Marius Turda, În căutarea românului perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România modernă, Polirom, 2024, 312 pagini

Among the photos that document the Iasi Pogrom events, there are a few taken in the Romanian city’s center, on Cuza Voda Street, capturing the aftermath of raiding the Jewish stores. Scattered bodies of entire families were lying on the pavement, contorted and breathless, while passersby civilians would stroll along in promenade attire, gazing at the scene’s depraved spectacle of humanity with body language reflecting mere curiosity or casualness. There is something uncanny about the image that never sat well with me. It was not the fact that seeing these photographs forever changed the affective significance of those places so close to my secondary school, infusing them with the mark of atrocity, but the emotional composition of those visual testimonies. The mismatch was at odds with the version of the events I (barely) learned in school, an episode that was either off-limits in class or completely wrapped in euphemisms, as if the Romanian Holocaust never happened, was not a serious topic to be covered, or – when admitted – Romanians were portrayed as mere victims, forced to witness the gruesome project of their Nazi allies as civilians and to implement it as military. The curious or business-as-usual attitude of civilians in the photo was talking about their readiness, the gradual cultural change that preceded the atrocities, a change meant to instill patriotic sentiments and values predicated on racism, exclusion, marginalization, and – along the coordinates of eugenics, absorbing an understanding of the necessity of controlling and even annihilating foreign elements that were “threatening” the integrity, and purity of national body.

Reading “In Search for the Perfect Romanian” I could finally make more sense of that dissonance. Marius Turda’s book goes into an in-depth analysis explaining how the flow of racist, antisemitic, and eugenic ideas led to the Romanian military, police, and civil society becoming so actively and enthusiastically involved in this annihilation project. Year after year, the Elie Wiesel Institute’s survey of the Romanian population indicated that a vast proportion of Romanians continued to believe that the guilt for the Holocaust which happened on Romanian territory is attributed to Hitler and the German army, the real perpetrators of the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti.

The volume „In Search of the Perfect Romanian” brings to the general public a massive body of archival evidence to the mentality shifts that preceded the second world war, managing to counter ideas such as the autonomy of scientific endeavor, the notion that eugenics was a fringe movement in other spaces that Germany or the US, or that it stopped once Romania turned its arms against the Nazis and their extermination project. The reading offers us a comprehensive picture of the Romanian eugenic program, through analysis of the international context, before zooming in to get a full trial of the native ideological flavors and local implementation solutions. We meet the most active supporters of eugenics in Romania and their meticulous work, inspired by academics in Great Britain, Germany, and the US, who spearheaded the movement. These scholars participated in international congresses, published monographs, and even established institutes like the Biopolitics Institute in Cluj, the first of its kind in the world. The Romanian eugenic project was a massive scientific undertaking, combining contemporary concepts and models with localized, historically backed narratives, feeding into the notion of a continuous, enduring, biologically-based hierarchy, where Romanianness dominates. It was a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary undertaking, which employed actively cross-pollinating perspectives from philosophers, anthropologists, statisticians, geneticists, sociologists, and psychologists to support racial discrimination and determine with „hard evidence” the genetic inferiority of the Roma people, Jews, and disabled.

Scientific, cultural, and religious elites have all been dedicated for decades to promoting and finding ways to serve eugenic goals, and they met little or no resistance. When exponents of the movement like Iuliu Moldovan tried to tone down this enthusiasm and ask for moderation, realizing the direction it took, it was unfortunately too late. While, after the war, most scholars abandoned their allegiance to the Nazi project, the scars continued to show in discriminatory laws and institutional practices, ongoing health disparities, and pervasively infiltrated the cultural narratives around health, fitness, authenticity, and normality with racist and ableist prejudice. If post-Holocaust Germany went through a denazification process, involving academic and political institutions and the society as a whole, Romania’s years of communism shrouded the eugenic legacy of the Holocaust in silence, replacing it with glorifying myths and reactionary, defensive revisionism. Schools, academic departments and institutes, medical institutions, wards, or academic prizes continue to carry the name of eugenic founders. This lack of explicit and programmatic disavowal in Romania, only allowed eugenics to find a new language and ideological host under communism, enabling its exclusionary and annihilative impetus to fester under the surface. This explains, on the one hand, the ignorance of the general topics regarding the extent of our role in the Holocaust and why political candidates to the right of the political spectrum who are trying to recast war criminals as national heroes are not automatically disqualified, on the other. Moreover, given the historical gap between the Holocaust and the moment our society openly started confronting it, the attempts to critically examine the past seem to be regarded as unnatural, the result of revisionist campaigns aimed at denigrating our nation, its history or simply interpreted and dismissed as excesses of political correctness or wokeness.

