Diana Chiriac

Introduction in Jewish History in Poland, Russia and Ukraine Chiriac Andreea-Diana
Prof. dr. Andrii Portnov Matrikelnr: 101912

SoSe 2019 Kuwi Bachelor
Mihai Eminescu and the Jewish question
An analysis of Mihai Eminescu's relations with the Jews cannot be perceived

without presenting some details on the history of the Jews established in Romania in
the 19th century. As it is known, the Treaty of Adrianopol (1829) meant for the
Romanian Principalities total commercial freedom, which determined that the
Romanian rulers encouraged the settlement of the Jews in these countries, so that they
could prosper. Due to the fact that the Jews were denied ownership of the land, they
would concentrate on cities. Under these conditions, the Jewish bourgeoisie signifies
a real competition for the Romanian bourgeoisie, which has generated negative
reactions from a segment of the intellectuals and the Romanian political class.
Interesting is Moses Gaster's perception1 of the relations between Jews and

Romanians. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, few Jews were interested in
politics and you could rarely meet a Jew reading a Romanian newspaper. Politics was
not one of their concerns. Moses Gaster considered that the Jewish society in
1
Dr. Moses Gaster (1856-1939), was a Jewish rabbi from Romania and England, philologist, literary
historian, publicist and folklorist, especially in the field of Romanian language and culture and of Jewish
studies. Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy, he was also a fighter for the emancipation of the
Jews from Romania and an important Zionist leader. In the year 1878, at the initiative of Prof. Graetz,
Gaster joined the Romanian Committee in Berlin, which, after the Russian-Turkish war, tried to
associate the recognition of Romania's independence by granting full civil rights to non-Christian
minorities, respectively to the Jews. In 1881, Gaster began to study the old and popular Romanian
literature, held lectures in comparative mythology at the University of Bucharest and collaborated in
important cultural publications of the weather. He took part in the meetings of the "Junimea" circle,
establishing friendly relations with Titu Maiorescu and Mihai Eminescu. After in 1885 he was elected
a member of the Romanian Athenaeum, surprisingly, shortly thereafter, he was expelled from Romania,
by the order of Ion Brătianu's liberal government, together with the main opinion leaders of the press
Jews, as a result of their enforcing restrictive legislative measures, administrative abuses and
propaganda against the Jews. He has the merit of being the author of the first attempt to systematize the
Romanian literary folklore in "Romanian Popular Literature", Bucharest, 1883. "Romanian
Chrestomacy", Leipzig, Bucharest, 1892, was considered by many years reference work in the field,
making known in the European specialized fields the Romanian language and literature, as well such
as his lectures at Oxford or studies published in specialist journals.
1
Bucharest was characterized by Balkan superficiality, cultural mimicry and

rudimentary institutions2.
The stranger is an active presence in the imaginary of any society. Lucian Boia
mentions that two features of Romanian history have determined the other's
perception: on the one hand, the reaction of a rural, traditional civilization and, on the
other hand, the powerful impact of foreign models.3
In the nineteenth century there was an intense Jewish emigration to the

Romanian Principalities, in particular to Moldova.
Most Jews came from Galicia and Russia. A small contingent arrived in the
Principalities, from the Ottoman Empire, being descendants of the Jews expelled from
Spain in the fifteenth century4. Thus Carol Iancu mentioned the following figures: "In
1803 there were about 30,000 Jews in Moldova, in 1848 about 60,000, and in 1859
118,922"5. The Jews settled in the cities of the north and south-east of the Romanian
area, in Bessarabia, Moldova, Bucovina and Maramures. The presence of Jews in such
a large number in these regions has led to anti-Semitic outbursts. Romanian anti-
Semitism was characterized by an economic motivation.
“The Romanians, in their vast majority people related to the land - peasants or boyars
- and to traditional activities have not excelled very much in the economic and
commercial tasks. Many foreigners - not only Jews, but also Germans, Greeks and
Armenians - occupied these sectors, printing Romanians with an inferiority complex.
The weight of the Jews was especially high in trade ”6.
The genesis of Romanian anti-Semitism is interwoven with the origins of the modern
Romanian state and with the emergence of the national cultural tradition that
2
GASTER (1998): p.23.
3
BOIA (1997): p.127
4
BOIA (2002): p.49
5
BOIA (2002): p.192
6
IANCU (1996): p.30
2
accompanied the Union of Principalities, the conquest of independence and the

