Serguey Ehrlich. In Search of Criteria for the “Romanian Race.”
Review of: Marius Turda. In Search of the Perfect Romanian: National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania. Budapest; Vienna; New York; Amsterdam: Central European University Press, 2026. 379 pp. ISBN 978-90-4857-360-8; E-ISBN 978-90-4857-361-5 (PDF); E-ISBN 978-90-4857-362-2 (accessible EPUB).
Abstract: The author of the book under review challenges the prevailing historiographical assumption that racial concepts played no significant role in the thinking of Romanian nationalists during the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on the history of eugenics, Marius Turda demonstrates that the concept of “race” provided an important theoretical framework for numerous figures in Romanian academia and intellectual life, particularly during the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. He argues that the ideas developed by proponents of eugenics—most notably, the conception of the nation as a biological organism—not only contributed to the intellectual legitimization of the persecution and extermination of Jews and Roma during the Holocaust, but also survived the collapse of Marshal Ion Antonescu’s dictatorship and continued to shape the biopolitical thinking of the Ceaușescu regime. Turda further draws attention to the enduring appeal of the concept of the ethnic nation in contemporary Romanian society. In this context, a broader examination of interwar eugenics may serve both as a means of critically confronting the past and as a way of identifying the intellectual mechanisms through which misanthropic ideologies can re-emerge in the future.
Keywords: eugenics, racial theories, forced sterilization, intellectuals, Holocaust.
Corresponding author: Serguey Efroimovich Ehrlich, PhD (Doctor Istoricheskih Nauk), Editor-in-Chief of Historical Expertise. Email: istorexorg@gmail.com
The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed not only spectacular advances in the natural sciences but also the rapid expansion of nationalism. It was at the intersection of these two developments that eugenics emerged: a doctrine that conceived the reproduction of the nation by analogy with the breeding of pedigree animals, implying the exclusion from reproduction of individuals belonging to other “breeds” and the culling of those that failed to meet the prescribed standards. Such a form of biopolitics sits uneasily with the democratic principles of a multiethnic civic nation. Instead, it tends to privilege an ethnic nation governed by authoritarian principles, in which minorities become objects of discrimination. Once the nation is biologized, the concept of “race”—vague enough to accommodate almost any desired interpretation—readily becomes a purportedly universal explanatory framework.
Eugenics, of course, cannot in itself be regarded as a cause of Europe’s subsequent evolution toward fascist dictatorship, a political trajectory followed by numerous European states during the interwar period. It is nevertheless striking that the first jurisdiction to enact a “eugenic” compulsory-sterilization law was the United States, the showcase of liberal democracy: Indiana, in 1907 (p. 175). This does not, however, diminish the role played by eugenicists in creating an intellectual climate in which a variety of crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust, could become conceivable and, ultimately, practicable.
It is this complex relationship between science, nationalism, and authoritarianism that Marius Turda, Professor and Director of the Centre for Humanities and Health at Oxford Brookes University, explores in his history of Romanian eugenics. The book traces its development from the early 1880s to the late 1940s. Over these decades, Romania passed through a succession of radically different political regimes: constitutional monarchy; royal dictatorship, established in 1938; the fascist Legionary State, beginning in 1940; Ion Antonescu’s military dictatorship from 1941; and, finally, the communist dictatorship that began to take shape from 1944 onward. Romanian eugenics underwent substantial transformations at each of these stages.
Soviet propaganda accustomed several generations to the idea that fascism was the “Age of Grayness,” to use the phrase associated with the Strugatsky brothers, or the “ideology of the lumpen and the shopkeeper,” in the formulation of Yulian Semyonov. Turda’s book effectively dismantles this caricature, whose ideological motives is difficult to explain. Far from being a marginal phenomenon cultivated by social outsiders, eugenic and racial ideas attracted some of the most prominent representatives of Romanian science—physicians, biologists, psychologists, and sociologists—as well as influential figures in the cultural sphere, including writers, journalists, civic activists, and members of the clergy. They provided intellectual justification for the ostensibly scientific project of “national regeneration” through the “cleansing” of society of socially and ethnically “undesirable elements,” while translating Social Darwinist fantasies into the language of racial legislation and political programmes.
Turda challenges the widespread historiographical assumption that Romanian ethnic nationalists did not take racism seriously and that, when they employed racial terminology, they did so largely as an imitation of “currents of opinion fashionable in other countries” (p. 14). Vladimir Solonari, for example, argues in the chapter “Romanian Eugenics: ‘Racism without Race’” of his book Purifying the Nation that Romanian eugenicists substituted the concept of race for that of “the ethnic nation” in order to legitimize the mixed origins of Romanians as having produced an outcome no less “biologically valuable” than the supposedly “pure Nordic race” (Solonari 2020: 98).
