Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

– Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins

On 14 June 1925 a Romanian police agent belonging to the interwar secret police service Siguranța, identified only as “Ș.S.”, stepped into the building at 2 Gării street in the city of Chișinău. His assignment was to monitor and report on the activity of the “sectarian” group which met there. The building served as the prayer house for the Comunitatea Creștinilor Evangeliști-Baptiști [Evangelical Baptist Christian Community], and on that particular day they held a festive religious service inaugurating the care-home for their community. An impressive four hundred people were in attendance. The Siguranța officer gave a detailed account of the morning and evening services, the sermon themes, the preachers’ names and addresses, and the “well organized” choir and orchestra. He was struck by the attentiveness of the audience and the seriousness with which they examined the New Testament books they held in their hands. Most extraordinary, however, was the mix of people. He encountered a “dappled” world – o lume împestrițată – of “Romanians, Russians, Jews, English, Greeks, etc.”¹ The agent had entered a strange world, both in the mix of people present and in their unusual religious actions. Though fascinating, they appeared suspicious, and potentially dangerous, in their radical diversity. Their mix of ethnicity and languages, characteristic of many interwar evangelical churches, challenged the Romanian state’s attempts at ethnic, linguistic, and religious homogenization as well as challenging our current view of interwar religious communities. Unlike most cases of interwar religious conversion, these groups faced increased marginalization, rather than assimilation, when joining a new Christian denomination. These evangelicals bring to light the multiethnic communities that existed at the turn of the twentieth century, revealing that ethnicity and religion were not inextricably linked and faith communities took precedence over national or ethnic identities.

After World War I, Romanian statesmen faced the difficult task of uniting diverse peoples and varying administrative systems across the regions newly acquired by Romania. As part of the peace treaties, the Romanian state received the territories of Bessarabia, Transylvania, the Banat, southern Dobrogea, and Bukovina. Transylvania in the west, along with the Banat, and Bukovina had been part of the Astro-Hungarian empire, while Bessarabia in the east composed part of the Russian empire. Each was previously under different administrative systems and consisted of large populations of ethnic minorities: Hungarians, Jews, Serbs, Ukrainians and others. Leaders of the newly enlarged Romania, now referred to as Greater Romania [România Mare], were concerned that urban educated ethnic minorities monopolized cultural and economic resources at the expense of the Romanian bourgeoisie and the peasant majority. They passed laws to ensure ethnic Romanians had social, political, and economic advantages.

The Romanianization policies that ensued sought to unify the regions and lift the ethnic majority population into positions of authority. These policies included universal male suffrage that gave Romanian males the right to vote, radical land reform,² regulations on ethnic composition of the military,³ primary and secondary school reform, and parameters for religious practice and conversion, among others. The land reform broke the semi-feudal system, giving the majority of Romanian peasants their own land. Access to the military became increasingly limited to ethnic Romanians, especially the higher rank positions. School reform increased the number of village schools, slowly increasing the literacy rate of the majority Romanian peasant population.⁴ These were all attempts to bring Romanian language, culture, and ethnic majority Romanians into places of political or social authority and economic predominance.⁵

The push to make thoroughly “Romanian” all institutions (Romanianization) occurred throughout the interwar period. This included antisemitic legislation that lead to and was further intensified during World War II.⁶ However, as historian Ștefan Ionescu describes it, “[Romanianization] never constituted a clear-cut or consistent policy but was characterized by contradictions, ambiguities, economic problems, rivalries, conflicts, and tactical delays,” especially as it was applied differently in each region.⁷ The short-lived interwar governments meant policies changed often with each new party in power.⁸ The intense regional identities in Greater Romania made unification difficult and gave “romanianization” a slightly different definition depending on the hometown loyalties of any particular statesman.

Those from Transylvania, Bukovina, or Banat, all previously part of Austro-Hungary, resented the centralization and control of Bucharest, which was the capital of the previous and post-World War I Kingdom of Romania. This was equally true of Bessarabia, formerly part of the Russian empire. Bucharest politicians pursued policies that often benefitted their region at the expense of other regions. However, the growing influence of right wing politicians or cultural figures and the rise of fascist para-military groups, like the Legion of the Archangel Michael, resulted in increased antagonism towards ethnic and religious minorities across the different regions.

