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times of historical catastrophe, with the Iron Guard singling out the Jews
as the main enemy of Romania's renascence, these intellectuals
"respectabilized" a direction and a movement that under any circum–
stances could only be called barbaric. The more they talked about
Christian values, the less were they ready to feel any empathy with those
who were suffering real persecution.
With their contempt for the idea of natural rights and the Western
contractualist tradition, with their glorification of the ethnocratic state and
the wild, often insane generalizations about national characteristics (more
often than not egregious stereotypes rooted in envy, fear and resentment),
they paved the ground for the extreme racist legislation after 1940 and the
forcible deportation to and vanishing of Romania's Jews in the
Transnistrian camps. The more they insisted that the nation had to assert
its purity by contrasting alleged Judaic materialism to Christian Orthodox
idealism, the more they anesthetized the population and allowed for in-
sensitivity to real, palpable and murderous forms of "ethnic cleansing."
Leon Volovici's book,
Nationalist Ideology and Anti-Semitism: The Case
of Romanian Intellectuals
in
the 1930s
(Pergamon Press) is the first system–
atic attempt to tell the convulsive tale of Romania's inter-war young in–
tellectuals. As he puts it, the theorists of the Messianic national revolution
created a climate in which the "Jewish question" became "an acute
theme of intellectual life." Fortunately, he places this history against the
background of Europe's ideological battle between Enlightenment and
counter-Enlightenment, with its often misleading images of "total revo–
lution" and frozen archetypes of Left and Right. The merit ofVolovici's
book is that it offers the Western reader an introduction to the early stage
of a thinker who was later to be lionized as the distinguished successor to
the lyrical, aphoristic and anti-systematic tradition of philosophizing ex–
emplified by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. When Susan
Sontag praised Cioran's "radical will," she was unaware of his intellectual
metamorphoses: the little
tache honteuse
in Cioran's biography eluded this
proponent of absolute candor and supreme authenticity. Volovici's book
is not an indictment. His sober (and somber) conclusion is worth quoting:
Between the two world wars, few of Romania's intellectuals were ex–
tremist anti-Semites, but attachment to a certain idea of national
awareness, with a somewhat latent perception of the Jew as an alien,
and in certain circumstances as even dangerous, characterized most of
them. For this reason there were very few intellectuals who, in the
most critical days, adopted the rejection of anti-Jewish discrimination
as a cause of their own that they would willingly defend in public. In
