Murder at the university

It is becoming increasingly common in American colleges and universities to witness murders or even mass killings, almost always driven by sheer madness, sometimes mixed with racial, political or sexual motives. Far more complex – and still partly unresolved – are the reasons that led to the murder, on 21 May 1991, of Ioan Culianu at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The professor’s body was found lifeless in the school’s toilets, shot with a small-calibre pistol – the perfect weapon for a crowded place. A gruesome incident that immediately raised many questions, primarily because it seemed largely anticipated by the victim himself, who in the preceding weeks had in fact taken the trouble to entrust some of his papers to a colleague for safekeeping. That file contained articles that were evidently controversial, for many reasons and for many people. They concerned Mircea Eliade, one of the most important historians of religion of the twentieth century and Culianu’s own mentor, who for a long time had denied the importance and significance of these rumours, but had then gradually been forced to change his mind, beginning to work on a collection of those articles which had met with the open hostility of Eliade’s widow.

Those articles bore witness to Eliade’s fervent support for the Iron Guard, a racist and anti-Semitic far-right Romanian organisation tainted by outright pogroms in which many people had died, and to Romania’s embrace of Hitler’s Germany. Having emigrated to Salazar’s Portugal whilst the war was still raging, Eliade immediately began to downplay that compromising affiliation with ever-increasing vigour, until it had all but vanished. At least until the early 1970s, when a Romanian journalist based in Israel, Theodor Lavi, wrote a ‘j’accuse’ in which he dredged up Eliade’s compromising past. It was an isolated voice at the time, but over the years it was joined by those of other scholars, including Italians. And eventually, after much reluctance, Culianu too.

Many people investigated the murder of Culianu, including Saul Bellow, who devoted part of his last novel, "Ravelstein", to the affair. It was proof, in 1991 – when the communist regimes had collapsed and many were discussing the end of history and the beginning of a long era of peace marked, at most, by a few local skirmishes – that the long trail of violence and hatred which had characterised the century drawing to a close had not been extinguished along with the Eastern European regimes, but would resurface in other forms, though with no less intensity.

    

Bruce Lincoln
, Murder at the University
, Il Mulino, 232 pp., 24 euros