Reorienting the Western Gaze and the Question of Otherness:
A Review Essay on Jolanta Sujecka’s The Balkan Jews and the Minority Issue in South-Eastern Europe (Warszawa: Wydawca, 2020)
Despite being published in 2020, The Balkan Jews and the Minority Issue in South-Eastern Europe remains an extremely timely book during the current unsettling events in the Middle East. After the horror of the Oct. 7 events and the Israeli retaliation in Gaza, many citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo have almost unprecedentedly taken to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians. In other capitals and towns of Southeast Europe, local Muslims along with marginal Arab diaspora and leftist organisations have called forth the recognition of the Palestinian state. Meanwhile, state authorities and most political representatives have firmly stood in support of Israel.
Just as security experts and pundits warned about the potential effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine on Southeast Europe, so scholars have paid attention to the reverberations of the war between Israel and Iran’s proxies in the same region. In this regard, the collected volumeedited by Jolanta Sujeckacan provide sobering perspectives as different chapters explore the most salient historical events of Balkan Jews in relation to the aspirations and repercussions of the establishment of Israel in 1948. By addressing the tragedy of the Holocaust and its aftermaths in Southeast Europe, some contributors debunk the myths of the heroic and benevolent narratives over the “Jewish question”. Likewise, others re-examine the history of Balkan Jewish merchants and trade makers, political activists and royal soldiers, or simply “others”, whose agency has been at times undermined and often forgotten, albeit not fully erased from the linguistic, political, and sociocultural fabric of Southeast Europe.
This collected volume has anticipated a wide range of scholarly studies dedicated to Balkan Jews – among others, Nadège Ragaru’s monograph (2023) on Bulgarian Jews during the interwar period, or Katerina Králová’s study (2025) regarding the adverse circumstances of the homecoming of Greek Jews after the Holocaust. The bulk of the volume is dedicated to the constant attempt to shine bright the history of Balkan Jews so that day-present minority issues in the region can be more easily grasped. As a whole, the volume shows how Balkan Jews came to experience, compromise, and at times grapple with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the nation-states and nationalist policies toward minority groups, as well as the interwar period and socialist takeover until the arrival of democracy in 1989. Most chapters problematize and challenge the idea of Balkan Jews being a monolithic and homogenous community. In fact, the different case studies not only recollect a history of persecution and extermination but also that of successful trade makers, polyglots, religious and secular figures, partisans fighting the Nazi occupiers in Yugoslavia, Zionists, and internationalists. They all serve to counter the ambiguous and mendacious official national narratives still imbued with the legacies of the socialist knowledge production and its memory culture.
This review does not follow the book’s chronological order, nor does it discuss each chapter in depth. Rather, it seeks to advance a comparative approach to an array of similarities and dissonances that, at different levels, have either popularised and exploited the memory and history of Balkan Jews or consigned the latter to oblivion.
Throughout the volume, the Ottoman period takes a central place. Different authors describe how the religious salience and cultural heritage of Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Romaniote Jews differed from one another across the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish Millet was recognised, becoming the centre of a network of urban hubs from which successful trade relations were established and carried out by Jewish brokers and merchants. From the Southeast European coastline to Western Anatolia, the cities of Thessaloniki, Dürres, Valona, Split, and Dubrovnik, as well as Sarajevo, Skopje, and Belgrade, and others beyond the Balkan Peninsula, such as Izmir, Aleppo, and Baghdad, constituted the geography of the Jewish entrepreneurial success. This entrepreneurial network shows the decentralised organisation of the Ottoman Empire and the high level of autonomy given to the same Jewish millet. Despite this, Dragi Ǵorgiev notes how all Balkan Jews were nonetheless subjected to the deshvirne – the blood tax – and a wealth of restrictions imposed among non-Muslim and non-Turkish millets for neutralising any potential threat against the central authority of the Sultan. Balkan Jews had to grapple with the Ottoman Turkish and Muslim hegemony, often compromising on their religious identity to minimise tax liability and avoid military obligations. The phenomena of Islamisation were not uncommon among Balkan Jews.
