Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe? / Lud 2012, t. 96

Item

Title: Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe? / Lud 2012, t. 96
Description: Lud 2012, t. 96, s. 51-74
Creator: Markovitz, Fran
Date: 2012
extracted text: Lud, t. 96, 2012

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

51

FRAN MARKOWITZ
Ben-Gurion University
Beersheva
Israel

WHOSE JEWS? WHOSE BOSNIA? WHOSE EUROPE?

Beginnings
Most chroniclers of Sarajevo Jewish Community begin by noting that Jews
expelled from Spain at the end of the 15th century were greeted with tolerance and
granted refuge when they arrived in Ottoman Bosnia (Levy 1996; Malcolm 1996;
Schwartz 2005; Serotta 1994). A Sephardic Jewish community of merchants, artisans and laborers, and rabbis and physicians prospered in Sarajevo for over 400
years, until their synagogues, businesses, homes and lives were brutally destroyed
during the Nazi occupation of 1941-1945. Many of those who survived the camps,
or fought as partisans, or hid in the homes of Muslim and Christian neighbors left
for the new Jewish State of Israel in 1948. The thousand or so Jews who re-situated
themselves in Sarajevo picked up the threads of their lives and wove them back into
the multiply textured cultural pattern of socialist Yugoslavia.
That is one way to begin. Here is another:
In the postwar present continuous of the 21st century, Bosnia-Herzegovina
(hereafter B-H) depends on a constitution that was uncomfortably born in Dayton, Ohio during November 1995 (see Holbrooke 1999). The Dayton Peace
Agreement (DPA) that ended the 1992-1995 wars fought for and against ethnic cleansing conﬁrmed the independence and territorial integrity of B-H, while
clarifying and making legible its mixed-up people(s) through the establishment
of two self-governing „entities” – the Bosniac-Croat Federation and the Serbian
Republic – and three constituent nations. These nations, the Bosniacs, the Croats
and the Serbs (hereafter B-C-S), are guaranteed collective rights to their own
language, culture, history and territory.
At the end of the preamble of the DPA, which declares the Bosniacs, the Croats and the Serbs the country’s constituent peoples, is a parenthetical addition;

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Fran Markowitz

these nations comprise the state (along with Others). B-H’s Others, or Ostali, are
endowed with individual liberties, but they do not possess the B-C-S group rights
from which many of these liberties derive (see, e.g. McMahon 2004: 202; Mulaj
2005: 8). Eligibility requirements for the tri-person presidency, many government posts, state and entity positions, and university places reﬂect the ongoing
importance of maintaining a balance of power among the constituent nations.
In newspaper articles and population tables; on job applications and university
registration forms the B-C-S-(O) constitutional order constantly repeats itself,
sending the unremitting message that the Ostali are an afterthought, a residual
category of citizens who cannot or will not assert national belonging as Bosniacs,
Croats or Serbs (see Markowitz 2010: 92-96)1.
During the 1992-1995 wars, Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs fought each other for and
against the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sarajevo’s small Jewish Community refused to ally itself with any one group and asserted its neutrality by providing
sorely needed aid to all (see Serotta 1994). After the war, Bosnia’s Jews have been
ofﬁcially amalgamated into the Ostali. At the same time, however, as „one of the
old and formative components of the Bosnian pattern (…) that had shaped [Sarajevo’s – F.M.] urban culture and entire ambience” (Lovrenović 2001: 170), the Jews
of Sarajevo and their institutions linger in popular discourse. This contradiction raises
questions about how Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs perceive Sarajevo’s Jews as a cultural category, a social group and political constituency. Whose Jews are they? The
ambiguous and multiple answers that Sarajevans provide are connected to the ever
vexing issues of citizenship and nationhood in postwar, ethnically divided Bosnia and
are at the root of B-H’s shaky position in 21st century Europe.
That Europe has taken the lead role in ensuring the Dayton peace through
the establishment of the Ofﬁce of the High Representative (OHR), a supra-governmental institution that oversees implementation of the civilian aspects of the
accords. The unelected, EU-appointed High Representative holds absolute authority to overturn state and entity legislation deemed by his ofﬁce as unconstitutional. Originally slated to close at the end of 2006, the OHR continues to pursue
its mission, „to work with the people of B-H and the international community
to ensure that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a peaceful, viable state on course to
European integration”2. In other words, the European Union has the ﬁnal word
in determining if, and if so, how the B-C-S-(O) people of B-H will (re)join the
continent of which it is intrinsically part.
And here is the third beginning:
1

