FantasiesOfDegeneration:SomeRemarksOnRacialAntiSemitismIn

InterwarRomania
FantasiesOfDegeneration:SomeRemarksOnRacialAntiSemitismInInterwar
Romania

byMariusTurda

Source:
StudiaHebraica(StudiaHebraica),issue:3/2003,pages:336348,onwww.ceeol.com.

FANTASIES OF DEGENERATION: SOME REMARKS

ON RACIAL ANTI-SEMITISM IN INTERWAR
ROMANIA
Marius Turda
Introduction
Contemporary scholarship separates the idea of the nation from the biological
concept of race. This line of reasoning, so popular in the literature on nationalism,
anti-Semitism and Nazism, was explicated by such influential authors as Ernst Nolte, who
argued that race doctrine was an extreme manifestation which, despite some points of
contact, stood outside the highly differentiated main strand of European thinking.1 But
such a precise demarcation cannot be made. In his Toward the Final Solution: A History
of European Racism, George L. Mosse refuted the view that racial thinking should be
treated as peripheral to the vital centres of European political history.2 Race was a vital
part of the arguments of biological and medical sciences of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. At the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, most scientists took
the existence of racial identity for granted. Certainly, few disputed that the category of
race was a legitimate one for scientific inquiry and that racial differences played an
important part in shaping society and culture.
Since the eighteenth century, a major transformation has occurred in European
culture as a result of the growth of medical sciences. This development interacted with
the emergence of the idea of race in European thought, an idea that was embraced by
the scientific community and increasingly imbued with precise biological meaning. The
major consequence of integrating race into scientific discourse was that the sense of
difference embodied by European representations of the Other were interpreted as a
difference of race, that is, as a primarily biological and natural difference that was
inherent and unalterable. 3 Moreover, the supposed difference was presented as scientific
fact.4 Within Europe, representations of the Other as an inferior race focused, most
1

Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (London: Weidenfeld, 1965), p. 286.

George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (London:
Dent, 1979).
3
Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages. Ancients Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western
Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
4
Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 30-31.
2

336

prominently, on the Jews. This was sustained partly by proclaiming the biological
superiority of the Nordic races, but it was also the result of the emergence of antiSemitism as a modern phenomenon.
Late-nineteenth century physical anthropology classified the Jews as a race.
The racial classification differed, of course, from one anthropologist to another.5 Whether
the differences between the Jews and the Gentiles were inherited or constructed
constituted one of the focal points of the debate over Jewish racial identity and difference.
As Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), the father of Jewish sociology, wrote in 1906: Almost
all inquiries into the social, intellectual, and physical differences between Jews and
Christians address the question whether these differences have their root in the particular
racial makeup, or in the economic and political conditions of the Jews over the past two
thousand years.6 It was during this transfer from religious to physical signs that antiSemitism replaced anti-Judaism. 7 It is also within this transformation from anti-Judaism
to anti-Semitism that the theme of degeneration - the idea that the Jews were condemned
to physical deterioration - infiltrated the discourse of racial anti-Semitism.8
In this paper, I look at a case that is rarely explored by scholars working on racial
anti-Semitism: interwar Romania. While there are many accounts of interwar antiSemitism in Romania, systematic surveys of the theme of degeneration in anti-Semitic
rhetoric are still lacking.9 Moreover, the existing accounts of extreme right movements do
not reflect the particular conceptual framework I intend to adopt with respect to racial
anti-Semitism in Romania. 10 There are no consistent attempts to connect political antiSemitism with scientific arguments about race.
Racial anti-Semitism used generalised scientific explanations, which circulated
freely between science, society and politics. Moreover, these scientific explanations were
not rigid structures; they were based on powerful metaphors. Degeneration was one of
these metaphors, or as Nancy Stepan suggested, it was a compelling racial metaphor.11
As a metaphor, degeneration transgressed national boundaries, but was then reconceptualised, i.e. used in local contexts, where it became entangled with a multiplicity
5

See John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race. Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-deSicle Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).
6
Quoted in Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 169.
7
Klaus Hoedl, Physical Characteristics of the Jews, in Jewish Studies at the Central
European University, ed. Andrs Kovcs (Budapest: Central European University, 2000), p. 63.
8
J. Edward Chamberlain, Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration. The Dark Side of Progress
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
9
For the general context, see Ezra Mendelson, The Jews of East Central Europe between
the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
10
See Armin Heinen, Die Legion Erzengel Michael in Rumanien Soziale Bewegung und
politische Organisation (Mnchen: Oldenbourg, 1986) and Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology
and Antisemitism. The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, translated from the Romanian
by Charles Kormos (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991).
11
Nancy Stepan, Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places, in J. Edward
Chamberlain, Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration. The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), p. 97.

