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“Memory, History & Identity in Bessarabia and Beyond”

University of Pittsburgh,

October 21-22, 2005

“ ‘Nothing but Communist Propaganda’ The Encounter between Romanian Police and Jewish Activists in Interwar Bessarabia.”

Kate Sorrels

History Department,

University of Pittsburgh

Abstract:

Modern Jewish political movements in Eastern Europe enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the interwar period and Jewish political parties multiplied, forming a complex and highly nuanced political spectrum. Movements such as traditional Orthodoxy, socialist labor, Zionism, Diaspora nationalism, and the Hebrew and Yiddish language movements, provided the cultural and ideological base for Jewish politics. However, none of these visions for the future of modern Jewry could produce a solution markedly more realistic than the others for to the common predicament that Jews faced in Eastern Europe’s new or reconfigured nationalizing states. The result was profound political ineffectiveness. In Bessarabia, the intense political activity and broad, complex political spectrum was interpreted by the Romanian Siguranţa as evidence for a pervasive Jewish conspiracy. Using autobiographies of young, politically active Jews and the records of the Siguranţa in Bessarabia, I examine the goals and intentions of young Jewish activists as compared with the conspiracy attributed to them by the Romanian officials who had them under surveillance. I argue that due to centralist priorities and ideological bias, the Siguranţa’s interpretation of the information they gathered on Bessarabian Jews of all political persuasions was fundamentally flawed. The Siguranţa found evidence for a potent international Jewish conspiracy making rapid progress Bessarabia in what was, in fact, highly ineffective and powerless politics.

Kate Sorrels is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds an M.A. from the Central European University in Budapest.

While she has worked on the Transylvanian Saxon conservative women's movement and eugenics movement from the turn of the century to the mid 1920s, her current research interest is in modern Central and East European Jewish intellectual history, where she focuses on how Jewish intellectuals have used ideas of Europe to articulate their identities and to define cultural regions or spaces.