The past and present of the history of racism in Romania

Cristian Cercel provides an in-depth reflection on Marius Turda’s new book În căutarea românului perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România modernă [In search of the perfect Romanian. National specificity, racial degeneration, and social selection in modern Romania], published by Polirom in 2024. Cercel writes that the book seeks to stir a debate on the relevance of eugenics and racism for implicit and explicit understandings of “true Romanianness”. 

Published in the summer of 2024, Marius Turda’s book on the “search for the perfect Romanian” strikes a raw nerve. It brings to the fore the consequential significance of the eugenic and racialized constructions of Romanianness emerging against the background of the consolidation of Romanian statehood at the end of the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century. The book thus aims to correct an oversight of scholarship on Romanian nationalism, which has largely tended to ignore the importance of racism, treating it at most as a rather superficial imitation of external trends. This is a very important intervention given the apparent recrudescence of right-wing nationalism in Romania, also drawing on the largely uncritical engagement with pre-1945 Romanian intellectual and political ideas and discourses.

On a broader level, the book ties in with the scholarly interest in the ambiguous place of Central and Eastern Europe in the past and present history of race and racism.¹ While this interest is increasingly visible in English-language academia, Romanian-language scholarship and contemporary Romanian intellectual and political debates tend to ignore it. This means an implicit disregard of the appeal of racism in Romanian ethnic ontologies, which contributes to the all too easy embrace of parochial and nationalistic positions. Turda’s book essentially warns against such a disregard.

The six chapters in this book draw on fourteen texts (articles in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, exhibition catalogues) previously published by Turda, mainly in English, but also in German, and Romanian, between 2003 and 2023. The texts have been revised and updated for the Romanian edition, with an emphasis on primary sources, while the author has also pruned some of the secondary literature. The narrative strategy thereby ensuing is that of letting the sources speak for themselves. This is thus a book published for a Romanian-language audience, with an almost pedagogical stake to it, wanting to stir a debate on the relevance of eugenics and racism for implicit and explicit understandings of “true Romanianness”. 

Turda has been critically engaged with the interconnected histories of eugenics, biopolitics, and racism in Romania and Eastern Europe as well as beyond for the last fifteen years: three of his English-language books have already been translated into Romanian.² The present volume implicitly dialogues with works by Maria Bucur on eugenics and modernization (likewise translated into Romanian), by Lucian Butaru on racism in Romania, and by Tudor Georgescu on Transylvanian Saxon eugenics in interwar Romania.³ Turda aims to reveal the centrality of racialized thinking for the eugenics movement: in his analysis, “race” carries a significantly heavier weight as compared to how both Bucur and Butaru have interpreted the discourses and practices of the eugenics movement. 

In its six chapters, the book addresses the following topics: the relevance of the idea of race in pre-1918 Romania (chapter one); the relationship between anti-Semitism and ideas of racial degeneration (chapter two); the role of biopolitics in nation-building debates and projects in interwar Romania (chapter three); the history of sterilization in Romania (chapter four); anti-Roma racism and the imagination of the Romanian “by blood” (chapter five); and the rejection as well as transformation of ideas and visions from the interwar repertoire of eugenics into scientific discourses on heredity in early postwar Romania (chapter six). The introduction situates the work in its broader scholarly context. The conclusions suggest further research avenues, pleading for a critical engagement with the longer-term impact of eugenic ideas, beyond 1945 as well as beyond 1989. 

The first chapter analyzes the impact of the idea of “race” in pre-1918 works by intellectuals-cum-politicians Constantin Rădulescu-Motru (1868-1957), A. C. Cuza (1857-1947), and Aurel C. Popovici (1863-1917), discussing how theories of racism such as those developed by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) were received and further refashioned by authors overly preoccupied with defining Romanianness. The chapter sheds light upon ethnic ontologies and racially and biologically tinted reifications of the Romanian nation subsequently picked up on by the rabid nationalism of the interwar period. It thus shows the gains brought by the broadening of the timeframe of the scholarly engagement with eugenics and racism in Romania, inviting a more thorough reflection on developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In effect, the focalization on the more recent past, i.e. on post-1918 Romania, which informs both public and academic discourses, tends to brush lightly over the earlier roots of the ideas circulating in interwar Romania.⁴ While distinguishing between Rădulescu-Motru’s racial philosophy and nationalist epistemology, Cuza’s virulent antisemitism, and Popovici’s “racial nationalism” characterized by fears about “racial mixture”, Turda’s analysis of Romanian nationalism as informed by visions of ethnic regeneration suggests that the intellectual pedigree of Romanian eugenics and of Romanian racism stretches back to the early twentieth century. 

