Schooling

Our knowledge of the schools run by the Jesuits in Cluj in the decades immediately before the official return of the Society in 1693 are sketchy; Jesuit records from this period are sparse, although a few suggestive details are known. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, following their expulsion, Jesuits were not to be found sojourning permanently in Cluj. The Transylvanian Diet did however relent from its initially hostile attitude towards the fathers and allowed them to resettle at Kolosmănăştur, a short distance west of the town.1 At the same time members of the Society, in the garb of secular priests, were teaching in unspecified locations in Transylvania, perhaps including Cluj, as early as 1652.2 In 1657, a band of Turkish raiders attacked and damaged Kolosmănăştur, which prompted the town authorities to bend and allow the Jesuits to resume their work within the walls of Cluj while continuing to maintain their operations in their former location, although the Society’s presence within Cluj proper remained very modest.3 The silence in formal reports reaching Rome regarding the Cluj enterprise bears witness to the low-profile status of the project, but the Jesuits never abandoned their educational program. In 1665, Giulio Spinola, the papal nuncio in Vienna, reported that the two or three Jesuit fathers and two deacons in Kolosmănăştur “habent scholas usque ad rhetoricam.”4 The location of the Society’s school a short distance from the town may have been motivated by a desire to avoid incurring the wrath of the community leaders, who would have numbered among them many Unitarians. This school, located on the previous site of a Jesuit house, remained small. In 1683, among the eight Jesuits listed as working in Kolosmănăştur, only one, Ladislaus Barany[a]i, is denominated a “professor,” which simply identifies him as a teacher possibly of lower-level Latin grammar referred to as “parva.”5 Six years later, Andreas Szinder professed

1 György Lajos, “A kolozsvári római katolikus Lyceum-könyvtár története (15791948).” György’s study of the entire history of the Jesuit library and its descendents was completed in the late 1940s and remained in manuscript until it was recently put online: https://www.mek.iif.hu/porta/szint/tarsad/konyvtar/tortenet/gyorgy/html/index.htm. Unfortunately this work does not include citations or bibliography, but is nonetheless valuable because of the inclusion of archival data no longer available.