Turda takes a considerably stronger position. In his view, “the acceptance of racial and eugenic thinking was much more widespread and more generalized in the interwar period than has been discussed in Romanian historiography” (p. 23). He provides ample evidence that the ideas of the “founding fathers” of racial thought, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, were received in Romania almost immediately. As early as 1900, only one year after the publication of Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, the philosopher and psychologist Constantin Rădulescu-Motru published an extensive review in which he praised Chamberlain’s racial theories as presenting race “in the most complete and most objective manner” in which, in his view, “scientists should write about race” (p. 38).
Racial thought encountered fertile ground in the “organic nationalism” that emerged in Romania in the late nineteenth century. One of its early and most influential cultural figures was Mihai Eminescu, the country’s canonical poet (p. 47). His family name, Eminovici, has prompted speculation about both Armenian and South Slavic connections: there is, for instance, a hypothesis that one of his ancestors was the Armenian merchant Murad Eminovich. The surname is also encountered among Bosnian and Serbian public figures. Eminescu himself acknowledged having Russian ancestors. Whatever the complexities of his genealogy, his writings contained pronounced xenophobic elements directed against Greeks, Bulgarians, Russians, and, above all, Jews. The physician and far-right journalist Nicolae Roșu consequently maintained that Eminescu “spoke of a Romanian race, using anthropological as well as spiritual arguments” (p. 55). Yet in this particular instance, the terminology of “race” may well tell us more about Roșu’s own ideological framework than about Eminescu’s conceptual vocabulary.
The search for objective criteria defining a “Romanian race” was particularly problematic in a country characterized by ethnically diverse population. Numerous minorities, each constituting more than one per cent of the total population, lived alongside the Romanian majority and inevitably participated in processes of intermarriage and cultural interaction. According to the 1930 census, the ethnic composition of Romania was as follows:
Romanians: 12,981,324 (71.89%);
Hungarians: 1,425,507 (7.89%);
Germans: 745,421 (4.13%);
Jews: 728,115 (4.03%);
Ruthenians and Ukrainians: 582,815 (3.22%);
Russians: 409,150 (2.26%);
Bulgarians: 366,384 (2.03%);
Roma: 262,501 (1.45%)[1].
This demographic “Tower of Babel,” compounded by the succession of populations that had inhabited the Carpathian-Danubian lands over the preceding two millennia, produced striking anthropological differences even among ethnic Romanians living in different regions of the country. Thus, cranial measurements conducted in 1920 by Victor Papilian, Director of the Institute of Anatomy in Cluj, revealed substantial differences between the inhabitants of the Old Kingdom—the territories east and south of the Carpathians—and those of Transylvania, west of the Carpathians (p. 119). Anthropologists eventually had to acknowledge that “cranial measurements could not offer definitive answers to their questions about race” (p. 118).
Attention consequently shifted toward serology: the statistical study of blood-group distributions among different ethnic populations. Such research was expected to provide “the necessary scientific evidence to explain the nature of national specificity” (p. 118). In 1943, Iordache Făcăoaru, a researcher at the Institute of Social Hygiene in Cluj, reported that “the frequency of Group A, so-called European, decreased from the north and west to the south and east.” From this observation he concluded that Transylvania was “the province richest in superiorly endowed racial elements,” whereas Moldavia was exceptionally poor in them (p. 129). The resulting theory of a “racial hierarchy clearly expressed the difficulties encountered by the interwar Romanian nationalists when they tried to define a homogeneous ethnic nation” (p. 130).
Not everyone was prepared to turn science into an instrument of racist ideology. Francisc Rainer at the Institute of Anatomy and Embryology of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Bucharest had come to the conclusion that “stature, the cephalic index, the nasal index, and the morphological index of the face varied so much from one individual to another, and between men and women, that it was very difficult, indeed perhaps impossible, to establish with certainty which of these somatic characteristics corresponded to some specific blood groups and not to others” (p. 135).
The failure to discover a primordial “Romanian race” did not, however, put an end to efforts to construct it. One possible solution was to eliminate internal “defectives” through compulsory sterilization, a practice already tested in the supposedly “advanced countries” of the West. In 1923, for example, Dr. Ygrec—the pseudonym of Iosif Gliksman—cited German eugenics in advocating “legal measures for the sterilization of children born blind, deaf and dumb; then of cretins, epileptics, and the demented; of violators of good morals; of women who have given birth to two or more illegitimate children, whose paternity is doubtful; then of criminals, etc.” (p. 177).
