Marriage, Race, and Eugenics in Romania From the Late Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries
Type de matériel :
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This paper aims to analyze the topic of mixed marriages (in the sense of marriages involving different ethnicities) in discourses of eugenics in interwar Romania. This topic enjoyed a resurgence as an issue of national public interest in the mid-1930s owing to general anxiety concerning the democratic destiny of Romanian political life, and the danger of revision of peace treaties after the First World War. Mixed marriages were seen as instruments of the denationalization of those Romanians who entered into them. The Cluj eugenics school initiated a series of research programs to study the growth and impact of mixed marriages in the towns of Transylvania. The results were consistent with the fears: between 1920 and 1937, one in three Romanians married a spouse from a non-Romanian ethnic group. Most frequent were marriages between a Romanian groom and a Hungarian bride. This was an unacceptable situation for the Romanian intellectual and political elite. In 1940, a law was enacted to forbid marriages between Jews and Romanians, and in the same year State clerks were prohibited from marrying with non-Romanians. In the following year, army officers were subjected to the same restrictive matrimonial regime. All of this ended when Soviet troops entered Romania in the second half of 1944. However, we also seek to show that Romanians’ fear of denationalization through mixed inter-ethnic marriages was not a specifically interwar phenomenon, but went back to the period when the national identity of Romanians in Transylvania was first formed and asserted, i.e. at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In short, what we are dealing with here are fears that developed within the context of a national ideological construction and which, in a second stage, were then bolstered within the context of a scientific paradigm.
Réseaux sociaux