Forming the majority population in a small area, the Saxons have lived in relative isolation until modern times. Their dialect and culture have retained medieval characteristics long abandoned by Germans elsewhere. All Saxons have been Lutheran since that denomination was introduced into Transylvania in the sixteenth century. The Swabians are Roman Catholics and live in the Banat region. As with the Saxons, their designation as Swabians does not truly reflect their origin. They were settled in the Banat during the eighteenth century to work the land recently vacated by the Turks. Before their arrival there, the language and culture of the Swabians had undergone various modifications to which the Saxons had not been exposed. Most Swabians are peasants farming the rich plain around Timisoara. Like the Hungarians, the German minority in Romania has resisted assimilation and maintains its cultural identity through German-language schools, books and newspapers, radio and television programs, and theatrical performances and through the perpetuation of their characteristic dress, dances, and folk art. Jews In those censuses in which they are identified (but not including that of 1966), Jews are listed as an ethnic group or nationality rather than as members of a religious denomination. In the 1956 census they represented the third largest minority in the country with a membership of 146,000. In early 1972 Western observers roughly estimated the number of Jews still residing in Romania at slightly under 100,000. The influx of Jews into Romania took place during the first half of the nineteenth century when large numbers left the unsettled conditions of Poland and Russia to seek new opportunities in prospering Moldavia and, later, Walachia. A small number of Jews from various parts of Austria-Hungary settled in Transylvania at the same time and earlier. By 1900 Jews constituted more than one-half of the urban population of Romania, most of them engaged in commerce, banking, or industry. Not allowed to assimilate by various restrictions on their movement and activities, the Jews remained apart from the rest of the population. This apartness and their role in the economy engendered distrust and resentment, which periodically erupted into persecution by some elements of the population (see ch. 2). The loss of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union and the deportations and exterminations during World War II by the Nazis reduced the Jewish population in Romania to its 1956 size. It has been further reduced since then through emigration to Israel. Despite their historic separateness from the rest of the society, most Jews in the mid-twentieth century tend to think of themselves as Romanians of the Jewish faith rather than an ethnic minority. All speak Romanian, and only one-fourth claimed Yiddish as their mother tongue in the 1950s. They continue to be urban oriented, and one-fourth of them lived in Bucharest in 1956. Other Minorities