Post by Bozur on Aug 18, 2009 18:49:51 GMT -5
Jews in the Balkans particular coexistence
by HAJRUDIN SOMUN*
Responding to the actuating Turkish foreign policy in the Balkans, Sven Alkalaj, the foreign minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, paid an official visit to Ankara in the last days of July.
In addition to other high-level Turkish officials, he had prolonged talks with his host, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who told him that Turkey placed great importance on Bosnia and Herzegovinian integration into NATO and the European Union. For this occasion, I would rather divert from a further evaluation of that visit to the very personal identity of Minister Davutoğlu's guest.
I suppose that many Turks following political news were not aware that Alkalaj was a Jew, unlike officials, diplomats and scholars, as well as a few Turkish Jews who might figure it out from his name. For a great part of the Turkish public, whoever comes from Bosnia is considered a Bosniak, in other words a Bosnian Muslim. Alongside that diplomatic event, I was also inspired to make a short review of the past and present position of Balkan Jews in a documentary film by Dardan Islami, which premiered in Pristina recently. It was a story of how 2,000 Jews found a “save haven” in Albania during World War II and thus were saved from Nazi persecution and death. It pointed to a rarely known fact: that Albania was the only country in Europe to emerge from World War II with a larger Jewish population than before.
It is estimated that there are today about 70,000 Jews across the Balkans -- from 15,000 in Romania and 500 in Bosnia to just 250 in Macedonia and 50 in Kosovo. I doubt that those making such estimations include Turkey in the Balkans, as is customary in other matters. Otherwise, around 25,000 Turkish citizens of Jewish origin should be included in the wider Balkan region.
It is similar with the enumeration of Balkan Jews in earlier periods. When Steven W. Sowards claims in his study on modern Balkan history that at the turn of the 20th century “there were more Balkan Jews (some two million) than either Slovenes and Albanians,” he probably didn't include the Jews of İstanbul and Anatolia, but only those living in the European lands still under Ottoman rule and those that had gained independence earlier, such as Hungary, Greece and Romania.
In any case, Balkan Jews should be observed differently than Jews of other parts of Europe and elsewhere in the world. The history of the European and Western world's Jews could be regarded generally as before and after the Holocaust. In Arab and other countries with majority-Muslim populations another division could be made -- before and after the creation of the state of Israel. Regarding Balkan Jews, roughly speaking, I would draw the historical line between two periods -- the Ottoman Empire and the 20th century.
Small Jewish communities have lived in Asia Minor and today's Balkan lands since the fourth century B.C. Bulgarians called them Ramagnotes, and the mother of their last medieval king, Ivan Shishman, was of Jewish origin. However, the greatest influx of Jews into the region, already under Ottoman rule, began after the Christian conquest of Iberia in 1492. When the Sephardic Jews, together with other non-Catholics, became victims of the Inquisition and were expelled from Spain and Portugal, Sultan Beyazit II formally invited them to come to the empire. Regarded as “people of the book,” they were offered a significant degree of religious freedom. Through the separate Jewish millet in the Ottoman system, they enjoyed certain self-governing freedoms and became in short time a prosperous community, influential even at the sultan's courts. They settled in İstanbul, Bursa and Jerusalem, but also in Salonika, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik and other Balkan towns. In the course of time, they built 44 synagogues in İstanbul alone.
Due to persecution by the Christian rulers of England, France and the German states, Ashkenazi Jews also sought refuge in eastern and southeastern Europe, but a great majority of Balkan Jews were -- and still are -- Sephardic. They became a very respectable community, living in peace and close friendship with other Balkan peoples. They were particularly successful in the trades, often provoking rivalry with local tradesmen and craftsmen. There is a story about how the Jewish shopkeepers were forced to leave Foca in eastern Bosnia. The weekly bazaar day in that town was Friday for a long time. Being aware that Jews were not allowed by their religion to work on Saturday, Muslim and Serb shopkeepers convinced the local authorities to move the bazaar to that day. A telal, an announcer of news during Ottoman times, called out, beating his drum: “O people, listen, Friday is no longer on Friday, but on Saturday!” Generally, Balkan Jews were described by a Czech historian at the end of the 19th century as “mostly temperate, modest, industrious and kindly people.”