This Dayton-born B-C-S-(O) scheme of categorizing the population conﬂicts with and overrides
the multiplicity that for centuries characterized Sarajevo’s ethnoscape where Albanians, Hungarians,
Jews, Macedonians, Roma, Slovenians and Yugoslavs were named and noticed. Twenty ﬁve categories
were listed in Yugoslavia’s last census of 1991. Now only Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs are listed in ofﬁcial documents; all others have been unnamed and amalgamated into Ostali.
2
Ofﬁce of the High Representative, http://www.ohr.int (19.01.2012).

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

53

Most of this special issue contributions posit and wrestle with an anthropology of Europe from the dual perspectives of home and abroad. My essay blurs
those categories. I am not Bosnian, and I am not a former Yugoslav. I was born
and spent most of my life in the USA. Curiously, though, throughout ﬁeldwork,
my positionalities – I hesitate to say „identities” – as an American, a Jewess,
and an Israeli brought me directly into the fulcrum of the overlapping issues that
connect the Jews of Sarajevo to the B-C-S constituent nations; and all of them to
the unsettled and unsettling future of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a tri-nation-state in
the heart of Europe. The meanings that my hosts attached to my ethno-religious
belongings and national citizenships played critical and decisive roles in this research. How I was included and excluded by Sarajevans while taking part in
events, interviews and conversations reveals much about the heterogeneity and
hybridity of Bosnia’s „third space” (after Bhabha 1990; Karahasan 1993) where
the questions, „Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? and Whose Europe?” converge.
My involvement in these questions began on a hot, humid day in bombed-out
Sarajevo during August 1997. As I made my way to the Sarajevo Jewish Community on the northern bank of the Miljacka River I thought back to my ﬁrst
visit to that Community fourteen years earlier. At that time, the Ashkenazi Synagogue was ﬁlled with lively, little children, middle-aged men engrossed in chess
and backgammon games, and people of all ages stopping by to chat. Much had
changed in Sarajevo since then. Eight years after triumphantly hosting the 1984
Winter Olympic Games, the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence. But instead of prospering in postsocialist Europe, the country erupted into
a vicious war, and Sarajevo was held under the longest siege in 20th century history (see Andreas 2008; Maček 2009). At the war’s end, thousands of civilians
had ﬂed, been wounded or killed; many cultural landmarks were destroyed, and
the country’s economic and social infrastructure was demolished. In August 1997
the people I met seemed to repeat mechanistically, Bilo je rat. Biče bolje („There
was a war. Things will be better”).
I approached the synagogue unsure of what to expect: Would there still be
men engaged in chess games surrounded by eager kibitzers? Would I ﬁnd any
gangly youths or parents with little children? Would my ears once again catch the
strangely familiar phrases of Judeo-Spanish intermeshed with local Slavic syllables? Mindful of wartime evacuations and other losses I wondered, as I reached
the building, if there would be anyone at all in the lobby.
I entered the synagogue and the lobby was quite full. It was early afternoon,
and lots of older people were working their way toward the exit. The air was
heavy with lingering odors of cooked meat and vegetables, and I saw some young
men hauling out crates of apple peels and cabbage leaves. I took in the scene and
then found my way to an ofﬁce where framed photographs and certiﬁcates of
appreciation covered the walls. That was where Dragica Levi, the Community’s
secretary general, explained to me that hot lunches, funded by the government of

