In Search of A.C. Cuza (revised version)
In The Romanian road to independence, Frederick Kellogg describes the mostly economically driven anti-Semitism that existed in the nascent united and independent Romania, especially in the former principality of Moldavia, when A.C. Cuza came of age:
“Thrifty Jewish entrepreneurs earned distrust as well as profit from Romanian aristocrats and peasants. In Moldavia, Jews were bankers—moneylenders and moneychangers—innkeepers, lessees of taverns in villages: grocers, rug merchants, peddlers, besides being artisans—tailors, turners, glass makers, and carpet makers. Romanians reckoned Jewish money lenders in particular to be dangerous to the social order owing to their pervasive influence on impoverished farmers and perennially indebted landed proprietors. Boiers, or aristocrats, regarded commerce and industry to be beneath their dignity, thereby leaving the door open for their Jewish creditors to seize control of an important segment of the economy. An additional problem was the Jewish way of life in Moldavia. The Jews’ exclusive family circles and non-Romanian customs clearly identified them as outsiders. Romanians considered them to be aliens, and some were indeed foreign subjects protected by one or another of the great powers.”
It was in this atmosphere of decaying Ottoman suzerainty and Ashkenazi immigration that anti-Semitism such as A.C. Cuza’s was fostered. Nevertheless, historian Irina Livezeanu has labeled him “the father of Romanian anti-Semitism,” so influential was he on the younger generation of Romanians. To best understand his worldview, it is important to take note of Cuza’s early intellectual development.
In his youth, Cuza met a brilliant poet and editorialist named Mihai Eminescu. The latter would later become known as Romania’s national poet. Cuza was involved in the production of one of the few known photographs of Eminescu.
Of peasant origin on his father’s side and descended from Moldavian boyars on his mother’s side, Eminescu had not put his inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally, if not always geopolitically, an enthusiastic Germanophile. As a young man, he had studied in Vienna and in Bismarck’s Prussia, where he’d learned Sanskrit and immersed himself in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. He had also been a student of Eugen Dühring.
Eminescu had intellectual precedents in his own country, but he often made radical departures from them. His ideas were influenced by a leading conservative Romanian cultural circle called Junimea, which originally reflected the interests of the old Moldavian boyar class that had been displaced by the liberal bourgeoisie in the 19thcentury. However, there are significant differences between Eminescu’s philosophy and Junimism.
“The Junimists,” notes Hungarian-Jewish historian Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, “wanted literature to be separated from politics; to remain l’art pour l’art, with no social content desirable.” Eminescu rejected this doctrine. Nagy-Talavera also points out that Eminescu was “less of an elitist” than the prototypical Junimist, and that “Junimism was opposed to anti-Semitism, considering it to be a barbarous affront to human intelligence.” With the latter opinion, Eminescu disagreed.
According to William O. Oldson’s A Providential Anti-Semitism: Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth Century Romania, Eminescu “stood out as the most eloquent spokesman of the radical anti-Semites.” Eminescu viewed Romania’s relatively recent Jewish immigrant population, by and large, as inherently unpatriotic. He has been described as a fierce opponent of civil equality for the Jews, arguing, as summarized by Oldson, that “they presently constituted a danger to the Romanian nationality, when they did not possess equality of rights. They would be so much the more a peril once naturalized.”
Eminescu’s anti-Semitism never went as far as A.C. Cuza’s later did, but it evidently had an impact on his formerly left-leaning younger friend. To a large extent, so did Eminescu’s hostility to liberalism. Nagy-Talavera summarizes Eminescu’s worldview thus:
“Eminescu’s goal — he defines it as his ‘supreme law’ — was the preservation of his country and its ethnic identity… Consequently, the national interest must determine every political, educational, and cultural decision. Thus, in Eminescu’s eyes, what he called ‘American liberalism’ (or Western humanitarian values) might imperil the uniqueness of the Romanian ethnic character, and should therefore be rejected… He rejected the incomplete and superficial Westernization of 1848. Eminescu recognized only two positive classes in Romania: the nobility, and, above all, the peasantry. Any development must be based on the peasant, and it must be an organic one… Eminescu was closer to the peasants than to the boyars.”
Eminescu was killed by medical malpractice in 1889. He was only 39 years old. Foul play has been widely theorized. It was perhaps the controversial fate of his older friend that led A.C. Cuza to become such a bitter and obsessed man.