337

of traditions and integrated into very different institutional settings. One of these settings,
hitherto unexplored in the scholarship, is the medical profession.
In order to probe the interaction of medical sciences, eugenics and politics in
interwar racial anti-Semitism in Romania, I offer a brief survey of biological discourses
on race and their impact on discussions of degeneration at the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth centuries. I then take a closer look at the role of the
eugenicist discourse in interwar Romania, a discourse which inspired medical doctors to
reconcile the eugenic movements conflicting impulses: individual emancipation and
social awareness within an organic conception that placed the national community at the
forefront of a distinctly radical vision of the nation-state. Also, the affirmation of
humanism as the final objective of science conflicted with the radical measures
advocated by eugenicists with respect to the Jews and national minorities. I conclude with
some reflections about anti-Semitism and racism in the evolution of eugenic discourse
after 1918 in Romania.

I. Race and Degeneration

In the nineteenth century, there were a number of sciences concerned with
measuring and representing the human body that contributed to knowledge about racial
identity and difference. Craniometry, physiognomy, and phrenology were all regarded as
indispensable tools in the science of race. By the beginning of the twentieth century,
anthropology, biology, statistics and medicine were already considered central to racial
thinking; all shaped, and were in turn shaped, by the concept of race. These disciplines
provided much of the interpretative and conceptual language of the developing scientific
discourse about ethnic and racial differences.
Racial representations of the human body also became central elements in the
construction of anti-Semitic narratives.12 The shapes of heads and noses, the colours of
eyes, hair, and skin all helped researchers in their task of defining and classifying
individuals and groups. Somatic features as much as language and history were viewed as
constitutive of a given ethnic group. Typological thinking became an intrinsic part of the
science of race. Furthermore, the body itself offered the explanation of moral and
intellectual achievements: the volume of the cranium and the weight of the brain, to
mention two of the most well known examples, were taken as indicators of intellectual
dexterity or, conversely, retardation. 13
Degeneration played a decisive role in forming images and conceptions about the
functioning of the human body. As Nancy Stepan remarked: The study of degeneration
in human races seemed especially critical to these issues by providing information about
the extent of racial variation in physical and psychological traits in the human species and
the changes brought about by reproduction, especially those from crosses between very
different races.14
12

Andrei Oiteanu, Imaginea evreului in cultura romn (Bucureti: Humanitas, 2001).

See Peter Weingart, Jrgen Kroll, Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte
der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988),
pp. 121-125.
14
Nancy Stepan, Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places, p. 97.
13

338

In many ways, the idea of degeneration was a nineteenth century invention. 15

There are three main strands of thought that dealt with degeneration in the nineteenth
century. They could be termed: civilisational (referring to the decline of civilisations and
cultures), legal (advocating judicial and legislative measures against degeneration) and
cultural (integrating degenerated individuals within cultural frameworks). They
intersected and influenced each other. Arthur de Gobineau articulated the idea of
civilisational decline; Cesare Lombroso developed legal measures against degenerated
people; and, finally, Max Nordau elaborated the idea of cultural degeneration.
Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) was a French diplomat and writer. His Essai sur
lingalit des races humaines was published in four volumes between 1853 and 1855. 16
Gobineaus book had an enormous influence upon the development of racist theories and
practices in Western Europe. 17 What Gobineau attempted in the Essai was to chart a
genealogy of racial decay.18 He regarded degeneration as one of the most important
elements of his racial philosophy, which included the idea that race mixing was the most
valid explanation for the decline of civilisations. Looking at classical periods in European
history and keeping in mind the social deprivation of the French aristocracy after the
Revolution of 1789, Gobineau prophesised the inevitable collapse of his contemporary
world because of racial mixing and degeneration. As miscegenation seemed to him
unstoppable, mankind was destined for biological and therefore social mediocrity. His
description of the hybrids (people resulted from mixed marriages) that they are either
beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or, if intelligent, both weak and
ugly19 is illustrative in this sense.
Gobineaus fatalistic reading of European civilisation was not influenced by a
biological formulation of ethnic differentiation, but by a profound disdain for racial
miscegenation between different social classes. The notion of aristocratic decline can be
identified in the texts of numerous nineteenth-century authors. In this respect, Gobineau
was not an original thinker. His elaboration of the concept of degeneration was, however,
remarkable. The works of two Jewish thinkers, Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau,
complemented Gobineaus aristocratic lament over the decline of civilisations. By the late
nineteenth century these authors became standard reference points on the work on
degeneration.
Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) was a liberal Jew and the founder of the science of
criminal law. To him, degeneration was a sign of inherent criminality. Thus, the criminals
15