creation of Greater Romania. The leaders of the revolution from 1848-1849 from the
Romanian Country and Moldova fought for the emancipation of the Jews and the
granting of political equality with the Romanians7. Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza also
ruled in favor of the Jews. The civil code of 1864 favored their naturalization, but
under limited conditions. In fact, no Jew received citizenship during Cuza's reign,
faced with a growing opposition, which eventually led to his abdication8.
Leon Volovici affirmed that the Romanian anti-Semitism appeared after the
Unification of the Romanian Principalities in 1859 when the status of the Jewish
population in the new territorial frameworks had to be specified. “The violence of the
political debates and of the public manifestations reaches the maximum point in 1866,
when, with all the pressure of Germany and France, the article 7 of the Constitution is
voted that maintained the foreigners' status, and, again, after the declaration of
independence (in the period 1877-1879 ), when, after the Berlin Congress, Romania is
practically forced to modify the article in favor of the Jews ”9
It is necessary to mention that the dissatisfaction against the Jews was also generated
by the feeling of Romanian insecurity faced by the hostility of some of the Great
Powers, who did not wish to unite the Romanian Principalities and to gain national
independence.
One of the stereotypes encountered in the specialized works presents the poet as anti-
Semitic. What is omitted, however, is that Eminescu did not accuse the Jewish people,
his language and culture, but certain behavioral traits (mercantilism, speculation) of
the Moldovan Jew. The poet's anti-Semitism was not a racial one. He only intended to
stimulate the Romanians' resistance to the fierce competition of the Jews.
7
IANCU (1996): p.52-54
8
IANCU (1996): p. 56-65
9
VOLOVICI (1995): p.52
3
The poet's negative attitude towards the Jews is generated by their non-productive
occupations. In his perception, the Jews do not represent a positive social structure,
because they are only consumers, traders and traffickers of Romanian products.
Positioned in this value grid, the Jews generate the artificial cost of daily life and
compete negatively with the productive occupations. "As a word the Jew does not
deserve rights anywhere in Europe, because he does not work and the trafficking and
the cost of living are not work, and almost only the Jew consists of Jews. The Jew does
not demand, as the middle class of the seventeenth century, the freedom of productive
labor, but the freedom of trafficking. He is eternally a consumer, never a producer, and
of course only with very rare exception will a Jew indeed be found to produce. If he's
a craftsman, he's superficial, he works only for the eyes. Therefore, even in us, where
the circumstances should force them to work, we will find that they represent the
superficial profession. The most solid craftsman is here in the country either Romanian
or German or Czech, never Jewish ”10.
Eminescu does not blame the Jews for being Jewish, or for the Greeks for their
ethnicity, but for the fact that a segment of them resort to incorrect tools to accumulate
wealth to the detriment of the peasants. His vehement tone is not addressed to the
Greeks and Jews established for hundreds of years in the Romanian Countries, but
against those who came after the Revolution of 1848, which concealed with the Great
Powers against Romania. The poet mentions that, if the Jews had been mass
naturalized, as the liberals demanded, they would have amplified the electoral body
favorable to the liberals.
"A tribe that gains all rights without sacrifices and work is the Jewish one ... What
service did the brave and selfish Jewish nation bring to humanity? Occupying
themselves everywhere only with the trafficking of foreign labor, choosing their
homeland only the countries where, under special circumstances, corruption was
confined, they follow in their emigration to foreign land precisely the opposite way to
10
EMINESCU (1980): p.301
4
the whole of humanity ... The Jew passes from Germany to Poland, from Poland to
Poland Russia, from Austria to Romania and Turkey, being everywhere the sure sign,
the symptom of a social disease, of a crisis in the life of the people, which in Poland
ends with the death of the nationality. equality with the citizens of the Romanian state?
They fought with the Turks, Tatars, Poles and Hungarians? Did the Turks put their
heads to their feet when the old treaties were in place? Through work has the vase of
this country been raised, has this language been unraveled from the envelopes of the
past? By one of them did the Romanian people gain a place in the sun? Since when is
the spell an element of civilization? By the law of the monopoly of spirits it was
decided that only voters in the commune could be prisoners in the country. In a word.
What guarantees can an income, no one, a homeless soldier, that the drinks will not be
forged, as they are, so damaging to health "11
Article 7 of the Romanian Constitution of 1866 legislated that "only foreigners of