The second chapter addresses in more detail the relationship between ideas of “racial degeneration” and antisemitism, situating the interwar Romanian iterations of this relationship within a broader context informed by the elaborations of authors such as Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) and Max Nordau (1849-1923). It shows that medical experts seriously contributed to the emergence and consolidation of Romanian racist discourses and that eugenic visions underlay the debates with respect to the health of the Romanian people, which frequently focused on rural Romania and on the Romanian peasant as the true carrier of Romanianness. Bringing to the fore ideas disseminated by the likes of Nicolae Paulescu (1869-1931), Gheorghe Banu (1889-1957) and Petru Tipărescu, the chapter argues that the envisaged “protection” of Romanians from “degeneration” came together with the racial othering of Jews and with the imagination of Romanianness as defined by racial commonality. 

The following chapter sheds light on the development and institutionalization of biopolitics in interwar Romania and during the Second World War, under the influence of Iuliu Moldovan (1882-1966), a Vienna-trained Transylvanian medical doctor, professor of social hygiene, and key figure of Romanian interwar health politics. Moldovan has also been cast in a central role in the works of Maria Bucur and Lucian Butaru.⁵ The chapter highlights how anthropology and serology provided scientific legitimacy to the biopolitical search for a Romanian racial type and to the goal of constructing a perfect ethnic and racial Romanian community, against the background of the institutionalization of eugenics and biopolitics in Romania between the two world wars and during the Second World War. While suggesting that militant anthropology pushed for the racial utopia of a homogenous biopolitical Romanian state belonging to biologically defined Romanians, the chapter also addresses the forceful inclusiveness that racial taxonomies and racial thinking can produce. It does that by discussing the Romanian-Hungarian debates with respect to the Szekler and the Csángós and the attempts by Romanian anthropologists such as Petre Râmneanțu to prove the fact that the two groups were racially Romanian. 

The book’s fourth chapter delves into the interwar discussions with respect to eugenic sterilization and reproduction control. It shows how proponents of eugenic sterilization – medical doctors, but also legal scholars and Orthodox theologians – pleaded for sterilization measures in order to “save”, “protect”, “purify” or “perfect” the “race” in Romania, and how the topic came to be discussed in parliamentary and legal debates. In this context, Turda also looks at the Romanian reception of the sterilization measures inscribed within the legislation of Nazi Germany. 

Despite the wishes of its eugenically minded proponents, no law on eugenic sterilization was adopted in Romania. The Sanitary Law of 1930 was by all means a piece of legislation drawing on eugenic public health precepts, but it eventually included no provisions on sterilization. Turda suggests that the law adopted in 1930 included the provision that abortion was permitted for eugenics and social reasons, to be determined by a commission of specialists. However, a closer look would reveal that the text of the said Sanitary Law included no provision whatsoever with respect to abortion.⁶ Considering the citation of archival documents by medical doctor and statistician Sabin Manuilă (1894-1964), Turda’s suggestion is probably the outcome of a rather hasty reading of primary sources. Manuilă may have envisaged the introduction of a eugenic provision with respect to abortion, perhaps in the context of a planned Law for the Protection of the Mother and the Child.⁷ The Penal Code of 1936 criminalized abortion with only one exception, namely when carried out in order to save the mother’s life or when it was certain that the child would suffer from “severe mental defects” inherited from one of the parents.⁸ This was indeed a eugenics provision, yet its scope was slightly different from what Turda argues.⁹

