Aristide Blank
Aristide or Aristid Blank, also spelled Blanc or Blanck, was a Romanian financier, economist, arts patron and playwright. His father, Mauriciu Blank, an assimilated and naturalized Romanian Jew, was manager of the , a major financial enterprise. Aristide took up jobs within the same company, and introduced various new ideas for development with a series of pamphlets. He was drafted as a junior officer in the Second Balkan War and again in World War I, though he did not see action during the latter; instead, he advanced causes related to Romanian nationalism, as well as his own agenda, in the Russian Republic, in the Far East, and eventually in France. He also began expanding BMB investments, branching out into maritime transport and founding CFRNA/CIDNA airlines. This period witnessed his attempt at setting up a press empire around the twin dailies Adevărul and Dimineața, and his brief engagement with Epoca.
Inheriting his father's position at the BMB, Blank expanded its activities and expenditures, setting aside money for graft, and allowing his staff to engage in accounting fraud. By 1923, he was sponsoring nationalist propaganda writings, working alongside historians Nicolae Iorga and Vasile Pârvan, as well as advocating for a regime of free trade. He set up his own publishing house, Cultura Națională, and a literary agency, which was for a while managed by philosopher Nae Ionescu—ultimately sacked by Blank upon the discovery of embezzlement. Blank, who allegedly alternated mainstream politics with support for the far-left, found himself pitted against the antisemitic far-right, being brutalized by the National Christian Defense League and marked for retribution by the Iron Guard.
Beginning in the early 1920s, Blank cultivated Crown Prince Carol, who took over as King of Romania after a 1930 coup. Emerging as Carol's economic adviser, Blank joined the resulting camarilla, an affiliation which shielded him from the consequences of BMB mismanagement. The enterprise crashed in 1931, unable to absorb the effects of the Great Depression. Blank was removed from his managerial position following intervention by the National Bank of Romania, but used political channels to preserve some measure of control, and was instrumental in toppling National Bank Governor Mihail Manoilescu, who did not wish to refinance the BMB. His influence fluctuated for the remainder of Carol's reign; still unable to fully control the BMB, he still owned Discom, a lucrative retailer for products of state monopolies. In the 1930s, he helped develop Eforie and Techirghiol into summer resorts.
Public antisemitism and fascism took the forefront during the late years of Carlism and the early years of World War II. This period saw Blank marginalized, and resulted in additional scrutiny of the BMB affair, at the end of which he was sentenced to pay 600 million lei in damages. Blank reemerged as BMB manager after King Michael's Coup of 1944, but he and his business were finally repressed by the communist regime from 1948. In 1953, he was sentenced to 20 years for high treason, but managed to have that verdict overturned in 1955. After international pressures, he was allowed to emigrate in 1958, and lived his final months in Paris. His children from his successive marriages and affairs include American soldier Milenko Blank and French press magnate Patrice-Aristide Blank.
Biography
Early life
Born in Bucharest on the first day of 1883, Aristide was the son of Mauriciu Blank. Through his paternal lineage, he belonged to the Sephardi minority within the local Jewish community, and was distantly related to linguist Moses Gaster. His clan, originally known as Derrera el Blanco, had first settled in Wallachia during the 18th century, but their Judaism prevented them from obtaining naturalization. Martinho de Brederode, Portuguese ambassador to Romania in 1920, described Aristide as the first Jew to have ever made his way into Romania's high society. By then, the family's ethnic background was still largely unknown to the Romanian public, with the Jewish publication Mântuirea noting in 1920 that Aristide was of "obscure origin". As reported in 1924 by L'Univers Israélite, he was fully assimilated, "Jewish only in origin"; the same year, Opinia newspaper assessed that Blank was "a Semite seen by other Jews as a renegade assimilated to the point of exhibiting all Romanian vices, the parent of Romanian Christian children". In the early 1910s, the junior banker reportedly endorsed Radu D. Rosetti's movement in support of cremation.Around 1880, Mauriciu was entering the financial elite of the newly established Principality of Romania, having served as head of the Marmorosch Blank Bank since 1874. At the time of Aristide's birth, it was the most powerful private bank in the fledgling Romanian Kingdom. Blank's political friend and enemy, Constantin Argetoianu, claims that Mauriciu had a marriage of convenience to Aristide's mother Betina Goldenberg, who was "ugly as well as vulgar, avaricious as well as venomous". She was contrarily described by her Rabbi, Jacob Itzhak Niemirower, as "pious" in her Judaism, "a symbol of the Hebrew concept of life both festive and holy." One of Aristide's sisters was married off to another financier, Adalbert Csillag, who would experience complete bankruptcy. Another sister, Margot, married industrialist Herman Spayer, whose residence on Batiștei Street was briefly used by the BMB. The family finally received Romanian citizenship in 1883, shortly after Aristide's birth.
