In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Marius Turda – author of the new book În Căutarea Românului Perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România modernă (In Search of the Perfect Romanian. National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania) – discusses the intersection between eugenics and racism in Romanian nation-building; presents the main historical moments that influenced the evolution of eugenics and racism; and analyzes the influence of interwar debates around eugenics and racism on socialist and post-socialist Romania.
Marius Turda is a Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Religion, Oxford Brookes University. His research focuses on the history of ideas, the history of science, and the history of medicine. He has authored and edited over twenty books on issues of race and racism, the history of eugenics, the Holocaust, and the history of anthropology in Romania and Hungary.
În Căutarea Românului Perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România modernă has been published byEditura Polirom.
Adrian Matus: Most of your scholarship is addressed at reading publics in English and you use academic concepts that are familiar in that language. Your new book adds such academic concepts to the Romanian intellectual discourse to shed light on the coexistence of racism, anti-Semitism, and eugenics. What motivated you to want to write such a book? Were there any special historiographical or conceptual challenges, or maybe even limitations, when writing the book in Romanian and for a Romanian audience? If so, how did you try to tackle them?
Marius Turda: If you really want to understand the present, you need to go back to the past. But one should go back to the past in a way that allows the past to speak for itself rather than reinvent it.
A lot of good books about Romania that are very interesting theoretically speaking and very provocative conceptually speaking are written from the point of view of adopting a terminology or a methodology which worked in Colonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Decoloniality and so on, and then try to use this conceptual work to see how it applies to Romania. My strategy, on the contrary, was, first and foremost to tell the story. I want to revive the past through the work of a historian and through the tools historians have at their disposal. Then, the reader can actually encounter what happens and encounter an idea or a concept or an explanation for a social phenomenon through the actual reading rather than through my eyes.
I very much hope that there will be a conversation and theoretical debate after this book is published and disseminated about racism and about eugenics. We still do not have a history of Romanian racism. We still do not have a history of the eugenic movements in Romania. Of course, there is the German eugenic movement, the Romanian eugenic movement, and then the Hungarian eugenic movement, but the research on the Romanian one has never been done.
An intense theoretical debate about certain crucial moments from the past can only happen once the past is known rather than reinvented.
You might remember the conversation the historian Lucian Boia and others had about mythologizing of the past. Now, I could have done something similar to what Lucian Boia did. I could have written a book about Romanian eugenics, biopolitics and racism, demythologizing it as something that is bad, or something that was alien to Romanians. The outcome would have been completely different because then people would have said that you basically replace one historiographic construction with another. My strategy may be considered very unorthodox because obviously, people did expect me to use a lot of the terminology that I have acquired through my work, to use that kind of English-speaking terminology that is familiar to everyone who is educated in English-speaking universities and to apply that to the Romanian context.
I did not do that in order to see whether there is a fertile ground for a conversation whilst people know exactly how diverse this phenomenon was, how complex it was, and how much it really shaped the debate on national character and national specificity in interwar Romania. If that is the case, then we could have a meta-debate or a meta-theoretical conversation about what it all means. People could come and say this is very descriptive and positivistic. Apart from the introduction, the book does not have any secondary sources. It has 1000 footnotes – and all of them reference primary sources. Every argument I put would have required 5 to 10 secondary sources – just imagine how the book would have looked like then.
My strategy could backfire. People could ask why I did not offer more theoretical background to the book rather than just present this argument in its simplicity. Prior to this, apart from one or two people who knew something about eugenics, I could not have a conversation about what I cover in this book because no one has actually put this historical material together. What would be the point to discuss, for example about disability without having an example of how it was understood in interwar Romania? In the book, I provide the example of someone who murdered her son and killed herself in a hotel in Bucharest because her son had disability and people were throwing stones at him on the street. In parallel, there were discussions in the Parliament whether to introduce eugenic laws and have premarital certificates, so people with certain diseases would not have children. Through such examples, we can have a talk about what it meant at the time.
This is in many ways very pedagogical and didactic.
We are in a culture in Romania where these topics have not been discussed properly but there is a big jump in terms of the theoretical argument.
Particularly now, there is an amazing group of younger people across the board – from sociologists to political scientists and historians – who are very attuned to debates abroad and they are very keen to integrate into that conversation and integrate the Romanian case study in that global debate about various issues.
