Trouble Next Door
In mid-February, a peasant revolt began in Romania, specifically in northern Moldavia, the region of the country directly bordering Bukovina. That the uprising began on estates employing Jewish leaseholders resulted in a high level of anti-Jewish violence, at least initially. As the revolt spread across the country, however, it became marked more by indiscriminate violence against property and its owners and managers, regardless of ethnic group. As the capital of a region directly bordering on the area in turmoil, Czernowitz was a major hub for news about the uprising. In addition, villages along the border between Bukovina and Romania received numerous refugees, including both Romanian peasants and Jews fleeing antisemitic violence.[1]
Irina Marin points out in her recent study of the uprising that there was never any real danger of the violence crossing the border into Bukovina, despite the presence of a large Romanian population on both sides. However, news of the revolt had significant repercussions for the electoral campaign and the rhetoric surrounding it. An unsigned comment in Bukowinaer Post connected the violence in Romania to the current battle between Jewish candidates in the election: “You Jews who sow the seeds of division among your own people, who wage a battle against your own co-religionists, against your own national brethren – you should consider that only the harmonious union of all forces can ward off evil and peril … The events in Romania, close to the border of Bukovina, are a gruesome Mene tekel for our Jews. You should understand this right.”[2] Evoking the handwriting on the wall from the biblical Book of Daniel, which foretold the destruction of the Israelite Kingdom of Judah, the author reminded readers, “The Jews are always in danger!” – a catch phrase often uttered by Straucher in the past. Although the article was unsigned, the editors at Bukowinaer Volks Zeitung clearly believed Straucher had written it. They responded with their own front-page item attacking Straucher’s call for unity, referring to “his lack of embarrassment in erasing the misfortune of the Jews in Romania and cooking his thin soup by the fire of the peasant uprising there.”[3]
More disturbing was the response from some corners of the Romanian community, however. The lead-off item in the March 23 edition of Neue Freie Lehrer Zeitung, a weekly German-language newspaper targeted at Romanian educators and students, was entitled “Addressed to Our Jews.” It laid on the antisemitic stereotypes heavily. “It is not acceptable to see the cultureless peasants merely as objects of enrichment,” it read, “as unfortunately a large part of Jewry, not only in Russia and Romania but also in Austria and especially Bukovina, believes.” More ominously, it continued, “We involuntarily think of our own Jews at the many alarming reports that reach us from the border towns, and so many people who know our Jews find the popular anger, which is currently unfolding in such a fearful mass in the neighboring kingdom, all too understandable.” Bukovina’s Jews were condemned for peddling of alcohol, usury, worker exploitation, and control of the press. While assuring Jewish readers that it only had the best interests of the Jewish people in mind, the article accused the “Schnapps barons” of leading an attack on Aurel Onciul, and it closed with a dismissal of Straucher’s call for Jewish unity and a warning to Bukovina’s Jews to treat everyone justly and equitably.[4] The newspaper was not yet finished. The next week, its front-page item, simply entitled “The Jews,” heaped insult upon injury. Having recognized that the nature of violence in Romania was predominantly economic and not antisemitic, the article accused Jews and specifically Straucher – now sneeringly called “the infallible” – of wrongly accusing others of hating them. Even as it warned readers that “Revolting farmers do not distinguish between circumcised and uncircumcised capital,” it engaged in grotesque antisemitic caricature: “It has never occurred to any of us to believe in ritual murder or to dwell on the fact that the Jews circumcise their boys instead of baptizing them, wear caftans and sidelocks, pray to the moon and believe in magical rabbis.”[5]
The threatening tone of these articles aside, it does bear mentioning that the hostility expressed toward Straucher is in keeping with the apparent division between Straucher’s JNP and the JPA/IJP and their respective alliances or aspiring alliances with the Ukrainians and Romanians of Bukovina. For the JPA/IJP, this gambit did not pay off. When it came time for the city’s newspapers to endorse candidates for the election, Neue Frei Lehrer Zeitung endorsed a choice: either the SD candidates, Brod and Grigorovici, or the Christian Germans, Roschmann and Scharizer. The Romanian support for the SD candidates, particularly for Brod, is somewhat confounding, but it seems to have been more a matter of denying votes in Czernowitz to Straucher and Wender than of supporting Brod or Grigorovici. With the Christian Germans, there was at least the unifying principle of antisemitism. In an overview of the electoral situation at the end of March, Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung noted, “The German candidate, Dr. Scharizer, is running on a national program with a strong – but unacknowledged – “Christian” element … The candidacy of Dr. Scharizer is intended to be implicitly antisemitic.”[6] Roschmann would soon make his own antisemitism much clearer.
