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Abstract
After the Congress of Berlin (1878), the international pressure to eliminate from the Constitution the exclusions based on religious criteria produced an ideological battle, which raised the Romanian antisemitism to a new level. Of the representatives of the Romanian antisemites, Mihai Eminescu is the figure that has the widest public recognition. We can find in Eminescu's writings a pattern of discourse which it was used later (without any nuances) in the Romanian antisemitic discourse. Eminescu contributed to the development of a specific Romanian antisemitic understanding of the Jewishness, as a cultural product - a function of religion, of economic interest and of ethnicity.
Keywords: antisemitism, citizenship, Jewish identity, racism, ideology production
The making of the Romania was intertwined with the 'making' of the Romanians, as the invention of institutions was intertwined with the development of the national ideology. Tradition, religion and many prejudices constituted a part of the framework of this complex process - the international relations constituted the other part of the frame. Politicians and enthusiastic ideologists, working in this framework, produced a specific pattern of antisemitism. We may say that the 'Jewish question' followed like a shadow the birth and the development of the Romanian State from the perspective of the relationship with the European powers and that of the territories and populations which could constitute Romania as a national State. The various peace treaties, which guaranteed Romania's different forms of existence, implied that Romanian rulers should take into account the entire population. Due to the persuasive Jewish lobby, Romanian politicians were able to see (or were forced to see) a kind of inappropriate intervention behind European universalism.
Retrospectively (from the perspective of inter-war discourse), we could notice that the events accompanying the birth and the international recognition of Romania as a State generated a number of discussions and solutions regarding the Jewish question; and the way in which these problems were perceived and resolved constituted a pattern for the following developments of the question. One could notice that, regarding both the antisemite understanding of Jewishness (either as a religious problem, or an ethnic one, based on the language criterion) and the antisemite political measures (focused on the citizenship issue), the interwar discourse owes a lot to this period.
The citizenship...