Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making, requiring many years of empirical and conceptual spadework.1 My work has come to fruition with the generous help and formative influence of many scholars within the stimulating academic environment of the Department of History, Central European University (CEU), Budapest. I am indebted to Alfred Rieber, Sorin Antohi, László Kontler, and Rogers W. Brubaker, among many others. Outside the CEU community, I would like to thank Irina Livezeanu (University of Pittsburgh), Gisela Bock (Free University, Berlin), and György Péteri (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway), for their useful comments on the overall theoretical foundations and comparative scope of my project. I have also benefited from feedback in extensive private conversations or during formal seminars, conferences, or workshops with Gail Kligman, Katherine Verdery, Dorin Dobrincu, Jürgen Kocka, Ivo Banac, Dieter Gosewinkel, Andreas Fahrmeir, Patrick Weil, and Édouard Conte, among others.
My research could not have been conducted without the extensive primary and secondary resources placed at my disposal by various libraries and archival institutions in several countries. The bulk of the research has been conducted in Romania, at the Library of the Romanian Academy, the Library of the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History, and the “Lucian Blaga” Central University Library, Cluj-Napoca. Archival research has been conducted mainly in the collections of the Central National Historical Archive (Arhivele Naționale Istorice Centrale, hereafter ANIC), Bucharest, and the Archive of the Center for the Study of the History of Jews in Romania (Centrul pentru Studiul Istoriei Evreilor din România, hereafter CSIER), Bucharest. My work has benefited from additional archival and secondary research in the Archives diplomatiques du Ministère des Affaires étrangères in Paris and Nantes, France; Bibliothèque et Archives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris; Başbakanlık Arşivi, Istanbul, Turkey; Hartley Library, University of Southampton, UK; the British National Archives, Kew Gardens, and the London Metropolitan Archive, both located in London; and the Archive of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. On a more personal level, I am indebted to the unconditional support of my family, who has endured the privation of me being away for research, at times seeing me only in between academic conferences and research trips. During these years, my wife Éva has been not only a wonderful companion but also a critical reader. I am grateful for her help and patience. Our daughter, Lujza, has been a miraculous “distraction” from my research projects, challenging me to constantly reconsider the relationship between academia and private life, and reconcile them into a meaningful union. It is much more than a polite untruth to say that these individuals and institutions cannot be blamed for eventual errors of facts or differences of interpretation, which remain mine, together with the hope that I have succeeded in rewarding their investment.
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Note on dates and spelling: This work employs the local (Romanian) spelling of proper names and localities (e.g. Bacău, Iași, etc.) except for translated names that have already gained currency in English (e.g. Bucharest, rather than București). Dates in Romanian history are rendered in the (old) Julian Calendar. That calendar was eleven days behind the (new) Gregorian Calendar, used in Western Europe, for the interval March 1, 1700–February 28, 1800; twelve days for the interval March 1, 1800–February 28, 1900; and thirteen days for the interval March 1, 1900–October 1, 1924. Romania adopted the Gregorian Calendar on April 1st, 1919, a date which became April 14, 1919. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations (from Romanian, French, and Hungarian) into English are my own.
Over time, several parts of this book have been published, in an incipient form, in several publications: for a first overview of the citizenship emancipation of minorities, see Constantin Iordachi, “The Unyielding Boundaries of Citizenship: The Emancipation of ‘Non-Citizens’ in Romania, 1866–1918,” European Review of History 8 (2001) 2: 157–186; on Northern Dobrudja, see Constantin Iordachi, Citizenship, Nation and State-Building: The Integration of Northern Dobrogea into Romania, 1878–1913 (Pittsburgh, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1607, 2002), 90 p.; on the Greeks in the Principalities, see Constantin Iordachi, “From Imperial Entanglements to National Disentanglement: The ‘Greek Question’ in Moldavia and Wallachia, 1611–1863,” in Roumen Daskalov, Tchavdar Marinov, eds., Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. 1: National Ideologies and Language Policies (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 67–148. For the purpose of the book, these parts have been abridged, updated with new research data and bibliography, and also partially reworked (see mainly chapters 1, 6, and 11).