Peter Weingart et. al, Rasse, Blut und Gene,, pp. 42-46.
Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur L`Ingalit des Races Humaines, ed. Hubert Juin (Paris:
Pierre Belfold, 1967).
17
On Gobineaus life and impact, see Michael Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology. The
Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (London: Weidenfeld, 1970) and Patrick von zur
Mhlen, Die Rassentheorie Gobineaus, in: Rassenideologien. Geschichte und Hintergrnde
(Berlin: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz, 1977), pp. 52-73.
18
See the chapter De ce qu`un doit entendre par le mot degeneration; du mlange des
principes ethniques, et comment les socits se forment et se dfont. In Gobineau, Essai sur
L`Ingalit, pp. 57-66.
19
Gobineau, Selected Political Writings, ed. Michael D. Biddiss (London: Jonathan Cape,
1970), p. 139.
16

339

were physically detectable by bearing signs of degeneracy. These features included:

enormous jaws and high cheekbones, handle-shaped ears, found in criminals, savages
and apes.20 Lombroso believed that criminals are irreversibly lost for the society and
must be exterminated. Capital punishment, he argued, was a part of a process of
deliberate selection, which served to supplement and strengthen natural selection.21
Later racists were impressed by this argument and used it extensively in their portrayal of
Jews as criminals.
Max Nordau (1849-1923) was the real populariser of the concept of degeneration.
A Hungarian-born Jew, Nordau was an ardent Zionist, and wrote extensively on Jewish
issues as the Paris correspondent for various newspapers in Vienna and Berlin. His book,
Degeneration, published in 1892-93, was dedicated to Lombroso. It was mainly due to
Nordaus book that the concept of degeneration infiltrated in the cultural vocabulary of
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contrary to Lombroso, however, Nordau
was preoccupied with explanations of science and culture, and not with clinical analysis
or legal arguments. In a Social Darwinist vein, he believed that irresistible and
unchangeable physical laws applied as much to man as to nature. According to Nordau,
only science could oppose and prevent degeneration. According to this theory, as diverse
people as Tolstoy, Auguste Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec were degenerate, for they
opposed what Nordau considered to be the middle-class morality. Nordaus concept of
degeneration praised liberal virtues and shunned those who rejected them.
Gobineau was rightly characterised as the father of racist ideology, but neither
Lombroso nor Nordau was a racist. However, all of them contributed to the creation of a
vocabulary of stigmatisation and rejection from which many racists extracted much of its
rhetoric. A. C. Cuza, the famous Romanian anti-Semite, used many of Gobineaus
arguments in his descriptions of the Jews as a plague for the Romanian nation. Cuza was
an inflexible proponent of violent anti-Semitism, based on the notion that Jews were a
degenerate and inferior race.22 By adapting Nordaus arguments, he claimed that the Jews
were undermining Romanian morality, thus obliging those who aimed at protecting
Romanian national values to argue for legal measures against them. He was also one of
the spiritual fathers of Romanian extreme-right movement. These were the political
arguments Romanian anti-Semitism had used them since mid-nineteenth century.23 In the
interwar period, however, they received a new impetus.
Medical doctors and eugenicists embraced many of these arguments. As Maria
Bucur asserted: Cuzas views about the need for national purification through the
exclusion of the Jews bore similarity to those of some of the more aggressive eugenicists,
such as Iordache Fcoaru.24 Like elsewhere, Romanian doctors too were concerned
with the problem posed by degenerated individuals. Gradually, the Jews were added to
20

