'An Epoch-Defining Social Reform': Local Agency and Economic Romanianization, 1938-1943

• In Event: Counter-Monuments, Poetic Myth, and Coal: New Vantage Points on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe

Abstract

While both the dictatorships of King Carol II and Marshal Antonescu aimed to exclude Jews from society, the Romanianization laws’ application was deeply influenced by economic goals, wartime state imperatives, and local agency in a provincial setting — the largest coal basin in the Kingdom of Romania Both dictatorships centralized control over coal production, leading to local resistance and the need for negotiation. With respect to Romanization, a broad coalition of labor organizers, state officials, and intellectuals welcomed expropriation of Jewish property while at the same time resisting the application of exclusionary laws to other minorities (most principally, Hungarians). Concurrent efforts to segregate workers along ethnic lines, however, were vigorously resisted in Jiu. When more radical Romanianization policies were put in place after 1938, Jiu was an immediate target both as a key center for hard-rock coal and given its ethnic pluralism — a third of its populations were ethnic Hungarians, with German, Jewish, Polish, and Czech minorities. Jews were this time successfully segregated from economic life of the city over 1938 to 1941, even as the mining administration and the miners, irrespective of ethnic identity, were willing to band together and foil efforts at removing ethnic Hungarians from the coal companies. The coal industry represents a case in which a multiethnic labor force deployed both ethnicity and socialism to protect Hungarians from the policies of the Romanian state, while standing by as the Jewish population was targeted.

Author

• Anca Glont, U of Dayton