According to a hostile note by French journalist Jean Mourat, Blank Jr was "raised in luxury, so as to keep up with good traditions." Aristide received an elite education, and was possessed of an artistic sensibility; however, Argetoianu portrays him as "highly intelligent lacking a serious culture", his main attributes being ambition, jealousy, and eventually paranoia. He became a published poet in his teenage years. In 1899 Foaia Populară put out his debut poem, Bătrâna; this was followed in April 1900 by Despărțire, a pastiche from Eduard von Feuchtersleben that he signed as "Aristide Blanc", also in Foaia Populară in April 1900. Blank took a graduation diploma from the University of Bucharest Faculty of Law and Philosophy. His first career from 1904 was as a lawyer affiliated with the bar association of Bucharest.
In February 1905, Blank's translations of poems by Mihai Eminescu into German saw print in the Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung. He experimented in other fields as well: in March 1905, he played violin for attendees of a BMB banquet; he was also interested in automobiles, and in early 1908 was issued license plate "118", as one of Romania's first registered car-owners. He had spent most of 1905 undergoing specialization at banks in the City of London, and had been appointed branch subdirector at the BMB. In late 1906, he had also toured the Aromanian communities in Salonica vilayet, donating 1,500 lei for the upkeep of their schools. In October 1908, he announced his engagement to Marietta Culoglu, daughter of politician Emanoil Culoglu, the "distinguished nationalist", and herself noted as an activist for women's suffrage. As argued by Culoglu's critics, their relationship was engineered by Alexandru C. Constantinescu of the National Liberal Party, who thus obtained Blank as an asset for his clique. Aristide and Marietta were wed in January 1909, during a civil ceremony attended by Vintilă Brătianu, Emil Costinescu, and Vasile Morțun. In June of that year, he became a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Romania.
After giving up his law practice, Blank Jr closely followed his father's career in finance. By 1910, he was providing free lessons in political economy for the benefit of BMB employees, and also serving on the board of directors for various BMB branches, including Moldova Bank of Iași and the Aromanian Bank of Commerce. He was inducted into the Order of Commercial and Industrial Merit in 1912, when he also served on the committee to establish the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies. In June 1913, Blank was blackmailed by Seara newspaperman Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, who had inaugurated a smear campaign against the BMB. According to notes left by Searas Mateiu Caragiale, Blank "trapped" Bogdan-Pitești with direct support from the Romanian Police. This refers to a sting operation at Flora Restaurant, where Blank heard Bogdan-Pitești and his associate Adolf Davidescu state their demands while policemen were standing by. Obtaining legal assistance from Take Ionescu, Blank took Bogdan-Pitești to court and won, resulting in his rival's imprisonment. A month after, Romania entered the Second Balkan War, with Blank enlisted as a Land Forces officer in Southern Dobruja. It was here that he first met historian and politician Nicolae Iorga, with whom he would cooperate on cultural ventures in the early 1920s.