Cesare Lombroso, Introduction, to Gina Lombroso Ferrero, Criminal Man According

to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso (New York and London, 1911), p. xv.
21
Ibid, xviii.
22
See A. C. Cuza, Meseriaul romn (Bucureti, 1893).
23
William Oldson, A Providential Antisemitism: Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth
Century Romania (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991).
24
Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernisation, p. 56.

340

the feebleminded and the mentally ill in medical research. They were considered a
biological menace. This is not to say that anti-Semitism and eugenics were
indistinguishable from one another, but instead to suggest that they agreed intersected
exactly on what both movements perceived as the central point of their argumentation:
the protection of the Nation. 25

II. Medical Doctors, Eugenics and Anti-Semitism in Romania

Interwar Romania was the scene of intense debates on the shape and the role the
new Romanian state created in 1918 should perform with respect to the homogenisation
of the national community.26 During the interwar period, Romanian politics exploded in
many new and different directions.27 Racial anti-Semitism was one of these directions.
The political stage became filled with various groups defined by their commitment to an
ideology that emphasised common features of nationality and race. As ideas of race
purification circulated widely in Europe, especially in Germany, Romanian intellectuals
and professionals increasingly focused on the negative effects the Jews had on the health
of the nation and on the ways to prevent their destructive presence.
When Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, he defined it as the
study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of
future generations, either physically or mentally.28 As such, eugenics aimed at
recognising and regulating the undesirable elements in a population through relevant
social controls (negative eugenics), while at the same time encouraging the reproduction
of the better elements (positive eugenics). By the early twentieth century, these
suggestions achieved considerable currency as the various eugenics movements urged
government action to prevent national and racial decline.
Many medical doctors in interwar Romania suggested that eugenics would be the
best strategy to achieve a new body politic and state. The state, they argued, should
become modern not only in terms of infrastructure, economic developments and political
institutions, but also in terms of education, public health and modern hygiene. All of these
efforts, however, should be conducted to preserve the biological capital of the nation.
This rejuvenation of the Romanian nation could be achieved either by creating a system
of public health or by detecting the social illnesses prevalent in the country. Thus, in
addition to those afflicted with tuberculosis, alcoholism and mental illness, certain groups
25

Maria Bucur is sceptical about establishing connections between the eugenic movement
and the extreme right ideology. This is a topic that needs further research and here I could only
suggest some preliminary observations. Both eugenicists and the theorists of extreme right
discussed the same theme the creation of a new Romanian national identity even if the
language they employed was different (scientific and rational, for the former; mystical and
irrational, for the latter).
26
Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building
and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
27
Vago Bela, The Shadow of the Swastika. The Rise of Fascism and Anti-Semitism in the
Danube Basin, 1936-1939 (London: Saxon House, 1975).
28
Francis Galton, Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims (1904) in Sally Ledger and
Roger Luckhurst, The Fin-de-Sicle. A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880-1900 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. 329-333).