Thessaloniki was undoubtedly recognised as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans” prior to becoming the apple of discord among nations in the wake of the demise of the Ottoman administration. When Western scouts and travellers began to visit the Balkans, local Jews were orientalised along with other populaces in the region. It should be pointed out that the “Western gaze” was already replicated within the Ottoman Empire in other forms of otherisation. For instance, Sephardi Jews were seen as “people of the West” because of the different linguistic and cultural baggage that they themselves had brought into the Balkans after being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Agnieszka August-Zarębska focuses on the Ladino heritage, otherwise known as the Sephardi Jewish language. The use of Ladino facilitated a diglossia among the Balkan Sephardi Jews, who were able to integrate into the different non-Jewish administrations without refraining from nurturing their Jewish uniqueness through the translation of Biblical texts and the canonisation of other religious sources written in Hebrew (p. 186). Tellingly, August-Zarębska notes how the Ladino was gradually brought to the brink of extinction since the same language and its orthography had been constantly exposed to the consequences of geopolitical disorders, such as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish language reform, the rise of Balkan states and the parallel rebirth of Latin and Cyrillic notations and texts in the “first Yugoslavia” and Bulgaria, respectively. In this regard, other contributors to the volume do not convey a passive image of Balkan Jews, but they aptly discuss how Zionism and Hebrew came to play a paramount role in the formulation and dissemination of political aspirations and philosophy for establishing a Jewish state. If the revival of Hebrew as a lingua franca came to downgrade other minor Jewish languages (p. 211), the revival of Ladino studies during the 1960s and the 1970s among the US and Israeli Jewish diaspora reinforced ironically the image of a “Western” or “diaspora language” having no roots in Europe and Southeast Europe in particular.
August-Zarębska’s chapter can be understood here as the introduction to a larger section of the volume dedicated to the exploration of age-old tropes of orientalism ascribed to Balkan Jews. Wojciech Sajkowski employs the gaze of French travelogues to investigate the reasons why Balkan Jews were often unnoticed despite being recognised as an important community since the time of the Ottoman Empire. The image of the “Jewish other” contributes to placing Balkan Jews outside the region but having its history inside it. A similar position has been historically given to Balkan Muslims (Karić et al. 2024) and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Southeast Europe. To reorient this geospatial dissonance, Bojan Aleksov begins by investigating the scholarship of Holocaust studies in tandem with that of Balkan Jewish refugees and survivors after WWII. When contextualized within European studies scholarship, the thorny question of belonging indicates that the historical presence of minority groups in Southeast Europe has often been depicted as a great danger (see Bobako 2017, Said 2019:60-71). Aleksov here aptly argues that the Western gaze has historically compromised the knowledge production over the history of Balkan Jews, positioning the latter into a “neither Western nor Eastern” predicament (p.331). When recent studies tend to resituate Jewish history more firmly in its European context and move beyond the dichotomy of “Jewish” vs. “European” history (or “German”, “French”, “Serbian”, “Greek”, etc. — and thus implicitly “non-Jewish”), they reinforce the idea that the Jewish population belongs neither to the Balkans nor to the Middle East. The Western gaze at Balkan Jews reduces the latter to a community of survivors and refugees fleeing Europe in the direction of Israel, while at the same time anti-Zionist (and at times anti-Semitic) organisations, some Arab nations, and Palestinians often perceive Jews from “the East” as former European refugees who have colonised, robbed and settled in Palestine. In other words, it seems that Balkan Jews belong to nowhere, constantly scattered between the West and the East and burdened by the question of belonging. It also follows that the Balkans are considered a transit area in the history of Balkan Jews in the same way the region today takes the shape of a “corridor” for the thousands of refugees and migrants escaping from the Middle East and Asia.
Although the historical role of Jews was tokenised during socialism and exploited by Eastern bloc’s regimes to commemorate the victory over Nazism, Jews themselves had managed to avoid further cultural exploitation and stigmatisation. By self-identifying as Yugoslavs, for instance, Jewishness remained somewhat protected beneath the ideological parapet of the socialist “unity and brotherhood”. If anything, the geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East after the establishment of Israel radically changed the public position of socialist citizens of Jewish origin. The policies of scapegoating and harsh expulsion were orchestrated in order to instrumentally associate Jews with Israel and pursue vested interests in the Mediterranean region. In the wake of the 6-Day War, the hostile reactions of the socialist states toward Israel forced Jewish communities to leave the Balkan heartland or comply passively with the new geopolitical order.