Such “legal measures” were widely discussed in Romania, but compulsory sterilization was never enacted into law, unlike in a number of other European countries. One possible explanation is that the authorities feared that, in a deeply patriarchal society, compulsory sterilization would be regarded by much of the population as a violation of religious norms. A revealing literary echo of this debate can be found in a play published in 1968 by Petre Țuțea, a former member of the Legionary movement. Its characters discuss the prospects of eugenics in the interwar period, while a priest objects that “man has no right to censure God” (p. 326).
A second strand of eugenic thinking focused on protecting “one’s own” nation from intermixture with members of supposedly “inferior races.” This became increasingly prominent in the public discourse as Romania moved toward dictatorship. From the late 1930s onward, increasingly strident voices called for the removal from the “national body” of, above all, representatives of “three peoples as interesting as their Asiatic ancestors: the Hungarians, the Gypsies, and the Jews” (p. 94).
The Romanian state had relatively limited room for manoeuvre when it came to repressing the Hungarians of Transylvania, who enjoyed the support of the neighbouring dictatorship of Admiral Miklós Horthy. Eugenicists therefore pursued a different strategy. In 1939, the hygienist Petru Râmneanțu compared the blood-group distributions of Romanians with those of the Szeklers, a Hungarian-speaking population concentrated in the centre of Romania. He concluded that the Szeklers “in general have the same ethno-anthropological origin as the Romanians” (p. 138). Within this framework, the Szeklers could be reclassified as Romanians who had undergone forced Magyarization. Such pseudo-scientific reclassification, however, could not alter the geopolitical consequences of the Second Vienna Award of 30 August 1940, under which large parts of Transylvania inhabited predominantly by Hungarians, including the Székely Land, were transferred to Hungary.
The situation was different in the case of the supposedly defenseless “Asians”—Jews and Roma. Turda identifies antisemitism as the dominant xenophobic current of the period under examination. Romanian intellectual life was by no means uniformly antisemitic. The aforementioned Rădulescu-Motru, for example, maintained that “a good patriot cannot approve of the antisemitic movement.” Yet one of the most influential Romanian thinkers and politicians, Professor Alexandru C. Cuza of the University of Iași, took precisely the opposite position, for him “being patriotic meant being antisemitic” (p. 48).
Such an opinion was very strong in the interwar period. A particularly disturbing example is provided by Emil Cioran, who would later become one of the most distinguished stylists of twentieth-century French language. In the 1930s, however, he was also one of the most fervent intellectual advocates of Romania’s fascist Legionary movement. Turda quotes from Cioran’s 1936 The Transfiguration of Romania:
“The theory of races seems to have been born only to give expression to the feeling of abysmal separation that differentiates any non-Jew from a Jew. This abyss is born not from antisemitism or from any sort of conception, but from the plain or hidden antagonism that characterizes two essentially different beings. The Jew is not our fellow, our neighbour, and whatever intimacy we may permit ourselves with him, a chasm separates us, like it or not. It is as if they were descended from another species of monkey than us and had been condemned from the start to a sterile tragedy, to hopes forever betrayed. Humanly, we cannot approach them, because the Jew is a Jew first and a human being second” (p. 83).
The significance of such statements lies not merely in their extremity but in the intellectual authority of those who articulated them. By the time Marshal Ion Antonescu’s dictatorship entered into alliance with Nazi Germany in 1941, the atmosphere of hatred generated in part by intellectual and political elites had already undergone a decisive transformation. As Turda puts it, “antisemitism in Romania was no longer just a political discourse, it was an undeniable historical reality, expressed through racial laws, deportations, and massacres” (p. 96).
Anti-Roma racism was no less intense, although it operated according to a somewhat different logic. The Roma were regarded as particularly dangerous from a racial perspective precisely because they lived in close proximity to Romanian peasants: they spoke the same language, professed the same religion, and were even regarded as important custodians of Romanian folklore (p. 265). The perceived danger therefore lay not in their isolation but in their capacity for assimilation and interpenetration with the Romanian population.
This anxiety remained visible even after the fall of Antonescu’s dictatorship. In 1945, the sociologist George Em. Marica published The Psychosociology of the Mahala, in which he portrayed urban outskirts (mahala) as dangerous spaces commonly described as țigănie, or “Gypsy quarters.” Here, on the one hand, the Romanianization of Roma was taking place, while, on the other, Romanian peasants migrating to the cities were adopting “certain Gypsy manners and habits” (p. 311). This process of mutual convergence was perceived by Romanian racists as a kind of mark of Cain. Eugenicists of various ideological persuasions therefore sought ways to contain or reverse the process by which supposedly “alien” populations were becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the national majority.
Various measures were proposed to prevent the “‘contamination’ of Romanian with ‘Gypsy’ blood.” In 1942, Major Ioan Peșchir, head of the gendarmerie administration of Timiș-Torontal County, proposed a eugenic programme combined with measures for the “regulation [of] relations of Romanians with Gypsies.” These included “their [Roma] isolation, forbidding the further sale of Romanian property to Gypsies,” and “measures to prevent [their] multiplication” (p. 239).
