Legal exclusion of the Jews, driven from the countryside and forbidden from commerce outside the capital, despite the article of the Berlin treaty that prohibited it

The principality and later kingdom of Serbia expelled Jews from the countryside and prohibited them from trading outside the capital, pushing them back toward Belgrade where they were already established. The measures were voted, repealed, and re-voted according to the succession of ministries for more than thirty years. They survived the Treaty of Berlin, which nonetheless made Serbia's international recognition contingent upon equal treatment of its subjects regardless of religion: the clause was signed but not applied, as was the case in Romania at the same time. Emancipation came only at the very end of the century, through a constitutional revision, and the Belgrade community emerged from it weakened, a portion of its families having emigrated to Vienna or to the Ottoman Empire.