The general context of East-Central Europe was one of fluctuating politics and social and economic uncertainty, leaving people unsure of what would happen at the start of the 1920s. Everyone was recovering from the damages of the recent war. Many now also faced novel identities formed or imposed upon them by the newly created postwar nation-states.

Statesmen across eastern Europe considered religion a particularly important element for national unification, especially in Romania. The laws on religion restricted the activity of smaller religious groups in order to ensure the dominant church, the Romanian Orthodox Church (Biserica Ortodoxă Română, hereafter BOR), retained cultural and political authority. BOR’s drop from 93% of the population prior to 1912 to 73% after the war raised concerns among clergy and state authorities.⁹ The decrease of Orthodox Christians in Romania between 1912 and 1930 was due to the incorporation of the new territories and the change in Romania’s borders which included an increase in Greek Catholic, Jewish and other minority religious believers. Many influential Romanian intellectuals and politicians from across the political spectrum saw BOR as an important symbol of the Romanian nation and protector of its traditions. BOR leaders were senators, and BOR priests held various ministerial positions through which they influenced policies of consolidation, especially in regards to religious practice. Patriarch Miron Cristea was Prime Minister from February 1938 to March 1939; Archbishop Florian Roxin was a senator, Bishop Grigorie Comșa a deputy in parliament in 1920 and subdirector of the Ministry of Religious Denominations and Arts from 1920 to 1925; and Metropolitan Bishop Nicolae Colan was Minister of Religious Denominations in 1938, among others.¹⁰ However, BOR itself underwent a difficult process of unification, incorporating the Orthodox congregations from different regions and attempting to mollify regional disparities. An autocephalous Romanian patriarchate was finally created in 1925, led by Miron Cristea who became the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Regional tensions remained, as Orthodox leaders, in Transylvania and the Banat in particular, felt marginalized by the BOR hierarchy in Bucharest.¹¹

Romania’s newly acquired territories of Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina, incorporated many religious minorities after 1918. Among the most suspicious were the new evangelical Christian denominations, seen as heretical by BOR and labelled sectarian by the state. Though many of their members were ethnic Romanians, their adherence to what BOR considered “foreign faiths” and their large percent of ethnic minority members made them sources of “contamination” of Orthodox society and of undermining Romanianization policies. This battle for religious space created “confessional turf war” on the local level and an attempt at the state level to “police the borders of religious community,” through laws regulating where, when, and how many could attend religious gatherings.¹²

The Romanian state had three major categories for religious groups: denominations (recognized by the Romanian government’s Ministry of Religious Denominations with full rights), religious associations (allowed limited activity), and illegal sects. The denominations recognized by law were BOR, the Greek Catholic/Uniate Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Reformed Church, Judaism, and Islam. By contrast, religious associations were in a precarious position; the government often rescinded their rights depending on who was in office, hoping to pacify BOR (or Greek Catholic majority leaders in Transylvania) and to maintain control over the expanding religious scene. However, the government at times temporarily promoted the Baptists or the Adventists to the status of denomination if the state faced too much pressure from abroad.¹³

This book focuses on Baptists, Brethren, Pentecostals, and Seventh-day Adventists, the four largest and best documented evangelical groups in Romania.¹⁴ Their legal status fluctuated from sect to religious association to denomination and back to illegal sect throughout the interwar period depending on who was in government. They began to grow exponentially, first among the German and Hungarian minorities in Romania in the first decade of the twentieth century, and then among ethnic Romanians, challenging the dominant Romanian Orthodox Church’s religious but also cultural position. Baptists went from 634 members in 1893 to over 60,000 in the 1930s.¹⁵ The incorporation of the new territories was the main reason for this increase, especially the large numbers of believers in Transylvania and Bessarabia. In Transylvania, in the regions of Wallachia and Moldova comprising the Old Kingdom of Romania, and in Bukovina, the ethnic minority Hungarian and German churches planted the seeds for the evangelical movement. In Bessarabia, however, autochthonous evangelical movements were more influential.¹⁶

In the early post-World War I years the Romanian Baptists, Brethren, and Adventists set up their own seminaries, printing houses, orphanages, clinics, and musical education (the Pentecostals began to build theirs in the 1930s). They held yearly regional or nation-wide congresses with co-religionists from other parts of Europe and from the Americas. Each denomination had its own union, with a leadership committee elected by pastors from across the country. These unions represented their churches before government authorities, administered state-issued licenses for preaching, and re-distributed donations and tithes gathered from church members.¹⁷

