page_title: Petre P. Carp
section_title: Philosemitism
hierarchical_section_title: Petre P. Carp / Political vision / Philosemitism
caption_attribution_description: Harta distribuţiei populaţiei pe cetăţenie (nu etnie!) conform recensământului din 1899. Alb = cetăţeni români Gri = cetăţeni străini Negru=cetăţeni străini, dar supuşi ai statului român (cu şedere permanentă în România)
context_page_description: Petre P. Carp was a Moldavian, later Romanian statesman, political scientist and culture critic, one of the major representatives of Romanian liberal conservatism, and twice the country's Prime Minister. His youth was intertwined with the activity of Junimea club, which he co-founded with critic Titu Maiorescu as a literary society, and then helped transform it into a political club. He left behind a budding career as Junimea's polemicist and cultural journalist, joining the state bureaucracy of the United Principalities, the Romanian diplomatic corps, and ultimately electoral politics. A speaker for aristocratic sentiment and the Romanian gentry, Carp helped create the Conservative Party from the various "White" conservative clubs, but also led a Junimist dissident wing against the Conservative mainstream leaders Lascăr Catargiu and Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino. He was a contributor to the Junimea platform Convorbiri Literare, and founder of the newspapers Térra and Moldova.
  Widely seen as unyielding and trenchant in his public stance, and respected as an orator, P. P. Carp stood against the majority current in various political debates.
context_section_description: P. P. Carp was an outspoken critic of generic intolerance, seeing it as the enemy of civic values. Speaking in 1892, he theorized: "Culturally speaking, the first sign of a backward state is intolerance. When somebody thinks that only he is right, that there is nothing outside his brain and absolutely nothing in social life, he is an uncultured being, who never had a chance of knowing how varied, how many, there are manifestations of human thinking." As Carp noted, the natural breakdown of "forms without content", and the disruption of traditional lifestyles, had made it tempting for regular Romanians, and for crowd-pleasing orators, to use the Jew as a scapegoat. Carp's political isolation was only increased by such discourse. According to Virgil Nemoianu, Carp was his usual "trenchant" speaker on this subject as well. Historian Armin Heinen notes that, with the minor socialist movement and, at times, Maiorescu, Carp was one of the very few to demand collective Jewish emancipation in the final quarter of the 19th century.
  Carp's openness on this issue dated back to his political debut, and was at the time compatible with the philosemitic agenda of Alexander John Cuza. It was opposed to the antisemitic program adopted in 1860 by Ion Brătianu and the Moldavian "Fractionists", and later to the PNL's overall antisemitism, but Carp also shunned antisemites in his own camp, including Eminescu. During its brief existence, Térra attacked "Red" politics as duplicitous, noting that the liberals arbitrarily expelled Jews from Romania and excused pogroms, but that they feigned innocence whenever European observers were brought in. These pronouncements also impacted on Carp's traditional rivalry with Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu. Hasdeu dismissed young Carp, Maiorescu and their patron Manolache Costache Epureanu as the "Judaized" Moldavians, and continued to periodically target Carp which such remarks for over thirty years.
  As an extension of his ideas on industriousness, Carp also advised Romanians to reject the PNL's economic antisemitism, insisting that the solution to all real economic problems was the capitalist work ethic. He witnessed with concern how antisemitism damaged Western attitudes about Romania. In the early 1870s, when Bismarck implied that Romania's Jews risked being stoned by their Christian neighbors, he replied (probably tongue-in-cheek): "Your Excellency should not forget that the Romanian has barely emerged out of the Stone Age." His unpopular ideas on the Jewish issue only had one prominent Romanian disciple, the Junimist philosopher Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, who used them in denouncing the antisemitic Democratic Nationalist Party.
  Although Carp's views on Jewish integration were exceptionally modern, his philosemitism had its specific limitations. These were discussed by cultural historian William O. Oldson, for whom Carp is, "by Romanian standards", the "most magnanimous" and "altruistic" of 19th-century legislators. However, Oldson cautions, Carp's own project granted "piecemeal" concessions to local Jews. As Junimist leader, he did not intervene to help Jewish linguist Lazăr Șăineanu, whose naturalization was energetically opposed by the PNL antisemites. By 1912, Carp's own law excluded Jewish and Armenian immigrants to Northern Dobruja from even being considered in the naturalization process.
caption: Kingdom of Romania map of 1899, showing the distribution of citizens (white), aliens (gray) and non-citizen subjects (black)
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