Christian rite will be able to obtain naturalization"12. The Berlin Congress called for
this restriction to be removed in exchange for recognizing the country's independence.
After solving the problem of Bessarabia and Dobrogea, the Romanian society was
intensely concerned about the modification of the constitution as requested by the
Berlin Congress and in this context Eminescu became involved in these debates.
The poet ruled against granting Jewish citizenship en masse. He motivated his attitude
by the social and economic realities of the time and mentioned that he was not
dominated by hatred of the Jews. "The great social phenomena happen, in our opinion,
in a causal order just as necessary as elementary events, and if we cannot say that we
have hatred against the rain, even when it falls too much, or against the snowfall, so
we cannot feel hatred for an event as elementary as the mass immigration of an ethnic
element that has contracted certain economic approaches that have not they suit us
under the persecution of other peoples ”13. Eminescu was referring to the fact that in
11
EMINESCU (1980): p.299-300
12
EMINESCU (1980): p. 560
13
EMINESCU (1980): p. 240
5
the countries from which they emigrated, the Jews were denied the practice of crafts
and were forced to deal with the merchant and speculate. The poet mentioned that the
immigration of Jews in large numbers, especially in Moldova, was due to their attempt
to evade the obligation to perform military service in the states of origin, the possibility
of taking advantage of the consular regime in Romania which provided them with a
"privileged position in front of them". by the indigenous population of the country and
especially by the inability of the Romanian Principalities to defend themselves against
this invasion ”14
According to the poet's opinion, the Jewish influence on the Romanian society was
due to the fact that they manifested themselves as a foreign and hostile structure "using
instead of knife and pistol counterfeit drinks with poisons"15
"Solidarity with each other, understanding and contracting in a language not

understood by our people, judging conflicts before the Rabbis, formed a nation, a state
in a state and an enemy state of our existence, given the ruin and loss of our
populations. These things cannot be denied. The tariff of prices of all the consumables
was established and is still established in the synagogues; first-hand goods are being
sold today in Moldova with higher prices for Christians, with lower prices for Jews ”16
In support of his claims, Eminescu used the statistics of the rural population, which
tended to grow in the counties where they were not Jews, whereas where there were
many Jews the birth rate among Romanians was lower than mortality17. Also statistical
was used in the study published between May 24 and June 21, 1879 to present the
effects of the Jewish household and how the industry and commerce of the locals were
affected18. Eminescu's conception was quite widespread in Europe at that time, as
14
15
16
17
18
EMINESCU (1980): p.239-256
6
shown by the studies he took on the situation of Jews in Austro-Hungary, France or