341

were considered purveyors of various maladies. The Jews figured prominently in this
terminology. Although external factors were important in shaping racial anti-Semitism in
interwar Romania, the development of a racist discourse was ultimately a decision made
by the medical doctors and eugenicists themselves, reflecting their own negative eugenics
thinking and the popularisation of anti-Semitic political discourse.
The medical doctors who embraced eugenics believed that the genetic qualities of
the nation had a direct impact on the social and political development of the modern state.
As George Mosse pointed out: Eugenics must be practised on behalf of the superior race,
to keep it from degeneration, and that meant the elimination of the unfit.29 Furthermore,
they believed that a biologically based identification with the nation, with ones racial
characteristics, would be a prerequisite for preserving the differences between the
Romanian majority and national minorities.
Furthermore, to those engaged in debates over the Jewish question in interwar
Romania, eugenic theories offered a theoretical basis for disputing the national integration
and uniformisation the state was trying to achieve by democratising political life. As a
consequence, these theories produced a range of biological arguments that ultimately
penetrated Romanian nationalism and anti-Semitism. As Nicolae Rou, a prolific author
on nationalism and racism in the interwar period, put it:
Blood is the biological substrate of heredity; consanguinity, on the intellectual,
emotional and social level, means the same sentiments, ideas and tendencies.
Race is therefore the condition of a nations existence; it is its conception of life
itself. The nationality principle is based on this fundamental truth. There is thus a
profound difference between the members of the same state, amalgamated
together into a heterogeneous mixture through the notion of citizenship and the
members of the same race, pre-destined, through heredity, to co-work unitary and
harmoniously.30
In the 1940s, these arguments coalesced into a new medical agenda that
combined science with politics and, most importantly, contrasted the Jews with the
Romanians. The Jews became undesirable, both politically and medically.
Degeneration was one of the arguments used most consistently in stigmatising the Jews
and opposing them to the healthy Romanians. As Dr. D. Grigorescu formulated it:
The Jews a people exposed throughout the centuries to so many hardships and
emotions have become arthritics, nervous; the majority of them [are] unhealthy. Their inter-marriages, added to other causes, make this race to
degenerate, and we can find a series of typologies in which we could even see
changes of a pathological nature apart from those of plastic and morphometric
nature. These unhealthy individuals do not disappear, but on the contrary, they
procreate (and it is know the high natality among Jews) a series of elements,
29

George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, p. 87.

Nicolae Rou, Ideea de ras la doi gnditori romni Revista fundaiilor Regale VIII
(1941): 400. Quoated in Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci. Extrema dreapt romneasc, rev. ed.
(Bucureti: Ed. Fundaiei Culturale Romne, 1996), p. 112.
30

342

[which are] deviated, [and] susceptible to produce very special maladies

specific [to their] race.
From a racial point of view, the Romanian people represents a solid nucleus
with indubitable physical and moral qualities and with the luck of living on a terrain
with a climate and a food, rich in all the minerals necessary for the keeping up a good
biological equilibrium. But external toxic (alcohol) and infectious causes (syphilis and
tuberculosis) seem to knock at our door, and in some place they had come in a long time
ago, with horrible desires to alter our elite race. Let us open our eyes in time and
everything will be corrected. 31
Romanian doctors thus envisioned a national community based upon the
exclusion of all those deemed to be alien, hereditary ill, or anti-social. The
Romanian national community itself was categorised in accordance with racial criteria.
These criteria included not only ideas of racial purity, but also biological measures
against the Jews.
An equally important process paralleled the medicalisation of anti-Semitism: the
social and political affirmation of medical profession. After 1918, the social role of the
medical doctor changed considerably. He was not anymore a simple physician, but the
expert in socio-biological sciences, who was entitled to decide which parts of the
population were racially valuable and which ones needed correction. As Iuliu
Haieganu, a famous Romanian eugenicist, put it in 1925: through his career, a doctor is
chosen as the most useful and important social agent in a state.32 However, the same
author continued, medical doctors would be able to implement their eugenics ideas only
when governments will understand that no progress and no prosperity are possible
without seriously organising the states hygiene and fighting against social diseases [in
order to] favour creating a more robust human species and protect the race.33
Closely connected to the protection of race was the issue of heredity. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, heredity became an influential concept in the debate
about the treatment of a wide range of mental diseases and disorders, and had a
considerable impact on the psychiatric profession. There were many reasons why heredity
was considered so important. The main argument was that medical doctors hoped that the
knowledge about how mental diseases are transmitted would also be the key to control
them. For instance, eugenic psychiatrists claimed that mental conditions were, to a large
degree, inheritable. On the other hand, psychiatrists inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis
stressed the social causes of mental disorders and diseases and argued that psychotherapy
would be the only effective treatment. These are two among a spectrum of possible
interpretations, but they illustrate the importance attached to the heredity problem in
explaining mental and physical degeneration. Psychiatrists helped to popularise the concept
of heredity in the common culture of society; they also connected heredity to degeneration.
31

Dr. D. Grigorescu, Fundamentul biologic al rasei, Gndirea, an XIV, no. 2

(Februarie 1935): 107.
32
Iuliu Haieganu, Rolul social al medicului n opera de consolidare a statului naional
Transilvania, 54 (November December 1925): 588.
33
Iuliu Haieganu, Rolul social al medicului: 590.

