The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union, Diana Dumitru

Abstract

Reviewed by: The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union by Diana Dumitru Ion Popa The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union. By Diana Dumitru. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 300 pages. $31.99 (paper). Diana Dumitru’s book offers provocative insight and indirect answers to some of the most important questions posed by the millennial problem of antisemitism: what is antisemitism; can it be resisted in a meaningful and successful way; and, how can one explain that antisemitism differs in intensity across the European continent? This highly original study looks at two regions that share important similarities and differences. Although Bessarabia and Transnistria have been central to writings about the Holocaust in Romania (see the work of Jean Ancel, Avigdor Shachan, Dalia Offer, Dennis Deletant, Radu Ioanid, and others), we have not had a comparative study of antisemitic attitudes in these regions until now. The book starts with details about the levels of antisemitism in both Bessarabia and Transnistria before the First World War. These territories had been under Tsarist rule (Bessarabia was annexed to Russia in 1812) for almost the entire nineteenth century. Diana Dumitru contrasts examples of Russian antisemitism—such as those expressed by the central administration and by cultural figures such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol—with examples from [End Page 190] Bessarabian and Transnistrean writers and journalists. She also examines intellectual circles that fought against the state-supported anti semitic campaign, including the creators of the 1890 “Declaration of V. S. Solov’ev,” signed by Leo Tolstoy among others, that protested the regime’s oppression of Jews. This first chapter draws arguments from a variety of places, from numerous archival materials to a multitude of secondary sources, in languages as varied as French, Russian, English, and Romanian. Later in the book the author uses the extensive archival collections of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the state archives of Romania, Moldova, and Russia. Especially noteworthy is the use of numerous testimonies from both Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and non-Jewish inhabitants of these territories, some of them gathered by the author herself. At the end of the First World War, Bessarabia became part of Romania, while Transnistria became part of the Soviet Union (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). The territory of Transnistria is very different today than it was during the Second World War— the book focuses on the war-time territory, which was approximately the size of today’s state of Moldova in southeastern Ukraine. In Romania, the interwar period was a time of increased nationalism and antisemitism, while the Soviet Union was pushing for the concept of korenizatsiia—or indigenization—geared toward promoting “national equality” and “friendship of the peoples.” Diana Dumitru’s book asks whether this difference in state policy and public discourse explains the later differences in behavior toward Jews in the two regions. In the following chapters the evolution of Jewish-Gentile relations in Bessarabia and Transnistria is examined. First, the author describes the way in which Bessarabian Jews were treated in Greater Romania, where there was a combination of state-encouraged anti-Jewish policies on the one hand and grassroots continuation of pre-WWI antisemitism on the other. In fact, grassroots antisemitism became even stronger in Romania after 1918 in a context in which the state, which was mostly governed by ethnic Romanians, favored a centralized model alienating the ethnic and religious minorities [End Page 191] added as a result of the Great Union. This was coupled with the intense intellectual debates that legitimized Orthodox Christianity as the core element of Romanian nationalism and encouraged the antisemitic actions of rightwing parties and movements such as the Iron Guard and the National Christian Defense League (often called Cuziști, after the name of its founder A. C. Cuza). The book then moves to Transnistria, where the story was substantially different. The newly established communist regime intended to end centuries of discrimination and conflict between various ethnic groups by integrating them into a new socialist society under the leadership of the Communist Party. This intention was visible immediately in...