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BOOK REVIEW

The Image of the Jew
BARUCH COHEN

Andrei Oisteanu
Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures
(University of Nebraska Press for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2009)

In memory of my beloved Malca

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that
Romania was the most antisemitic country
in pre-war Europe.-Hannah Arendt

By the year 1940, there were almost 800,000 Jews living in Romania-the fourth largest Jewish community in the world after the U.S.S.R, Poland and U.S.A.

My reading of Andrei Oisteanu's important work, Inventing the Jew, recalled the daily newspapers: Buna Vestire [The Annunciation], a most virulent antisemitic tabloid; Universul [The Universe]; Porunca Vremi [The Times Call]; and many other antisemitic dailies. When I was a prisoner in a forced labour camp all summer in 1941 during the war, I was brutally beaten by a Romanian officer who told me, "You Jews are vermin, and vennin must be destroyed."

I remember Mircea Eliade, author of The History of Religion, saying on the radio before the war began, 'The Yids are guilty of most of the misfortunes of this country." Oiseteanu cites the renowned antisemitic author and, later, U. of Chicago professor 14 times for his antisemitic diatribes.

Mihai Eminescu,Romania's talented National Poet, is cited ·25 times:

They [the Jews) have introduced and exploited the vice of drinking in villages, have aduJteted drinks with poisonous matters, and have thus pbysically envenomed and morally corrupted over populations .... As a foreign race, they have declared a mortal war upon us and have employed instead of knife and pistol, the drinks with poison. (185)

The common denominator in these and many other examples throughout this excellent book is the presence of a "stranger" and, more importantly, of the Jew-the stranger par excellence.

Between the imaginary Jew and the real one rests an entire history of hate and discrimination over the last thousand years. Andrei Oisteanu' s book is an outstanding, uniquely courageous description of Romania's darkest history. In this much-needed and unerringly accurate book, the author focuses on the extent to
which, and the reasons why, the image of the Jew as "stranger" has occupied a special place in the history of Romanian culture as the "stranger". He examines five portrayals: 'The physical", "the occupational", "the moral and intellectual", "the mystical and magical" and "the religious".

The first antisemitic movements in Romania, as in other countries, did not create the negative image of the Jew. It was inherited, and subsequently developed, from the antisemitic traditions of the Orthodox Church and Romanian folk literature. The Jew described by the Church, and depicted in proverbs, anecdotes, songs and a variety of superstitions, is cursed by God and possessed by Satan.

Andrei Oisteanu's book is a fascinating, brave, wel1-written, well-documented, and intelligent encyclopaedia of antisemitism. To understand the evil and ma1feasance of antisemitism, especially antisemitism in Romania, this book is a must!

(Baruch Cohen, Research Chair of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research,
is a survivor of the Holocaust in Romania.)

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