343

Romanian psychiatrists too were preoccupied with the question of whether and to
what extent psychiatric disorders and diseases were inherited. 34 In 1941, Petru Tiprescu,
a psychiatrist from Bucharest, published Ras i degenerare, cu un studiu statistic asupra
jidanilor35 (Race and Degeneration, with a statistical study on the Jews). Tiprescu
conducted his research in the Central Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases in
Bucharest in the late 1930s. Tiprescu`s statistics were based on research on a population
from Oltenia, Muntenia and Dobrudja and were conducted in 1930. According to the
1930 census in these three provinces there were 6.357.658 inhabitants; out of which
5.597.364 were Romanians; 93. 645 were Jews and other minorities. 36 The total number
of the mentally ill interned in the hospital was 2.448. Comparing this number to the total
number of inhabitants, the result of ill people is 3, 85 % of 10.000. Thus, Romanians
5.597.364 and 1.959 ill people give 3,49 % of 10.000 inhabitants; Jews 93.645
inhabitants and 280 ill people give 29,90 % of 10.000 inhabitants.37
What is of interest in Tiprescus book is that, even though his argumentation is
phrased entirely in terms of the medical discourse of its time, it has very specific political
overtones. Tiprescu was a supporter of hereditary determinism. To him the fact that:
[the Jews] are a degenerated race can be seen in all of their manifestations on the
sociological level. Many famous authors, Romanians and foreigners, have
convincingly proved it, and, finally, today these works on racial hygiene began to
influence our state policy, [thus] preconditioning measures for the supremacy of
the majority ethnic element and for the protection of our nation. The question also
requires a special study and, we think, it would be necessary to found an official
eugenic institute in our country, for the study of races and for finding eugenic
norms, adaptable to the conditions of our country.38
Tiprescu devotes an entire chapter on the Jews special predisposition towards
degeneration. It is entitled The Degeneration of the Jews as a Race.39 Relying on N. C.
Paulescus book The Degeneration of the Jewish Race (1930), Tiprescu enumerates the
following causes of Jewish degeneration: intoxication, infections and the congenital
lesions of the brain. He adds, however, that heredity is the main cause of the
degeneration of the Jews as a race.40
According to Tiprescu, Jews are prone to constitutional psychopathies, by which
he meant mental maladies derived from the hereditary font.41 They occur, he believed,
because the Jews had degenerated as a race. Based on his research at the Central Hospital,
34

Peter Weingart et al., Rasse, Blut und Gene., pp. 47-50.

Petru Tiprescu, Ras i degenerare, cu un studiu statistic asupra jidanilor (Bucureti:
Tip. Bucovina, 1941).
36
Recensmntul general al populaiei Romniei 1930, vol. II (Bucureti, 1930).
37
Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 53.
38
Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 45.
39
Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, pp. 49-58.
40
Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 49.
41
Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 50.
35

344

Tiprescu elaborated on the taxonomy of maladies: racial, familial and individual. The
constitutional psychopathies are incurable, though they could be alleviated. Further, he
considered that racial maladies due to the unchanging nature of racial characters are
incurable: they are like the unnecessary part of the race or of human species, which
through natural selection are eliminated from the series of human reproduction.42
Tiprescu illustrated his arguments with a series of charts. For example:
Degeneration
Psychic-constitutional
Toxic psychoses
Toxic-organic
Organic

Entire population
2,93 %
14, 29 %
5, 47 %
13,14 %
1,90 %

Romanians
2,84 %
11, 88 %
5,21 %
12,99 %
1,67%

Jews
22,42 (20,63) %
161,24 (148,37) %
28,83 (25,53) %
63, 00 (57,97) %
18,15 (16,70) %

He deduced from the these investigations that: comparing to the entire

populations and to Romanians, the Jews are 7 times more degenerated; from 10 to 13
times in constitutional psychoses; 4, 5 times more in toxic psychoses; 4 times more in
organic-toxic; 8-10 times in organic.43
With respect to the constitutional psychoses, i.e. those determined by heredity,
Tiprescu offers the following picture:
Psychoses
Maniacal
Melancholic
Maniac-depressive and periodical melancholy
Periodical mania
Paranoia
Para-phrenology
Schizophrenia, catatonia and premature dementia