All four groups self-identified as evangelical during this period despite different practices and traditions. The Adventists observe different dietary and sabbath traditions than the other three. The Pentecostals place a strong focus on the Holy Spirit in their theology and practice glossolalia (speaking in tongues). The Brethren, connected to the international Plymouth Brethren communities, have no minister; each community appoints its own church elders. They had slight and larger theological differences, but they all held to the basic tenets of Christian belief and were derived from the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation. Jewish and Roma minorities in Romania, already experiencing discrimination due to the expansion of racist and eugenic policies across Europe, joined the evangelical denominations. Soon, the latter managed to establish themselves as growing influential religious minorities within Romania, enjoying strong ties with co-religionists abroad and ethnic minority co-religionists within the country.

Romanian state leaders came to perceive the evangelical minority as endangering the construction of a strong post-war Romanian national identity. They believed the international and inter-ethnic connections of evangelicals might encourage secessionist groups (such as the Hungarians in Transylvania, the Serbians in the Banat, and the Ukrainians in Bukovina or southern Bessarabia) and threaten Romania’s territorial national borders, as well as challenge and lessen the dominant status of the Orthodox Romanian ethnic majority. Romanian leaders identified BOR as a unifying institution, central to Romanian national identity, and made substantial efforts to promote this role for the Orthodox Church. This was especially evident in the xenophobic rallying cries of the fascist Legionnaire movement for a pure Orthodox Romanian state, a movement which gained popularity across Romania and among a high number of BOR priests.¹⁸

Evangelical men and women challenged this conceptualization of “Romanianess” through their ethnically, linguistically, socially diverse congregations. They capitalized on the diversity in their communities and did not impose ethnic, national, or linguistic limits. This is contrary to what major religious institutions and states in the region were doing at the time. State governments were intent on solidifying national communities, due to the vulnerability of their borders and to secure the recognition of their sovereignty, but this book argues these groups showed an alternative to ethnic homogenization.¹⁹ Besides bridging linguistic and ethnic divides, evangelicals were also crossing class and gender barriers. Their diversity and radical inclusivity was a clear contrast to established religion (in this case, BOR), making them a source of both fascination and of suspicion.

The book takes place mainly in the 1930s due to the important conglomeration of events that occurred in Romanian history at that time. A decade of Romanianization policies increased political and social tensions; the global depression affected the economy; Carol II came to the throne while the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael and its political party the Iron Guard gained popularity. For Romanian evangelicals, the increased publication possibilities, the evolution of their institutions, and increased support from co-religionists in America during this time provide a fascinating look into the development of multiethnic evangelical identities and how they prioritized religion over the nation.

The study fills important historical gaps and is crucial to a better understanding of religious politics in Greater Romania and across Europe. Almost nothing has been written about the multiethnic character of these groups nor of eastern European multiethnic communities in general. Jewish Studies and Roma Studies examined neo-Protestants or evangelicals within the Jewish and Roma ethnic groups but mostly neglected the interwar period.²⁰ Roland Clark’s recent book is one of the few English-language publications to point out the relevance of these groups in Romanian interwar nation-building.²¹ The most important recent approaches to the topic are Dorin Dobrincu’s analysis of the social and rural dimension of Romanian evangelical groups throughout the twentieth century and his multidisciplinary co-edited volume with Danuț Mănăstireanu analysing evangelical historical, political, social, cultural, and theological identity.²² The large, three volume history of Baptists in Romania by Mihai Ciucă, published posthumously, is the first monograph to document in depth the multiethnic Baptist communities among Romanians in the 19th and early 20th century. Alternative Evangelicals extends the analysis across evangelical groups and specifically to the turbulent interwar years.²³

There is some scholarly and lay controversy over the appropriate term for these groups. In Romania, “evangelical” often referred to the German Evangelical Lutheran Church, or to the Romanian Evangelical Church founded by Tudor Popescu in the 1920s. The common academic label “neo-Protestant” came into use during the communist regimes in Romania, although it also appears in Orthodox articles from 1910 and 1922.²⁴ Roland Clark includes Baptists, Brethren, Pentecostals and Seventh-day Adventists in the wider group of interwar non-conformist groups considered sectarians, for whom he uses the term “repenters.” This is the English translation of Pocăiți, a term that was used colloquially in Romania throughout the 20th century to refer mainly to evangelicals.²⁵ Likewise, anthropologist Sînziana Preda argues that “in the collective mentality, Romanians refer to the members of these churches as ‘repenters’ (in Romanian pocăiţi); they are distinguished from other Christian groups by the practice of adult baptism.”²⁶ However, the name “repenters/ pocăiți” does not appear regularly as a self-identifying term among group members in the sources from the interwar period.

