Authors

Valeria Chelaru¹;  ¹ Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania

Discussion

After the Russian Empire’s collapse (1917), Bessarabia, – the territory between the rivers Prut and Dniester – became part of Greater Romania (1918). Despite the region’s Romanian origin, Bessarabia’s post-imperial legacy contradicted the dream of the Romanian leadership: an ethnically pure and homogeneous nation. Within the Russian Empire for a century (1812-1918), Bessarabia underwent intense Russification and major demographic alterations. It grew into a multiethnic cauldron. Most importantly, it represented a chunk of the empire’s Pale of Settlement, the compulsory area for Jews’ residency. During the Russian rule, the number of Jews soared and they became intertwined with Bessarabia’s social fabric. Their amount and cultural traits underlined even more the province’s incongruence within Greater Romania. This paper tackles the Romanian administration’s last decade in Bessarabia, and its impact on the local Jewry. It shows how the Romanian stereotypes regarding the province, combined with the former’s “traditional” narrative of its Jewry, altered Bessarabia’s interethnic dynamics. In this light, the paper reevaluates the relationship between the Moldovans (Romanian speakers) and the local Jewish minorities. Finally, the article demonstrates that racial hate and xenophobia in the region derived from Romanian leadership’s failure to achieve national unification.

Keywords: Jews, Bessarabia, Greater Romania, nationalism, the Pale of Settlement