Ultimately, this can only be done if this new generation actually knows what exactly happened. Otherwise, they end up constructing as much as they deconstruct – they construct via deconstructing because what they say is basically another construction.
The general public finds it very hard to follow a debate which is highly theoretical, particularly when it comes to topics such as fighting racism in Romania, combatting xenophobia, or tolerance. The person on the street will not accept any of that unless you come and show what happens. Not just the Holocaust. Not just the deportation and the pogroms, but the very strong streak within Romanian culture that really reach very deeply in the Romanian population: the idea that we have to define ourselves not just in terms of language or religion, but also in terms of blood and race. Every single country has done it – Romanians are no different than Hungarians, Croats, Bulgarians or the English. It is not about being in a very unique position in Europe. We imitated and copied, we followed and emulated so many Western models.
The entire Romanian historiography and literature is rich with examples of how the Romanian revolutionaries of 1848 imitated the French revolutionaries. And as much as they adopted the idea of patriotism from French political discourse, they also adopted the discourse about race from that political tradition.
It does not take that much historical inquiry to put it all together, but it has not been done.
Hopefully mine is one step forward, one attempt to really bring the conversation towards some very key moments in the history of Romania and in the intellectual history of Romania, which in a way allows us to re-read in a different key the period between the 1880s and the 1950s and at the same time to shed some light on longue durée phenomena in Romanian culture leading to the present day, particularly with respect to anti-Semitism, racism, eugenic feelings and eugenic behavior towards people with disability, and how the Romanian state behaves as it continues to adopt eugenic language.
MA: A core argument of the book is that being a Romanian was constructed via culture but that the idea also acquired a marked biopolitical component in the 20th century. So what did it mean to be Romanian at various times? What main justifications were used to exclude those who were not considered part of the national project?
MT: I tried to offer some answers to this question in the book by looking at how, for example anthropology, sociology or demography were used to define ‘Romanianness’. Before the 19th century, an entire tradition already existed in the form of the Enlightenment Transylvanian school that defined the Romanian as someone who spoke Romanian, lived for generations on the territory that is today Romania, and was a descendant from either the autochthonous population or from the synthesis created between Romans and the Dacians. There were many ways in which historians of the Enlightenment were already formulating a definition of Romanian identity.
In the 1880s however, with the creation of Romanian state, a number of very important novel elements came into the picture. The Romanian would need to be a citizen of the new Romanian state – so a definition of the idea of citizenship was required.
The Jews were not Romanians by blood, but could they become, civically speaking, Romanian citizens? That was a big debate. At the time, citizenship came to acquire, as was the case in other countries too, a very powerful meaning, because it could give one the quality of being a Romanian. The First World War and the creation of Greater Romania then intensified the whole conversation about who is Romanian, how can one define Romanian (because of the number of ethnic minorities in the country – not only the Jews, but also the Hungarians and Germans). The Romanians were constantly confronted with a need to redefine their national identity; first in the 1880s, regarding the Jews, then again in the early 1900s, and then particularly in the 1920s regarding the other ethnic minorities.
There was always the idea that if an individual is Romanian citizen, that is enough. But then, there was always lurking in the backs of some minds that this attitude might be ruinous, that it might actually delegitimize the Romanian national project and lead to a catastrophe. Some would tell you that Emil Cioran[i] is one of those who came up with one of the best questions summarizing the dilemma of Romanianness: “How could you be or how could one be a Romanian?”
I think there is another important question that was asked at the time that actually encapsulates this debate and gives a good answer. This is a question asked by Nae Ionescu[ii], who asked it in the context of the debate he had with the Romanian Catholics. For him, Romanian Catholics could follow the laws, pay their taxes, or in other words, be model citizens, as many Jews, Germans, and Roma were. But, he says, you could be good Romanians, but the essential question remains, “are you Romanian?” To me, this is extraordinary. You could see the same tendency in the debate he had with Mihail Sebastian, where the question was precisely not how much Sebastian would try to become Romanian. Nae Ionescu considered Sebastian only as a Jew from Brăila.