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Fran Markowitz

Germany and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were served daily to the mostly Muslim and Christian aged and poor of the neighborhood. I asked
about the middle-aged and young people I had seen and blurted out that I thought
that the Jews of Sarajevo had been evacuated during the ﬁrst years of the war. Dragica gave me a long, cold stare, took a deep pull on her cigarette and told me, as she
slowly let out the smoke, that she and many others never left their city. They stayed
to organize medical care, pharmacies, a short-wave radio communication station,
hot lunches, and more, „Don’t you know about the Jewish Community’s war efforts?”. After a pause she continued, „Many did leave, and many returned – from
Israel, from Spain, Switzerland, and Canada”. Dragica called in a young man who
had been to Israel and back again. We set a time to meet later that week, and when
we sat together he narrated to me the reasons for his family’s decision to send him
to Israel, and why, after six years there, he returned to Sarajevo. When I inquired
about him again ﬁrst in 2002 and then in 2004, Alex was long gone. But drifting in
and out of the synagogue, living their lives and telling their tales were several other
young people along with those at the peak of their adulthood.
The Jewish Community of Sarajevo is as diverse as the city itself. It is comprised
of čisti jevreji („pure Jews”) and those of mixed heritage. They are Sephardim, the
Ladino-speaking descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 from Spain, and Ashkenazim, Jews who hailed from Germanic, Hungarian and Slavic lands; those who spent
their entire lives in Sarajevo, those who lived abroad and returned, and some, like
me, whose peregrinations have not come to an end. Several are employed in the liberal professions within various businesses and governmental agencies; some hold
jobs in the Jewish Community; most others are on pensions. Many participate in
holiday services, social activities and commemorative events, take their no-longer
free lunch in the synagogue’s restaurant, and drop by to see who is around and what
is going on. No one is an Orthodox practitioner of Judaism and it is difﬁcult, if not
impossible, to distinguish Sarajevo’s Jews from their B-C-S-(O) neighbors.
After providing sketches of the people who come and go in the Jewish Community, I will take a more political turn by exploring how Jews participate in
multi-ethnic Sarajevo, and how their neighbors cognize and constitute them as
individuals, a people of history, and a political constituency. We will hear Jews
narrate their history and identity, as well as how various Christians and Muslims
classify the Jewish Ostali in their midst. What follows are debates and dialogues
that occurred between 1997 and 2008 as Jewish Sarajevans, their interlocutors
and I interacted in postwar urban space under the inﬂuence of historically salient
cultural categories and contemporary governmental schemes3.
3
Thanks to IREX for a Short-Term Travel Grant that brought me to Sarajevo in August 1997, a grant
from the Dean’s discretionary funds of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Ben-Gurion
University that underwrote two weeks of ﬁeldwork in the summer of 2002, and to IREX again, which
awarded me a 2003/04 IARO (Individual Advanced Research Opportunity) grant for the long-term
ﬁeldwork I conducted in 2004.

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

55

The Jevrejska Zajednica in Sarajevo and beyond
In 1997, 2002, 2004 and 2008, most days when I came to the Jewish Community for a meeting, an interview or to lunch in the restaurant, business was
brisk. During the summer, there are many returnees from abroad who meet up
with friends over coffee. At other times certain guests will pay a visit: the Israeli ambassador makes a yearly call as does the European representative of the
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Sometimes foreign rabbis, scholars and tourists will drop by; sometimes it is university students from Slovenia
or Sweden; or staff from the shrinking array of humanitarian organizations in
Sarajevo. Teams from local television stations regularly arrive at the synagogue
to chronicle holiday services; less frequently, ﬁlm crews come from abroad to
document the only operating synagogue in Sarajevo, which during the 1992-1995
siege served as a citywide relief and communications station (see Serotta 1994).
All that notwithstanding, most of the people who congregate in the synagogue’s lobby are locals. I met Moric Albahari there in the summer of 2002. As
a teenager he had fought as a partisan, and as an adult he served as a pilot in the
Yugoslav air force. Moric, who is ﬂuent in ﬁve languages, was an ofﬁcial of
the synagogue and looked up to as a role model by the younger generations.
During our ﬁrst meeting, Moric was sitting with a colleague who had served
with him in the air force, and together they described Yugoslavia as a great country based on socialist humanism. By way of introduction Moric’s friend told me,
„I am a Muslim, who has a Catholic wife. But what’s the difference? All people
are one under God; all people were one in Yugoslavia”. He continued,
During the war, this place, the Jewish Community, was the only place that gave
food and medicine to anybody. Go to Merhamet [a Muslim charitable organization
– F.M.] and they ask your religion. If you’re not Muslim, then go away. I wanted to
change my religion to become Jewish because of the way that they treated everybody equally.