Germany19.
"Our intimate opinion is that although the Jews in large numbers flooded the country
- but especially Moldova - they represent an immediate danger to the country's
economic and national existence, yet they are more of an acute than organic disease
and that through a more conservative organization they would be forced to migrate to
other countries of the East. The Jews gather in the countries where semi-civilization is
united with pseudoliberalism and run away from true civilization and true freedom.
”20
Faced with this reality, the poet did not conceive the application of coercive measures
against the Jews. The solution that the public opinion proposed was structured on the
harmonization of the interests of the Jews with the majority Romanians, in a
constructive formula.
“The Israelites, in the number they are today, are a power whose action must be taken
into account. To make this power not exist is not in the faculty of the state man, as one
cannot abolish Dâmboviţa or Ialomiţa; the question can only be to make it really
useful.
Like a drowned mountain river not being subject to the will of man, while with the
regular riverbed he carries vessels and becomes a source of life for the plains that he
spends, so an ethnic element that would only free his instincts would be dangerous,
while departed in the bed of a quiet and productive work they would become useful to
his adoptive homeland and, in time, he might hold on to his holy ground as much of a
heart as the descendants of those warrior shepherds with strong and sturdy skulls with
19
20
7
which Radu and Dragoş they included the plains of Modova and of the Romanian
Country. ”21
Referring to the persecutions and lack of rights invoked by the Jews, Eminescu
considers that a considerable part of the levers of economic life are owned by the Jews
and their rights are not the result of personal merits, but of foreign pressures. "Trade
and capital in their hands, urban land ownership, for the most part, in their hands, the
arches of estates in Moldova idem, under the hand all the flow of tobacco and spirits,
import and export business, with a word all the arteries of economic life that are based
on speculation. What is the heavy oppression they complain about? And if they
complain, why don't they choose other lands than in Romania, other countries where
they are equal in all with the citizens of the state? Why not Austria, France, Germany.
Why? Because there is no persecution in us and the rights they do not have, nor do
they deserve them”22
Without trying to minimize the poet's language to the Jews, we should mention that
his attitude is not unique at the time. Mihail Kogălniceanu intensified the action of
marginalizing the Jews in the rural area, which gave them existential difficulties.
Kogălniceanu's action has generated protests from European governments. The
reaction of the Romanian minister consisted in the assertion that the regime imposed
on the Jews is within the competence of the Romanian state23.
The historian A.D. Xenopol said that through the pressures of the Great Powers
materialized by the formulation of article 44 of the Berlin Congress on the
naturalization of the Jews, "these hordes, which always stripped us and kept us on our
backs, had to be removed"24
21
22
23
IANCU (1996) :p.106-108
24
GRIGORAȘ (1942): p.132
8
During the same period, B. P. Hasdeu perceived the Jews as having "a horrible
marriage of three negative qualities: the tendency to win without work, the lack of
sense of dignity and the enmity against all the people"25
Eminescu's attitude starts from economic considerations. In his opinion, the deficient
genesis of the local social organization is located in the provisions of the Treaty of
Adrianopol (1829), by which the Romanian Countries obtain the commercial freedom,
and the Jewish and Armenian merchants will control the country's trade and finances
for decades. For the press, only a percentage of the Jews would be enough for the
country's economy, the rest not justifying its existence in Romania: "99 percent left
for America, to earn there by productive labor the bread of all days and then with those
who they will remain we will easily reconcile, but until there are seven more alliances,
like the universal one, to conspire with the doors closed against the Romanian nation,
we will always know how to show them along the nose, because we did not break even
from the curses to the Jewish press, not even to the statements of the idealistic orators,
as long as the existence of our people is concerned. If they want to conquer us, they
can only do it ... openly, like all nations, with a gun in their hand. But with tertips and
appeals it doesn't work. In the number of Jews there are strangers of Christian rite,
who cannot merge with our people, neither can they claim more than to suffer, and we
seem to have no cause to complain about our tolerance."26
The essence of Eminescu's conception of the Jews is contained in an article published