This troubling predicament has been taken into consideration by Jonna Rock and Maja Savić-Bajanić, who investigate the long-lasting legacies of the anti-Israeli feelings in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina on a legal and political ground. Both chapters begin with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the reorganisation of the state through the Dayton Agreement in 1995. Within the new institutional landscape, Bosnian Jews fell under the category of “others” as the community could not fit the three constituent national groups – e.g., Serbs, Croats, and Muslims (p.392). The return of Islam as a national identifier caused Bosnian Jews to face anti-Semitic discourse as the geopolitical upheavals of the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab dispute reverberated into a country also in search of justice and peace. Furthermore, the collected volume also shines a light on a wealth of under-researched postulates of solidarities and interfaith cooperation that Jews and Muslims had nurtured and enacted in other dire times in Southeast Europe. These chapters speak volumes of the need to decolonise the study of the Balkans as Europe’s historical powder keg. Among others, Katarzyna Taczyńska explores a gendered historiography of Balkan Jews through the lens of personal diaries and memoirs written by Jewish female partisans during WWII. Her analysis rebuts the stereotypical image of enmity by looking at the terrible events of WWII also as a period of emancipatory social discourse and transformation (p. 265). Taczyńska focuses on the lived experiences of Ervin Salcberger, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Pale, Bosnia, and Lea Salcberger, another Jewish woman with Sephardic roots from Sarajevo. The first occupied a high position in a unit designated for Bosnian Muslims as chief of staff of the 16th Muslim Brigade, while the second was a rebellious woman engaged in guerrilla resistance movements. Rather than fuelling Yugo-nostalgia through the memory of female comradeship and two politically engaged women, Taczyńska contributes to expanding the scholarship of untapped interfaith and interethnic solidarity that other scholars have highlighted, such as that of the 1941 Resolution of Sarajevo Muslims condemning the persecution of Serbs by Ustaše and Muslim coreligionists of the SS Handschar (Sindbaek 2012, among others). In an interestingly gendered twist, the typically ascribed picture of a female caregiver goes to a Jewish man, Zoran Mandelbaum, the chairman of the Jewish community during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. In Konstanty Gebert’s chapter, the Bosnian capital emerges out of the ruins of war as a city of tolerance, whereby the story of Mr. Mandelbaum embodies Sarajevo’s age-old tradition of tolerance and coexistence – a tradition that brought Mr. Mandelbaum to provide “kosher aid” to his Muslim komšije, the neighbour, who gratefully replied out loud: “Oh, he’s Jewish, you know. Jews do such things” (p.277).
It goes without saying that interfaith coexistence cannot be taken for granted or romanticised. Throughout the volume, the rise of anti-Semitism and the persistence of anti-Jewish sentiment within the Balkans are explained as phenomena driven by religious prejudices, conspiracy theories, or ignorance in general. As Aleksov argues (p. 330), harking back to the genealogy of anti-Jewish feelings in the Balkans serves as a stepping stone to address broader questions of contemporary anti-Semitism. The “myth of the rich Jews” resembles present-day discursive tropes of anti-Semitism, albeit such a stereotype began to circulate since the time of the Ottoman suzerainty of the Republic of Dubrovnik. In fact, successful Jewish merchants and trade makers had established a modern vector of economic transitions whose potential reached the cities of Venice and Ancona, as well as the whole Adriatic eastern coast and Thessaloniki. Benedetto Littorio describes such a success story of the local Jews in Dubrovnik, seemingly proving the “myth of the rich Jews” true. However, other chapters – such as those authored by Sajkowski and Ognyanova – describe the bulk of the Balkan Jewish communities as poor, backward, and ignorant (p.52), or usually belonging to an urban middle class (p. 92). Other two chapters – written by Dragi Ǵorgiev and Bojan Mitrović – respectively, identify in the Christian theory of the Jewish deicide and ignorance among Serbian rural society (p. 73) the main features of a hostile sentiment against Jews that in the twentieth century became of urban relevance, especially in Bulgaria.