He did not change his religion; he does not have to. He can sit in the synagogue lobby with his friend, drink coffee-with a shot of rakija (brandy) on the
side-reminisce about the glory days of Yugoslavia and share regrets about
the ethnically divided aftermath of Bosnia’s tragic war.
Most days two well-appointed receptionists meet and greet those who enter
the synagogue. Early in 2004 one told me:
I work here. Philanthropic work. There are old people who are sick, isolated, and
cannot leave their houses. Their pensions are very small. We send a young woman
to shop and to cook for them. From La Benevolencija, the charitable arm of the
Jewish Community. And their nationality doesn’t matter. We offer services to all

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people. I myself am from a Muslim family. My husband was half-Jewish, half-Catholic. That’s how I got here. I’ve been here since 1992.

Nadja’s story of involvement in the Jewish Community through intermarriage
was but one of many. And reports of children living abroad repeat over and again.
In March 2004 I began to attend the meetings of La Bohoreta, the women’s
group that prepares the synagogue’s social hall for Sabbath dinners and holiday
feasts, arranges visits to the sick; makes condolence calls, keeps in phone and
mail contact with members abroad, sends representatives to multi-confessional
welfare organizations and provides a reason to get together. The ﬁrst meetings
I attended were ofﬁciated by Zlata, who after living eight years in Israel returned
to Sarajevo with her husband. A few weeks later, after returning from a visit to
her family in Canada, Nela, the group’s president, resumed her duties. At the end
of the business part of the meeting, photo albums showing smiling adults with
their young children against the backdrop of broad Canadian vistas, London city
scenes, and sun-drenched Israel, changed hands.
At one of my ﬁrst Bohoreta meetings I met 70-year-old Nada who, in her
cheerful pastel outﬁts, looks so much younger than her years. She is the mother
of four children but lives alone in Sarajevo. One of her sons is in Serbia, the other
two went to Israel, and her daughter is an art teacher in Croatia. During the war
Nada volunteered at the synagogue where everyday she oversaw the distribution
of clothing, blankets and foodstuffs. These days she spends most time in her favorite living-room corner where she reads and writes essays and poems. When
the weather is ﬁne, Nada cultivates fruits and ﬂowers in her garden. She tells me
the amount of her meager monthly pension and shows me her household accounts
book. „How do we live?” you ask. Moramo da živimo – „we must live”.
Branko, a widower and the Jewish Community’s informal security guard, sits
right inside the entrance to the synagogue. I stopped to chat with him one day in
May 2004 when he told me that he is the father of two grown children, a son in Israel and a daughter who lives in North Dakota. I asked Branko if he has ever visited:
No, I’ve never been there. I have no desire. There’s nothing for me there, and I have
no connection with that place. Now Israel is another thing. I like that country very
much. It has its own soul, its spirit. There is always something going on there, something to do. My son lives there; he, his wife – she is also a Sarajevan – and their two
sons. My eldest grandson is 8, the youngest is 5 and a half… They are very happy
there. No, none of them wants to return, except of course to visit. I’ve been there
twice, and I’d go again. But to live there, no. It’s too hot for me! Besides, I have my
mother here. And my pension, and my job, and my community, my friends.

