Victor wrote:
You can believe what you want, but some evidence would probably help convince others.
I have found a declaration from 1924 of gen. Alexandru Averescu:
During the time when I was prime-minister, the Jewish population from Volhinia and Podolia, chased by the Bolsheviks, gathered near the Dniester and asked, through their brothers in Romania, the permission to enter Bessarabia. Guided by a humane feeling I agreed, with the condition that this was only a temporary solution, until things will settle down and they can leave. However, I noticed with regret that many Jews, through fraud, tried and are still trying to remain in the country
This person, General Avarescu, may well have made the above statement. But does it represent historical reality?
The lie to the statement is given by the phrase "chased by the Bolsheviks". In fact, Jews were never chased by the Bolsheviks, who were philosemitic and suppressed anti-Semitism wherever they came upon it. Jews were indeed "chased", but by the Kuban Cossacks of Denikin's Dobrovol'cheskaia Armiia, and to a lesser extent by Petliura's Ukrainian army and by the Polish Army.
It is patently obvious that General Avarescu's statement was a total distortion, aimed at justifying the refusal of Romanian citizenship to the Jews of Bessarabia. That province had been part of the Russian Empire, but was seized illegally (ie not pusuant to a treaty) by Romania after the end of the First World War. Bessarabia contained a relatively large Jewish population (about 200,000), due to the fact that the Russian Imperial Government had promoted large-scale Jewish immigration into the province from the over-populated areas of Volhynia and Podolia during the 19th Century.
By claiming that the Jews of Bessarabia were refugees from Russian territory who had fled there during the Russian Civil War, Avarescu was saying that they were not native inhabitants of Bessarabia at the time that it was annexed by Romania, and therefore had no right to Romanian citizenship.
Avarescu was right in stating that the Jews of Bessarabia had originally come from Volhynia and Podolia; but that movement occurred in the 19th Century, when Bessarabia, Volhynia and Podolia were all provinces of the Russian Empire. The Jews were already settled in Bessarabia when the province was seized by Romania.
In fact' the statement by Avarescu quoted by Victor bears out my point entirely; the anti-Semitic government of Romania from 1920 onward sought any excuse it could find to deny Romanian citizenship to the Jews of the territories it had annexed, particularly those of Bessarabia.
Victor should beware of believing the claims of an anti-Semitic Romanian general.
Another category of Jewish immigrants were the Russian political refugees who arrived after 1922.
Russian political refugees may well have entered Romania, but they can hardly have been Jews. They must have been Whites, supporters of the anti-Bolshevik forces that were defeated in the Russian Civil War. No Jew in his right mind would have left the philosemitic Soviet Union for anti-Semitic Romania. There were some Jewish Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks who opposed the Bolshevik regime and left Russia, but they went in their great majority to Germany and settled there.
The government which took these first anti-Jewish laws was also the first nationalistic government, lead by Octavian Goga. In fact Charles had already instituted the royal dictatorship.
The point I was making is that the Romanian government that took those measures, regardless of its political complexion, regardless of what King carol was up to, was independent and in no way subject to Germany. In other words, Romania had an anti-Semitic government that had adopted anti-Jewish measures of its own volition. In doing so, it was following an anti-Jewish tradition that had been established in Romania since it became independent in the 1870s.