In January 1941, immediately after the Legionnaires' rebellion was crushed, "Conducător" Ion Antonescu asked Rosetti to join a new government as Education Minister. A longtime opponent of totalitarianism, he reluctantly accepted, but resigned in November after ten months in office. He invoked health reasons, but the real cause of his departure was aggravation at the tension that had arisen between him and part of the ministerial staff, who found his inflexibility and integrity an inconvenience to their various arrangements. While in office in March 1941, he explained the motivation behind a decree banning Romanian Jews from converting away from their faith: "thwarting any Jewish attempt to hide their ethnic origin, which among the Jews is confused with their Mosaic religion; blocking Jewish infiltration into the Romanian national community; protecting the ethnic character of the Romanian people from the admixture of Jewish blood". On 7 November 1941 he was awarded the Order of the Crown, Grand Cross class.