In the case of the latter, Irina Ognyanova’s and Yorgos Christidis’s chapters deserve special attention. Both authors argue that anti-Semitic fashion was imported by Western nations, and reinforced by Bulgaria’s geopolitical orientation during the interwar period. After WWII, Bulgaria’s national myth constructed around the idea of having been the only nation that “saved its own Jews” was barely challenged. If anything, this heroic narrative was exploited after the Communist takeover, surviving until the radical changes of 1989. As mentioned above, Nadège Ragaru’s recent investigation (2023) and other previous research (Crampton 2005:167, and Ntetorakis, 2022:73-79, among others) debunk such a myth by shedding light on the terrible savagery in the Bulgarian-occupied regions of Macedonia and Thrace. There, the local Jewish population was interned in transit camps before being deported to Nazi-occupied Poland. What Ognyanova interprets as a pragmatic decision undertaken by the Tsardom of Bulgaria to compromise with the Axis allies was, in truth, motivated by the nationalist aspirations of repairing the historical wrong that the Treaty of San Stefano and the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 had officialised by ceasing Bulgaria from the regions of Macedonia and Thrace. Within these, a large degree of complicity with the Nazi extermination policy continues to be tabooed and denied by nationalist views circulating within today’s Bulgarian academia. Moreover, questions of political and moral responsibility remain undressed. As I argue elsewhere (2024:125), Bulgaria’s national rhetoric of innocence over the “Jewish question” is imbued with a positivist understanding of history that neutralises critical approaches to the study of the Holocaust and fascism in the country. Bulgaria’s national myth systematically taboos research on the predicament of Jews in the Bulgarian-occupied lands during the interwar period. Ognyanova here aligns her historical analysis with the latest statements of the Bulgarian Academy of Science (Vatchkov et al. 2022a and 2022b), which deny the penetration of Fascism into the highest power hierarchies during the interwar period. Perhaps, Christidis’s chapter provides an alternative perspective on the subject matter, focusing on the reaction of Shalom – Bulgaria’s main Jewish organization – to the so-called 2019 Terzin Declaration on the “Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues”. Despite being non-legally binding, the declaration aimed at compensating the Jewish community for the Holocaust-related confiscations (p. 406-407). Although a similar declaration should have also been extended to the Turkish and Muslim victims of the ethnic cleansing of 1989 (Kamussela 2019), Christidis argues that even Shalom reiterates the heroic discourse over the “Bulgarian rescue of Jews” to avoid any further political exploitation of historical events which could have otherwise jeopardised the position of the same organisation with the institutional landscape (p. 407).
A certain “musoxenia” – meaning, “the fear of strangers” – resonated over time within Southeast Europe. Agata Grzybowska-Wiatrak employs this paradigm to explore the historical reluctance of Greeks to mix with other “ethnoi” – namely, other people. Similar to the Bulgarian context, Pédro Bádenes de la Peña also looks at Greece’s silence over the extermination of local Jews during WWII. The thorny question of collaboration with Nazis, the indifference of most Greek (Christian, white) society toward the Holocaust, and the absence of a proper, public debate on a national scale, were historically conditioned by nationalist voices and ideological positions. To a certain extent, Leszek Kołakowski’s assumption (2012:85) about the different use of the memory of the Holocaust in the West and socialist countries, is proven untrue. Although post-1945 Greece experienced a bloody civil war due to the power vacuum left by the Axis collapse, the “Jewish question” remained subaltern to national interests and ideological manipulations in the post-1945 Greek-Israeli relations. The latter were firstly interrupted by Greece to have an upper hand over Greek minorities in Arab countries, and only later mutually restored to seek vested interests within the Western orbit and the European Union in particular.
A comparative look at Bulgaria’s and Greece’s “shared guilt” suggests that a “patriotic focus” was a common feature of most European nations to sanitise and idealise their nationhood and defend it at all costs. Two chapters authored by Amikam Nachmani and Andrea Bourotis address exactly the issue of Hellenisation – that is, the age-old predicament of adaptation and compromises that Greek Jews enacted to respond to processes of minoritisation that nonetheless forced them at times to leave Greece or eventually endure ethnic cleansing. Hellenisation takes back to the local history of Jews in Thessaloniki, a city that best explains the reasons for which the “Jewish question” remains a subject of multilayer controversies in historiography. In Bouroutis’s contribution, Thessaloniki is rightly considered the geopolitical centre of competition between competitive nationalisms and post-Ottoman aspirations of emerging Balkan states in the nineteenth century. Throughout, Jews were hit the most by the Great Fire of 1917 – a tragic event that devastated two-thirds of the city, including the Jewish quarter. Jews had to pay the highest price after phenomena of gentrification and inconvenient local policies that de facto displaced them firstly on the edge of the city and later outside Thessaloniki proper. In retrospect, Bouroutis’s chapter intercepts a certain anti-Jewish attitude that did not cease to grow rampantly since then. For instance, Thessaloniki Municipality’s decision to allow the local open market on Saturdays – the Sabbath for Jews – reveals how the important and historical Jewish community was not considered in the plans of the reconstruction of the urban fabric and its local economy.