on July 7, 1879: “And all this movement is based on the absolutely true theory that
there are Israelites, Romanians of Mosaic confession. But do these Romanians speak
Romanian in their families? Not. The Hungarians admit this theory, unpleasant to the
nationalities, that there are Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian Hungarians,
although this theory is a mystification. However, we do not want to acknowledge it,
since it is not true, we are required to see this abnormal view through the Berlin Treaty.
25
HAȘDEU (1866): p.30
26
9
There are no Romanians of Israelite rite, because there are no Israelis in the family to
speak Romanian, because there are no Israelis to enter into marriage with the
Romanians, one word the Jew is Jewish, he feels Jewish until now. he did not want to
be anything but a Jew. ”27
The so-called anti-Semitism of Eminescu is precisely explained by the indignation of

the patriot, who is perceived oppressed in his own country. "Whoever does not shed
blood for his ancestral patch of earth may pre-empt matches and vax, but it will be
good to leave us alone. The European powers themselves have recognized that the
claims of the Jews are unjustified. Austria and Russia have concluded in this regard
with Romania, who will not conclude them in the same way to save us with love ”28.
In an irritated tone, the journalist condemns the Jewish intrigues, specifying the true
relations between the Jewish trader and the Romanian peasant: “As for Romanians,
the equal justification of 600,000 lepers and pre-emissaries is a matter of death and
life, and our people believe they would prefer death faster by sword than slow death
by vitriol ”29
The analysis regarding the psychological and social predispositions of the Jews
becomes more and more numerous in his publicity and they express the poet's
involvement in the public debates of the moment. The social degradation of the
Romanian peasantry and the seizure of the main arteries of the economic life by the
Jews will lead, the poet mentioned, to the appearance of foreign settlements in the
Romanian environment. "The proletarian Jew, having absolutely nothing, neither
capital in money, nor secure craft, marries however, very early, makes a lot of children;
lives with them in a great misery - often two or three families in a small room - and
thus in these human fornication there are then generations of hyenas of society,
children reduced and imprisoned in the physical and intellectual, in which they
27
EMINESCU (1980): p.291-292
28
29
10
develop a only instinct, that of speculating on the work of another, on the exploitation
of another ”30
Faithful to the theory of positive classes, Eminescu shows that the Jewish danger
comes from the disproportion between the productive and the consuming elements.
Therefore, his attitude is not determined by race factors, but purely economic:
"We grant that among these 600,000 there will be one percent who will produce
something by themselves and keep you in the country and the people, but when we
have 700,000 workers in the country, the peasants, we do not understand with these
600,000 product speculators. , so that every Jew would live from the preoccupation of
the work of a single Romanian peasant. The rights of civil and public women only
mean the right to exploit our people willingly”31. In fact, the idea was present in
Eminescu's jungist conception under the following formula: “A small once-fallen
bulge falling from the top of a mountain becomes bigger, it breaks the trees of the hills,
it breaks the pastures, it fills a village. A small wrong seed in the organization of
society, in the economic life grows and buries a nation. We are all surprised by the
multitude of spices in our country, by the multitude of Jews, the cause is the multitude
of rachis, the multitude of velni (...) Velniţa produced rachis, the rachis had to be
consumed and there was much. There were bruises. For this, they had to have spit.
Many Jews were brought in (...) the racket had become a necessity and this demand
required fulfillment. What was her result? An unhealthy population, without energy of
character, without economic energy, who sold his work on drinks, a population in
which mortality increases frightfully. No wonder Austrian influence is great ”32
He idealizes the peasant class, comparing the Jews with the Romanian peasants. "What
are these people like? Peasantry? I'm not. Owners, no, you learn, not even the black
under the nail, manufacturers only of words, no craftsmen, no honest guild. What are
30
31
32
11
they? Usurpers, demagogues, dead ends, lazy people who live from the sweat of the
people without compensating for anything, hammers breaches and fudges, much
sharper than descended from the oldest nations of the country ”33. The present text
decodes the idea that the poet considers the profession of trader to be parasitic, which
shows that he was influenced by the prejudices of the moment. However, Eminescu
did not consider the Jews of a lower race, rather he reproached them for not marrying
the Romanians.
The poet's "anti-Semitism" did not have ethnic or religious springs, but rather social
and economic circumstances. The hard-working and character-minded Jew who knew
the Romanian language and identified with the interests of the Romanian state, had all
the respect of Eminescu. In this sense his relations with M. Gaster are known. Mihai
Eminescu is, first of all, the superior personification of the romantic spirit, with its
virtues, but also with its limits. Despite the fact that the "Israelite Alliance" asserted
that the Romanian states became an area of intolerance towards the Jews, Eminescu
mentioned that the Romanian Principalities represented an area of tolerance where
long-established Jews were educated at the expense of the Orthodox monasteries.
"Receive in our schools the same way as the Romanians, awarded and distinguished
if they learned well those who learned the book from us, in the schools not maintained
by their duties, but from the income of the Christian monastery goods, it is precisely
the students of our schools more enemies of Romanian nationality, they are just part
of the Israelite Alliance, which has nothing to do with the question of existence of a
historically formed state and lasting for hundreds of years only if they do not give
equal rights to a minority of immigrants at a very recent time ”34
Eminescu's attitude can also be interpreted as an insufficient perception of the

