization by comparison, continued to exist.