OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS IN ROUMANIA.

Globe, Volume XXI, Issue 1744, 22 September 1879, Page 2

OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS IN ROUMANIA.

A correspondent of the " Times," who writes from Ischl, tells us that party spirit is very selfish and bitter in Roumania, and that the people at large do not care whether the present abnormal diplomatic situation between certain Great Powers and Roumania is continued or not; while, on the other hand, they are personally and pecuniarily interested in preventing the Jews of the Principality from acquiring the right to hold real estate in the rural districts, inasmuch as a great part of the real estate in already mortgaged to the Jewish usurers, and these mortgages would soon be foreclosed if their holders could possess the lands in their own right. It is true that moneylenders can get higher returns from loans at usurious rates of interest than would be derivable from landed property, but Jewish human nature is lika ether human nature, and the Jews would delight in becoming proprietors simply because they have hitherto been deprived of this privilege. In fact, I have frequently been asked with manifest interest by Jewish capitalists at Bucharest if I thought the Powers would really procure them the right to hold landed property in Roumania. The policy of the new conglomerate Cabinet will oppoßO all enfranchisements en masse. It will adhere to the principle of individual admissions of foreigners to citizenship in Roumania, and to restricting their right to hold landed property within certain limits to be fixed by future legislation, and to the Jewish population being regarded as foreigners until admitted individually to citizenship. The whole question turns upon the means devised for granting Roumanian citizenship. If they are liberal and reasonably easy of application, the Powers can scarcely demand more without being more exacting than appears just and reasonable to the unprejudiced foreigners residing in Roumania and familiar with the complicated questions arising from the relations between the classes of the population affected by the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin,