Nae Ionescu’s preface argued that Jewish and Christian values are essentially irreconcilable. The really virulent language comes at the end, when the Jewish-Christian conflict is seen as soluble only through the disappearance of its cause, the Jews. The Iron Guard ideologue provided a definition of Romanian identity: “We are Orthodox Christian because we are Romanian, and Romanian because we are Orthodox.” This was not a new definition; prestigious intellectuals had already espoused it. What was especially dramatic, and especially dangerous, was the historical context in which these inflammatory pronouncements now appeared.
Especially hard to forget was the part of Nae Ionescu’s preface in which “Judah,” having “refused to recognize Christ the Messiah,” was declared an essential, irreducible enemy, a “dissolver of Christian values.” The indictment was total, unconditionaclass="underline"
It suffers because it gave birth to Christ, beheld him and did not believe …. Judah suffers because it is Judah …. Iosif Hechter, you are sick. You are sick to the core because all you can do is suffer …. The Messiah has come, Iosif Hechter, and you have had no knowledge of him …. Or you have not seen, because pride put scales over your eyes …. Iosif Hechter, do you not feel that cold and darkness are enfolding you?
The writer of the novel that was being introduced was not referred to as Sebastian, but as Hechter, as “Judah.”
Thus the hooligan year 1934 was given a hooligan scandal. At the time, it seemed to some commentators that Sebastian’s willingness to allow this incitement to genocide to appear at the front of his “Jewish” novel was perverse and cowardly. Assailed by fascists and Marxists, Christians and Jews, liberals and extremists, Sebastian replied with an essay, “How I Became a Hooligan,” which appeared in 1935, the year in which his Journal begins. He wrote that anti-Semitism, which “channels toward Jews the hate-filled distractions of organisms in crisis,” was nonetheless “on the periphery of Jewish suffering.” In 1935, he still had a certain condescension toward external adversity, seeing it as minor or rudimentary in comparison with the ardent “internal adversity” that besets the Jews.
Despite the dangers closing in from all sides, Sebastian continued to dwell romantically on the “spiritual autonomy” that Jewish suffering conferred upon the Jews. Judaism was a strict and tragic position in the face of existence. “No people has more ruthlessly confessed to its real or imagined sins; no one has kept stricter watch on himself or punished himself more severely. The biblical prophets are the fieriest voices ever to have sounded on earth.” Sebastian locates the “open wound” of Judaism, its “tragic nerve,” in the tension between “a tumultuous sensitivity and a ruthlessly critical sense,” between “intelligence in its coldest forms and passion in its most untrammeled forms.”
Sebastian liked to refer to himself as a “Danube Jew,” and defined his identity as follows: “I am not a partisan, but always a dissident. I have confidence only in the single individual, but in him I have a great deal of confidence.” He was adamantly opposed to the idea (it was all around him) that the collective has priority. “The death of the individual is the death of the critical spirit,” and ultimately “the death of man.” Sebastian’s enemy is man in uniform: “Is it religion you want? Here’s a membership card. Or a metaphysic? Here’s an anthem. Or a commitment? Here’s a leader.” He thirsts for dialogue and friendship, but he clings to his faith in solitude: “We can never pay too high a price for the right to be alone, without half-memories, without half-loves, without half-truths.”
As for the country that he never ceased to love for its paradoxes, its contradictions, and its eccentricities, Sebastian was not inclined to flatter it. “Nothing is serious, nothing is grave, nothing is true in this culture of smiling lampooners. Above all, nothing is incompatible …. Compromise is the blossom of violence. We therefore have a culture of brutality and horse-trading.” The formulation profoundly describes a time when collusion and compromise were preparing a future of violence. Sebastian recalls the surprise that a Frenchman visiting Bucharest in 1933 felt at the intellectual “cohabitation” prevalent in the country. A notorious Iron Guardist, “caught in the act of intellectual tenderness” with a notorious Marxist, explained that “we are just friends — which doesn’t involve commitment.” Just friends: this, for Sebastian, is a “summing up of Bucharest psychology,” a psychology of stupefying mélanges and metamorphoses. “Incompatibility: a concept completely lacking at every level of our public life.” The formulation recurs in the Journaclass="underline" “Incompatibility is something unknown on the Danube.”
This and other statements appeared even more prophetic as the situation in Romania became more and more extreme. In 1937 the Iron Guard (supported by Sebastian’s friend Eliade) scored a major success at the polls. Finally there were no illusions. “All is lost,” Sebastian noted on February 21. The anti-Semitic government led by the poet Octavian Goga introduced into official discourse the evil “energy” of a language attuned to new imperatives: jidan (kike), jidánime (a horde of kikes). The official review of Jewish citizenship, and the elimination of Jews from the bar and the press, was followed by further restrictions and humiliations.
The danger grew. Officially inspired anti-Semitism gradually became a cheap entertainment within the reach of more and more people. The Iron Guard “rebellion” in January 1941 unleashed the predictable horrors in a city terrorized by armed street clashes and murderers chanting religious hymns. “A large number of Jews have been killed in Báneasa Forest and thrown there (most of them naked).” Sebastian noted on January 29. “But it seems that another lot have been executed at the slaughterhouse, at Stráulesti.” A few days later, when he was reading about anti-Semitic persecutions in the Middle Ages in Simon Dubnow’s History of the Jews, he turned again to what had happened. “What stuns you most about the Bucharest massacre is the absolutely bestial ferocity with which things were done … the Jews slaughtered at Stráulesti were hung up on abattoir hooks, in the place of split-open cattle. Stuck to each corpse was a piece of paper with the words: ‘kosher meat’ …. I cannot find more terrible events in Dubnow.”
The worst fears were coming true. Even before the horrors, Sebastian had recorded premonitions. “An uneasy evening — without my realizing why. I feel obscure threats: as if the door isn’t shut properly, as if the window shutters are transparent, as if the walls themselves are becoming translucent. Everywhere, at any moment, it is possible that some unspecified dangers will pounce from outside — dangers I know to have always been there …. You feel like shouting for help — but to whom?” This was written, as if in a state of siege, on January 14, 1941.
Many of Sebastian’s friends were now in the enemy camp. The failure of the Iron Guard revolt infuriated and embittered them. “The Legion wipes its ass with this country,” said Cioran immediately after the Iron Guard was defeated. Eliade expressed the same reaction more professorially: “Romania doesn’t deserve a legionary movement.” In 1941, General Ion Antonescu, a former ally of the Legion who was obsessed with “law and order,” established a military dictatorship with the support of the Führer. This did not put a stop to anti-Semitic murders. The summer of 1941 brought not only Romania’s entry into the war, but also a fresh round of atrocities. Massacres took place at Ia
i; and long before the Nazi gas chambers were established — also in Iai — the sinister experiment of a “death train” killed hundred and thousands of Jews by asphyxiation in sealed wagons on a journey heading nowhere.