Juifs des Balkans

The history of the Jews of the Balkans is one of an Iberian graft upon Eastern soil, of a language that survived four centuries far from its homeland of origin, and of a civilization that the Second World War almost entirely annihilated. At the heart of this narrative lies a foundational event: the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish, was the language of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. After the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th century, this language became widespread in the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans after the Jewish exiles from Spain were permitted to settle there; Spain is known as "Sfarad" in Hebrew, and today's Sephardic Jews are the descendants of these exiles.

From Salonika to Sarajevo, from Belgrade to Sofia, these exiles reconstituted a communal life of exceptional richness, transmitting across the Balkan peninsula an archaic Castilian, religious customs, a musical heritage, and a communal organization that remained recognizable into the 20th century. This work retraces the major stages of this presence: the Ottoman welcome, the urban apogee, the singular role of Sarajevo nicknamed "little Jerusalem," the catastrophe of the Shoah, and then the fragile contemporary revivals. The share of memory — songs, legends, family traditions — dialogues everywhere with the share of the archive, without any claim to erase the zones of uncertainty that remain.

The massive arrival of Iberian exiles in the Balkans was part of the Ottoman Empire's policy of openness, which, unlike much of Christian Europe, offered Jews a structural refuge. What made this refuge possible was the remarkable openness the Ottoman Empire showed toward Jewish communities at a time when much of Europe was expelling them; the Ottoman sultans offered protection, the right to worship, and the freedom to rebuild communal life.

In Bosnia as elsewhere in the peninsula, Jewish settlement first followed the Ottoman route, then was supplemented, centuries later, by an Ashkenazi contribution under Austro-Hungarian administration. Sephardic Jews first arrived in the region during the Ottoman Empire, having fled the Spanish Inquisition; Ashkenazi Jews followed when the region came under Austro-Hungarian rule in the 1870s. This stratification — an ancient, Ladino-speaking Sephardic core, followed by a later Ashkenazi layer — is one of the keys to understanding the entire history of Balkan Jewry.

So deep was this rooting that Bosnia became a Sephardic center of the first importance on the scale of the continent. Sarajevo's original Jewish community was Sephardic, and Bosnia was home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in Europe after Spain. Under the protection of the sultans, these communities were able to develop their religious institutions, their merchant networks, and their intellectual life, making the Balkan arc one of the principal conservatories of Sephardic culture after its disappearance in its land of origin.

Judeo-Spanish — Ladino, Djudezmo, Espanyol — was the identity-binding fabric of Balkan Jewry for nearly four centuries. A domestic language, a liturgical and paraliturgical language, a language of commerce and of the press, it carried a collective memory passed down from generation to generation. Its demographic vitality can still be measured in the censuses of the early twentieth century: according to a 1921 census, Ladino was the mother tongue of 10,000 of Sarajevo's 70,000 inhabitants.

Its weight was comparable in the other regional capitals. On the eve of the Second World War, 10,000 Jews lived in Belgrade, of whom 80% spoke Ladino — the Sephardic Jews — and 20% spoke Yiddish — the Ashkenazi Jews. This distribution illustrates the Sephardic predominance in southeastern Europe, where Ladino largely outweighed Yiddish, the inverse configuration of that of Central and Eastern Europe.

Beyond statistics, Ladino was above all the vehicle of a musical and poetic heritage — romances, laments, wedding and cradle songs — transmitted essentially by women. This oral tradition, long threatened with extinction, has in the contemporary era been the object of efforts at reappropriation. The new generations of Balkan Sephardic Jews have sought to reclaim a vanishing cultural heritage. The marker of "intersection" applies here: what tradition transmitted orally, scholarly research and collection now document, confirming the historical depth of a language that statistics alone could not restore.

No city embodies Balkan Jewish identity better than Sarajevo, whose traditional nickname captures a reality of interfaith coexistence. Before the Shoah, Sarajevo was approximately 20% Jewish, and the city was affectionately called "little Jerusalem" for the diversity of its synagogues, mosques, and churches — Catholic and Orthodox — all located in immediate proximity to one another. The nickname, preserved in collective memory, thus rests on a verifiable urban and demographic foundation.

This Jewish density placed the city among the major Sephardic capitals. Today, at most 900 Jews live in Bosnia-Herzegovina, of whom about 500 are in the capital, Sarajevo. The contrast between this figure and the flourishing prewar communities measures the magnitude of the twentieth-century rupture.