contribution of the Jewish bourgeoisie to the economic development and
modernization of the Romanian trade. As we know the poet was conservative and anti-
33
34
12
liberal in his political and economic views. Eminescu's false anti-Semitism must be
within the limits of a conservative and anti-liberal vision.
The literary critic Nicolae Manolescu formulates another point of view. "There is no
doubt that Eminescu was a nationalist, xenophobic, with racist and anti-Semitic
impulses growing alive towards the end of his life, a radical conservative, like Burke,
if we may say so, evolutionary philosopher of history, adept at the natural development
of the natural and adversarial state. of the contractual state of Rousseau, an ideologist
who detested liberal individualism and considered unfavorable for the health of the
nation the economic and political role of the overlapping blanket (blanket in fact
formed not only by halogens and which was the first middle class in our history) ”35.
Our problem is not to categorize Eminescu as anti-Semitic or not, but to correctly
relate his ideas to those of the pre-war era and to value them with intellectual honesty.
Eminescu criticized the liberals' intention to grant full civil rights to a large number of
Jews because "not the political rights granted to the Jews are dangerous, but the only
civil right they did not have, to buy rural property; I then showed how the granting of
this right in Galicia resulted in the reduction of the native population to the role of
islets of the Jews; I have shown how the hardships that press on our peasant at the
moment because of the expensive liberal organization make it accessible to the most
inhuman exploitation from the capital, as the land is prepared for the expropriation of
the Romanian nation from the same country, from its ancestral land. I showed how
from the general displacement of the society and from the terrible pressure that was
born after the multiplication of the non-productive elements, the productive element
of the country, the peasant backs up, gets corrupted, fills the prisons ”36
In October 1879 the Parliament adopted the conservative solution that had been
supported by Eminescu in his articles, by which the land was individual, the
naturalization in block being granted only to the Jews who had participated in the war
35
MANOLESCU (2008): p.406-407
36
13
of independence, which is why the Jewish problem disappears as a subject of the poet's
publicity.
At the end of the study we consider that it is necessary to formulate the following
conclusions.
1. The Jew was perceived by traditional societies in the hypostasis of an alien

demonized in most situations and tolerated with difficulty in the peripheral areas of
the large urban agglomerations. The beginning of the negative attitude
of the Romanian political and cultural elite towards the Jews is chronologically
associated with the moment of the conquest of national independence conditioned by
the Treaty of Berlin, which stipulated the modification of article 7 of the Constitution
of 1866.
This article mentioned that only foreigners of Christian rite can obtain Romanian
citizenship. Another historiographical opinion mentions that the Romanian anti-
Semitism appeared after the Unification of the Romanian Principalities when it was
necessary to identify the status of the Jewish population in the new territorial borders.
2. Mihai Eminescu's negative attitude towards Jews has economic and non-racial
considerations. Its language is generated by the fact that Jews use incorrect methods
in accumulating assets at the expense of Romanian peasants, perceived as a positive
class. The unhealthy competition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to the detriment of the
Romanian one, the monopoly over the sale of some products, their commercial
abilities created at the level of the Romanian collective sensitivity a reaction of Jewish
denigration. In the poet's vision, the Jewish producer, characterful and knowledgeable
of the Romanian language, had all his respect. Eminescu's attitude can also be
perceived as an insufficient understanding of the contribution of the Jewish
bourgeoisie to the development of the Romanian trade.
14
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
B.P. Haşdeu, Studiu asupra judaismului. Industria naţională, industria streină şi