The fifth chapter of the book looks at Romanian antigypsyism as a form of racism. While minority groups such as the Hungarian-speaking Szekler and the Csángos were at times reframed into actual Romanians on racial grounds, the Roma were most frequently cast into the position of the racially inferior and undesirable. The analysis that Turda lets unfold throughout the entire book and particularly in this chapter illustrates the entanglements between hierarchizations and racial and social discrimination. It also suggests that racist and racialized thinking and the rejection of social welfare provided by the state easily come together, as exemplified by the stances of Gheorghe Făcăoaru, who endorsed the sterilization of the Roma population in order to cut the state’s social welfare spending. Furthermore, the chapter indicates the appropriation of a “white” European identity in Romanian racist discourses, joined by the racialization of the Roma (but also of Jews or of other racialized others) as non-European (and non-white).

The last chapter of Turda’s book looks at how eugenics discourses morphed in the early aftermath of the Second World War, in the context of the rejection of the Nazi-tainted racial vocabulary and of the growing adaptation to Soviet paradigms. Turda acknowledges the transformations and reconceptualizations taking place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the rejection of the racialized eugenics that had become mainstream in the interwar period and during the war. Heredity continued to be important, but environment and education increasingly came to occupy center stage, while the equation of “race” with belonging to a nation or a people was largely dismissed. In one of the chapter’s subsections, Turda discusses a study published in the autumn of 1945 on Romanian-Roma relations in the so-called mahalale (marginal city quarters), showing how it was informed by representations of racialized otherness and Roma inferiority. Nonetheless, such representations were now embedded within a discourse on assimilation, equated with social advancement. Still, Turda finishes his chapter with a snippet from a theater play by Petre Țuțea (1902-1991), the guru of Romanian wannabe intellectuals and right-wing intelligentsia, published at the end of the 1960s. The themes of the dramatic dialogue quoted by Turda seem borrowed from the 1930s: racial hygiene, eradication of the abnormal and of the inferior, the peasant as the biological source of the nation. Herewith, Turda suggests the need to engage with the eugenics project of the Ceaușescu regime, nurtured from a repertoire of ideas with roots in the pre-1945 period. 

In his book, Turda brings to the fore numerous examples that substantiate his claims with respect to the importance of racialized and eugenic thinking for Romanian nationalism. Nonetheless, his strategy of letting the sources speak for themselves sometimes leaves readers wanting more, particularly when it comes to establishing the links between such thinking and the discourses illustrating it on the one hand and the descent into the genocidal state-sponsored violence against Jews and Roma during the Second World War on the other. There is still some work to be done in order to flesh out these links, yet Turda’s work significantly contributes to the delineation of the framework in which such an analytical operation can take place. 

Writing a review of Turda’s book at this moment in time cannot avoid the elephant in the room, namely Călin Georgescu’s surprising and sudden appearance on the Romanian political arena at the presidential elections in November/December 2024, which have in the meantime been annulled. There is a lack of thorough engagement with the gallimaufry of contradictory ideas uttered in speech and in writing by Georgescu, yet his nationalistic outlook and his idealization of fascists resonates with the positions that Turda tries to come to grips with in his work. Suffice to say that Georgescu constantly asserts his belief in the vigorous Romanian peasants as the backbone of the Romanian nation and that he holds strongly conservative views as regards reproductive rights, in response to the demographic decline in Romania. There is nothing really new about this, as Turda’s book shows. While it is tempting to depict Georgescu’s reactionary farrago as an aberration, truth is its content is in many ways compatible with ideas and discourses that have been circulating unchecked for the past decades and that share obvious affinities with the ideas and discourses put under the spotlight in Turda’s book. Since 2001, a statue of Nicolae Paulescu (1869-1931), a frantic antisemite and one of the scientists about whom Turda writes, has stood in the immediate proximity of the Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest. Timișoara, the European Capital of Culture in 2023, has a street named after Petre Râmneanțu, another scientist about whom Turda writes. Turda’s book can help us understand that Paulescu’s statue (and many other statues adorning Romanian cities and villages), Petre Râmneanțu Street (and many other street names across the country) and Georgescu are deeply interconnected.