An Appeal to Christian Voters
Sometime in early April, Roschmann tried to a new campaign strategy. He had posters put up across the city appealing to Christian voters – not German, but Christian – presumably a tactic to peel off antisemitic voters among the Romanians and Ukrainians of Czernowitz. For its own part, the liberal press in Czernowitz closed rank. Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung ran a signed front-page editorial by Johannes Kromayer, a German philologist and fellow professor at FJU, appealing to the better instincts of German readers and a sense of fairness in allowing the two Czernowitz mandates to be held by Jewish politicians.[7] More incisive was an unsigned lead-off item in Czernowitz Tagblatt, which called Roschmann “a sinister agitator and wrongdoer who is all the more sharply condemned when he happens to work in the highest place of enlightenment and knowledge.” The piece diagnosed a split in the German political camp, urged German voters in the Three Cities to support Skedl – “a German of real scrap and grit” – and reminded readers that Czernowitz was already represented by two Jewish deputies – Straucher and chamber of commerce representative Rosenzweig.[8] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung declared Skedl the “Jewish candidate” in the Three Cities despite his past.[9] Bukowinaer Post reminded readers than neither Roschmann or Scharizer were natives of Bukovina, and as “imported Germans,” neither deserved the votes of the inhabitants of Czernowitz.[10] Czernowitz Tagblatt picked up this thread and called the Christian German candidates “foreigners.”[11]
Even the twice-monthly Czernowitzer Presse, another of the late Herman Czopp’s newspaper, got into the act, releasing its second issue of the year after having appeared only sporadically since the publisher’s death. The first issue of 1907, released on April 9, ran a front-page editorial by an “independent socialist” who signed himself “Spektator.” The author, who piece ran five pages, accused Grigorovici of antisemitism – a strange claim considering the SD candidate in Czernowitz-West having openly courted Jewish voters (playfully referring to himself as a goy at an SD event in March), sought cooperation with the Jewish Bund in Russia, and most importantly, having a rather prominent Jewish wife, the Marxist theoretician Tatjana Pisterman; attacked Wallstein with the bathhouse allegation; and promised Billig that, if he did not withdraw from the campaign to “clean up his own affairs,” he would regret it.[12]
With the April 15 issue (which turned out to be the final issue), Czernowitz Presse opened with an attack on Billig and Wallstein but then turned to discussing the German candidates. In another pseudonymous piece – this one signed Justus – the Christian Germans were attacked as foreigners, “ignorant of the country, completely unfamiliar with the conditions of the population.” Roschmann’s declaration of himself as the “Christian candidate” was denounced as a “trick.” Finally, it warned that, if the Germans did not stop stoking antisemitic fires, Straucher’s JNP might consider canceling any deals with German candidates – an indication that it was up to Skedl’s liberal Germans to keep the Christian Germans at bay.[13] This call seems to have been answered, with a new organization, the Bund der Deutschen (Association of Germans) emerging to call on German voters in Czernowitz to vote for Straucher and Wender.[14] At the same time, cracks were beginning to show in some of Straucher’s other alliances. Two newspapers reported that the Straucher ally Smal-Stocki was encountering resistance getting Ukrainians to vote for the JNP.[15] There was also talk of a Romanian entering the race in Czernowitz-East, presumably to force a run-off election in a district that still heavily favored Straucher.
[1] Marin, Peasant Violence, 6, 209-210.
[2] Bukowinaer Post, March 21, 1907, 2, translation is taken from Marin, Peasant Violence, 243.
[3] Bukowinaer Volks Zeitung, March 23, 1907, 1.
[4] Neue Freie Lehrer Zeitung, March 23, 1907, 1-2.
[5] Neue Freie Lehrer Zeitung, March 30, 1907, 1-2.
[6] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, March 31, 1907, 2.
[7] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, April 12, 1907, 1.
[8] Czernowitzer Tagblatt, April 13, 1907, 1-2.
[9] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, April 14, 1907, 1.
[10] Bukowinaer Post, April 14, 1907, 2.
[11] Czernowitz Tagblatt, April 14, 1907, 4.
[12] Czernowitzer Presse, April 9, 1907, 1-5.
[13] Czernowitzer Presse, April 15, 1907, 3-4.
[14] Bukowinaer Post, April 21, 1907, 3-4.
[15] Neue Freie Lehrer Zeitung, April 20, 1907, 2; Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, April 23, 1907, 4.
Inevitable Historicity 