Entire
population
1,41 %
0,86 %
1,52 %
1,71 %
0,80 %
1,05 %
6,91 %

Romanians

Jews

1,07 %
0,66 %
1,16 %
1,32 %
0,67 %
0,91 %
5,71 %

14,94 (13,75) %
10,67 (9,82) %
25,62 (23,58) %
10,67 (9,82) %
9,61 (8,84) %
11,74 (10,80) %
77,95 (71,73) %

(The percentage is to 100,000 inhabitants)

Tiprescus arguments thus portray the Jews as medically different than the
Romanians. According to him: comparing to the entire population and the Romanians,
the Jews give a percentage of 9 to 13 times bigger in maniacal [psychoses]; in
melancholy, from 11 to 16 times; in manic-depressive and periodical melancholy, [from]
19 to 22 times bigger; [in] periodical mania, 5 to 7 times bigger; [in] paranoia, 11 to 14
times bigger; in para-phrenology, 10 to 12 times bigger; [in] schizophrenia, catatonia
and premature dementia, 10 to 13 times bigger.44
Tiprescu concludes his analysis by suggesting that the new research agenda
should shift its focus - from the feebleminded to the Jews. The implementation of racially
42

Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 51.

Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 56.
44
Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 57.
43

345

hygienic policies presupposed the existence of a public medical bureaucracy,

administratively and legally empowered to pursue racial hygiene policies. However, the
health system and financial resources in Romania were insufficient. The need for
implementation of radical measures surfaces in Tiprescus conclusions. He remarked:
To discover the superior race or even to find out what makes my race superior
comparing to the racial value of other peoples, a very complex study is necessary,
which is not possible today. There are a number of elements that necessitate
special research within the study of races; and to mention only those hitherto
neglected: cranial capacity, the ossification of the skull, cranial malformations
[which are] racially specific, the differences of the nervous cell, the racial
characteristics of the circumvolutions of the brain, the racial value of the
psychosomatic constitutions, the functional characters of races, the biochemical
racial index, the glandular constellations specific to races, racial and familial
maladies, etc., etc.45
As other racial doctors, Tiprescu also believed that the degeneration of the Jews
might be averted through negative eugenics. In the end of the book, Tiprescu claimed:
It is thus absolutely necessary that we take urgent and radical measures against the
Jewish danger. We must defend the country, the nation, the race!46
The discourse on degeneration was not exclusively medical as one might assume
from the example presented here; it included popularised versions of racism and
nationalism as exploited by politicians and intellectuals alike. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu,
for example, the leader of the Iron Guard, the extreme right movement in interwar
Romania, declared:
The worst thing that Jews and politicians have done to us, the greatest danger that
they have exposed our people to, is not the way they are seizing the riches and
possessions of our country, destroying the Romanian middle class, the way they
swamp our schools and liberal professions, or the pernicious influence they are
having on our whole political life, although these already constitute mortal
dangers for a people. The greatest danger they pose to the people is rather that
they are undermining us racially, that they are destroying the racial, RomanoDacian structure of our people and calling into being a type of human being that
is nothing but a racial wreck. They present us with the type of politician who has
nothing left of the nobility of our race within him, but only dishonours our race,
degrades it and condemns it to oblivion.47
In addition to medical doctors and political leaders, philosophers of culture,
theologians and poets also included race in their visions of Romanias destiny. Nichifor
45

Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 60.

