Štip (Štip)

Jewish presence in the Balkans is ancient: Greek-speaking Romaniote communities lived there long before the massive arrival of exiles from Spain and Portugal. After the expulsion decree of 1492 and the forced conversions in Portugal in 1497, the Ottoman Empire, under sultans Bayezid II and his successors, welcomed Sephardic refugees who settled in the major urban centers of the peninsula — Salonika, Constantinople, Adrianople, Skopje (Üsküb), Monastir (Bitola) and Štip.

According to reference works, the Jewish community of Štip is attested from the sixteenth century onward, formed mainly of Sephardim who came to strengthen or absorb any earlier Romaniote nuclei [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. Within the framework of the Ottoman millet system, the community enjoyed religious and administrative autonomy: it managed its own places of worship, its rabbinical courts and its charitable institutions, under the authority of a rabbi and a council of notables.

The economic integration of the Jews of Štip follows the Balkan model: the textile trade, the sale of fabrics and the commerce in grain and agricultural produce constituted the dominant activities [Jewish Virtual Library]. Situated on axes connecting the production zones of the Macedonian interior to Salonika's export markets, Štip offered Jewish merchants a natural intermediary role. This commercial function, comparable to that observed in other Mediterranean and Balkan Judeo-Spanish centers, durably structured community life.

It should be recalled that the influence of Salonika — whose scholarly history has been renewed by works brought together under the direction of Gilles Veinstein on the "city of the Jews" and the awakening of the Balkans [Veinstein, 1992] — radiated across all satellite communities, of which Štip was a part. Liturgy, ritual practices, models of community organization and even matrimonial networks unfolded at the scale of this Judeo-Spanish space of which Salonika was the center of gravity.

The daily life of the Jews of Štip was organized around the synagogue, the ritual bath (mikvé), the school (talmud tora) and charitable confraternities. Judeo-Spanish remained the language of the home, of commerce among coreligionists and of transmission; romances, proverbs (refranes) and wedding songs were perpetuated from generation to generation, as throughout the Sephardic diaspora of the Balkans.

This culture, largely oral as far as small communities are concerned, has reached us more through transmitted Memory than through written archival items. Family narratives evoke a close-knit community, practicing a traditional piety marked by the Hebrew calendar, celebrating the feasts of Pesach, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur according to Sephardic customs, and maintaining close ties with neighboring communities of Skopje, Bitola and Kočani.

The Jewish cemetery, the synagogue and the neighborhood where families were concentrated constituted the topographical landmarks of this presence. The transmission of family names — a domain in which Sephardic onomastics has been the subject of systematic studies, notably by Joseph Toledano for the North African region [Toledano, 2003], whose method illuminates by analogy the Judeo-Spanish anthroponymy of the Balkans — reveals the Iberian depth of these lineages, bearing Hispanic or Hebrew surnames inherited from the exile.

It must be acknowledged here that there is a degree of uncertainty: direct documentary sources on the internal life of the Štip community are rare, and much of what we know of it stems from reconstruction by comparison with better-documented Balkan communities, as well as from testimony transmitted by the few survivors and their descendants.

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 disrupted the centuries-old balance of Ottoman Macedonia. Štip, like the entire Vardar region, came under Serbian sovereignty, then was integrated, after the First World War, into the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. This change of political framework profoundly altered the conditions of existence for Jewish communities.

The disappearance of the Ottoman millet system and entry into a modern nation-state transformed the legal status of Jews, now citizens of a Balkan kingdom. The communities of Macedonia — Skopje, Bitola and Štip principally — reorganized themselves within Yugoslav communal structures. The interwar period saw the beginning of mutations: schooling in the public system, spread of national languages, rise of Zionist aspirations among part of the youth, and gradual erosion of Judeo-Spanish linguistic homogeneity.

On the demographic plane, the community of Štip remained modest in size compared with major centers like Bitola, which counted several thousand Jews, or Skopje. The censuses of the interwar years attest to a continuous but restricted Jewish presence in Štip, composed of families of merchants, artisans and small traders perpetuating traditional activities in textiles and grain [Jewish Virtual Library]. This economic continuity, in an environment undergoing complete recomposition, illustrates the resilience of a community rooted for centuries in the local urban fabric.

The invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers in April 1941 sealed the fate of Macedonian Jewry. Macedonia of the Vardar, including Štip, was placed under Bulgarian administration — Bulgaria, allied with Nazi Germany, effectively annexing the territory without obtaining full international legal recognition, its inhabitants being deprived of Bulgarian nationality.