Cuza later became the dean and a popular lecturer at the law school in Iași University, and mentored Romanian students who feared the growing Jewish presence in higher education. The most charismatic and influential of these students was Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. The latter was the son of Ion Zelea Codreanu, Cuza’s friend and fellow Romanian nationalist.
According to Codreanu scholar Dr. Rebecca Haynes, “Cuza became Codreanu’s godfather and acted as his mentor when Codreanu was a student at Iași University… In his attitude toward the Jewish minority, Codreanu was greatly influenced by his godfather, A.C. Cuza.” Together Cuza and Codreanu established the League of Christian Defense (Liga Apărării Național Creștine, L.A.N.C.) in 1923.
This radical student group used the swastika as a symbol a full decade before Hitler came to power in Germany, where both Cuza and the half-German Codreanu had studied. In fact, Cuza had flaunted the swastika even before the First World War. According to Romanian historian Victor Dogaru, it was Cuza who first coined the use of the swastika as a symbol of anti-Semitism.
Such fateful influence on Central Europe, coming from a Southeastern European leader, should not be as surprising as it may seem. Though in some ways an ultranationalist, Cuza was capable of international networking in unlikely places. In 1925, for example, not long after the Hungarian-Romanian war of 1919, an “anti-Semitic World Congress” was held in Budapest, Hungary. In the capital of his country’s bitterest rival, not a place one would expect to embrace a leading Romanian nationalist, Professor Cuza was apparently welcomed with open arms.
Internal administrative politics in the League soured the partnership between Cuza and Codreanu by 1927, a break that Dr. Haynes attributes also to Cuza’s being — at least at the time — “willing to work entirely within the parliamentary system.” Codreanu seems to have been more strongly anti-democratic than his mentor, and despised the parliamentary system as such. It wasn’t until after Codreanu’s paramilitary approach proved successful that Cuza adopted similar tactics.
This has sometimes been unconvincingly interpreted to mean their split occurred because Codreanu was essentially more violent than Cuza. In fact, Cuza’s own rival militia has been described by some scholars as more violent than Codreanu’s Iron Guard — at least while Codreanu was still alive. According to historian Dennis Deletant, in his biography of Romanian military strongman and key Hitler ally Ion Antonescu, Professor Cuza’s organization of lancieri (lance-bearers, or “blue shirts”) consisted of nothing but “an army of thugs,” so in the 1930s, “it was not the Guard that posed the chief threat to public order.”
A.C. Cuza’s willingness to work within the parliamentary system paid off, at least for a time. In the 1930s he formed a new political party with the poet Octavian Goga, a coalition that was selected to govern the country by the increasingly autocratic king in response to Codreanu’s growing popularity. During the period of the short-lived but influential Goga-Cuza cabinet, anti-Jewish discriminatory laws and measures were enacted in Romania.
Cuza’s party was not as popular as Codreanu’s front group, and the Goga-Cuza government ruled only briefly in late 1937 and early 1938 before being forced out of power and replaced by King Carol II’s direct dictatorship. It was this monarchial autocracy that had Codreanu imprisoned and assassinated in late 1938. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu had finally broken the parliamentary system he so despised, though at the cost of his own life.
In the 1940s, which saw the Communist takeover of Romania, Cuza had to leave Iași for Transylvania. However, he was apparently spared the notorious fate of the executed Ion Antonescu, probably because Cuza was considered too old to stand before a similar kangaroo court. Thus robbed of the martyrdom seen in the trajectories of other, more popular Romanian historical figures, A.C. Cuza has not generated as much attention among historians as he merits.
That may explain the dearth of information on him in English. He passed away in 1947, just four days short of 90 years old. One particularly hostile source, Romanian-Jewish historian I.C. Butnaru, laments that “A.C. Cuza died comfortably in his bed and was never judged for his misdeeds.”
Cuza’s body of work is not always consistent, except in its unapologetic anti-Semitism. Cuza’s 1905 publication Nationality in Art, or Nationality in the Arts (the book deals far more with literature than with the plastic arts), was first published in complete book form in 1908 and went through several revisions throughout his lifetime. This book demonstrates that Cuza began as an Indo-European chauvinist in the vein of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, though with none of Chamberlain’s underappreciated nuance. In the book, Cuza includes not only Europeans, but also Persians as Aryan.
Cuza’s 1922 article “The Science of Anti-Semitism,” which was later approvingly reprinted in its entirety in Codreanu’s autobiography For My Legionaries, reveals that its author had by then reconsidered some of his opinions, such as his appraisal of Islam and the Arabs. While maintaining his lifelong opposition to “mixture of unrelated races,” Cuza, in “The Science of Anti-Semitism,” has now abandoned his racial chauvinism in favor of what might be called pan-antisemitism. On the other hand, Nationality in the Arts continued to be published in several editions long after “The Science of Anti-Semitism” first appeared.