World War I
Upon the expedition's end, Blank Jr helped to establish and finance two BMB naval transport enterprises—respectively operating on the Black Sea and the Danube. In the winter of 1914–1915, he was sent to the United Kingdom by Ion I. C. Brătianu's PNL government, in order to secure a loan for the state, establishing neutral Romania's closer ties to the Triple Entente. He and George Danielopolu also formed a two-man delegation to the United States, reaching New York City in early December 1914. This mission caused much controversy at home: Foreign Minister Emanoil Porumbaru refused to sign his name to the deal, believing that it compromised Romania's policy of non-alignment; Porumbaru was consequently forced to resign. Upon his return, Blank debuted in economic theory with a tract on pricing policies, Scumpirea și ieftinirea traiului ; his ideas on this topic inspired banking clerks to set up a consumers' co-operative. During June 1915, he was involved in the grain trade out of Brăila, and criticizing the administration for imposing caps on the exports of foodstuffs. In September, he served as executive of an anonymous partnership for the manufacture and sale of ammunition. This had been established by his father with participation from Culoglu, Alexandru Kirițescu, and Mihail Săulescu. As reported by Argetoianu, Blank Jr still had connections in the German Empire, which he used to plant his protege Felix Wieder in a German consortium—a position which Wieder then used to defraud that firm.The Treaty of Bucharest brought Romania into the war as an Entente ally, then its invasion by Germany. Again drafted as a Lieutenant, Blank enlisted in the Romanian Air Corps. He was subsequently spotted at Iași, the provisional capital of a rump Romanian state. Argetoianu reports that wartime Iași was where Blank first earned the trust of Carol of Hohenzollern, the disgraced Romanian Crown Prince. Carol used Blank in his attempts to earn support from Prime Minister Alexandru Averescu. Also according to Argetoianu, Blank was also faking asthma attacks, which saw him relieved of his duties and sent to Paris. One report by Alexandru Lapedatu suggests that Blank transited through Moscow, in the Russian Republic, where he personally witnessed the November Revolution. He was evicted "by some Englishmen" during the Red Guards' attack on Hotel Metropol. During the exodus of 1917, Blank arrived on a special mission to Vladivostok; from this outpost, he sponsored Ioan Timuș's extended trip to Japan, asking him to act as an informant on Japanese cultural norms, and "therefore of use to our country". Blank himself lived for a while in the Shanghai International Settlement. As recalled by fellow expatriate businessman Gheorghe Pallade, he was engaged in currency speculation, and paraded through the French Concession in an automobile decked in Romanian tricolors. According to this report, Blank, who still wore his officer's uniform, was "terribly enraged" when a Chinese Jew sent him a gift of matzah, seemingly because it exposed his ethnic heritage.
By his own account, Blank was in Republican China when Romania sued for peace with Germany in early 1918. In October 1918, he sailed across the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and into Europe, ultimately reaching France; he had intended to join the French Army, but his services were no longer required after the Armistice of November. He remained in French territory after that date, working primarily as a propagandist and financier for Romanian nationalist causes. Historian identifies Blank and Paul Brătășanu as the two main backers of La Roumanie newspaper, which campaigned for the creation of a Greater Romania. Before the end of 1918, Blank was allegedly in Nice, alongside Octavian Goga, the Transylvanian poet-activist. Goga returned in 1919 to his native region, which had been newly united with Romania, with a check for 100,000 kronen, donated for the establishment of Romanian-language libraries. By early 1920, Blank was also networking with pro-Allied nationalists from both the Old Kingdom and Transylvania, including Take Ionescu and Alexandru Vaida-Voevod. Vaida's private correspondence notes that Ionescu, Blank and Constantinescu were colluding to bring the former in as Prime Minister, which required them to manipulate the market against the national interest—a "solidarity of bandits". Lapedatu also claims that Blank, rather than acting as a philanthropist, recovered all the money he had lent to Romanian politicians in 1918–1920.
Before the Armistice, Blank had visited the Société des Avions Bernard, which were creating a bomber plane capable of reaching Berlin. In the aftermath, he calculated that the same investment could be used to create airline services between Paris and Bucharest. In December 1918, he also published in La Renaissance his own project for a Greater Romania, which he depicted as an economic boon for the Allied cause. Blank envisaged the Danube as a commercial highway for Romanian grain and timber, but noted that its success relied on the internationalization of the Turkish Straits. According to diplomat Nicolae Petrescu-Comnen, Blank was one of the "men of culture" and "patriots" who personally assisted him in countering the propaganda put out by the Hungarian Republic, which vied with Romania for control of Transylvania. In 1919, when he was decommissioned as a Captain in the Second Cavalry Regiment, Blank put out the first volume of an illustrated propaganda album, La Roumanie en images. Iorga viewed it as a superior work of art, but noted that its selection of prints displayed "banality" and a "lack of familiarity with all newer discoveries regarding Romania's past". After reading his comments, Blank employed Iorga as his editorial adviser. The following year, he sponsored French editions from Iorga's own works: Histoire des Roumains et de leur civilisation and Anthologie de la littérature roumaine. Lapedatu recounts that, in doing so, Blank saved the former book from being shelved by Hachette.