Unlike my experiences with Jewish parents in post-Soviet Russia (Markowitz
1994), I rarely if ever heard Bosnian parents complain of the hardships of life

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

57

alone without their children. Most people told me matter-of-factly about their
transnational families. They often added a positive note about their children’s
jobs and living conditions while stressing their own reasons for staying in Sarajevo. Perhaps Greta put it best: the younger generation has the opportunity to
lead good, happy and productive lives abroad is something to celebrate. And she
should know for as a young woman no such opportunity had been offered to her.
Greta Weinfeld Ferušić was born and raised in Novi Sad in the Vojvodina region of Serbia, until that fateful autumn day in 1944 when the Nazis deported her
entire family to Auschwitz. After the war, Greta, the only surviving member of
that family, resettled in Belgrade where she enrolled in the university and studied
architecture. She also met the man who was to become her husband, a secular
Bosnian Muslim. They moved to his hometown of Sarajevo in 1952 where an
engineering job awaited him along with an appointment at the university. Greta
then entered a competition and she too landed a position at Sarajevo University.
When Sarajevo was shelled and war broke out in 1992, Greta and her husband
resolved to stay put but insisted that their son, his wife, and their two children
ﬂee. She explained, „I left once with two suitcases and did not ﬁnd anything when
I came back. And I was 21 years old then. A second time, no. Not by my own will.
I stayed here the whole time with my husband, but the children we sent out. They
have their own lives to live”.
Several young people who were children or teenagers when they „were sent
out” of Sarajevo told me that although they understand now that their parents
acted to save their lives, or to give them lives to live, remember feeling scared,
alone and abandoned as they rode the bus away from their city and their homes.
Renata was one of those children. In August 2002, within seconds of introducing
ourselves, Renata, who was then 24, narrated in one breath, „The war broke out in
April 1992. I left in August 1993. I spent four years in Israel at a boarding school.
Then I came back to Sarajevo”. Over the course of several meetings in 2004 Renata expanded on her story, conﬁding that the experience of being on her own was
terribly difﬁcult. After returning to her parents’ home, Renata worked as a nanny
for an American diplomat, and then enrolled in the criminology program of Sarajevo University. She has made a few trips back to Israel and participated in the
„Walk for Life” which begins at Auschwitz and ends in Tel Aviv. Renata has also
organized an intensive Hebrew class for the young adults of the Community, and
when Israeli delegations come to Sarajevo she serves as a guide and translator. In
May 2004, Renata was one of four young people who organized and presented
the Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration service in the synagogue.
Jovan was another. When in 2002 I ﬁrst met him, Jovan, known to everyone
as Joja, was a 22-year old law student, volunteering at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
Joja’s mother is from a distinguished Sephardic Jewish family, but he carries
the distinctly Serb ﬁrst and last names of his deceased father. Here’s how he described his family:

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Fran Markowitz

My father died in 1988. My mother is Jewish, but we were a communist, atheist
Yugoslav family. My grandfather went to Prague in the 1930s, studied architecture and joined the Communist Party. That was the end of our being Jewish as
a religion! During the (Second World) War, grandfather was a partisan, he and
his brothers and uncles. Everyone else died in concentration camps – in Jasenovac, in Auschwitz. We grew up knowing we were Jewish: we went to the kehillah [Hebrew: community – F.M.] for celebrations, but we didn’t do anything
at home for Passover or Chanukah. We went to the Jewish Community summer
camps and winter camps. Since 1988 it’s been me, mother, her mother and my little
brother. My grandmother on my father’s side was a diplomat for Yugoslavia all
of her life.

When the shelling of Sarajevo began Jovan’s paternal grandmother insisted
that his mother send him and his younger brother to live with her. „To cut a long
story short, we went to Belgrade on the last ﬂight out of Sarajevo and lived there
for two years with our two cousins”. And here the story got murky. Joja was ﬁdgety; he moved around a lot and chain-smoked as he talked. He told me in Hebrew that things were so dafuk [screwed up – F.M.] in Belgrade – weapons and
tanks in the streets, propaganda day and night, „But what did I know? I went to
school, had a roof over my head, there were no bombings”. He continued the
chronology and noted that he and his brother were able to meet up with their
mother in Budapest during a cease-ﬁre. After some discussion, they all returned
to Sarajevo. But then:
In less than two weeks I was out again. My name and my accent, both 100%
Serbian, didn’t promise me much here. We got in touch with the Kehillah, and
20 hours later, I got out to Mostar, Split and then Zagreb. I spent a week in Zagreb,
ﬁve days in Budapest, and then on to Israel. I was there in a boarding school until
1999, four years… I’ve returned to Israel six times. I don’t stay two months in one
place! After all these years, I am very connected to Israel, very.