In the current political context, Marius Turda’s volume is not only interesting but necessary, delivering a commitment to recovering historical facts and confronting their legacies. Its goal is to reveal the „intimate relation between science and politics”, helping to answer the question of „how was it possible to kill through shooting, starvation, and sickness hundreds of thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Roma” (p. 22). The eugenic language’s complex and deep long-lasting effect relied on a moral syntax justifying the extermination or isolation of degenerates to maintain race hygiene, an emotional vocabulary evoking national progress, instilling patriotism, and aiming at preserving authenticity, all expressed in the expert prosody of scientific authority. An enormous data-collection effort was carried out by eugenicists to back the latter. The jargon and ethos of science were fully backed by statistics, tables, graphs, and comparative analyses meant to provide the justificative weight for a reprehensible project. What is truly surprising is the gleefulness, curiosity, and dedication with which Romanian scholars subscribed to it in the interwar period and after, taking on this messianic and civilizing role to save Romanianness, protecting it from inferior races and degeneration.

The procedure involved the constant reiteration of the dichotomy between superior Romanians and inferior Jews/Roma, whose importance is stated and restated over and over, to justify the need for eugenic intervention to combat racial degeneration. Emphasizing values related to the superiority of white, rural Romanian race and spirituality, promotes affective investment in maintaining the racial hierarchy and dichotomy mentioned before: a positive investment in a true, authentic Romanianness, which was to be regarded with pride, admiration, love, and appreciation for its naturalness, beauty and purity; and a negative investment tapping into emotions like disgust, intense repulsion and hate towards the ones deemed as racially inferior, foreign but also unfit because of chronic disease or disability. The rich primary sources Marius Turda uses excellently attest to this evaluative conditioning, constantly departing the scientific ideal of detached objectivity. This is best illustrated in the imagistic investment in metaphors such as the one borrowed from the father of eugenics, Francis Galton, who sees the racial wealth of a nation as a garden that needs to be protected from weeds. Similarly, Romania, the garden of the Virgin Mary, had to be weeded of allogenic, non-Christian elements (see page 47).  Such rhetoric adopted by not only political but also cultural and scientific elites is interesting to revisit through a contemporary lens, mapping into the present-day reactionary discourse and its relentless demonization of feminism, progressivism, derogating the values of pluralism, diversity, all seen as forces converging to end the Western civilization.

The idea of racial inferiority and degeneration were ingrained in the collective mentalities in Europe in the second part of the 19th century across Europe but were legitimized by the vast scientific efforts carried out later by entire disciplines that joined the efforts to justify exclusionary and segregating politics. The interdisciplinary transfer of race ideas between history, medicine, anthropology, philosophy, theology, and literature intensified at the end of the 19^th century. The prejudice informed the science, and then the scientific „evidence” trickled back into the public mentality, reinforcing scientific practices’ validation, first through public conferences and all sorts of popularization efforts, cementing them in the collective representation and memory.

What Romanian eugenicists like A.C. Cuza and Constantin Paulescu understood was the necessity of creating a vocabulary of stigma, rejection, and marginalization even if first only through appropriation (from Gobineau, Morel, Lombroso, or Nordau), and then through localizing. This aversive language to describe Jewish and Roma populations included epidemiological metaphors like the plague, and parasitism, but also became increasingly infused with spiritual connotations. Nicolae C. Paulescu saw the Jewish problem as a moral and spiritual one, and the „degenerates” threatening the purity of the nation as exponents of evil. The hateful charge of the vocabulary of denigration and dehumanization was undoubtedly boosted through religious or spiritual demonizing metaphors.  Romanian journalist Petru Tiparescu uses this kind of imagery for a call to arms against the „curses” that kept oppressing the „fate” (see page 72 for full citation) of a young and way too lenient nation. Display of concern and dignity for the other, tolerance and openness toward the foreign, or care for the vulnerable were cast as weaknesses that needed to be overcome or suppressed, as enemies within that threatened the integrity of the national constitution and future. This vocabulary or jargon of abjection was perfected by Sabin Manuila, as generously exemplified in the chapter Roma and „Romanians by Blood”.

Chapter 2 shows best how the ideas of race purity that needed to be demonstrated, protected, and promoted through hygiene policies slowly turned into a political imperative. Of course, researchers had to first identify and delimit the parameters of ethnonational belonging in measurable and comparable biological terms and intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural dimensions. Bringing massive amounts of data, complex equations, and graphs to the intuitive appeal of eugenic ideas is probably what explains the instant adherence to it, but also their persistence in the public imagination, especially among the highly educated, including those designated with the education of the younger generations. For instance, the idea of the local population’s hereditary advantage and continuity resides in the adversity-ridden history, on the one hand, and demonstrates the vigor of the genes on the other. The best argument is formulated by Gheorghe Banu, who shows that „the original constitutional background has been subject, throughout the vicissitudes of history, to a selection which has intensified native racial features” (cited on page 72), national features he characterizes through attributes such as vitality and intellectual and spiritual superiority.

