If the Serbs were to express their grievance against the Roumanian
ruling class for having landed them in this position, the Roumanians
would reply that the Serbs do not run the same risk as themselves of
being swamped by the undesirable Galician Jew. The Roumanians argue that
their peasants will go under if they are not shielded. "In our last
great manoeuvres," said the late King Charles to M. de Laveleye,[45]
"it was proposed to entrust the supply of food to Christians. On the
first day the provisions came; on the second everything was late; on the
third day the whole army was dying of hunger. I was forced to make a
hasty appeal to the Jews. They have great qualities--they are
intelligent, energetic, economical; but these very qualities make them
dangerous to us on economic grounds." Roumanians acknowledge that the
agrarian policy of a few vast landowners and a submerged peasantry did
not admit of peasants being made more formidable by increased education,
and they doubt whether their country-folk, so fond of music and dancing
and drinking, have it in them to rival those Serbian non-commissioned
officers who, early in 1919, became millionaires by skilful operations
on the money market in the Banat. Yet the Serbs are as much addicted as
anyone to the aforementioned delights, and it is probable that the
Roumanian boyars do their own people an injustice. But while the people
were favoured at the expense of the immigrants--not always very
effectively: the Jews have been prohibited from owning land, yet a fifth
of the whole of Moldavia belongs indirectly to a single Jew--one would
suppose that some distinction might have been made between the more or
less pernicious alien who is apt to get the village into his toils and
that other Jew whose family has lived perhaps two hundred years in the
country, who feels himself a Roumanian but is legally a foreigner. One
Magder, a Jewish barrister, performed such exploits at the front during
the Great War that he was mentioned in the communique, a distinction
only conferred upon two other soldiers. For one and a half years the
official publications insisted on Roumanizing his name into Magdeu,
after which three Cabinet meetings occupied themselves with the subject
and finally announced that the error was not intentional but
typographical. A French officer wished the Roumanian Croix de Guerre to
be given to him, but Headquarters refused the request on the ground that
he was a Jew. One cannot blame the United States for taking the
initiative in compelling the Roumanians to modify their legislation,
since the clauses of the Treaty of Berlin were merely carried out to the
extent of naturalizing a maximum of fifty Jews a year, each case having
to undergo innumerable formalities, accompanied with payments to
deputies and others that rose to 30,000 francs. Many Jews volunteered
for the army in 1913 for the sake of thus obtaining the naturalization
that was promised them as a reward; but these promises were frequently
not kept. A good deal of injustice occurred during the Great War: the
_Moniteur Officiel_, No. 261 (of February 2, 1918), printed a decree
relating to one Kaufman, who together with two Christian soldiers had
been away from his corps for twelve days in the previous September.
Kaufman was condemned to death, and the others to five years' hard
labour. When the King was asked to deal more equitably with the three
men, Kaufman's sentence was commuted to "hard labour without limit,"
_i.e._ for life. It is superfluous to give many illustrations: at
Falticeni seventy-two Jews were imprisoned without a trial for four
months, though twelve of them were Roumanian citizens and veterans of
1877, while most of the others had sons at the front; at the village of
Frumusica a major caused the Jews to come out of their synagogue in
order to listen to a speech in which he advised the Christian soldiers
to watch them well, as they were worse than the Germans. No doubt there
were Jews in the Roumanian army whose patriotism was less than
ardent--and who can blame them? In the 69th Regiment a special corps of
Jews was clothed in the discarded, dark uniform that was more visible to
the enemy. In the 65th Regiment Jon Dumitru was paid 14 francs a month
for spying on his Jewish comrades. At the battle of Savarat, to cover
the retreat of three battalions, a special corps of Jews was formed--one
hundred and twenty-two men under a Jewish second lieutenant; all but
three of them were killed or wounded. After this retreat the General,
who lost his head, commanded that the survivors should be killed
wholesale on account of self-inflicted wounds; but seeing that they were
so numerous (and innocent) he pardoned them, and only executed two Jews,
Lubis Strul and Hascal Simha, _pour encourager les autres_. A young
doctor, 2nd Lieutenant Cohn, who came back from Paris, contracted typhus
at the hospital where he was serving; afterwards he was sent to the 26th
Regiment and kept under observation; it was most suspicious, said the
authorities, that a Jew should return from France for his military
service. A reward of 2000 francs was offered to anyone who could supply
incriminating evidence against the doctor, but this was offered in vain.
The Jews, by the way, were told that while they would be removed from
menial positions in the hospitals they "would be tolerated" as
doctors--and nearly a hundred of these doctors died on active service.
The better class of Roumanians, such as Take Jonescu, is opposed to such
methods--he was therefore charged with being in the pay of the Jews,
although he was a wealthy man (a very successful barrister) whom
politics made poorer. It remains to be seen whether the
Roumanians--whose position with regard to the Jews is, partly through
their own fault, not without peril--will be willing to put into effect
those reforms to which the Supreme Council compelled them to subscribe.
The Article in question will probably become a moral weapon, since the
Roumanians regard themselves as on a higher level than the Balkan
peoples, and will not desire that continual complaints should be made
against them. One does not expect their prejudices and their
apprehensions to be suddenly renounced--instead of judging each case
individually, the railway administration, after the Government had
agreed that the Jews _en bloc_ could become citizens, barred them _en
bloc_ from that particular service by requiring that candidates should
present their certificates of baptism. The Agricultural Syndicates have
also introduced a statute which limits their organizations to Roumanian
citizens who profess the Christian religion. Gradually--one hopes, for
the sake of their country--the Roumanians will bring themselves to adopt
a less timorous spirit, and to acknowledge that it is more dangerous to
the Fatherland if a Jew as such is prevented than if he is permitted to
hold the office of street-sweeper. From such lowly public offices, or
from that of University Professor, no citizen should be excluded on
religious grounds or admitted to them "by exceptional concession." And
if a Jewish cab-driver at Bucharest is so severely flogged by his
passengers outside the chief railway-station that he succumbs in the
hospital to his injuries--a fate that overtook one Mendel Blumenthal, a
man fifty-three years of age, in September 1919--one trusts that a
newspaper article asking for an inquiry will henceforward not be
censored. "It is true," said Dr. Vaida-Voevod, then the Prime Minister,
"that the Jews still evince some reluctance to assimilate intellectually
with our people or to identify their interests with those of the
Roumanian State. But goodwill should be shown on both sides, and the
overtures should be reciprocal." Thanks very largely to the former
Liberal Premier, M. Bratiano, whose party was responsible for much
illiberal legislation--one of his powerful brothers was popularly said
to eat a Jew at every meal--the Supreme Council acted in such a manner
as to produce a particularly unwanted crisis in the Yugoslav political
world. Neither Roumanian nor Yugoslav need, in the opinion of Take
Jonescu, have considered that their dignity was being slighted, for the
tendency of the League of Nations is to limit the free will of each of
them. The cardinal doctrine of the League, as Lord Robert Cecil has
pointed out, is that its members are _not_ masters in their own house,
but must obey the decision of the majority. However, the Opposition in
the Belgrade Skup[vs]tina could not resist from using the delicate
situation for what many of the deputies thought was a patriotic course
of conduct, and nearly all of them regarded as an admirable party cry.