True Romanianness - Marius Turda on Racism and Eugenics in Romanian History

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Marius Turda – author of the 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) – discusses the intersection between eugenics and racism in Romanian nation-building; presents the main historical moments that influenced the evolution of eugenics and racism; and analyzes the influence of interwar debates around eugenics and racism on socialist and post-socialist Romania.

Adrian Matus: Most of your scholarship is addressed at reading publics in English and you use academic concepts that are familiar in that language. Your new book adds such academic concepts to the Romanian intellectual discourse to shed light on the coexistence of racism, anti-Semitism, and eugenics. What motivated you to want to write such a book? Were there any special historiographical or conceptual challenges, or maybe even limitations, when writing the book in Romanian and for a Romanian audience? If so, how did you try to tackle them?

Marius Turda: If you really want to understand the present, you need to go back to the past. But one should go back to the past in a way that allows the past to speak for itself rather than reinvent it.

A lot of good books about Romania that are very interesting theoretically speaking and very provocative conceptually speaking are written from the point of view of adopting a terminology or a methodology which worked in Colonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Decoloniality and so on, and then try to use this conceptual work to see how it applies to Romania. My strategy, on the contrary, was, first and foremost to tell the story. I want to revive the past through the work of a historian and through the tools historians have at their disposal. Then, the reader can actually encounter what happens and encounter an idea or a concept or an explanation for a social phenomenon through the actual reading rather than through my eyes.

I very much hope that there will be a conversation and theoretical debate after this book is published and disseminated about racism and about eugenics. We still do not have a history of Romanian racism. We still do not have a history of the eugenic movements in Romania. Of course, there is the German eugenic movement, the Romanian eugenic movement, and then the Hungarian eugenic movement, but the research on the Romanian one has never been done. An intense theoretical debate about certain crucial moments from the past can only happen once the past is known rather than reinvented.

You might remember the conversation the historian Lucian Boia and others had about mythologizing of the past. Now, I could have done something similar to what Lucian Boia did. I could have written a book about Romanian eugenics, biopolitics and racism, demythologizing it as something that is bad,  or something that was alien to Romanians. The outcome would have been completely different because then people would have said that you basically replace one historiographic construction with another. My strategy may be considered very unorthodox because obviously, people did expect me to use a lot of the terminology that I have acquired through my work, to use that kind of English-speaking terminology that is familiar to everyone who is educated in English-speaking universities and to apply that to the Romanian context. 

I did not do that in order to see whether there is a fertile ground for a conversation whilst people know exactly how diverse this phenomenon was, how complex it was, and how much it really shaped the debate on national character and national specificity in interwar Romania. If that is the case, then we could have a meta-debate or a meta-theoretical conversation about what it all means. People could come and say this is very descriptive and positivistic. Apart from the introduction, the book does not have any secondary sources. It has 1000 footnotes – and all of them reference primary sources.  Every argument I put would have required 5 to 10 secondary sources – just imagine how the book would have looked like then.

My strategy could backfire. People could ask why I did not offer more theoretical background to the book rather than just present this argument in its simplicity. Prior to this, apart from one or two people who knew something about eugenics, I could not have a conversation about what I cover in this book because no one has actually put this historical material together. What would be the point to discuss, for example about disability without having an example of how it was understood in interwar Romania? In the book, I provide the example of  someone who murdered her son and killed herself in a hotel in Bucharest because her son had disability and people were throwing stones at him on the street. In parallel, there were discussions in the Parliament whether to introduce eugenic laws and have premarital certificates, so people with certain diseases would not have children. Through such examples, we can have a talk about what it meant at the time.

This is in many ways very pedagogical and didactic. We are in a culture in Romania where these topics have not been discussed properly but there is a big jump in terms of the theoretical argument. Particularly now, there are an amazing group of younger people across the board – from sociologists to political scientists and historians – who are very attuned to debates abroad and they are very keen to integrate into that conversation and integrate the Romanian case study in that global debate about various issues. Ultimately, this can only be done if this new generation actually knows what exactly happened. Otherwise, they end up constructing as much as they deconstruct – they construct via deconstructing because what they say is basically another construction.

The general public finds it very hard to follow a debate which is highly theoretical, particularly when it comes to topics such as fighting racism in Romania, combatting xenophobia, or tolerance. The person on the street will not accept any of that unless you come and show what happens. Not just the Holocaust. Not just the deportation and the pogroms, but the very strong streak within Romanian culture that really reach very deeply in the Romanian population: the idea that we have to define ourselves not just in terms of language or religion, but also in terms of blood and race. Every single country has done it – Romanians are no different than Hungarians, Croats,  Bulgarians or the English. It is not about being in a very  unique position in Europe. We imitated and copied, we followed and emulated so many Western models. The entire Romanian historiography and literature is rich with examples of how the Romanian revolutionaries of 1848 imitated the French revolutionaries. And as much as they adopted the idea of patriotism from French political discourse, they also adopted the discourse about race from that political tradition. It does not take that much historical inquiry to put it all together, but it has not been done.

Hopefully mine is one step forward, one attempt to really bring the conversation towards some very key moments in the history of Romania and in the intellectual history of Romania, which in a way allows us to re-read in a different key the period between the 1880s and the 1950s and at the same time to shed some light on longue durée phenomena in Romanian culture leading to the present day, particularly with respect to anti-Semitism, racism, eugenic feelings and eugenic behavior towards people with disability, and how the Romanian state behaves as it continues to adopt eugenic language.