This is the question that we need to go back to and try to understand when we are looking at the complexity of the Romanian national project. These were Romanian citizens, but were they Romanians because of their inherent ‘Romanianness’, not acquired via political decision. I read this particular article by Nae Ionescu when I was in my 20s and it took me so long to understand what exactly he meant by the question: ”You are good Romanians, but are you truly Romanians?”. It was only after I studied the entire arsenal of arguments put forward by Romanian anthropologists, physicians and eugenicists for really trying to find that essence, that palpable thing, that I understood what he was referring to.
In Europe, centuries worth of effort have been spent by anti-Semites and others obsessed with the idea that if we can find the perfect Aryan and really identify it, that will solve all of our problems. It was the same with Romanian figures I am discussing. They really tried to say that it was not enough to really go to the top of the mountains and claim, like Lucian Blaga[iii] that “eternity was born in the village”. They wanted to go into the villages and find a peasant that actually looked like a piece of unchanging history when you looked at him: the way he had his beard, the way he peered into the distance, the way he presented his persona – in other words, they wanted to know about everything that concerned him that could actually be touched and felt. The physicality of the nation had to be identified.
In this context, they could define what Romanian was: ideally not only a Christian, but an Orthodox Christian, in other words part of the national church, but also someone who did not have any Roma or Jewish blood, ideally for three or four generations, if not more.
If they had some German blood that was not considered too bad, because that was thought as belonging to a superior nation. Ironically, some of the most radical of these Romanians were not of Romanian origin. It is the same as everywhere: most fanatics, are those who are never able to overcome what they call the ‘stigma’ or ‘shame’ of having impure blood. The quest for the perfect Romanian, as I call it, was something that really drove the conversation about national specificity.
Very few people were able to actually really pinpoint how this idea of identity changes – because it does change. I am not saying, for example, that a debate about economic arguments, social conditions or the cultural debates about national imitation are not important, but they could also be understood much better if they are put in conversation, or if they are put together in dialogue with this almost biological obsession people had about finding that real Romanian that poets write about and philosophers muse about.
AM: Who were the scientists that formulated these racial and eugenic arguments about the Romanian nation in the interwar period?
MT: There were many, some of them quite prominent: important psychiatrists like Gheorghe Marinescu[iv], important physicians like Gheorghe Banu[v], Iuliu Moldovan[vi], demographers like Sabin Manuilă[vii], as well as sociologists, poets, literary critics and genealogists. As I show in the book, it is very interesting that there was a so-called ‘scientific’ literature on race and racism, both supporting it and arguing against it.
There were a lot of eugenicists in Romania who were anti-racist because they were of Jewish origin or simply because they truly and genuinely believed, like Petre Andrei[viii] or Grigore T.Popa,[ix] that racism is the worst thing that could happen. However, they would not criticize eugenics as a discipline because they still believed eugenics was a progressive idea.
They still claimed they needed to improve the quality of the population. But they really criticized the ideas of race and German racism, which was adopted by certain Romanians, and anti-Semitism. That is a nuanced distinction that should be appreciated: one could be a eugenicist and be an anti-racist.
There were, however, many racists and eugenicists, including many people of the Church. Some of the most horrific things I found were actually said by theologians. This might be a shocking point for a Romanian: how can one be a priest where you were supposed to really embrace everyone, and yet be a racist at the same time? Particularly for a Romanian today, this is quite unthinkable. In other historical contexts, we know that was possible, but for the Romanian context, that is quite a shock. Ultimately, there are many examples of priests who embraced eugenics and tried to formulate a specifically ‘Christian’ eugenics. One of the important theologians of the 20th century, Liviu Stan, came up with the most synthetical definition of Romanian racism. He said:” the moment you stop being a racist, you stop being a Romanian”, which I must say, it is quite a shocking formulation, and it encapsulates basically the entire concept. As much as it was Nae Ionescu who came up with the extraordinary question I mentioned earlier about Romanian national character, it was this theologian who formulated a basic synonymity between blood, race and being Romanian, which a lot of anthropologists or eugenicists were not able to say like that. They would write, they would provide tables, and they would provide analysis for blood groups, they could even produce measurements of skulls, but ultimately it was a theologian who took this view the furthest by stating “when you stop being a racist, you stop being Romanian”.
