The Jews of the New Nation States of Bulgaria and Romania

New Jewish Political Communities

While most “Eastern” Jews remained denizens of the old empires and others became denizens of new ones, some found themselves citizens of—or unwelcome minorities within—new nation-states. Great Power struggles and nationalist movements in southern Europe brought erosion to the northwestern reaches of the Ottoman Empire; the 1870s saw the creation of new Bulgarian and Romanian states, and the creation of new Jewish political communities in the process. 

The roughly 30,000 Bulgarian Sephardim enjoyed equal rights, though antisemitism emerged as a serious problem in the 1890s. 

Jewish Civil Rights in Romania

The new Romania unwillingly housed a much larger population of roughly 250,000 Jews at the start of our period (which would eventually grow much larger), mostly Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic immigrants from the north. Unlike Serbia and Bulgaria, Romania granted full civil rights to only a small proportion of its Jews making it, as the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow put it at the time, “a kind of miniature version” of Russia.¹