Within three years, between 2008 and 2011, two leading scholars of antisemitism and the Holocaust in Romania, Jean Ancel (1940–2008) and Leon Volovici (1938–2011), have passed away, leaving a great void, perhaps to be filled gradually by a new generation of scholars. Both worked at and cooperated with Yad Vashem and were members of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania.
In a tragic irony of fate, Jean Ancel did not see the publication of the English edition of his major work The History of the Holocaust in Romania, first published in Hebrew by Yad Vashem in two volumes in 2002; nor did Leon Volovici see the English version, published in 2011, after he assumed the mantle of editing it following Ancel’s death. In a sense, the English edition will serve as a living memorial to the vast work of these two scholars, who were also related by family.
Born in Iaşi, and living in Israel since 1984, Leon Volovici embodied the life and fate of the Jewish intellectual in the tragic twentieth century. He was raised in the epicenter of the great pogrom of June 1941, educated in communist Romania, and driven to despair by the realities of the late Ceauşescu era. He and his wife Hana (Hania) and their children Ania and Marc experienced the difficulties, frustrations, and joys of becoming new immigrants and finding their place in Israeli society. Leon closed a circle when after 1989 he became a well-known intellectual activist in the public discourse in Romania, where he was involved in writing, lecturing, and teaching a new generation about their country’s past and the fate of its Jews. He contributed much to the intellectual discourse in Romania during the past two decades, writing in the top intellectual weeklies and periodicals, such as Revista 22 and Dilema Veche. His engagement in this discourse displayed a deep understanding of the past and present currents in Romanian intellectual life, and he successfully projected both an outsider’s overview from the heights of his apartment in the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem, and the insider’s perspective that he always retained. The saga of his life is told in a wonderful short memoir, From Iaşi to Jerusalem and Back, published in Romanian in 2007, out of which a complex, cosmopolitan, and yet a so very Jewish intellectual and a sensitive, caring person emerged.
Yad Vashem played an interesting role in shaping Volovici’s career over the last two decades of his productive life. A literary historian by training, having written his doctoral thesis on Romanian philology at the University of Iaşi, he found his first steady employment in Israel in the Yad Vashem Archives, where he worked for five years. There, as he wrote in From Iaşi to Jerusalem and Back, he first came into close contact with the tragic and challenging sources related to the Holocaust. Also there he encountered the complete microfilmed diary of Mihail Sebastian, which later he helped edit, as well as the raw material that underpinned the virtually uncharted, problematic cultural and intellectual antisemitism of interwar Romania, the topic of Leon’s classic Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Ro manian Intellectuals in the 1930s, published in 1991. But the years at Yad Vashem, where he was greatly appreciated, also had another effect on him. Under the impact of the sources he so diligently traced and organized, he realized he did not want to become a Holocaust historian, which was a rather strange realization for one working at the very hub of Holocaust research.
I do not think that I have the necessary psychological makeup to become a historian of that period. I do not see myself capable of becoming a specialist in the history of massacres, of all the methods invented by the Nazis to exterminate whole communities systematically, people of all ages, many, many children. I respect [those historians] and it makes me emotional to see [how they] can devote their lives to the history of Nazi crimes and those of Hitler’s allies, but I felt that I could not do it. I wanted to return to the library and to the research of cultural themes, and the history of ideas, even if those “ideas” are related to the history of political radicalism and antisemitism.
And perhaps as a farewell to the tracing of materials on the topic he felt he could not become a historian of, he received, in the literary sense, a final cold blast of the Holocaust in the freezing Moscow winter of early 1990 as one of the first scholars Yad Vashem sent there to the newly opened archives to microfilm documents attesting to Nazi atrocities committed on Soviet soil.
During his fruitful and productive years as a leading researcher and lecturer at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he fulfilled his sense of calling — a historian of ideas, of histoire des mentali tés. He focused on Romania and also on the nature of post-communist antisemitism, while working at numerous projects on Jewish intellectual life in Romania. He lectured often at universities in Romania and felt at home speaking at his alma mater in Iaşi, where he had a sense of “homecoming.” He also visited my native city of Cluj, where participating in conferences and in the Holocaust training program for Roma- nian teachers, he always made a point of praising Iaşi for its intellectual past, but appreciating Cluj’s multicultural life. He often renewed his contacts with Romanian educators in Israel, where he lectured on the Holocaust in Romania and other related themes to seminars of educa- tors at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies.
True, he did not become a “historian” of the Holocaust in the classic sense, yet his contribution to the understanding of it, especially in Romania, was immense. It seems that he bypassed the often-asked question “do words kill?” and proceeded immediately to “when and how do words kill.” He was looking more into the degeneration of a generation of Romanian intellectuals of the 1930s — the young and the bright, such as Nae Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Nichifor Crainic, and Mircea Eliade — each in his own way, and others like them, who provided the intellectual ammunition that led to the atrocities of Dorohoi, Bucharest, Iaşi, and Transnistria. None of them did the dirty work of shooting the Jews into the Nistru (Dniester) River, and perhaps they did not intend that such an end come to those “repulsive Jews” who had to be excluded from the pure body of the nation. Yet, this linkage was Leon’s great contribution to the work of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania in 2003–2004. The commission’s final report quotes from Leon’s Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism Emil Cioran’s dictum that
The Jew is not our fellow being, our neighbor. However intimate we may become with him, a precipice divides us whether we want it or not. It is as if he were descended from a different species of ape than we are and had been condemned from the beginning to a sterile tragedy, to everlasting hopes. We cannot approach him as a human because the Jew is first a Jew then a man.