I choose to use the term “evangelical.” All the groups – Baptist, Brethren, Pentecostal, and even Seventh-day Adventists – identified as such in their publications from the period. They all fit David Bebbington’s classic definition of evangelical: the Bible is held as authoritative truth; focus remains on Christ’s atoning work on the cross; repentance is required; and the gospel is expressed through actions. All four denominations hold to a traditional understanding of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.²⁷ By using this term, the study broadens recent scholarly work on evangelical history,²⁸ and shows the complexity of evangelical groups in a different cultural and historical setting. The stories in this book challenge narratives of evangelical groups as exclusive, closed communities or solely as martyrs, allowing for a more nuanced and entangled history of evangelicals.

Alternative Evangelicals brings to light the complex multiethnic identities of evangelical groups during a crucial period of national consolidation (in both Romania and Europe at large), allowing us to better understand BOR and the Romanian state’s hostile reaction to them.²⁹ Their stories provide a glimpse into the forgotten multiethnic communities of modern central and eastern Europe, who chose other identities to supersede those of ethnicity and nation.

We see this tension, between local identities and identities imposed from above, in what Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz identify as the narratives of “non-spatial Others”– whose identities are religious, ethnic, class or gender based – competing with the master narrative of the nation.³⁰ Central and Eastern Europe is ripe with examples of this. Jeremy King’s well-known story of Budweis/Budæjovice broke through the national master narrative to uncover complex local identities of one Bohemian town.³¹ Profession or class identity was the cornerstone of other communities such as the Habsburg Officer Corps prior to the dissolution of the empire.³² Likewise the “submerged heterogeneity” of Galician peasants prior to World War I reveals a “polyphony of voices” contesting national identity as constructed from above, with Catholicism providing a cohesive force.³³ In Upper Silesia, Catholic religious identity again dominated over that of being a German or a Pole.³⁴ Ottoman Macedonia at the start of the 20th century provides just one example of the destructive nature of ethno-religious divides and imposed homogeneity on the heterogenous communities of the Ottoman Empire.³⁵ Religion comes forth as a main source of identity for local communities in most of these cases. These works and other secondary literature use religion to express ethnicity, and the two are often presented as inextricably linked. Poles are Catholic; Romanians are Eastern Orthodox; Ukrainians are Greek Catholic; Bosnians are Muslim, etc. This book argues for the cases when religion did not correlate with ethnicity, but fostered new inter-ethnic cooperation and multiethnic identities.

Eastern Europe’s borderlands, in particular, held a fascinating complexity of religious-national-ethnic identities. Historian Ellie Schainker’s history of Jewish converts in Imperial Russia identifies “a minority of radical boundary crossers” who “undermined state investment in ethno-confessional clarity, who crossed a host of boundaries – confessional, political, and linguistic – and held ambiguous religious identities.”³⁶ The present work extends her analysis geographically, to Romania’s western-most borderlands, and temporally to the end of the interwar period. It moves beyond motivations for conversion, and shows these groups constructed new identities and communities that challenged state and BOR authorities, revealing the tension between lived versus state religion and local versus national or ethnic identities. Religion held these multiethnic communities together; however, both their religion and ethnic configurations were a thorn in the side of Romanian state-builders.

Historian R. Chris Davis’s work on the categorization of ethnic and religious identities of the Csangos during World War II, claims that “questions of national belonging, ethnic origin, and race were seminal and an omnipresent part of lived reality,” for many communities and individuals in central and eastern Europe.³⁷ However, the communities analysed in this book reveal these questions were secondary to religious identity, becoming more important only as enforced by local and state authorities. Like the Csangos in Davis’s study, the evangelicals maintained their faith despite their seemingly fluid national identity.