industria ovreiască faţă cu principiul concurentei, Bucuresti, 1866 (Study about
jewish. National industry, foreign industry and jewish industry as a competitor)
Carol Iancu, Evreii din România(1866-1919). De la excludere la emancipare, Editura

Hasefer, Bucureşti, 1996 (Jews from Romania (1866-1919). From exclusion to
emancipation)
Leon Volovici, Ideologia naţionalistă şi «problema evreiască» în România anilor ‘30,

Bucureşti, Ed. Humanitas, 1995 (Nationalist ideology and the jewish problem in
Romania’s 30 years)
Lucian Boia, Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti,

1997 (History and Myth in Romania consciousness)
Lucian Boia, România: Ţară de frontieră a Europei, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti,

2002 (Romania: Frontier European country)
Mihai Eminescu, Opere, vol.IX, Publicistică 1870-1877, studiu introductiv de Al.

Oprea, ediţie critică de Perpessicius, Editura Academiei R. S. R, 1980, Bucureşti
Moses Gaster, Memorii, corespondenţă, ed. by Victor Eskenasy, Bucureşti, Hasefer,

1998
N. Grigoraş, Naţionalismul antisemit al lui A. D. Xenopol, Iaşi, 1942 (Antisemitist

nationalism)
Nicolae Manolescu, Istoria critică a literaturii române. 5 secole de literatură, Editura

Paralela 45, Piteşti, 2008 (Critical history of Romanian Literature. 5 centuries of
literature)
15

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Introduction in Jewish History in Poland, Russia and Ukraine Chiriac Andreea-Diana

Prof. dr. Andrii Portnov Matrikelnr: 101912

Mihai Eminescu and the Jewish question

An analysis of Mihai Eminescu's relations with the Jews cannot be perceived

Interesting is Moses Gaster's perception1 of the relations between Jews and

Bucharest was characterized by Balkan superficiality, cultural mimicry and

In the nineteenth century there was an intense Jewish emigration to the

accompanied the Union of Principalities, the conquest of independence and the

Article 7 of the Romanian Constitution of 1866 legislated that "only foreigners of

"Solidarity with each other, understanding and contracting in a language not

shown by the studies he took on the situation of Jews in Austro-Hungary, France or

The essence of Eminescu's conception of the Jews is contained in an article published

The so-called anti-Semitism of Eminescu is precisely explained by the indignation of

Eminescu's attitude can also be interpreted as an insufficient perception of the

1. The Jew was perceived by traditional societies in the hypostasis of an alien

B.P. Haşdeu, Studiu asupra judaismului. Industria naţională, industria streină şi

Carol Iancu, Evreii din România(1866-1919). De la excludere la emancipare, Editura

Leon Volovici, Ideologia naţionalistă şi «problema evreiască» în România anilor ‘30,

Lucian Boia, Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti,

Lucian Boia, România: Ţară de frontieră a Europei, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti,

Mihai Eminescu, Opere, vol.IX, Publicistică 1870-1877, studiu introductiv de Al.

Moses Gaster, Memorii, corespondenţă, ed. by Victor Eskenasy, Bucureşti, Hasefer,

N. Grigoraş, Naţionalismul antisemit al lui A. D. Xenopol, Iaşi, 1942 (Antisemitist

Nicolae Manolescu, Istoria critică a literaturii române. 5 secole de literatură, Editura

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