Dispatch from Romania: Anti-Jewish Student Protests? Looking Back to History

The undersigned, Gabriel Schaffer, doctoral student in law and I. Markovici, doctoral student in medicine, honorably submit the following to your kind attention…

From the very first days of the reopening of the laboratories and seminaries near the faculties, Jewish students were prevented from attending them, and those who attended were systematically driven away…

…the Jewish students with sorrow in their hearts had to resign…seeing their right to attend class mercilessly trampled underfoot by groups of obstinate colleagues.

If these sound like the words of Jewish students who have been demonized and barred from attending classes at universities across North America since October 7, 2023, think again. These are the voices of Jewish students in Romania one century ago; students who were targeted for the simple fact of their religion and identity. The lines above are excerpts* from one of many letters describing the experiences of Jewish students who encountered the same intimidation, discrimination and attacks as Jewish students do today.

This particular letter, dated March 14, 1923, was addressed to the rector of the University of Bucharest, describing “(an) impossible and painful situation for the Jewish students…” and imploring him to “take the measures dictated by the circumstances, capable of restoring to us a right that we find with sadness that our Romanian colleagues are brutally taking away from us…”  (I haven’t yet learned what effect this plea had on the rector, nor on the exclusionary tactics used by ethnic Romanian and Christian students.)

The incidents described in this and many other letters occurred during one of the many student revolts at universities around the country long before the Shoah and the founding of Israel. As far back as the mid-19^th century, when Jews began to migrate to the Romanian principalities, anti-Jewish sentiment became rife in the region. There are references to Jewish students protesting against demonstrations in 1897, with antisemitism continuing to escalate towards the close of World War I, and right through the interwar period – in response to Romanian Jews being granted political and civil rights (though limited). Students of Romanian ethnic origin were quick to rise up and join the quashing of Jewish emancipation: In September 1920, a resolution passed at the first post-war student congress barring Jewish students from all student societies.

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I didn’t go looking for prior incidents of antisemitism perpetrated by students in Romania. Even though Romania was my father’s birthplace (and that of his large extended family), I had never heard about this particular troubling and shameful period of the country’s history. Finding these letters in a file was a total fluke.

When I landed in Bucharest on October 4, 2023, I immediately dove back into researching my late grandfather’s life and architectural career for my next book (except for the unexpected slowed-down pace due to all that has transpired since October 7^th).

With a background in law and investigations, I tend to cast a wide net when conducting field research, perpetually falling down rabbit holes along the way. A few months ago, when I learned that the archives of a legendary architect (whom my grandfather may have worked with at some point) were stored at the National Library of Romania, and were accessible to the public, I picked up a library card and dug in. While waiting for my requested files, I scanned a database list, in which I spotted one entry about an architect I had not yet heard of. By the time I received this file, I already knew that Ermil Pangrati acted as a university rector in the early 1920s – a meaningless bit of trivia at that moment. Only when I started sifting through Pangrati’s papers did I stumble upon these records, typewritten on paper now yellowed and fraying. And although I neither read nor write in Romanian, my eyes have acclimatized to words such as evrei and jidan.

This century-old trove of documents revealed a disturbing fragment of Romanian Jewish history eerily reminiscent of the current chaos gripping so much of the world. With the escalation of pro-terror activities on (and off) campuses across North America and Western Europe, these records felt almost prophetic.

I leafed through the folder, finding one page after another relating similarly offensive vilification. One Christian student in the faculty of veterinary medicine wrote that there would be no incident “as long as the (Jewish) students did not show up for classes…” while another in the faculty of medicine wrote that “the Christian students stopped the Jewish students from entering the laboratories.” One professor of mineralogy wrote to the rector looking for guidance, after students stopped him from teaching a lesson: “A group of students from the Faculty of Sciences posted themselves at the gate preventing the (Jewish) students who wanted to take part in their classes. I entered the laboratory and asked permission to communicate to the Jewish students present at the class the decision taken by the students on December 10, by which the Jewish students will be prevented from the classes… One of the (Christian students) threatened that if the decision… is not carried out, they will bring the mass that will impose this decision.”

The file contains letters from rectors of other universities around the country, asking for guidance on their own student revolts; charts on which the names of Jewish students are listed separately from Christian students; letters stating that a substitute lecturer refuses to give a class with two (Jewish) students present; and a group of Christian students who refuse to work alongside Jewish students “even at the risk of suspending work throughout the school year.”

A couple of police reports are there as well: One recounts how a first-year chemistry student, Stefan H Anastasescu, hit a Jewish student named Ludovich Solomon, while the other describes how a student attending a performance at the National Theater “disturbed the silence by shouting ‘down with the Jews’ and loudly imitating the Jewish accent.”

In the entire file, the terms ‘antisemitism’ and ‘Jew-hatred’ are completely absent. But a liberal scattering of the word evrei (or, more derogatorily, jidan) among the letters rendered this so-called ‘problem’ all too common.

* * *

My timing, in finding this file when I did, was uncanny. Just days earlier, after stopping by the latest pro-Hamas protest in Piața Victoriei, I ventured out to the student encampment in a remote outpost of the University of Bucharest, so hidden away that one must make a concerted effort to reach these grounds of ‘liberation.’ You could almost hear the cheers for Queers for Palestine. I found some typical signs – ‘Stop the Bourgeois War’ and ‘Israel is Burning Palestinians Alive” – while just beyond, a dozen or so sagging tents dotted the campground. A makeshift altar, with candles, photographs, garlands and written notes, blocked entry to a neighbouring church. Tattooed and wild-haired students, none of whom bother to conceal their identities behind a mask or keffiyeh, appeared bored standing by a table piled high with communist-themed books and the usual array of pro-Palestinian tchotchkes.

A long-haired student placed a one-page “Call to Action” explainer in my hands that parroted the same misinformed anti-Zionist baloney that appears in agitprop materials strewn across campuses everywhere: Israeli settler colonialism. Erasure of Palestinian identity. Displacement and ethnic cleansing. Hellfire. Two paragraphs in, I rolled my eyes, stopped reading, tucked the page into my purse and bowed out. These student ‘activists’ might wrap their Jew-hatred in a cloak of many colours, but anyway you cut it, in 2024, Romania’s non-Jewish students have inherited a legacy of propagating antisemitic tropes among their own ranks that they should finally consider shedding.

* * *

These discoveries – of damning letters in the rector’s file and a tiny but well-mobilized student encampment – led me to wonder if the same virulent strain of protests and assaults from the last century could reignite in Bucharest – much as they have on campuses in North America. Not likely, for these reasons: Public gatherings of any kind are watched closely and kept in check by the Romanian Jandarmeria, a high-level branch of security and law enforcement that works in conjunction with the police force – a highly visible presence since October 7^th. But here is the crux: Whereas there was a sizable and vibrant presence of Jews before the Holocaust – not only in Bucharest but in Romania’s other urban centers – so that the spread and force of such persecutions in universities were felt on a large scale, the current population of Jews in the capital (and beyond) is so negligible, and the presence of Jewish students in university faculties equally so, that such revolts in the post-10/7 landscape would virtually amount to nothing.

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*All quotes are rough translations from the original Romanian into English (by app).