---
title: "Eugen Relgis"
chunk: 8/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Relgis"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:03:21.362889+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Judaism, Zionism, Jewish culture ===
Beginning in the late 1920s, Relgis was also a supporter of Zionism, convinced that the path of Jewish assimilation was unsatisfactory for the affirmation of Jewish talents. He also adhered to philosopher Martin Buber's ideas about reuniting the three paths chosen by diaspora Jews: universalism, Zionism and Conservative Judaism. In his 1929 Avodah conference, he analyzed the ongoing Jewish resettlement into the Land of Israel, and investigated the causes of violent clashes between Jewish migrants and the Palestine Arabs. In other public statements, Relgis proudly stated his Judaic faith, noting that he had never actually left Judaism, "being integrated into its vast reality by the very reality of my own preoccupations, sociological and ethical, humanitarianist and pacifist." However, he explained to Iosif Gutman that joining a Zionist organization was not worth the effort, since membership was a form of captivity, and elsewhere suggested that Zionism was justified only as long as it did not follow "the restrictive methods of vulgar nationalism." The writer also described himself as committed to Romanian culture, and, as late as 1981, noted that Romanian was still his language of choice.
His essays on Judaism (some of which were dedicated to his father David) speak about the threat of societal collapse, which the author connected with mankind's spiritual decline after World War I. His theory on "dehumanization" postulated: "the spiritual evolution of mankind has proceeded to descent just as mankind is progressing in material terms." As a reversal of this trend, Relgis proposed a return to the roots of Judaism, in whose monotheism and Messianism he decoded the basic representation of moral responsibility, and the immediate precursors of Christianity. The Romanian writer was interested in those aspects of Jewish ethics which anticipated humanitarianism or pacifism, citing the Bible as "that most humane book", and identifying himself with the lament of Malachi 2:10 ("Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our fathers?"). He later wrote that Jews, and Israelis in particular, were entrusted with keeping alive "the ancient wisdom, poetry and faith", with creating "new values from the old ones". Defining in his own terms the relationship between Biblical proto-universalism and 20th century humanitarianism, Relgis wrote: "Judaism is comprised into modern humanitarianism like a flame within a crystal globe."
In tandem, he rejected those aspects of Judaism or Christianity which he believed where bigotry, and his pacifist discourse criticized all religions as potential instigators or ideological props of hawkish rhetoric. He reserved special criticism for the notions of a "vengeful God" and "Jewish chosenness", arguing that they are "primitive", and expressed more sympathy for Buddhist universalism. His texts, including the 1922 Apel către..., are thought by some to be purposefully reusing the pro-universalist vocabulary of Freemasons.
Relgis' Judaic-themed tracts cover a wide range of subjects. In several of them, Relgis concentrates on the Biblical prophet Moses, in whom he sees the symbol of "great human aspirations". Some texts trace the impact of Moses' teaching on more modern authors (from Baruch Spinoza to Charles Darwin), others talk about secular Jewish culture, and still others focus on individual Jewish personalities: Buber, Edmond Fleg, Theodor Herzl. As a critic, he also investigated the survival of ancient Judaic themes in the modern art of Marcel Janco, Lazăr Zin or Reuven Rubin, and in the literature of Zweig, S. Ansky, Mendele Mocher Sforim and even Marcel Proust. Other such writings are individual portraits of Romanian Jewish men of letters, from A. L. Zissu and Iosif Brucăr to Avram Steuerman-Rodion and Enric Furtună. According to Geo Șerban, Relgis spent much of his later career promoting "a more fertile awareness of the links between Judaism and the modern world."
A critic of antisemitism, Eugen Relgis also dedicated some of his main works in the essay genre to the cause of anti-fascism. Early on, he exposed claims about Judeo-Masonic domination as canards, and noted that antisemitism was a negative reaction to the Jews' own status as natural innovators in both politics and culture. He wrote: "I take antisemitism to be that psychological disease whose manifestations display the characteristics of a phobia, that is to say an obsession. When someone is obsessed with an image, an individual or even a collective entity, these become the center of their world—and all causes and effects, no matter how far apart and different from each other, are connected to the initial obsession."
Writing in 1946, shortly after the scale of The Holocaust became known to Romanian Jews, Relgis gave credit to the popular, but since challenged rumor that Nazis fabricated human soap. Historian of ideas Andrei Oișteanu analyzes Relgis' text as more of a reaction to Nazism's own obsessive take on cleanliness, and writes that, at that time, Jews and Christians in Romania had been collecting certain brands of German soap and burying them as human remains.