Antisemitic legislation passed in Romania

After Octavian Goga’s National Peasants’ party merged with Alexandru Cuza’s League of National Christian Defense, the anti-Semitic Goga-Cuza cabinet was formed in Romania. The Goga-Cuza party advocated an alliance with the Third Reich and undertook to amend the constitution. Political power would be confined to “Romanians who had pure Romanian blood in their veins”; the Jews would be removed from the press; Romanians would have priority in all economic enterprises and cultural institutions; and Jews would be barred from government service. The government committed itself to the expulsion from the country of Jews who had entered it by illegal means, to deprive the Jews of their citizenship, and to the confiscation of Jewish property. The gravest of the anti-Jewish measures was a law enacted on January 22, 1938, to review the citizenship of Jews. As a result of this review, a quarter of a million Jews – about one-third of the total Jewish population – were deprived of their rights as citizens. Under the regime instituted by King Carol II in February 1938, the deterioration in the situation of the Jews that had begun under the Goga-Cuza government continued.