Botosani County
Former Jewish-majority city that birthed Romania's national poet now anchors Moldavian agricultural economy
When Romania's national poet Mihai Eminescu was born here in 1850, Botosani was a Jewish-majority city—51.8% of residents spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, and 75% of merchants were Jewish. This was the second-largest Jewish community in Moldavia, with trade connections stretching to Leipzig and Brody, Hebrew schools operating despite Orthodox opposition, and synagogues that would number four as late as 1969. The Holocaust and subsequent emigration reduced 19,550 Jews in 1947 to 125 by 2004, but Botosani's identity as the birthplace of both Eminescu and historian Nicolae Iorga anchors it to Romanian cultural nationalism. Today the agricultural economy that first attracted Jewish merchants continues—the rich Moldavian plains feeding textile mills that replaced the old trading houses.