This ambiguous status had dramatic consequences. Bulgarian authorities applied to the Jews of Macedonia antisemitic legislation modeled on the "Law for the Defense of the Nation": census registration, wearing of distinctive marks, confiscation of property, exclusion from professions and restrictions on movement. Deprived of the protection that citizenship might have offered — and which, within old Bulgarian borders, delayed and ultimately prevented the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria proper — the Jews of the newly occupied territories of Macedonia and Thrace were delivered without recourse to the machinery of extermination [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

At the end of 1942 and in early 1943, within the framework of an agreement between the Bulgarian commissariat for Jewish affairs, headed by Alexander Belev, and German emissary Theodor Dannecker, the deportation of all Jews from Macedonia was planned. Štip, like other localities, was subjected to this meticulous administrative machinery: establishment of nominal lists, preparation of roundups and logistical coordination with the occupation authorities. The age-old community was to be annihilated in a matter of days.

During the night and early morning of 11 March 1943, Bulgarian authorities carried out the nearly simultaneous arrest of Jews from Skopje, Bitola and Štip. Families were torn from their homes, permitted to take only meagre luggage, then gathered before their transfer to the transit camp set up in the warehouses of the Tobacco Monopoly (Monopol) in Skopje, where several thousand Macedonian Jews were concentrated in appalling conditions.

From this camp departed, in three convoys staggered between 22 March and 29 March 1943, trains bound for the extermination camp of Treblinka, in occupied Poland. Nearly all the Jews of Macedonia — approximately seven thousand people according to established historical estimates — were murdered upon their arrival [Encyclopaedia Judaica] [Jewish Virtual Library]. The community of Štip, with its elderly, women, children and merchants, disappeared almost entirely in this catastrophe. The extermination rate of Macedonian Jewry was among the highest in Europe, the proportion of survivors being minimal — essentially people who had managed to flee, hide or join the partisans.

This total destruction explains the silence of these places: after 1943, there remained in Štip no living Jewish community. Property was looted or confiscated, homes were reassigned, and the fabric of a centuries-long presence faded from the city's daily life. What remains now belongs to commemoration and History.

After the war, Macedonia, integrated into socialist Yugoslavia and then, in 1991, becoming an independent state under the name of the Republic of Macedonia — today North Macedonia — slowly undertook to preserve the Memory of its annihilated Jews. The most striking commemorative initiative was the inauguration in Skopje, in 2011, of the Holocaust Memorial of the Jews of Macedonia, an institution dedicated to the preservation of the Memory of the communities of Skopje, Bitola and Štip.

For Štip itself, material traces are scant. The Memory of the community survives above all through the archives of deportation, the nominal lists drawn up by Bulgarian authorities — which became, through a tragic reversal, historical sources of paramount importance — and the testimony of the rare survivors. It is here that transmitted Memory and archive converge: the family narrative and the administrative document, though issuing from opposed logics, converge to restore the names, ages and occupations of these disappeared.

The work of Memory is part of a broader effort to safeguard the Judeo-Spanish heritage of the Balkans, to which research institutions and projects for digitizing archives and manuscripts contribute. The reconstitution of the History of Štip remains an open endeavor, where each notarial deed, each photograph, each recovered name comes to nuance or complete the lacunary picture at our disposal. As for other Mediterranean communities whose History could be written from rabbinical and communal archives — as in the work of Claire Rubinstein-Cohen on Sousse [Rubinstein-Cohen, 2011] — only the patient documentary exhumation allows us to restore human depth to what the statistics of the Shoah reduce to numbers.

The history of the Jews of Štip mirrors, in miniature, the trajectory of Sephardic Jewry in the Balkans: a settlement born from Iberian exile and Ottoman welcome, a long continuity of commerce and language under the radiant aegis of Salonika, then the upheavals of Balkan nationalisms in the twentieth century, and finally the brutal annihilation of March 1943. In a matter of days, a presence of more than four centuries was erased, with no possibility of rebirth.

This Great Book has attempted to restore this history by honestly distinguishing what belongs to the established archive — the deportation, the chronology of 1943, the legal framework of Bulgarian occupation — from what pertains to probable reconstruction or transmitted memory, regarding the internal life of a small, poorly documented community. Štip deserves its place in the topography of the vanished Jewish world: not by the extent of its remains, but by the fidelity that remembrance demands. Where there was a community, there remains a duty of memory — and this book is a modest stone in its foundation.