Violența antisemită în a doua jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea. Pogromul de la Iași din 1899
Anti-Semitic Violence in the Second Half of the 19th Century. The pogrom of Iași

Summary/Abstract: This study approaches a little known episode in the history of Iași: the pogrom of May 16, 1899. At the end of the 19th century, Iași was a center of the anti-Semitic movement in the Old Kingdom. Anti-Semites complained that Jews had become more numerous and more influential than Christians in the local economy. The 1899 pogrom was preceded by other Judeophobic turbulences in several cities, Bucharest included. This article points out the viral character of the idea that violence was an instrument to „solve” – or to speed-up the solution to – the Jewish question. International events, such as the Dreyfus Affair or Russian pogroms, also played a role in the dynamic of events. The perpetrators of the 1899 Iași pogrom were involved in previous incidents and tried to unite in a national or regional anti-Semitic movement. The Iași pogrom was the peak of violence and resulted in numerous injured people and widespread devastation. The atmosphere changed forever in Iași and Jewish-Christian cohabitation became extremely difficult afterwards. Because of this pogrom and other similar incidents, thousands of Jews left the country – they are known as „fussgeyers”. A conclusion of the study is that the anti-Semitic discourse and the appeal to violence had a local tradition, this feature being under-researched, in spite of the fact that it proved influential to the 20th Century history of Iași, which was devastated by another pogrom, in 1941.

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