The Sabbatarians in Transylvania

Transylvania and its Sabbatarian Population found themselves placed in the countries of Romania and Hungary at the outbreak of WWII and the Nazi Holocaust. They were an ancient church and Rabbi Kohn was faced with writing an historical explanation of them in his work Die Sabbatarier in Siebenburgen which has been translated into English (The Sabbatarians in Transylvania, CCG Publishing, 1998). In the foreword by W. Cox to that publication the WWII treatment of the Sabbatarians was examined. The work explained:

"Lazlo Gorgenyi in his work The Tragedy of Central Europe Transylvania Caught in the Whirlwind of the History, (Corvinus Library, Hungary, 1998, Vol. I, p. 122), says of the Sabbatarians in Transylvania that:

Transylvania had a cluster of old picturesque and peaceful Hungarian towns around Bozod, between the two Kukullo rivers whose residents were "Sabbathists" (szombatos) for centuries. They are not Jews, they never were. They are very strict Fundamentalist Christians, much like the Seventh Day Adventists in the USA, except they celebrate the Lord's Day on the Sabbath. Because they did not belong to one of the three Christian churches which the Romanian governments arbitrarily and grudgingly recognized as the only possible faiths for Hungarians, the census bureau gleefully counted the Sabbathists as Romanians. Hungarians of Greek Uniate religion in the northwestern regions of Transylvania were also registered as Romanians, against their vigorous but ineffective protest.

During the Nazi alliance of Romania (1940-44), the Germans deported these Sabbathist Hungarians in concentration camps as "Jews" although they were entered in the civil register as "Romanians." Dictator Gen. I. Antonescu did not intercede with his Nazi protectors on behalf of these alleged "Romanians" because he knew they were Hungarians. (Edgar Balogh: In Service).

This mirrored the attitude of history. They have all, Jews, Catholics, Orthodox and later Protestants tried to pretend that the Sabbath-keeping church did not exist because it was a condemnation of them all. When they were in a position to do so they all, Jews included, persecuted the church. This method was later applied to other minorities. This astonishing manipulation of statistical data and classification of minority ethnic and religious groups still persists. The Romanian census of 1989 was subjected to scrutiny for this reason by Dr. Ionel Popescu who tried to make some sort of honest effort to arrive at a creditable account of all the ethnic population groups in Romania. Gorgenyi says of his analysis:

1. Dr. Popescu failed to make an allowance for Hungarian Sabbathists (szombatosok) of nearly three centuries of separate existence. He had no means of identifying Hungarians who belonged to religious denominations (sects) recently established in Romania: Baptists, Adventists, Quakers (matatok), etc.

2. He had no technique for identifying the Hungarians from other nationalities among the people living outside of any organized religion (vallason kivuli). It was illegal for government employees, even manual laborers working for government agencies, to be members of national minority churches, or to attend any church functions and religious services - baptism, wedding, funeral - in any other denomination but Romanian Orthodox (ibid., 107).

This form of religious persecution, for that is what it is, was still extant in 1989 in Romania. The same mentality set the seeds for ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the next decade. We can see now that the figures were always false and the categories always hidden, generally by both sides for totally different reasons. The Sabbatarians had never professed what was termed a legally recognized religion and this was noted also at the "trial in Deés" contrary to the ruling by the Dietá of 1635 as Kohn shows in chapter 22 at page [203]." (Cox ibid).

From this we see that a number of people deported from Romania and Hungary as Jews were in fact Sabbatarians. This then helps to explain an apparent anomaly in the records of the Jewish camps. In the camps involved it seems that there were a substantial number of those classified as Jews that were burnt alive while the majority were shot. A number of these are recorded as being placed in the oven alive while the majority of Jews were simply shot or gassed and then burnt.

This is at first glance puzzling until we realize that from the council of Genoa and through various councils of the church the Sabbatarians were condemned to be burnt as heretics. When one views this activity the discernible pattern emerges of a religious inquisition where the persecution of the Sabbatarians was systematically carried out in the twentieth century as a continuation of a policy started centuries earlier. These details will be examined in their historical context in the section on the various Inquisitions and the nations involved in the Nazi Holocaust.

Wade Cox

The Sabbatarians in Transylvania is available from CCG Publishing.