MA: A core argument of the book is that being a Romanian was constructed via culture but that the idea also acquired a marked biopolitical component in the 20th century. So what did it mean to be Romanian at various times? What main justifications were used to exclude those who were not considered part of the national project?

MT: I tried to offer some answers to this question in the book by looking at how, for example anthropology, sociology or demography were used to define ‘Romanianness’.  Before the 19th century, an entire tradition already existed in the form of the Enlightenment Transylvanian school that defined the Romanian as someone who spoke Romanian, lived for generations on the territory that is today Romania, and was a descendant from either the autochthonous population or from the synthesis created between Romans and the Dacians. There were many ways in which historians of the Enlightenment were already formulating a definition of Romanian identity.

In the 1880s however, with the creation of Romanian state, a number of very important novel elements came into the picture. The Romanian would need to be a citizen of the new Romanian state - so a definition of the idea of citizenship was required.

The Jews were not Romanians by blood, but could they become, civically speaking, Romanian citizens? That was a big debate. At the time, citizenship came to acquire, as was the case in other countries too, a very powerful meaning, because it could give one the quality of being a Romanian. The First World War and the creation of Greater Romania then intensified the whole conversation about who is Romanian, how can one define Romanian (because of the number of ethnic minorities in the country - not only the Jews, but also the Hungarians and Germans). The Romanians were constantly confronted with a need to redefine their national identity; first in the 1880s, regarding the Jews, then again in the early 1900s, and then particularly in the 1920s regarding the other ethnic minorities.

There was always the idea that if an individual is Romanian citizen, that is enough.  But then, there was always lurking in the backs of some minds that this attitude might be ruinous, that it might actually delegitimize the Romanian national project and lead to a catastrophe. Some would tell you that Emil Cioran[i] is one of those who came up with one of the best questions summarizing the dilemma of Romanianness: “How could you be or how could one be a Romanian?” 

I think there is another important question that was asked at the time that actually encapsulates this debate and gives a good answer. This is a question asked by Nae Ionescu[ii], who asked it in the context of the debate he had with the Romanian Catholics. For him, Romanian Catholics could follow the laws, pay their taxes, or in other words, be model citizens, as many Jews, Germans, and Roma were. But, he says, you could be good Romanians, but the essential question remains,  “are you Romanian?”  To me, this is extraordinary. You could see the same tendency in the debate he had with Mihail Sebastian, where the question was precisely not how much Sebastian would try to become Romanian. Nae Ionescu considered Sebastian only as a Jew from Brăila.

This is the question that we need to go back to and try to understand when we are looking at the complexity of the Romanian national project. These were Romanian citizens, but were they Romanians because of their inherent ‘Romanianness’, not acquired via political decision.  I read this particular article by Nae Ionescu when I was in my 20s and it took me so long to understand what exactly he meant by the question: ”You are good Romanians, but are you truly Romanians?”. It was only after I studied the entire arsenal of arguments put forward by Romanian anthropologists, physicians and eugenicists for really trying to find that essence, that palpable thing, that I understood what he was referring to.

In Europe, centuries worth of effort have been spent by anti-Semites and others obsessed with the idea that if we can find the perfect Aryan and really identify it, that will solve all of our problems. It was the same with Romanian figures I am discussing. They really tried to say that it was not enough to really go to the top of the mountains and claim, like Lucian Blaga[iii] that “eternity was born in the village”. They wanted to go into the villages and find a peasant that actually looked like a piece of unchanging history when you looked at him: the way he had his beard, the way he peered into the distance, the way he presented his persona – in other words, they wanted to know about everything that concerned him that could actually be touched and felt. The physicality of the nation had to be identified.

In this context, they could define what Romanian was: ideally not only a Christian, but an Orthodox Christian, in other words part of the national church, but also someone who did not have any Roma or Jewish blood, ideally for three or four generations, if not more. If they had some German blood that was not considered too bad, because that was thought as belonging to a superior nation. Ironically, some of the most radical of these Romanians were not of Romanian origin. It is  the same as everywhere: most fanatics, are those who are never able to overcome what they call the ‘stigma’ or ‘shame’ of having impure blood. The quest for the perfect Romanian, as I call it, was something that really drove the conversation about national specificity.

Very few people were able to actually really pinpoint how this idea of identity changes - because it does change. I am not saying, for example, that a debate about economic arguments, social conditions or the cultural debates about national imitation are not important, but they could also be understood much better if they are put in conversation, or if  they are put together in dialogue with this almost biological obsession people had about finding that real Romanian that poets write about and philosophers muse about.

AM: Who were the scientists that formulated these racial and eugenic arguments about the Romanian nation in the interwar period?

MT: There were many, some of them quite prominent: important psychiatrists like Gheorghe Marinescu[iv], important physicians like Gheorghe Banu[v], Iuliu Moldovan[vi], demographers like Sabin Manuilă[vii], as well as sociologists, poets, literary critics and genealogists. As I show in the book, it is very interesting that there was a so-called ‘scientific’ literature on race and racism,  both supporting it and arguing against it. The