The authorities did not stop at such proposals. The war against the Soviet Union created a “corridor of opportunity” for the elimination of members of a supposedly “inferior race” who were considered to have become dangerously assimilated into the Romanian “Aryan” population. In 1941, the Romanian authorities began deporting “nomadic Roma” to Transnistria, where approximately 11,000 Roma died. The scale of these losses was far smaller than that of the Jewish Holocaust in territories under Romanian administration, which claimed between 280,000 and 380,000 Jewish lives. One reason for this disparity was the difficulty of identifying Roma in practice, precisely because many were difficult to distinguish from Romanians. At the height of the deportations, mayors of several cities called on the authorities to introduce a racial law establishing unambiguous criteria for identifying Roma on the basis of supposedly objective ethnic characteristics. No clear answer was forthcoming (p. 285).
The policy of “purification of the Romanian race” was not intended, under the favorable “European political context” (Ion Antonescu) created by the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, to be confined to Jews and Roma. On the eve of the invasion, Mihai Antonescu, the head of the Romanian government and a namesake of Marshal Ion Antonescu, who was most likely aware of Hitler’s instructions to his subordinates concerning the “war of annihilation” in Eastern Europe, stated at a Council of Ministers meeting on June 17 1941 that the time had come for “the purification of the population.” He further specified that, in the case of Bessarabia and Bukovina, this “purification” would affect not only the Jews, but “all nationalities—we shall come to practice a policy of total and violent removal of foreign elements” (pp. 248–249). Only a change in the “European political context”—in the form of the failure of the blitzkrieg—prevented the genocidal plans to annihilate approximately half of the population of the eastern regions of Greater Romania “liberated” from Soviet occupation from being carried out.
The fall of Antonescu’s dictatorship on 23 August 1944 did not mean the disappearance of eugenic thinking. Instead, Romanian eugenics underwent a terminological and ideological transformation as it adapted to the new Soviet-dominated intellectual environment. In biology, “Weismannism-Morganism” was being denounced, while the “Michurin-Lysenko doctrine,” which emphasized the decisive role of environment and minimized the significance of heredity, became dominant.
Yet, as Turda emphasizes, the racial impulse did not simply disappear; it retreated into a different ideological vocabulary. “Eugenics did not disappear after World War II,” he writes. “It was inserted into the communist project of the ‘new Soviet man and woman’ and it informed the nationalist and natalist fantasies of Ceauşescu’s Romania” (p. 329).
This argument gives the book a significance that extends beyond the history of Romanian eugenics narrowly understood. Turda is concerned that, amid the contemporary global rightward turn, the legacies of racial and eugenic thinking remain insufficiently confronted. He calls for “public debate about the legacies of Romanian eugenics and racism,” insisting that “their roots are buried deep in society, culture, and politics.”
The first round of Romania’s 2024 presidential election, in which Călin Georgescu—an outspoken admirer of Marshal Antonescu—emerged as the leading candidate, provided a striking contemporary illustration of Turda’s concerns. According to Turda, misanthropic ideas “continue to inspire new generations of political leaders who are committed to ethnic utopias and eugenic models of social engineering.” The slogan “Romania for Romanians,” he argues, “remains attractive to many Romanian politicians, who continue to argue that those who are not racially Romanian are undesirable from a biological and social point of view” (p. 336).
Turda’s book therefore does more than reconstruct the history of a once fashionable scientific doctrine. It demonstrates how scientific authority can be mobilized in the service of nationalist projects, how biological concepts can be transformed into political categories, and how apparently abstract theories of race can acquire concrete consequences for the lives—and deaths—of human beings. Its central warning is consequently not confined to the Romanian past. The history of Romanian eugenics shows how readily the boundaries between scientific discourse, ethnic nationalism, and political violence can become blurred. For Turda, confronting this difficult past is not an exercise in historical self-flagellation but a necessary form of civic vigilance. Where racial theories were once translated into laws, deportations, and mass murder, public discussion of their intellectual genealogy remains indispensable if such horrors are not to be repeated.
Bibliography
Solonari 2020 —Solonari V. A. Ochishchenie nacii. Nasil'stvennye peremeshcheniya naseleniya i etnicheskie chistki v Rumynii v period diktatury Iona Antonesku (1940–1944) / Avtorizovannyj per. s rumyn. A. Tulbure pod red L. Mosionzhnika. — SPb. : Nestor-Istoriya, 2020.
[1] According to expert estimates, the Roma population was significantly undercounted, since many Roma identified themselves as Romanian or Hungarian.
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