During the commission’s deliberations, he did not engage in discussions or even polemics focusing on the facts related to the magnitude of the Holocaust in Romania and the crimes of the Antonescu regime. The late Jean Ancel and other colleagues mainly did that, presenting and analyzing the numerous documents. Leon, it seemed to me, though he knew the sources very well, was not so keen on arguing about the details of the facts. For him, it was essential that the commission follow the road that had led to the poisoning of a society, by tracing the desen- sitization advocated by its leading intellectuals to any empathy toward its future victims. In the words of one younger Romanian member of the commission, Adrian Cioflanca, during the “tension-filled debates [in the commission’s sessions], I could only admire his equilibrium, elegance, in short, his wisdom.”
In numerous publications Leon dealt with the often-tragic encounter between Jewish intellectuals, their Romanian counterparts, and Romanian realities — the drift to the right and the rise of antisemi- tism, which further alienated those who wanted to build bridges across the divide separating the Romanian and Jewish cultures. He traced the attitude of Jewish intellectuals and leaders witnessing the rising tide of antisemitism in the interwar period and delineated their reaction as “a noble and exaggerated confidence in the rule of law, they felt that their loyalty and attachment to Romania were safely established — and relied on their constitutional rights. They considered Romanian antisemitism to be an artificial phenomenon provoked from above, a cre- ation of demagogic politicians.” He presented this analysis at the first major conference on Romanian Jewish history at Tel Aviv University in late 1991, where he spoke on “Romanian Jewish Intellectuals after World War I — Social and Cultural Trends.” Through his work at SIC- SA one can trace some of the milestones on his own intellectual jour- ney, from analyzing at the 1991 conference Wilhelm Filderman’s views on combating antisemitism — that “the best way was to demonstrate the baselessness of the antisemitic arguments” — to his taking over the editing of the second volume of Filderman’s memoirs after Jean An- cel’s death. This forthcoming volume will serve as another testimony to Leon’s multifaceted work.
His own road to understanding the dilemmas and tragedies of Romania’s Jewish intellectuals, such as Mihail Sebastian, became a major topic of his lectures and research. This line of investigation led him in 1996 to present his paper on “The Victim as Eyewitness: Jewish Intellectual Diaries during the Antonescu Period” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at the first major conference in the US on the Holocaust in Romania. In this paper, as in other studies, he stressed the loneliness of the Romanian Jewish intellectuals. They were abandoned by their Romanian colleagues whom they trusted so much. The Jewish intelligentsia were marginalized, expelled from Romanian society, and ultimately many ended up in Transnistria, while their Romanian counterparts became leading figures of the Romanian xenophobic, nationalist, extreme right.
Volovici continued in the early years of the new millennium with studies on the fate of Romanian Jewry after the Holocaust, in the communist period, under the leadership of Rabbi Moses Rosen. Serving as editor for the entries on Romanian Jewish History in The YIVO Ency clopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe and writing the introduction to the Romania section of the Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Na tions, Europe (Part II), he continued to leave his mark as a scholar who remained true to his calling as a “literary historian.” Yet, in spite of his desires otherwise, it seems he was never able or even willing to avoid being a “historian” of the Holocaust, which remained the focal point of his research — looking at its intellectual sources and into its aftermath, especially in the various forms of post-communist antisemitism, of which he became one of the best known experts.
In his autobiographical book, inspired by a series of talks in Cluj with Sandu Frunza, a philosopher with whom he had long discussions, Leon said that he knows “only three planets, one whose center is Iaşi; another, the one where Hana came from, Warsaw; and a third, the most mysterious one whose center is Jerusalem. As you can see, I wander from one planet to another.”
His native Iaşi was always on his mind. It was, in his words, an intersection of two Romanias. It was the city of a liberal, cultural, and open dialogue, but also the city of A. C. Cuza, the “father” of Romanian political antisemitism, of “the dark, nationalist antisemitism, [and] how not to speak of it as the ‘city of the pogrom,’” which he sur- vived at the age of three hidden in the house of Christian neighbors. It seems that Iaşi represented the intersections of his career — a strong attachment to the local culture and the Jewish contribution to it, and the dark, brooding past of antisemitism, its results, and living shadows today. As to the distance and difference between two of his planets, Iaşi and Jerusalem, in 2001 or perhaps 2002, when his Gilo neighborhood in Jerusalem came under daily shooting from the adjacent Palestinian town, with people injured and houses destroyed, Leon and I participated in a conference at the Hebrew University campus on Mt. Scopus. We were conversing during a reception on a balcony overlooking Jerusalem that afforded a magnificent view of the city when he was updated that his family in Gilo was safe and unharmed. I told him that in Iaşi you could never have such a display of contrasts, drinking and eating while your house is being shelled, and all this in one city at a distance of a few kilometers. He replied, “Yes, true, but we did have other scenes in Iaşi.” Such was his characteristic sense of humor and sarcasm, drawn from a wealth of Jewish experience and wisdom.
We, as historians, measure losses of friends also through a “historical perspective.” Leon was among the “younger of the elders.” He belonged to the tragic prewar and Holocaust generation, born in 1938, on the eve of these events, in contrast to the “elders of the younger generation,” like myself, born a year after the events ended. In generational terms, Leon’s passing away, like Jean Ancel’s, at an age which today is not considered advanced, is the passing of a unique generation with their unique experience and determination to pass on this legacy to future generations.
In From Iaşi to Jerusalem and Back, Leon wrote that “one is less frightened of a grave if one knows that the ground is warm. If I was not meant to live here, I would like to die here.” His wish was granted; he did live and die in Jerusalem.