In these dire times, however, Zionism began making inroads and opening a new horizon of opportunities for all Jews worldwide. Răzvan Theodorescu’s short chapter, which opens the collected volume, focuses on the figure of Theodor Herzl, the Sephardic Jew whose idea of establishing a Jewish state reached the Balkan Jews quite easily. Among others, Serbia and Albania were the countries that most resonated with Herzl’s final objective of establishing the state of Israel. This project did not follow a coherent line of action at first, nor did it have a final destination on the map. Alike Palestine, Uganda, and Argentina, Albania was also designated to let Herzl’s dream come true. Through the experience of Leo Elton, a British journalist, Shaban Sinani contends in his contribution that the idea of establishing a Jewish state in Albania was a truly diplomatic project rather than a simple speculation verbalised due to the lack of anti-Jewish feelings and religious intolerance in the country. As the Beinstein-Konitza Agreement confirms, Albania could have easily secured a “place under the sun” to Jewish escapees from the widespread Nazi course of action in Europe. On the other hand, the “first Yugoslavia” of the Prince of Serbia, Aleksandar Karađorđević, was always sensitive to the Zionist demands due to the loyal attitudes of the local Jews to his kingdom (p.60-65). As explained by Pawel Michalak, the “first Yugoslavia” was one of the first countries to support and sign the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Moreover, the so-called “Vesnić Letter” – a document which was named after the author, the Serbian diplomat Milenco Radomar Vesnić – was written in support of the resurrection of a Jewish state in Palestine (p. 80). The most symbolic sign of Karađorđević’s support of Zionism was the act of planting a forest in Palestine in 1935 and naming it “the Mountain of King Aleksandar”.
Konstant Gebert tries to explain such a decades-long friendship between Serbs and Jews by claiming that both people had endured the same sort of violence, fought against the same enemies, and experienced genocide (p. 278). Gebert’s parallelism echoes, in short, what Milorad Dodik firmly stated in a pernicious interview with The Jerusalem Post (Beck 2024). What Gebert overlooks here is also a certain continuum of nationalist and colonial policies that Serbs and radical Zionists have unleashed in Southeast Europe and Palestinian territories, respectively. If it is true that the history of both Zionism and nationalism in Southeast Europe cannot be reduced to one of colonialism and violence, it is also true that ethno-nationalist and racist ideas within certain Zionist circles (e.g., Ze’ev Jabotinsky faction) were also inspired by the Balkan nation liberations during the Balkan Wars and the revival of the same nations against “national foreigners”. Needless to say, the Holocaust prompted Balkan Jewish survivors to align more and more with Zionism and the idea of migrating to Israel. However, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews were divided by the dilemma of pursuing a (post-)integration path in the would-be Israel or protecting their status of “Serbs of the Moses faith” (in Serb., Srbi Mojsijeve vere, p. 174) recognised since the time of “first Yugoslavia”. As Krinka Vidaković-Petrov further explains, a homogeneous community of Balkan Jews did not exist even during the interwar period when many Jews embraced socialism and fought the Nazi occupiers in Yugoslavia, while others embraced Zionism in the attempt to overcome exactly the different positions within the Jewish communities.
Romania and Moldovia remain marginal to the historiography of Balkan Jews due to the small communities that have inhabited the two countries. In a similar context to Serbia, Emanuela Constantini notices that Romanian Jews and the first Zionists were close to the Kingdom of Prince Ion Cuza and his successor, Hohenzallen Prince Karl. This relation did not impede anti-Jewish feelings from shifting gears within the country but also conversely spread in Moldova and contributed to the outflow of the Jews in spite of a certain revival of the Jewish culture.
Francesco Trupia, PhD, Adjunct at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland
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