Elite a l’attente. Enseignants d’origine juive a l’Université de Jassy
Elites in expectation. Professors of Jewish origin at the Jasy University

Summary/Abstract: Very often, the formation of the national elites in Eastern Europe involved an exacerbation of the exclusivism on the account of ethno-confessional criteria. For a long time, the Jewish elites from Romania were banned from occupying a leading institutional position. What was the role of the universities in this respect? Did they contributed to the exclusionary process or, on the contrary, were they the channels through which the Jewish world and their elites could integrate from social and cultural point of view? This topic is only at an incipient phase and the research papers concerned with putting together plain facts are almost nonexistent. Consequently, by choosing the case study of Jasy University - the oldest Romanian university and the place where during the interwar period a strong anti-Semitic movement developed - in the present study we account for the presence of the Jews among the university staff while, in parallel, try to restitute the main lines of the institutional development that served as a background for this phenomenon. The preliminary results of this study show that in the last decade of the 19th century and up to the end of the 1930s of the 20th century, a number of almost 40 university staff shared a Jewish confessional belonging. The dynamics are uneven as well as the status of these people. Among them, only one succeeded to be appointed as full professor. For a decade or even longer, the majority of the Jewish staff occupied positions at the bottom of the hierarchy or stood in, so called, “in expectation” positions. At the beginning of the 1930s they will be entirely excluded from the university.

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