---
title: "Sextil Pușcariu"
chunk: 4/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextil_Pușcariu"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:03:14.223615+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== University administrator and anti-Semitic campaign ===
Following these events, which marked the culmination of Greater Romania's creation, Pușcariu could return to Transylvania, being named as the first rector of the Superior Dacia University in Cluj. A Franz Joseph University already existed in the city, but its Hungarian faculty departed as a bloc and an entirely new professorial corps and administrative structure were required. The revamped university had two founders, the idealistic Ghibu and the more practical Pușcariu. Chosen by the Directing Council, Transylvania's provisional government, the latter headed a twenty-man committee charged with the seemingly insurmountable task of setting up four faculties (Literature and Philosophy, Medicine, Science, Law) and recruiting professors within a few months. As a native Transylvanian, Pușcariu was familiar with the Austro-Hungarian milieu; he also had relations with academics in Western Europe and was close to a number of figures in the Old Kingdom, especially Nicolae Iorga. Set up in July 1919, the committee included twelve professors from the Universities of Iași and Bucharest, and eight Transylvanians.
At the time, Pușcariu recommended that intellectuals in Bukovina and Transylvania steer away from any involvement in the Old Kingdom's party politics. Despite pressures from the PNR, he announced a strictly apolitical hiring process, only making an exception for Maniu's brother Cassiu, a law professor he found "slightly ridiculous, but friendly and discreet". The new professors were mainly young, but also included a contingent of established Old Kingdom academics and Romanians working abroad, as well as foreign scholars. Pușcariu had insisted his formal appointment come from within the university rather than the government, which allowed him to deny Iași and Bucharest a greater say in the proceedings. He also advocated against extending to Cluj the same set of laws that governed the Old Kingdom institutions, as he found them unsatisfactory; the laws were not applied uniformly until 1925. Notably, Pușcariu hired Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică over Eugen Lovinescu; the former was, in addition to being a Transylvanian and a scholar of some local renown, Iorga's brother-in-law. It was Pușcariu's idea to bring in foreign academics, mainly from France, including geographer Emmanuel de Martonne, who drew Romania's expanded borders at the Paris Peace Conference; and Jules Guyart of the University of Lyon, who became the medical faculty's first head. Courses began in November 1919, with a grand opening held the following February. Cluj had suddenly become a visible European academic center. Pușcariu left the rectorate in 1920.
Although he had joined the Freemasonry, Pușcariu remained committed to his identity as a member of the Romanian Orthodox Church; he stood out among his generation for fusing the national and religious identity into a culturally conservative mold. In his Romanian literature history tract of 1921 (Istoria literaturii române. Epoca veche), he concluded that "our Orthodoxism was the most significant event when it came to our cultural development". This, he noted at the time, had both positive and negative effects: Romanians were absent from the Renaissance, but were also free to develop their own culture, one of "measure and harmony". The work was critical of monasticism, especially as embodied in the Catholic Church, alleging that "monasteries have always fostered internationalism". Istoria literaturii..., "very popular with students and men of culture", and heavily influenced by Iorga, made a point of discovering or reclaiming early contributions to fine writing in the medieval principalities. According to literary historian Eugen Negrici, this effort was unconvincing: "The aesthetic gamble is a meek one, and [Pușcariu's] critical insights and interpretative newness are both frail. [...] However, the imposing illustrations and the openness [...] toward other forms of ancient art (architecture, painting, embroidery, miniatures, etc.) are not without consequences. Such rich and motley environs become a resonance box for the hardly perceptible sound of an actual literature. We may now fool ourselves that this literature is one of force and consistency".
An anti-Semitic campaign swept Romanian universities in the wake of World War I. In this context, at the time the 1920–1921 school year opened, Pușcariu expressed his concern that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Medicine and Law faculties. He suggested they congregated toward those subjects because of surer and more profitable career prospects, given the lack of doctors, administrators and magistrates in Romania's newly acquired provinces. A Jewish quota was enacted in the Kingdom of Hungary in September 1920, leading to a surge in Hungarian Jewish enrollment at Cluj. Prompted by the medical faculty's leadership, the university senate discussed introduction of a similar policy. In early 1921, students, later joined by cultural figures, began demanding that sociologist Eugen Ehrlich be fired from his professorship at Cernăuți. Ehrlich was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, but the primary motivating factor in his firing appears to have been a campaign to fill teaching posts with ethnic Romanians. Ehrlich, who was rector in 1906–1907, had been instrumental in Pușcariu's being hired at the university. However, no one intervened on his behalf; not even Pușcariu tried to stop his benefactor's dismissal.
By 1922–1923, as a nationalist, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic student movement centered around Corneliu Zelea Codreanu gained ascendancy, he was not at the forefront of its radical promoters, but rather figured among a group of moderate, respectable academic supporters who countenanced the agitators and lent them an air of general acceptance. In March 1923, he wrote an article applauding the 15,000 student movement participants; praising the cohesion they showed, rare for Romania, he claimed they represented "a healthy and spontaneous reaction of the national preservation instinct". Addressing students from Bukovina, he called the Jewish quota something all those who wished the country well would endorse, for "in our country [which we] gained with so many sacrifices, we no longer have air to breathe; the invasion of the foreign element stifles us, chokes us".

=== Museum of the Romanian Language ===