History of the Jews in Romania
The history of the Jews in Romania concerns the Jews both of Romania and of Romanian origins, from their first mention on what is present-day Romanian territory. Minimal until the 18th century, the size of the Jewish population increased after around 1850, and more especially after the establishment of Greater Romania in the aftermath of World War I. A diverse community, albeit an overwhelmingly urban one, Jews were a target of religious persecution and racism in Romanian society from the late-19th century debate over the "Jewish Question" and the Jewish residents' right to citizenship, leading to the genocide carried out in the lands of Romania as part of the Holocaust. The latter, coupled with successive waves of emigration, including aliyah to Israel, has accounted for a dramatic decrease in the overall size of Romania's present-day Jewish community.
During the reign of Peter the Lame, the Jews of Moldavia, mainly traders from Poland who were competing with locals, were taxed and ultimately expelled. The authorities decided in 1650 and 1741 that Jews had to wear clothing evidencing their status and ethnicity. The first blood libel in Moldavia was made in 1710, when the Jews of Târgu Neamț were charged with having killed a Christian child for ritual purposes. An anti-Jewish riot occurred in Bucharest in the 1760s.
During the Russo-Turkish War, 1768–1774, the Jews in the Danubian Principalities had to endure great hardships. Massacres and pillages were perpetrated in almost every town and village in the country. During the Greek War of Independence, which signalled the Wallachian uprising of 1821, Jews were victims of pogroms and persecutions. In the 1860s, there was another riot motivated by blood libel accusations.
Antisemitism was officially enforced under the premierships of Ion Brătianu. During his first years in office Brătianu reinforced and applied old discrimination laws, insisting that Jews were not allowed to settle in the countryside, while declaring many Jewish urban inhabitants to be vagrants and expelling them from the country. The emigration of Romanian Jews on a larger scale commenced soon after 1878. By 1900 there were 250,000 Romanian Jews: 3.3% of the population, 14.6% of the city dwellers, 32% of the Moldavian urban population and 42% of Iași.
Between the establishment of the National Legionary State and 1942, 80 anti-Jewish regulations were passed. Starting at the end of October, 1940, the Romanian fascist movement known as the Iron Guard began a massive antisemitic campaign, torturing and beating Jews and looting their shops, culminating in the failed coup accompanied by a pogrom in Bucharest, in which 125 Jews were killed. Military dictator Ion Antonescu eventually stopped the violence and chaos created by the Iron Guard by brutally suppressing the rebellion, but continued the policy of oppression and massacre of Jews, and, to a lesser extent, of Roma. After Romania entered the war at the start of Operation Barbarossa, atrocities against Jews became common, starting with the Iași pogrom. According to the Wiesel Commission report released by the Romanian government in 2004, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust in Romania and the occupied Soviet territories under Romanian control, among them the Transnistria Governorate. An additional 135,000 Jews living under Hungarian control in Northern Transylvania also were murdered in the Holocaust, as were some 5,000 Romanian Jews in other countries.
On the current territory of Romania, between 290,000 and 360,000 Romanian Jews survived World War II. During the communist regime in Romania, there was a mass emigration to Israel, and in 1987, only 23,000 Jews lived in Romania.
Today, the majority of Romanian Jews live in Israel, while modern-day Romania continues to host a modest Jewish population. In the 2021 census, 2,378 people declared themselves to be ethnically Jewish.
Early history
Jewish communities on what would later become Romanian territory were attested as early as the 2nd century AD, at a time when the Roman Empire had established its rule over Dacia. Inscriptions and coins have been found in such places as Sarmizegetusa and Orșova.The existence of the Crimean Karaites, an ethnic group adherent of Karaite Judaism, suggests that there was a steady Jewish presence around the Black Sea, including in parts of today's Romania, in the trading ports from the mouths of the Danube and the Dniester ; they may have been present in some Moldavian fairs by the 16th century or earlier. The earliest Jewish presence in what would become Moldavia was recorded in Cetatea Albă ; in Wallachia, they were first attested in the 1550s, living in Bucharest. During the second half of the 14th century, the future territory of Romania became an important place of refuge for Jews expelled from the Kingdom of Hungary and Poland by King Louis I. In Transylvania, Hungarian Jews were recorded in Saxon citadels around 1492.
Prince Roman I exempted the Jews from military service, in exchange for a tax of 3 löwenthaler per person. Also in Moldavia, Stephen the Great treated Jews with consideration. Isaac ben Benjamin Shor of Iași was appointed stolnic, being subsequently advanced to the rank of logofăt; he continued to hold this office under Bogdan the Blind, the son and successor of Stephen.
At this time both Danubian Principalities came under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, and a number of Sephardim living in Istanbul migrated to Wallachia, while Jews from Poland and the Holy Roman Empire settled in Moldavia. Although they took an important part in Ottoman government and formed a large part of a community of foreign creditors and traders, Jews were harassed by the hospodars of the two Principalities. Moldavia's Prince Stephen IV deprived the Jewish merchants of almost all the rights given to them by his two predecessors; Petru Rareș confiscated Jewish wealth in 1541, after alleging that Jews in the cattle trade had engaged in tax evasion. Alexandru Lăpușneanu persecuted the community alongside other social categories, until he was dethroned by Jacob Heraclides, a Greek Lutheran, who was lenient to his Jewish subjects; Lăpușneanu did not renew his persecutions after his return on the throne in 1564. The role of Ottoman and local Jews in financing various princes increased as Ottoman economic demands were mounting after 1550 ; several violent incidents throughout the period were instigated by princes unable to repay their debts.
During the first short reign of Peter the Lame the Jews of Moldavia, mainly traders from Poland who were competing with locals, were taxed and ultimately expelled. In 1582, he succeeded in regaining his rule over the country with the help of the Jewish physician Benveniste, who was a friend of the influential Solomon Ashkenazi; the latter then exerted his influence with the Prince in favor of his coreligionists.
In Wallachia, Prince Alexandru II Mircea engaged as his private secretary and counselor Isaiah ben Joseph, who used his influence on behalf of the Jews. In 1573 Isaiah was dismissed, owing to court intrigues, but he was not harmed any further, and subsequently left for Moldavia where he entered the service of Muscovy's Grand Prince Ivan the Terrible. Through the efforts of Solomon Ashkenazi, Aron Tiranul was placed on the throne of Moldavia; nevertheless, the new ruler persecuted and executed nineteen Jewish creditors in Iași, who were decapitated without process of law. At around the same time, in Wallachia, the violent repression of creditors peaked under Michael the Brave, who, after killing Turkish creditors in Bucharest, probably engaged in violence against Jews settled south of the Danube during his campaign in Rumelia.
Early Modern Age
In 1623, the Jews in Transylvania were awarded certain privileges by Prince Gabriel Bethlen, who aimed to attract entrepreneurs from Ottoman lands into his country; the grants were curtailed during following decades, when Jews were only allowed to settle in Gyulafehérvár. Among the privileges granted was one allowing Jews to wear traditional dress; eventually, the authorities in Gyulafehérvár decided to allow Jews to wear only clothing evidencing their status and ethnicity.The status of Jews who had converted to Eastern Orthodoxy was established in Wallachia by Matei Basarab's Pravila de la Govora and in Moldavia by Vasile Lupu's Carte românească de învățătură. The latter ruler treated the Jews with consideration until the appearance of the Cossacks, who marched against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and who, while crossing the region, killed many Jews; the violence led many Ashkenazi Jews from Poland took refuge in Moldavia and Wallachia, establishing small but stable communities. Massacres and forced conversions by the Cossacks occurred in 1652, when the latter came to Iași on the occasion of the Vasile Lupu's daughter marriage to Timush, the son of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and during the rule of Gheorghe Ștefan.
According to Anton Maria Del Chiaro, secretary of the Wallachian princes between 1710 and 1716, the Jewish population of Wallachia was required to respect a certain dresscode. Thus, they were prohibited from wearing clothes of other color than black or violet, or to wear yellow or red boots. Nevertheless, the Romanian scholar Andrei Oișteanu argued that such ethnic and religious social stigma was uncommon in Moldavia and Wallachia, as well as throughout the Eastern Orthodox areas of Europe.
The first blood accusation in Moldavia was made April 5, 1710, when the Jews of Târgu Neamț were charged with having killed a Christian child for ritual purposes´. The instigator was a baptized Jew who had helped to carry the body of a child, murdered by Christians, into the courtyard of the synagogue. On the next day five Jews were killed, others were maimed, and every Jewish house was pillaged, while the representatives of the community were imprisoned and tortured. Meanwhile, some influential Jews appealed to Prince Nicholas Mavrocordatos in Iași, who ordered an investigation resulting in the freeing of those arrested. This was the first time that the Orthodox clergy participated in attacks on Jews. It was due to the clergy's instigations that in 1714 a similar charge was brought against the Jews of the city of Romanthe murder by a group of Roman Catholics of a Christian girl-servant to Jewish family was immediately blamed on Jews; every Jewish house was plundered, and two prominent Jews were hanged, before the real criminals were discovered by the authorities.
According to the Romanian-Israeli historian Moshe Idel, Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, was born in the Principality of Moldavia, in the area that would later become Bukovina.
Under Constantin Brâncoveanu, Wallachian Jews were recognized as a special guild in Bucharest, led by a starost. Jews in both Wallachia and Moldavia were subject to the Hakham Bashi in Iași, but soon the Bucharest starost assumed several religious duties. Overtaxed and persecuted under Ștefan Cantacuzino, Wallachian Jews obtained valuable privileges during Nicholas Mavrocordatos' rule in that country. Another anti-Jewish riot occurred in Bucharest in the 1760s, and was encouraged by the visit of Ephram II, Patriarch of Jerusalem.
In 1726, in the Moldavian borough of Onițcani, four Jews were accused of having kidnapped a five-year-old child, of killing him on Easter and of collecting his blood in a barrel. They were tried at Iași under the supervision of Moldavian Prince Mihai Racoviță, and eventually acquitted following diplomatic protests. The event was echoed in several contemporary chronicles and documents — for example, the French ambassador to the Porte, Jean-Baptiste Louis Picon, remarked that such an accusation was no longer accepted in "civilized countries". The most obvious effects on the condition of the Jewish inhabitants of Moldavia were witnessed during the reign of John Mavrocordatos : a Jewish farmer in the vicinity of Suceava reported the prince to the Porte for allegedly using his house to rape a number of kidnapped Jewish women; Mavrocordatos had his accuser hanged. This act aroused the anger of Mahmud I's kapucu in Moldavia, and the prince paid the penalty with the loss of his throne.