The last century, however, was different and disastrous for Balkan Jews. At its beginning, there were about 800,000 Jews in Hungary, 250,000 in Romania and 40,000 in Bulgaria. Between the two world wars, there were 70,000 of them in the kingdom of Yugoslavia and 50,000 in Greece. What were the causes that resulted in 25 times fewer Jews living in the region at the turn of the 21st century?
The main cause, of course, as elsewhere in Europe, was anti-Semitism and the Holocaust at it climax during World War II.
Deep anti-Jewish sentiment existed in Europe long before it developed into a worldwide anti-Semitic movement. Under the Russian tsars, Jews were permitted to live only in specified provinces. When Romania became independent, as the result of special rules imposed on non-Christians for gaining citizenship, only 4,000 of 250,000 Jews succeeded in becoming citizens. They were deprived of holding public office, voting and owning land. The widespread belief that most Jews were very rich increased anti-Semitic feelings in Hungary. Emerging nationalism and chauvinism also were prejudiced against Jews and other minorities in newly created nation-states. In Salonika, where Jews had been for few centuries a majority of the population, Greek nationalists burned the Jewish district of the city in 1931 and prohibited the presence of Jews in its harbor. Similar to the situation in other nation-states, Jews in the newly established Turkish Republic also did not feel as secure as during Ottoman rule, in spite of Atatürk's slogan, “The Jews will find their happiness in Turkey,” which is engraved on a wall of the Jewish Museum in İstanbul, opened in the former Zulfaris Synagogue in 2001.
Regardless of the efforts of ordinary people and even some officials to protect them during World War II, many Balkan Jews were forcefully extradited to Nazi Germany and exterminated in concentration camps. This happened particularly after the capitulation of the Italian fascists in 1943, when Germans took control over the entire region. Just in Greece and just in that year, 1943, out of 53,000 Greek Jews, 46,091 were sent to Auschwitz.
A great number of European Jews who survived the Holocaust went to the state of Israel, created in 1948, or emigrated to the United Sates. Half of the Jews from the former Yugoslavia chose to emigrate to Israel as well, but not as many from other Balkan countries.
Without regard to all that happened to Jews in the last century, with the unprecedented Nazi genocide and the consequences that Jews accepting and carrying out militant Israeli policy have inflicted other peoples of the “Holy Land,” their general condition in the southeastern region of Europe was better than, at least, other parts of the continent. Someone, comparing “cyclic waves of anti-Semitism in modern Europe,” said that “the coexistence of Jews and the Balkan peoples seemed almost idyllic.”
It might be an exaggeration, but our Bosnian, and my personal, experience is close to such a conclusion. Sarajevo was the city with the largest Jewish population by percentage in Europe on the eve of World War II. During the war in Bosnia, in 1992, a few Bosnians made heroic efforts to save “Sarajevo's Haggadah,” one of the most precious Jewish manuscripts, from the city's museum exposed to the Serbian aggressors' shelling. While I have, as a journalist, made ardent comments in support of Palestinians and harsh criticism of Israelis, my close friend Josip Finci, a Jew, has never objected. And the family of Bosnian Foreign Minister Alkalaj has been very close to my family for decades. When his father, Albert, passed away in his 95th year two months ago, I was requested to give a eulogy. Besides recalling his contributions to Yugoslav antifascism even before World War II, I also pointed to his son as an example of the Bosnian coexistence of different religions and cultures as I usually do when asked by foreign diplomats about Alkalaj: “His father was Jewish, his mother was Catholic, his wife is Muslim -- so, isn't he a real Bosnian?”
I would leave to historians to reply to a vague conclusion that I still feel is a question: whether the more favorable and “coexisting” position of Jews in the Balkans was a heritage of their position in the Ottoman Empire or if the invitation of Sultan Beyazit II came from their position in Moorish Spain, where Jews enjoyed wide freedoms and made great contributions to the medieval philosophy and culture.
*Hajrudin Somun is a former ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Turkey.
14 August 2009, Friday
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