Similar conditions prevail in Rumania. When that country gained its
autonomy in 1856, it not only denied to the Jews political rights but
declared them to be foreigners. Frequent mob attacks and arbitrary
treatment on the part of the courts and the officials made them
practically outlaws. A hope for improvement seemed to loom up when in
1878 the Congress of Berlin embodied an article in the treaty which
compelled the newly founded sovereign and autonomous states of Servia,
Bulgaria and Rumania to remove from their statute-books all laws
discriminating against citizens on the ground of religious belief. They
complied with this requirement, but Rumania availed itself of a ruse by
which the law was practically rendered nugatory. By declaring the Jews
to be foreigners, and naturalizing some Jews, it apparently complied
with the law, while almost all the 250,000 Jews of the country remained
in their former state of misery, enhanced by new regulations restricting
their economic freedom.
It looked in 1878 as if Europe had guaranteed the fair treatment of the
Jews even in countries of oppression; opposition began in popular ranks,
and in the same year anti-Semitism arose as a new name for hostility
toward the Jews. This first made itself felt in Germany through the
foundation of the Christian Socialist party in 1878, started with the
avowed object of withdrawing from the Jews their political rights,
including that of holding public office and advocating the prohibition of
the immigration of Jews.
From Germany the movement spread to Austria, where it first was taken up
by the radical German party in 1883, and later on by the clericals. It
spread then to Hungary and France, where the publication of Drumont’s “La
France Juive” in 1886 marks the beginning of the movement culminating
in the Dreyfus case. Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 was charged with
high treason in order to stir up anti-Jewish feeling, and this was not
abated until his innocence had finally been established in 1906. Another
sign of an unfavorable change in the attitude of the masses toward the
Jews was the revival of the blood accusation. When in 1840 it made its
appearance in Damascus, where Jews were imprisoned and tortured for this
cause, it seemed that such a return to mediæval barbarism was confined to
the Orient. In 1882, however, it took place in Tisza-Ezlar, Hungary, and
other cases followed in Western Europe: at Xanten, Germany, in 1891, at
Konitz in 1899, and at Polna, Bohemia, in 1900.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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