It is possible to view this seeming discrepancy as rather a pair of different strands of a multifaceted but coherent worldview. Cuza’s outlook was not purely tribal or purely altruistic, but incorporated both sensibilities at different times, for different reasons, in different contexts. Nationality in the Arts emphasizes the particularistic aspects of Cuza’s thinking, while “The Science of Anti-Semitism” focuses on the universalistic side of his thought.
In Nationality in the Arts, Cuza is writing as a Romanian, or at most as a European. Like many of Eminescu’s articles and poems, Cuza’s Nationality in the Arts rejects liberal values as a danger to the nation. “Humanitarianism,” he declares, “has no place in Romanian schools.”
In “The Science of Anti-Semitism,” by contrast, he writes of “a duty toward civilization” involving “the united efforts of all nations.” In this essay, he argues from the perspective of a citizen of the world as well as that of an enemy of the Jews. Being one of those, in Cuza’s estimation, inescapably entails being the other.
One way in which A.C. Cuza remained consistent is that, unlike the traditionally Orthodox Christian Codreanu – and also another Cuza associate, unsung insulin discoverer Dr. Nicolae Paulescu – Cuza was interested in a school of revisionist Bible criticism similar to that which would, in Germany, later be dubbed “Positive Christianity.” In contrast to Codreanu and Dr. Paulescu, Cuza’s religious views were more Wagnerian than Orthodox, though this was not a reason for the 1927 falling out between Professor Cuza and his godson.
Cuza’s ideas represent a different tradition of anti-Semitism than those of his associates. Dr. Paulescu was an exponent of France’s anti-Dreyfusard movement, and his work on occult history and Jewish organized crime cites the writings of anti-Dreyfusard historians. Himself Orthodox, Dr. Paulescu was nevertheless pro-Catholic in the vein of his French sources.
Codreanu, on the other hand, appears to have taken some of his inspiration from the Russian Empire’s right-populist and proudly Orthodox Black Hundred movement of the very early 20thcentury, the age of Nicholas II. This only partially qualifies as a foreign influence, however. The Black Hundred movement was founded chiefly by Russia-assimilated Moldavians from Bessarabia, a mostly Romanian-populated region that had been controlled by the Tsarist government since 1812.
Most notable among these unhappy Russified Moldavians were Pavel Krushevan, the first publisher of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Vladimir M. Purishkevich, a founding member and the chief propagandist of the Union of the Russian People. Purishkevich would later split from his Muscovite partner Alexander Dubrovin, with whom he had established Black Hundredism together. Purishkevich named his breakaway movement “The Union of the Archangel Michael.” Similarly, after Codreanu left Cuza’s L.A.N.C., the official name for his Iron Guard was “The Legion of the Archangel Michael.” In all probability, Codreanu’s interest in developments just east of the Prut river had come from his father Ion, who was descended from the Moldavian Cossacks of the 17thcentury.
(These subjects demand further examination. For a brief overview of these Moldavian Cossacks – who were sometimes misidentified as “Polish” due to their being “registered” in the army of Poland-Lithuania – see this writer’s 2019 book Michael the Brave, The Ottoman Wars, and Count Dracula. Steven Zipperstein’s 2018 study Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History contains much helpful biographical information on Krushevan. However, there has not yet, as of this publication, been anything close to a comprehensive biography of Purishkevich available in English.)
Altogether different was the intellectual tradition in which Professor Cuza wrote. Cuza was an exponent of the Schopenhauerian metapolitical legacy, which most notably includes Richard Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. (Eminescu had been an admirer of Schopenhauer and Wagner about a generation before Chamberlain.) Critical of the Old Testament, this school of thought sought to radically distance not only Christianity as a religion, but also the foundational figure of Jesus, from virtually any affinity to Judaism.
These ideas appear in A.C. Cuza’s work as early as Nationality in the Arts and are expanded upon in his 1925 book, The Teaching of Jesus. The former is in part an Iranophile manifesto, and contains an argument that Jesus was of ancient Median origin; the latter, translated into English in this volume, attacks pacifist interpretations of the New Testament. As extreme as Professor Cuza’s arguments are, there is something to be gained from their unsettling lucidity.
-Introduction to the 2019 English A.C. Cuza translation The Teaching of Jesus: Judaism and Christian Theology
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