19th century
Exclusion from trades
1899-1900·Roumanie
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
a law reserves crafts and professions to citizens, pushing thousands of Jews onto the roads, the fusgeyers leaving on foot toward embarkation ports
The Romanian law on trades reserved crafts and professions for citizens; the Jews of Romania, regarded as foreigners, were excluded from them. It completed an edifice built piece by piece over decades — exclusion from the countryside, from public schools, from the bar, from the civil service, from the army in which they had nonetheless served. Thousands of families took to the road. Some left on foot, in organized groups, pooling their resources for the journey and singing in the villages they passed through to pay for their lodging: they were called the fusgeyers, the walkers. In this way they reached the ports of Hamburg, Rotterdam, or Trieste, and from there, America. The word has remained in the language to denote this exodus.
- Period :
- 19th century
- Type :
- Persecution
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Roumanie
Carol Iancu, *Les Juifs en Roumanie* ; Irina Livezeanu, *Cultural Politics in Greater Romania* ; *Encyclopaedia Judaica*, article « Rumania ».