That is why we need to be very careful not to associate racist arguments with only a particular discipline. It is not only physicians or biologists who, because of the field they worked in, were more racist than others. Racism is actually a very chameleonic concept, it attaches itself to any host it can find. For example, if someone wanted to talk about the Roma and did not like them in their village, then they would use a racist explanation for their anti-Roma position. Thus, race would be used in that particular context: it could be the priest, it could be the head of the police in the village, or it could be the scientist who came to do research.
When talking about disability and poverty, race also became conceptually important. Racial arguments were used to explain that poor people are a different race because they were, apparently, physiologically and mentally completely different than other people. In parliament, when there was the need to introduce a law on the subject, the word race would always attach itself to these conversations. It is the same with nationalism and with anti-Semitism. This is why approaching these topics from the perspective of intellectual history is important. Of course, it should not be solely an intellectual history. It should be equally social history, economic history, a cultural history of race and so on, but it is important to know the strategies of intellectual history because then you are able to identify the discursive locations and sites where this kind of concept is brought to bear.
If you really look for a very pure debate on race in the Romanian literature, you will not find it. This is why people were saying: “Oh, I never thought about it because they looked for race as if it was a self-sufficient category”, whereas what I show in the book is that sometimes it really is a self-sufficient category. Ion Antonescu speaks about the Romanian race in 1941 and he talks about the purification of the Romanian race. There is a very clearly well defined concept of how race is being used. But in order to find its chameleonic presence in a culture, and certainly in a culture as existed in 20th century Romania, we need to find the topics that were really shaping the conversation. In the book, I just offered a number of maybe five or six major topics, including citizenship, national belonging, and birth control, all of which I thought are representative for that period of time and which allow us to understand how certain concepts coexist and how they change through time whilst retaining a certain meaning that never disappears.
AM: Your book shows that racial biopolitics received a new understanding in Romania during two key moments: in 1918 and then in the late 1930s. To what extent were those changes parts of broader European transformations, and what might have been specific about the Romanian case?
MT: 1918-1920 is important because, as I argue elsewhere, the First World War actually gave eugenics a new lease of life, not just in Eastern Europe and in Romania, but globally speaking. After the First World War, we really see a flourishing of eugenic movements everywhere.
In the Romanian case, it’s a bit more particular because of the creation of Greater Romania, which needed a new epistemological foundation, a new philosophy of belonging. Many of the Romanian eugenicists were at the same time institution-builders. They were public figures; they were ministers; they were inside the bureaucracy.
They realized that the state needed a eugenic philosophy, and they were trying to implement that, and with it, a biopolitical philosophy. As one of the most important Romanian eugenicists, Iuliu Moldovan, put it, biopolitics is basically the practical application of eugenics. Eugenics is a theory about human improvement and biopolitics is the practical application of that theory, the practical application of it as a means to create the best society. For Moldovan this also meant creating the most functional Romanian nation, because for him, the two ideals were interrelated.
The late 1930s and early 1940s saw the emergence and success of radical political movements. That really captured the imaginations of many political leaders in Romania who then tried to emulate certain ideas from both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, whilst adapting them to the Romanian realities. For example, the King Carol II really believed that he could create a kind of autocratic biopolitical state. He truly believed in that kind of biopolitical project. He created a range of organizations, from youth organizations to paramilitary organizations, in order to try and create a new generation of Romanians, animated by the love for their country and strong, not only in spirit, but also physically prepared to fight for the country.
The 1940s, the outbreak of the Second World War pushed these debates about biopolitics and eugenics in a new direction: Romania, as other countries, embarked on a project of purification by putting into practice certain elements of the political or cultural program for creating ‘the perfect Romanian’ by eliminating first the Jews and then the Roma.
They really go to the extreme by pushing the idea of an ethnic utopia, which meant a country of racially pure Romanians and for only these Romanians.
This is why we need to look at the historical data because it demonstrates not only an intensity of the racist and anti-Semitic agenda, but also the influence of eugenic arguments about human biological perfectibility and the need for ethnic cleansing that such an idea implied. Let us not forget that in Germany itself, the T4 program and the killing of people with disabilities anticipated the Holocaust. It created the precedent which could then be implemented on a larger scale against a group of people defined by their ethnicity and religion, and then expanded to include people who had different political views (the Communists), or were simply belonging to the a certain kind of European population which was considered to be of inferior stock, such as with the Slavs, the Poles, and the Russians. It was the same in Romania. We can see an escalation and acceleration of the biopolitical project that was conditioned by international developments, but ultimately was also internalized in a particular way within the Romanian conversation, because it was not merely an imitation.
Romanians did not simply imitate the Nazis or the fascists. They had their own internal dialogue and internal conversation. Some of its roots go back to the 19th century, as I mentioned. Alternatively, of its elements are from the 1920s specifically. Some of the context is specific to Greater Romania and we need to understand that. It’s a very complicated and highly colored conversation that requires the historian to really be trained, not just in reading the data or looking at the documents, but one also really needs to know the debates in literature, in philosophy, to look at the political aspects of the debate, the social dimension, the geographical diversity of the country, the religious aspects of it, and so on. Then one can see why 1989 is an important moment in this conversation, as well as why 1938 and 1941 were other crucial turning points in this conversation.
AM: In the introduction as well as your last chapter, you mention that the eugenics movement in Romania was formally stopped around the years 1947 to 1950. At the same time, many of the ideas circulated beyond those dates, if within a different conceptual framework, namely Soviet genetics. I would like to ask: To what extent were the interwar theories about Romanian national character, revamped in the 1970s and 1980s under Ceaușescu’s regime? What did ideas concerning the “perfect Romanian” imply in those decades?
MT: The 1947-1950 period is very important because this was when the entire former regime or political structure that existed since 1880s died out. The monarchy was dissolved. The king and the political elites were imprisoned. Cultural elites were also imprisoned. There was a change, not only in terms of the political structure, but in terms of a completely new ideology being implemented. Some of it, at least initially, was very critical of definitions of identity provided in the interwar period about what is truly ‘Romanian’. Moreover, the whole debate about national character became slightly muted because of the official Soviet interpretations of nationalism, internationalism, and the working class. The entire grammar of the debate had to be changed. The word ‘race’ itself was no longer acceptable. Racism was attacked. Imperialism was attacked. War criminals were punished. Antonescu was condemned, tried, condemned and then executed. There was a tendency to really get rid of everything that had been associated with the previous political culture and particularly with political elites.
The story of racism was a bit more complicated than this, however. Its various forms were quite successfully eliminated from the public rhetoric during socialism. They re-emerged only in the 1990s. This is the problem that the post-1990 cultural elites should be blamed for – they did very well in republishing a lot of the early 20th century literature without any critical assessment. That is important: racism has a specific kind of trajectory between 1950s and 1990s – but it is nevertheless a trajectory that brings these ideas into the present-day debate.
With eugenics on the other hand, things are different, because certain ideas about human society, ideas about human productivity, worthiness, usefulness, about who is a good citizen – someone who works, goes to and respects the laws, has a family, has children, and contributes to the welfare and well-being of the entire society – all this was very much part of Soviet and then socialist rhetoric, not only in the Soviet Union, but also in Romania.
The basic claim was “if you’re not a productive citizen, then you could be disposed of”. This is remarkably similar to the eugenic discourse I mentioned before. You can see this idea infiltrating throughout the entire socialist mentality, which was about creating the individual as someone who contributes in certain ways to the welfare and to the well-being of society.
Certain ideas about who is worthy and who is unworthy, who is deserving and who is not, were not necessarily articulated only within discourses of class and ethnicity, but also in the language of human values and eugenic arguments. In particular, the whole conversation about the nation itself was being reformulated increasingly after 1960s and 1970s, after Ceaușescu came to power, along the lines prefigured or pre-established by the interwar ideologues.
We have a certain tendency towards the ethnicization of the debate on ethnic or national identity of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the emergence of protochronism and autochthonism. The whole debate was reconfigured along the same lines. Early socialism, and then the regime in the 1970s, were both very happy to include a lot of elements from the interwar period. A lot of the elements from the interwar period were echoed by certain ideologues; certainly Nicolae Ceaușescu had such ideas in mind in terms of the perfect Romanian. There is irony in this conversation about the perfect Romanian because to me, the ultimate expression of eugenics in Romania is not the interwar period – it is Communism. This is not just in relation to the debate about nationalism and national identity, including the question about the perfect Romanian, but also in relation to other aspects, such as natalism, the debate about abortion, and this obsession the Communist regime had with the aim of a large population, which were some of the eugenic obsessions of the interwar period.