These groups provide an example of how nationalizing projects failed to instill a completely homogenous Orthodox Christian, Romanian-speaking population or how strong local opposition was to such projects.³⁸ This is especially observable in tumultuously contested border regions, such as interwar Transylvania and Bessarabia.³⁹ While some groups such as the Roma Baptists in Arad remained indifferent to national affiliations, the Jewish Christians in Bessarabia strongly opposed nationalism.

The so considered “conversion” of Romanians, who were previously Orthodox, to these “sectarian” groups enhances the role of religion in our understanding of modernity and the construction of the modern national self.⁴⁰ Religion was an important mechanism for nation-building elite and these “converts” where choosing to create their own mix of ethno-religious identity. However, while social relations are transformed, “conversion,” rather than creating a break with the past, results in a re-conceptualization of it, a new way of interpreting one’s past.⁴¹ These individuals from the majority ethnic population considered themselves more or truly Christian, rather than “converts” to a different religion. They thus challenged the presumed ties between established religion (in this case Eastern Orthodox Christianity as understood and practiced by BOR) and national identity.

Conversion is defined here as a change in belief systems based on various combinations of relationships, which unsettle identities of self, nation, community, and reveal the permeability and fluidity of such borders.⁴² Bukovinian Eric Gabe’s encounter with German Baptists in Bucharest led to his membership in the Chișinău Jewish Christian congregation, all the while still singing in the synagogue in Silistria, showing a web of relationships and new identities across eastern Romania. Conversion “marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging” and “communal empowerment.”⁴³ New faith and beliefs influenced conversion especially with the surge in religious activity in Romania after World War I and the personal stories and lived experience of intimate cross-confessional interactions.

Jewish, Roma, and Romanian believers in the sources use the terms “born-again” or “repentance” rather than “conversion.” Roma from the village of Fântânele, for example, described their adoption of Pentecostal faith through the word pocăință or repentance and did not use the word conversion.⁴⁴ Likewise, Jewish Baptists in Bessarabia identified the same concept through the Hebrew word teshuva.

Unlike previous works that focused on conversion of Jews to the dominant religions (specifically Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox), the case here of interwar Romania reveals the appeal of evangelical, non-conformist groups across different Jewish and Roma communities, despite the threat of increased marginalization and a double minority status.⁴⁵

Jewish interest in these and other Protestant denominations increased during the “evangelical and revolutionary ferment in the southern provinces [of Imperial Russia] in the last decades of the nineteenth century,” an interest that continued into the twentieth century across eastern Europe.⁴⁶ Conversion to evangelical faiths was not a path to assimilation for them, but resulted in an even more marginal status. This was the case for most ethnic groups and something secondary literature fails to address for this period.⁴⁷ Jews and others joined these evangelicals despite the increased repression they faced due to these faith communities’ historical background of ethnic diversity and openness.

Often the state authorities gave legal recognition to ethnic minority evangelicals such as the German Baptists, while persecuting Romanian Baptists. It was acceptable for “foreign” minorities to be associated with these faiths but ethnic majority individuals were labeled “sectarians” for joining them. These religious groups, “introduced religious choice … destabiliz[ed] inherited religion and … treaded on Christian evangelical turf that further undermined the Orthodox Church and [Romanian] cultural hegemony, and sowed countercultural and subversive political ideas in the countryside.”⁴⁸

Some Romanian politicians or BOR leaders saw the evangelicals as influential on a global scale with the potential to provide ways to escape oppression via emigration to the United Kingdom or North America, but this was not a guarantee and western co-religionists’ influence on religious policy was limited. Such dangerous affiliations with “foreign organizations” and taking on more minority statuses, reveal the intimate and complicated bond of faith and identity beyond that of the nation or ethnic group.⁴⁹

In the pages which follow, both peasant and urban dwellers are represented, turning the focus towards “everyday” evangelicals and their lived religion in the 1920s and 1930s to reveal ethnicity was of secondary importance in both settings. As described by historian Heather Coleman, lived religion focuses on the “centrality of words, images, objects and spaces to the ways in which Christians of various denominations have lived out their faith.”⁵⁰ The “lived religion” approach unveils the crucial importance of music for these communities, who sought to create space for themselves, and thereby legitimacy, in Romanian society specifically through their overt emphasis on music. Evangelicals also seemed to be “constructing new identities against the world rather than within it.”⁵¹ They tried to create space for themselves in Romanian culture and society, while challenging much of what that society was promulgating at the time about religious, national, and ethnic identity.

The stories that follow argue for the unique multiethnic interwar identities of these communities, so different from anything else at the time and from the image of evangelicals that exists today. Theirs is a forgotten alternative to interwar national narratives and to the discourses on conversion as simply a means to assimilation. Chapter one analyzes the social and geographic composition of evangelicals across Greater Romania to show who took part in these so-thought dangerous groups. It provides a bird’s eye view of class and regional distribution before looking in depth at two communities. Chapter two takes the reader to the eastern most region of Greater Romania and the intriguing Jewish Christian community led by Lev Averbuch in Chișinău. The chapter analyzes their religious activities and entangled identity to show how they challenged the increasing antisemitism and ultra-nationalism in Romania and across Europe.

Chapter three brings the birth of Roma evangelical churches into the story and moves the reader to western Romania, on the opposite side of the country. The openness that drew Roma to these churches is best observed in the case of the first Roma Baptist Church in Arad city. The analysis of Roma evangelical identities contributes to a better understanding of the burgeoning Roma interwar social development at the time.⁵² This untold early history of Roma evangelicals also provide the background to the religious revival movements of the 1950s in France and the growth of Roma Pentecostal churches after 1990. Unfortunately, the dearth of available sources result in a smaller chapter on the evangelical Roma; much more research needs to be done on these fascinating early Roma churches. However, the history of their communities is woven throughout the book and brought in wherever sources allow.⁵³

Chapter four brings the focus out again and adopts the lens of music to show the groups’ quest for legitimization as they created space for themselves in Romanian culture and society. Music featured prominently in both the Chișinău and in the Arad communities of chapter two and three. Evangelical choirs, orchestras, concerts, and regular music-filled religious services were important tools for uniting individuals with such diverse linguistic, ethnic, and social backgrounds. The challenges they faced and their categorization as sectarians by State and BOR officials (or as “bacteria” infecting Romanian society), are described in more detail in the final chapter. Conversion, rather than affording assimilation, meant increased marginalization for these believers in a Romania and Europe that sought clear ethno-linguistic-religious boundaries. Chapter five engages with the hostility these groups encountered at the State and local levels, and how they struggled to respond to increasing antisemitism. As all five chapters show, these groups were under constant surveillance by local police and agents of the Romanian interwar secret police, the Siguranța.⁵⁴

By 1940, state authorities outlawed all “sectarian” groups and deported some believers to the ghettos in Transnistria along with exiled Jews and Roma. The epilogue reveals how interwar perceptions and policies toward evangelicals escalated into antisectarian legislation. The diversity of these religious minorities, and their two decades of challenging contemporary conceptions of Romanian national identity, led to them being temporarily targeted by similar ethnic cleansing procedures as Jews and Roma, unlike their co-religionists anywhere else in Europe.⁵⁵ The tension between politics, religion, ethnic and national identities led to separate communities as evangelicals were affected by the discourse and policies calling for clear ethnic, religious, linguistic boundaries, reflective of the wider tendencies across Europe and globally. The reason so little is known about the multiethnic past of these groups is due in part to the success of the State’s homogenization policies.

Through characters such as Lev and Maria Averbuch, Dumitru Lingurar, Nina Tarleva, and Ioan Chișmorie, these forgotten communities come to life in the pages that follow. Their pursuit of communities that included such diverse people, languages, and social backgrounds at a time of strong national consolidation reveals a grass root desire for something different from the romanianization policies the government pursued. Especially in Bessarabia and Bukovina, these religious communities maintained some of the diversity that previously existed in these regions despite romanization policies. The following chapters expand Siguranța Agent Ș.S.’s observations from the opening vignette in 1925 Chișinău to provide an intimate look at these groups and individuals. From the formation and exponential growth of their communities to their resilience and failures under repressive policies, they bridge all sorts of barriers and provide a better understanding of the intricacy and entanglement of interwar multiethnic communities and identities.

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Administrative Map of Greater Romania (In the 1930 census, Sălaj County was part of Transylvania.) Source: ArdadN, “Greater Romania,” 2007, Public Domain

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