R. C hris D avis . Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood

R. Chris Davis’s insightful book Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945 shines a much-needed spotlight on the history of the Csangos minority in interwar and wartime Romania, and especially on how competing claims on the Csangos’ “true” national belonging reflected the radicalizing ideological, scientific, and biopolitical agendas of this period. Much of the historiography on interwar Romania’s multitude of ethnic and religious minorities centers on communities incorporated into the newly established Greater Romania in 1918, which effectively doubled in size through the addition of Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transylvania to the “Old Kingdom.” Investigating Romania’s interwar ethnic mosaic is a complex task at best, and Davis’s book’s strength lies with its elegant disentangling of the many, at times contradictory, relationships, loyalties, and political realities swirling around this roughly 230,000-large, mainly agricultural community of Hungarian Catholics in the Bacău region in Moldavia. In doing so, this study...

Ancient history · Economic history · Ethnic group · Historiography · Ideology · Immigration · Interwar period · Multitude · Political science · Politics · Romanian · Sociology · World War II · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies