Remembering the Past in Sarajevo: Rise of a Titan

The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina boasts several detailed exhibits depicting important moments and movements throughout the Western Balkan region, with each exhibition presenting a unique snapshot that shaped modern-day BiH. As should be expected, the recent conflicts take precedence, with the particularly moving Siege of Sarajevo showcase demonstrating the day-to-day lives of people trapped for 1,335 days without access to water, electricity or heating. Being able to see the creativity with which ordinary people overcame these difficulties, all whilst under the constant threat of shelling and sniper fire, is a testament to the resilience of the local population. Similarly, Jim Marshall’s 15 Years retrospective, in which he took photos around Sarajevo in 1996 and then recreated them 15 years later in 2011, shows where the city has recovered and developed, and where the scars of conflict remain.

Whilst these stunning images expertly shed light on what it was like for ordinary people in a time of great uncertainty and danger, it was another exhibit focused on a far more obscure moment in Bosnian history that caught my attention. The Lost Sephardic World of the Western Balkans takes a look at the history of the Sephardic Jews in the Western Balkans since their arrival on the Iberian Peninsula in the 5^th century. Expelled from Spain in 1492 following the Alhambra Declaration – a decree issued by the Catholic Monarchs of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in an attempt to reduce their influence on the large converso population (Jewish people who had converted to Christianity) in the region – the Sephardic Jews made their way to the Balkans, where they would remain for the next 500 years.

The Ottoman Empire was a safe haven for the Jewish community in the Western Balkans. Under the rule of the Ottomans there were no pogroms against them; they were free from the persecution that had faced in Western Europe. Throughout this time the Jewish community flourished, bringing the skills they had practiced in Spain and working as doctors, pharmacists, tinsmiths and merchants. Their influence on the culture of the Western Balkans was great. However, as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble in the 19^th century, Jewish communities became increasingly impoverished. Many German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews arrived in 1878 at the time of the Austria-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but fared less well than the established Sephardic communities in the area.

Throughout this period the Jewish population took an even greater role in society. Many served the Austria-Hungarian Empire in the First World War, but only a few years later following the formation of the pan-Slavic Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (colloquially, and later officially, Yugoslavia) a large number of Jews volunteered for the Royal Yugoslav Army. In the 1930s, some 8,500 Jews lived in Sarajevo alone, and played a central role in society, cementing their place as an important minority group that contributed much to the growth of the young Yugoslavia. However, 449 years after their expulsion from Spain, a new European power arrived in Yugoslavia and once again the Jews of the Western Balkans became a target. Following the arrival of the Nazis in April 1941, approximately 67,000 Jews, or 81% of the population, would be murdered. In “Independent Croatia” (which included much of Bosnia), Ustase death camps would become the final resting place for hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. In German-occupied Serbia, death by firing squad or transferral to concentration camps was almost unavoidable. The Jews that survived the initial wave of killings had a choice, to hide or to fight. Many chose to fight back. And of those that fought, many found their strength in an emerging resistance movement led by a then-little known communist agitator by the name of Josep Broz, better known colloquially as Tito.

Tito’s Partisans were a somewhat legendary group of fighters in the Second World War. Widely considered to be the most effective anti-Axis revolutionary movement in Europe, they developed their fighting prowess against Nazi Germany, Italy, Croatia’s Ustase, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians and even the Chetniks, a fellow resistance movement that the Partisans claimed were in fact suggestible to Nazi influence (a fact later borne out by German communications captured by the British). With fears that Yugoslavia could serve as a rallying point for a counter attack following the Allied invasion of Italy, Britain began to take an interest in Tito’s activities in the region, and in 1943 parachuted a small group of special forces operators into Yugoslavia in order to meet with the Partisans in Jajce, a small town about 150 km from Sarajevo.

In his excellent book Eastern Approaches the commanding officer of that operation, Brigadier General Fitzroy Maclean, details the logic behind the mission to make contact with a figure that at the time the Allies knew very little about. According to Maclean, his first order of business when arriving in Yugoslavia (and an order direct from Winston Churchill himself) was to establish if Tito was in fact a man, a woman, or simply a title given to the leader of the Partisan forces. Rumours of his communist ideology made Maclean wary, but Churchill was to tell him that his mission was “to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them kill more”(p281). Armed with these instructions, Maclean made contact with Tito and described his time with a man that, whilst socially very shy, was also very sure of himself and of the decisions that he made. Despite their vast political differences, a mutual respect grew between the men.

Tito, himself an ethnic Croat, led a multi-ethnic band of men and women. Mosha Pijade, Tito’s deputy, was Jewish; one of the approximately 1,500 Jews that joined the Partisan’s at the outbreak of war. Many of his leading commanders were Muslim and Croat, and at the outbreak of war many Serbs served in the ranks of the Partisans as well. Tito’s pan-ethnic policy was a part of his plan for the establishment of a multi-ethnic Communist state in Yugoslavia, but due to continuing ethnic tension amongst the groups many of the Muslim and Croat commanders had to change their names in order to protect them from their Serb colleagues. The rival Chetnik militia were fighting for the retention of the Yugoslav monarchy as a way of protecting the ethnically-Serb populations, and this was the foundation for much of the conflict between the two groups, who saw their goals as incompatible. The Chetnik vision of a ‘Greater Serbia’, advocated for by high-ranking Chetnik intellectual Stevan Moljevic, was indeed incompatible with the multi-ethnic ideals put forth by Tito.

Fierce fighting from Partisan men and women, supported by Allied aid following Maclean’s mission, led to Tito’s victory over the Chetniks and the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia following the end of the Second World War. Tito would rule Yugoslavia with an iron fist until his death in 1980. In many ways, he succeeded in building a multi-ethnic state, but the extent to which this uneasy ethnic peace was maintained by the power of his rule, and the threat of what would happen to someone who did conform to his ideals, is up for debate. Certainly, it was Tito’s death that would signal the resurgence of ethno-nationalist rhetoric in Yugoslavia, and it was this same ideology that would tear the country apart throughout the 1990s. The image of a ‘Greater Serbia’ re-emerged in the rhetoric of Milosevic and Karadzic and an increasing certainty among all parties that they simply would not be able to continue to live together under the same government contributed to the collapse of the nation.

The ability to wield ethnicity as a weapon has determined the history of this region in a way that cannot be overstated. Tito’s leadership has been bookended by devastating violence on an unimaginable scale, with both conflicts defined by their ethnic components. The ability to manipulate ethnicity into a force that can unite or divide is one that is often misused. It does not have to be. The Western Balkans is just one example of a region that has suffered because of a perceived incompatibility along ethnic lines. But it has also prospered greatly from its multiculturalism. One person cannot change the world, but an idea can. With a history so steeped in cultural heritage that has been blackened by moments of ethnic division, one must not lose sight of what unites us.

The region was viewed as a haven for the Sephardic Jews during its time under Ottoman Rule because ethnicity was not seen as a characteristic that should divide. A multi-ethnic Partisan militia resisted the Nazis, the proliferators of potentially the most toxic and divisive ethnic ideology the world has seen, at a time when even the American Allied forces did not allow black and white soldiers to fight in the same regiment. Today, there is much to celebrate in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious culture of the Western Balkans. But the ethnic tension remains, and it is important that it is kept in check. The spread of increasingly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric that is advancing across the West has not gone unnoticed in the region. We must not allow ethno-nationalism to be used as a force to draw us apart. We must be aware of the dangers of accepting political dialogue without questioning, and of not being conscious of the historical implications that such thinking has had. This is a lesson for all of us.