The demographic trajectory of the Bosnian community as a whole is well documented for the interwar period. The First World War saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and after the war, Bosnia-Herzegovina was incorporated into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; in 1926, there were 13,000 Jews in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The city had thus become a microcosm of the Balkan Sephardic destiny: an ancient Hispanic core, an Ashkenazi contribution under the Habsburgs, and a multi-confessional coexistence raised to an emblem. The legend of "little Jerusalem" is not a rhetorical ornament but the memorial expression of a real social configuration, which the archive and the statistics come to corroborate.

Sephardic presence was not limited to Bosnia. It extended across a vast space stretching from Greece to Bulgaria by way of Serbia and Macedonia, forming a Ladino-speaking cultural continuum. What is often passed over in silence is the devastation of the Sephardic Jews who lived primarily in the Balkan region, including Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria.

Within this whole, Salonica held a preeminent place, to the point of long being a metropolis with a Jewish majority or substantial minority, nicknamed the "Jerusalem of the Balkans." Belgrade, for its part, was home to a large and predominantly Sephardic community, as attested by the prewar figures already cited. This web of communities, linked by language, rite, and cross-border family and commercial networks, made the Balkans the last great living bastion of Sephardic civilization in Europe.

The history of these communities is also that of their integration into nation-states in the making, from the final Ottoman centuries to the successor kingdoms. The shift from the multiconfessional imperial order to Balkan nationalisms profoundly altered their status, without, however, breaking, before 1941, the continuity of a dense and organized Jewish life. It was this continuity that the war would shatter.

The annihilation of the Jews of the Balkans constitutes one of the most devastating and least known chapters of the Shoah. The Shoah is described as the destruction of the European Jewish community, but what is often not mentioned is the devastation of the Sephardic Jews.

The destruction of the great community of Salonika was central to the unfolding of the catastrophe in Greece. In 1943, after Germany had conquered all the Italian territories, it undertook the destruction of the Greek Jewish community, beginning with Salonika. The fate of the Greek Jews was not limited to the north of the country. In March 1944, the Jews living in Athens were rounded up and deported by the Wehrmacht and the Greek police to extermination camps.

Bulgaria presents a particular and debated case, where state persecution struck differently according to the territories. The Shoah saw the persecution of the Jews in the Kingdom of Bulgaria and their deportation and annihilation in the regions occupied by Bulgaria in Yugoslavia and Greece. The distinction between Bulgarian territory proper and the occupied territories of Thrace and Macedonia is essential to understanding the geography of the destruction. Likewise, in occupied northern Greece, the deportations struck the communities hard. The Shoah in Greece saw the mass murder of Greek Jews, as part of their deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Nazis during the Second World War. By the end of the war, Balkan Sephardic civilization, nearly four and a half centuries old, had been largely annihilated.

After 1945, the surviving communities had to confront a twofold ordeal: irreversible demographic loss and the gradual erasure of the language. Ladino, once spoken by tens of thousands of people, became a threatened heritage language, transmitted by a handful of elderly speakers.

Faced with this peril, preservation efforts emerged, both academically and culturally. A university launched an intensive Ladino language program, attesting to an institutional preservation effort. Musical transmission played a pioneering role in this revival, restoring an audience to a repertoire on the verge of oblivion. Before the release of these albums of Sephardic songs, it was very rare to hear songs in Ladino, and a concert of Sephardic music was quite simply unimaginable, particularly in socialist Yugoslavia, where urban youth were passionate about punk, new wave, and jazz.

In Bosnia, the contemporary community strives to preserve and transmit its heritage. The Jewish community of Bosnia is building archives with a view to a possible museum. These endeavors belong as much to History as to living Memory: the aim is to transmit a received, fragile heritage whose last witnesses are vanishing. The marker of "transmitted memory" imposes itself here, for this revival rests less on intact structures than on the deliberate will to reactivate a cultural heritage after a near-disappearance.

The history of the Jews of the Balkans traces a curve of rare intensity: a generous Ottoman welcome at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a rootedness of several centuries that made the peninsula the principal Sephardic center of Europe, an urban apogee symbolized by Salonika the "Jerusalem of the Balkans" and Sarajevo the "little Jerusalem," then the brutal collapse of the Shoah, and finally, fragile rebirths. The guiding thread of this trajectory is Ladino, a memory-language that survived the Iberian exile and carried, until the twentieth century, the identity of a scattered people.

What the archives establish—the censuses, the legal statuses, the geography of the deportations—is constantly intertwined with what memory transmits—the affectionate nicknames of the cities, the songs of grandmothers, the awareness of a preserved Iberian filiation. It is at this intersection that the essential resides: a civilization nearly erased, yet whose traces, carefully gathered, continue to illuminate a major and too often forgotten page of European Jewish history.