Studii și Materiale de Istorie Contemporană, vol. XXIV, 2025

Mioara ANTON, Ani de suferință. A fi evreu în România în vreme de război. Studiu de caz: Serge Moscovici [Serge Moscovici/ Years of Torment: Being Jewish in Wartime Romania] [SMIC, XXIV, 2025, pp. 25-38] 

https://www.doi.org/10.62616/SMIC.2025.24.03

The full text is available on CEEOL/ Textul integral al studiului poate fi accesat prin CEEOL: https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1419316

At the end of the 1930s, and especially during wartime, anti-Semitism became the official state policy in Romania. The anti-Jewish laws which restricted the rights of the Jewish minority set the path for wartime deportation and extermination operations. Violence and assassinations against the Jewish minority increased in intensity in September 1940 following the rise to power of the Legionary Movement. 

During the military dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania aligned with the Nazi program of total extermination and a large part of the Jewish community was displaced and deported to Transnistria. Those who remained lost their civil and administrative rights, had their property confiscated, and were dismissed from their jobs and experienced forced labor. My paper explores the biography of Serge Moscovici (Strul Moscovici), who became after the war one of the most famous researchers in the field of social psychology. The wartime years decisively shaped Serge Moscovici who tried to explain and explain to himself the nature of institutionalized crime and the emergence of social-political evil. To be Jewish in 1940s Romania meant to be condemned to a slow death which many did not survive. 

For Serge Moscovici, Romania’s war against the Soviet Union began with the war against the Jews through the pogrom in Iassy (June 1941) when around 14.000 people were murdered. Like thousands of other Jews in Romania, the young Serge Moscovici lived in a context of violence and extreme insecurity, overwhelmed by the fear of deportation to an extermination camp, tormented by the disappearance of those close to him, and anguished by material and moral despair. Joining the Communist Party was the gesture by which he defied the authorities. His attraction to communism ceased when he experienced the early effects of the Soviet occupation in Romania. After the war, he chose the path of exile to avoid repeating the experience of previous years. Serge Moscovici was a survivor, but the traumas of war followed him and decisively influenced his entire intellectual life.

Keywords: Second World War; Anti-semitism; Communism; Holocaust; Sionism;