Authors

Discussion

In this paper, I discuss Romanian nation-building in the decades leading up to WWI, with a focus on the seemingly paradoxical entanglements of anticapitalist and anticolonial rhetoric, on the one hand, and pervasive antisemitism, on the other. With a corpus including both fiction (taken from the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel, an archive comprising 80% of the novels published before the war) and political interventions (speeches, essays, press articles) by right-wing intellectuals (e.g., Nicolae Iorga, A.C. Cuza), I explore the ways in which the critique of Romania’s marginality and underdevelopment gave way to increasingly xenophobic rationalisations and to the demonization of various “internal others” (Johnson & Coleman 2012). It is a well-known fact that, while semiperipheral regions were being integrated into the capitalist world-economy at the turn of the century, the resistance of the local population often resulted in hostile attitudes towards ‘foreigners’ seen as capitalist agents, especially the urban Jewish community (Nirenberg 2013; Muller 2010). I aim to show that, in the Romanian case, this ideological configuration derived from the narrative of an ethnically homogenous nation, which was historically marginal(ised), persecuted, and even ‘colonised’ by foreign powers yet maintained a coherent identity through the shared memory of hardship: a regionally recurrent tale of self-victimisation and exceptionalism which fostered xenophobic policies (Trencsényi 2009). The anticolonial rhetoric targeting the Jews appears in pre-war fiction and political discourse, either implicitly or explicitly, although antisemitism itself often recycled stereotypes favoured by the colonial imagination (Gilroy 2000; Bell 2018; Parvulescu & Boatcă 2022). Not only did the conservative political discourse blame the Jews for the precarious situation of the peasantry and the working class, pitting an economically vulnerable group against an ethnically vulnerable one (Livezeanu 2000), but it also exploited the antisemitic motivations of the 1907 Peasant Uprising and enshrined them in the Romanian national identity (Müller 2009). While operating within the “narrative template” (Wertsch 2012) of the ethnic nation under siege, these authors and political figures also recast the memory of the 1907 uprising as a “specific narrative” (Wertsch) meant to reinforce the pattern: the national body politic fighting against intruders. In this paper, I investigate which of the novels in the corpus that depict the peasantry and the Jews submit to the conservative attempt to “naturalise” the ethnic nation and which novels take a polemic stance against ethnonationalism, disrupting its assumptions and polarising structure.