Commandments of scientists equipped with sophisticated instruments and terminology to detect, label, rank, and classify individuals along various racial characteristics were dedicated to diagnosing who is endowed, worthy, or unfit and disposable. This haste to find the dimensions of the essential biological and spiritual traits of the true Romanian takes a comedic dimension especially when presented side by side with the similar efforts of the Hungarian counterparts, driven by the same evidence-based zeal but not surprisingly, reaching opposing conclusions. Romanian researchers situating the cradle of Romanianness, where they “found” the Dacian or Carpathian biotype embodied by the Transylvanian peasant, competing in the scientific arms race with the Hungarian ones, just illustrates that their primary goal was not the pursuit of scientific truth, but feeding into nationalistic narratives.

This search for Romanianness backed by the ethos of scientific rigor and discipline turned into a matter of „life and death” in the early 40’s as Traian Herseni depicts in the daily Newspaper „Cuvantul”. The entire hateful rhetoric behind and generated from the Romanian race science reached a boiling point noticed in the increased calls to arms, asking for concrete measures to racially cleanse the nation. As the author points out, the message of the scientific and political elites did not change fundamentally compared to the 20s, serving the same goal of defining a national biopolitical program. What changed now was its accelerated pace, its urgency, and readiness to turn into a full-blown politics of annihilation. This cultivated sense of urgency legitimizes and consecrates the upcoming extreme, brutal violence against co-nationals, many times members of the same community, coworkers, or neighbors.

Through rationalization, the instinctive empathetic concern towards potential victims is suppressed, ignored, or experienced as a weakness of will that needs to be overcompensated, to win a holy war against the impure and degenerates threatening the fate of the nation. Associating these imaginary inside enemies with aversion, disgust, and hate, the collective identities and mentalities become the terrain where individuals are desensitized to the hostility and violence embedded in their attitudes and language. The scientific language bringing justification makes them acceptable and desirable, part of a national mission. The morally abject actions projected by the dehumanizing language will become invested with a goal and a subject of admiration in a Kierkegaardian theological suspension of the ethical. The decadeslong silence on the topic during communism, mirroring Abraham’s silence after returning with Isaac from the mountain demanded a revision of that higher goal. This only took that unquestioned higher goal and carried it over in sublimated forms, manifesting in a pedagogy of disgust and social hygiene that dictated who was worthy of concern and care, and who could be and should be discarded. Marius Turda is not looking for historical answers in this book, not providing solutions, but engages his reader in questioning that higher goal, avoiding alarmism or long due trials of conscience. The background question is the possibility of building a civic national identity that is not exclusively predicated on ethnicity.

As a reader, one shortcoming I experienced, especially in the second chapter, was the lack of visual support. Diagrams, medical records, and drawings of bodily and cranial types would have been a rich anchoring into the visual and aesthetic universe of true Romanianness and its eugenic molding. But hopefully, the author is reserving all these materials, for a Romania-focused exhibition.

The volume is intended for a large audience, for whom it displays how easily the claims for the autonomy of scientific disciplines are dismantled. As readers witness entire scholarly traditions being absorbed into these nationalistic projects, they can understand how this subjugation manifests for decades to come, in academic practices, in the way institutions of welfare and healthcare were set up, but also how they keep intruding on intimate and domestic life, influencing partner selection or parenting practices, collective mentalities and folk psychologies shaped by cravings for eugenic explanations of ill fate and also of resilience, but also for the hopeful imagining of eugenically shaped futures. Romanian history certainly offers a rich case study of how these intersections of eugenics and politics evolved and expanded leading to tragic events. “In Search for the Perfect Romanian” is redacted with an objective but engaging narrative style that does not betray the author’s scholarly rigor and fidelity. However, it can be a difficult read at times, especially for those not fully familiar with the vocabulary of eugenics and anthropological research. The lack of a vernacular in Romanian adds to the difficulty but this is in itself proof of the pioneering nature and also demonstrating the necessity of this volume in the Romanian space.

The marriage of medical jargon, scientific terminology, and ethical case for avoiding national degeneration, on one hand, and the blatant ugliness of the degrading and dehumanizing racial slurs contained in the referenced primary sources, makes the volume a difficult and baffling read that would normally come with trigger warnings in some Western universities. However, this explicit content is useful in understanding the recipes contemporary race scientists from the same Western cultural spaces use to advance identitarian and white supremacist calls for arms against immigrants, Jewish elites, against egalitarianism, and alleged globalist agendas, with a more veiled and polite language, adapted to the current standards of acceptability.

The volume integrates insights from various medical and social science fields to provide a holistic understanding of modern Romanian biopolitics. The result is an essential contribution not only to the history of eugenics in Romania but also to how the sociopolitical changes and scientific and intellectual projects led to tragic events in an attempt to build a strong and healthy nation, an attempt which remained imprinted in the definition of our national identity. The book provides a well-documented account of the development and ramifications of eugenics and racism in a non-Western space.

How can we combat race science? Are we condemned to witness history repeat itself, as the specter of eugenics is back to haunt us? I hope the book will spark an intense and genuine interdisciplinary dialogue on this pressing issue.

Ana Maria HOJBOTA