The obsession with having many children was understood in terms of efficiency and productivity. The regime claimed they needed a numerous population to workers in the factories, as well as to work the land and produce a strong economy. Incessant material production was everything, to the point of basically destroying the biological capital of the very population they were hoping to perfect and create. If I look at the entire educational program under socialism, it was all created by the eugenicists. The whole idea about the tests, the criteria used for evaluation, the way they assimilated and integrated groups, particularly the Roma, not fully accepting they were of the same degree of intelligence, translated very well from the eugenics of the interwar period into socialism.
Another point we should consider is the means by which ideas from the interwar period survived into socialism – not necessarily only in political discourse. We need to look at institutes of research. We need to look at research agendas put forward by various organizations. We need to look at the academy, at various institutes, textbooks, education, pedagogy, social care, and social assistance. There we could see how these ideas were implemented because it was there that interaction with real people occurred. It all requires a completely different historical understanding and this has not been done yet. I mention it in the book and I suggest a certain direction of research to be picked up by other people, but I truly believe that we need to continue this conversation into socialism, all the way into the 1990s, rather than stop, like I did in the 1950s.
AM: My closing question focuses on the long-lasting impact of the ideas discussed in this new book. To what extent are ideas from the interwar period still circulating in Romanian public or scientific discourse today? What might be their current implications?
MT: Romania, as with many other societies at the moment, is currently going through transformative societal and political processes. On the one hand, there has been a revival of nationalist ideas, some of them even racist and anti-Semitic, which are associated with what can be called traditional, populist movements and parties. Again, we see a rhetoric about what it is to be Romanian and who can be Romanian. It is about gender as much as it is about sexuality, and it is also about religion, In many ways, you can see complete arguments from the interwar period in use today.
The claim today is that you have to be heterosexual, you have to be married to a woman, you have to have a certain amount of children – it is not enough to simply speak Romanian. Your children need to speak Romanian, and your children’s children need to speak Romanian as well to really be considered Romanian.
This is something we can see in Hungary very well, where a lot of the interwar eugenic ideas have survived and were then amplified by the Orbán regime. The discussion around the family, the discussion about heteronormativity, and the discussion about gender, all of these are shaped by arguments from the interwar period.
In this context, a very important discussion is about disability. Romanians, as many others, regrettably continue to have a profound dislike of disability and little understanding of it. There is a certain dehumanization that works against people with disability, which is completely internalized by the population. They say things without even noticing that are basically eugenic arguments against disability. They reproduce these arguments on television, in public speeches, on the street.
Another area where regrettably a lot of eugenic and racist arguments survived is in the attitude towards the Roma population. Roma and anti-Roma racism is probably the most prevalent form of racism in Romania – in fact, in many East European countries. You can see that in Slovakia, in Hungary as well. The way they are described still consists of numerous eugenic metaphors. The claims are that “They are not only a threat, they are asocial, they don’t work, they are thieves, they are criminals, etc.” All of these arguments you hear about the Roma are basically a creation of the interwar period that survived very well into the 21st century to this day. The discussion about mental patients is another area. Another area is education.
Regrettably, there are so many areas infused with eugenics that require our critical eye, that require us to really, forcefully fight. We need to empty that space. They have occupied this intellectual space, not for ten years, but for more than a century. When we talk about the lasting legacy of eugenics in Romania, we should not look at a timeframe of 10 years or 20 years, we should look at the whole century. Then we understand its power.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. In cooperation with Matthew Haji-Michael and Ferenc Laczó.
[i] Emil Cioran (1911-1995), Romanian philosopher, aphorist and essayist.
[ii] Nae Ionescu (1890-1940), Romanian anti-Semit philosopher, logician.
[iii] Lucian Blaga (1895-1961), Romanian philosopher and poet.
[iv] Gheorghe Marinescu (1863-1938), Romanian neurologist, founder of the Romanian School of Neurology.
[v] Gheorghe Banu (1889-1957), Romanian hygienist and Health Minister, one of the main promoter of eugenics.
[vi] Iuliu Moldovan (1882-1966), Romanian doctor and politician.
[vii] Sabin Manuilă (1894-1964), Romanian statistician, demographer and physician.
[viii] Petre Andrei (1891-1940), Romanian sociologist, philosopher and politician.
[ix] Grigore T. Popa (1892-1948), Romanian physician and public intellectual.