Tiprescu, Race and Degeneration, p. 64.
47
Corneliu Codreanu, The Resurrection of Race, in Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 221.
46

346

Crainic, for instance, the theoretician of Gndirism, a traditionalist-Orthodox literary

movement in the interwar period,48 posited many racial concepts in his characteriology of
Romanian essence. Blood itself is tradition, he claimed, it is the biological tradition.49
Other authors, however, attempted to connect Romanianness with the Aryan myth.
Alexandru Randa thus argued that: The creation of a social Romanian consciousness is a
primordial condition for the affirmation of Romanianism on the international arena
This Romanian racism would naturally be based on the Aryan myth The racial basis
of Romania is the same with that of Aryan Europe.50
However, the pervasive usage of race concepts in interwar Romania did not go
unchallenged. P. P. Negulescu, a well-respected philosopher a culture, in his influential
Geneza formelor culturii (1934) rejected the concept of race based on the myth of
blood. 51 Lucian Blaga, a celebrated Romanian poet, expressed the same criticism towards
the usage of race.52 Even Iuliu Moldovan, founder and leader of the eugenic movement in
Transylvania in the interwar period, tried to distance himself from the racist
predisposition of many intellectuals and scientists of his time, by declaring in 1943 that:
the concept of race cannot ever be a forceful idea and a goal [for Romanians].53
These intellectual repudiations notwithstanding, it cannot be denied that many
academics and scientists in interwar Romania were involved in the formulation and
implementation of racial and eugenics ideas. Racial anthropologists, biologists, and
hygienicists, economists, geographers, historians, and sociologists created a conceptual
framework that relied upon the scientific legitimacy of eugenics. Having imposed a
logical structure on various forms of classification and discrimination, the same
academics and scientists voluntarily offered their knowledge for the general publics antiSemitic tendencies.

Final Remarks
This paper argued that anti-Semitism and degeneracy were inextricably linked in
the racial bio-medical discourse in interwar Romania. The projection of mental
degeneration on the Jews during the 1940s was understood in political as well as medical
terms. As such, the concept of degeneration became for interwar racial anti-Semitism a
central term for the political and medical categorisation of the Jews. The new medical and
racial order advocated by Tiprescu and others was based upon the purification of the
nation, i.e. the elimination of all those categorised as being alien and degenerated.
That category included the Jews as well as the mentally and physically handicapped.
Obviously there were major quantitative and qualitative differences in the degree of
persecution to which these groups were subjected. The Jews, as the racial group which
48

See Keith Hitchins, Gndirea: Nationalism in Spiritual Guise, in: Kenneth Jowitt,
ed., Social Change in Romania, 1860-1940: A Debate on Development in a European Nation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 140-173.
49
Quoted in Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci, p. 108.
50
Al. Randa, Rasism romnesc (Bucureti, 1941), p.1. Quoted in Ornea, Anii treizeci, p. 109.
51
P. P.Negulescu, Geneza formelor culturii (Bucureti: Ed. Minerva, 1993).
52
Lucian Blaga, Despre ras ca stil, Gndirea, an XIV, no. 2 (Februarie 1935): 69-73.
53
Quoted in Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization, p. 40.

347

some Romanian anti-Semitic doctors regarded as the greatest threat, undoubtedly

constituted the largest stigmatised group.
In a way, Romanian eugenicists and medical doctors reproduced social and
biological schemes already implemented by the Nazi regime in Germany. As some
authors have rightly pointed out, the new biomedical interpretation of national belonging
was not a form of regression to past times, but rather its objectives were novel and sui
generis: to realise an ideal future world, without lesser races, without the sick, and
without those who they decreed had no place in the national community.54
In interwar Romania, biological interpretation of mental diseases received an
increasing plausibility and popularity. New theories of heredity gained influence among
diverse explanations of the causes of mental disorders and psycho-pathological
phenomena. Eugenics and psychiatric practices thus shifted from a rather progressive
concept to a reactionary and even extreme right one. As a result, the notion of kollektive
Entartung (collective degeneration) gradually became accepted in the nationalist and
medical vocabulary of the interwar period. Degeneration seemed to threaten the Volk,
the Race and most importantly, the Nation.
Marius Turda holds a B.A. in history from Bucharest University and an M.A.
in history and a PhD in comparative history from the Central European University in
Budapest. He was a visiting student at the University of Oxford, Oriel College. His
field of expertise covers Central European history of political ideas, with a special
focus on nationalism, social Darwinism, and racism at the turn of the 20th century. He
is the editor of The Garden and the Workshop: Disseminating Cultural History in
East-Central Europe. In Memoriam Peter Hank (Budapest, 1998) and has published
several articles on the intellectual history of Romanian federalism and nationalism.

54

348

Michael Burleigh, Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State, p. 306.