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Abstract
This article highlights issues pertaining to the Sephardim ([-im] is the masculine plural Hebrew ending and Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain. Sephardim thus literally means the Jews of Spain) in Sarajevo from the time of their arrival in the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century until the present day. I describe the status quo for the Sephardi minority in post-Ottoman Sarajevo, in the first and second Yugoslavia, and in today’s post-Communist Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The objective is to shed light on how historic preconditions have influenced identity formation as it expresses itself from a Sephardic perspective. The aim is moreover to generate knowledge of the circumstances that affected how Sephardim came to understand themselves in terms of their Jewish identification. I present empirical findings from my semi-structured interviews with Sarajevo Sephardim of different generations (2015 and 2016). I argue that while none of the interlocutors conceive of Jewish identification as divergent from halachic interpretations of matrilineal descent, they moreover propose other conceptions of what it means to be Jewish, such as celebrating Shabbat and other Jewish holidays, and other patterns of socialization. At the same time, these individuals also assert alternative forms of being Bosnian, one that includes multiple ethnicities, and multiple religious ascriptions. This study elucidates a little-explored history and sheds light on the ways in which historical conditions have shaped contemporary, layered framings of identification among Sarajevo’s current Jewish population. This article is relevant for those interested in contemporary Sephardic Bosnian culture and in the role and function of ideology in creating conditions for identity formation and transformation.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a paper presented at the Association for the Study of Nationalities World Convention, Columbia University, May 4–6, 2017. I would like to thank John Hulsey for his inspiring and helpful comments and remarks. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her insightful questions and suggestions. I moreover thank my supervisor Christian Voß for his enormous procedural help. Dejan Djokić’s encouragement and his evaluation of this article are invaluable.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Judeo-Spanish is hardly spoken anymore among the Sarajevo Jews and this is why the interviews were not conducted in Judeo-Spanish. The pattern seems to be that the elderly are “rememberers” of Judeo-Spanish rather than semi-active or active speakers.
2 The cemetery is the second largest European-Jewish cemetery after Prague's and is famous for the rounded tombstones (Sundhaussen Citation2014, 81–83). Today, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are being buried together but before World War II, the Sephardim were buried on the right side of the cemetery and the Ashkenazim on the left-hand side (Eliezer Papo, personal communication, 8 May 2014).
3 Mahala is a Turkish loan word in Bosnian for district or neighborhood.
4 During the Ottoman period, millet was a legal court under which religious communities ruled themselves and thus had their own judicial systems. After the so-called Tanzimat reforms (1839–1876), millet was another term for religious minority groups. The word millah literally means nation in Arabic (Sachedina Citation2001, 96–97).
5 The Alliance israélite universelle was a Paris-based Jewish organization founded in 1860. One of the missions of the organization was to promote a more advanced and Westernized Jewish educational system with French as language of instruction (Birri-Tomovska Citation2012, 89, 152; Brink-Danan Citation2012, 16).
6 In this Habsburg period, the Sephardic women, for instance, started to spend time in cafés which was something that was being criticized in La Alborada. Another topic that was elaborated upon in the journal was Zionism and the question of having Hebrew as the language of the Sephardim instead of Judeo-Spanish (Simović Vučina Citation2016, 134, 136, 259).
7 In 1940, the Yugoslav authorities passed two anti-Jewish laws: one banning foodstuff enterprises which were owned by Jews, and another one introducing numerus clausus, which reduced the number of Jews enrolled at schools and universities according to the percentage of Jews in the total population (Goldstein Citation1999, 10).
8 There were survivors as well who had been hiding with friends, and approximately 6% of the Yugoslav Jews were part of the Titoist partisan movement which fought against the occupiers (Greble Citation2011, 110, 113).
9 In Yugoslavia's second constitution, there were two official categories of nationality: narod and narodnost. In the constitutions of the federal republics, there was another category: etničke zajednice. Narod were people from one of the Yugoslavian republics, that is, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Muslims, Serbs, and Slovenes. Serbs and Croats had two homelands in Serbia/Croatia and in Bosnia. Narodnost were national minorities whose “home” often was situated outside of Yugoslavia, the largest being Albanians and Hungarians. Etničke zajednice were those groups of people considered geographically scattered, that is, Jews, Greeks, Russians, and others (Blum Citation2002, 29). The categories of nationality attributed to these groups were, however, shifting and the Romani people were recognized as a narodnost in 1981 in the Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin republics (Matasović Citation1989, 119).
10 When one immigrates to Israel, it is termed to go on Aliyah from the so-called diaspora to Israel.
11 The Haggadah is read during Passover and it's a Jewish text about the Book of Exodus in the Torah. The Sarajevo Haggadah was brought by Sephardim to Sarajevo from Spain. The text has been saved throughout history and is until today to be found in Sarajevo's National Museum (Greble Citation2011, 37–38).
12 In the same Questionnaire (December Citation2016) requested from the EU, the subsection on Right to Property furthermore states that Bosnia and Herzegovina should provide information regarding any legal uncertainties in relation to property restitution, as well as their plans to solve these uncertainties (44).
13 Luna (Laura) Papo Bohoreta (1891–1941) was a very productive Sarajevo-born feminist writer and playwright. She wrote her works in Judeo-Spanish and cared deeply about preserving the Sephardic culture.
14 According to the president of the community, Jakob Finci, they are a “traditional Sephardic community” even if it is not 100% clear-cut defined to anyone in the community what this actually means (Jakob Finci, personal communication, 26 November 2015).
15 The Sephardic tradition was not reformed as the Ashkenazi was (Brink-Danan Citation2012, 19).