I saw Joja several times during my stay in 2004. His hopes were to become
a diplomat for Bosnia-Herzegovina so that he can continue traveling, especially
to Israel and the Middle East. As Renata put it, „All of us who were in Israel see
ourselves as the future of the Jewish Community. We’re a small community and
we all need to join efforts to survive”.
The Jews of Bosnia-Herzegovina are no strangers to dispersal and disruption.
Nonetheless, from 1530 until 1941 they found there a haven and made it their
home. And although their community was ravished and reduced in the Holocaust,
Sarajevo’s Jews rebounded in socialist Yugoslavia. During the 1992-1995 war
some fought for the independence of multi-ethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina; many
left, some to return; others to eke out new lives in different places. Families have
separated and reunited, and separate and reunite again.

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

59

Although people come and go, the pink brick Ashkenazi synagogue on the
northern bank of the Miljacka River remains solidly in place for the Jewish Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The synagogue endures as a mainstay of Jewish
life in an unpredictable world, but it cannot and does not exist as an island unto
itself. It is part of the Sarajevo cityscape, and its constituents are residents of
the Canton of Sarajevo in the Bosniac-Croat Federation, and Ostali-citizens
of the ethnically trisected Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Jews of „multi-culti” Sarajevo: performances, perceptions
and politics
Bosnia’s Jews may be classiﬁed as Ostali, but every spring they come together
as a community in the Ashkenazi Synagogue to celebrate the holiday of Passover.
Passover is the yearly festival that commemorates the liberation of the Jewish
people from slavery in Egypt. It begins in the evening with a Seder [seder means
order in Hebrew – F.M.], which is a special gathering and festive meal based on
the ritual objects, prayers, stories and songs that are detailed in the Haggadah, the
Passover prayerbook. On April 5, 2004, I took a seat next to Klara at the Community Seder. I met her daughter and a friend as we became reacquainted. Klara
was giving me an overview of the people of the Community when she suddenly
declared that in Sarajevo during the Ottoman reign,
There was a very mean ruler here who for no reason hated the Jews. Maybe it was
because they had some of the wealthiest shops in the Baščaršija. Like in the story of
Purim that happened in Persia, he was planning to murder the Jews of Sarajevo. So
he took his soldiers into the Baščaršija and asked all of the merchants and artisans
to come out of their shops and line up. Then he commanded, „All the Jews, step
forward!”. And every one of the men – Jews and non-Jews – took a step forward.
That way, he would have had to kill them all or none of them. That is the kind of
tolerance and solidarity that Sarajevo is known for4.

For Klara, who is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Croat mother and married to a Bosniac, the Jews of Sarajevo are part of the city’s unique multiplicity
that must persist in spite of the perversions of the recent war.
4

Noel Malcolm (1996:112) offers a different version: „One intriguing story from the early nineteenth century involves the fate of a Jew from Travnik, Moses Chavijo, who converted to Islam, took the
name of Derviš Ahmed, and began to rouse the local Muslims against the Jews. In 1817 the leaders of
the Bosnian Jews complained to the next governor of Bosnia, Ruždi-paša, who seized the opportunity to
squeeze some money out of the Jews: he commanded that they pay a recompense of 500,000 groschen,
and seized ten leading Sarajevo Jews, including the rabbi, threatening to kill them if the payment were
not made. The end of the story, however, is that a crowd of 3,000 Muslims took up arms and demanded
the Jews’ release – which was promptly done”.

60

Fran Markowitz

After a few hours of prayer, prose, food and song – all against the backdrop
of ongoing conversations – the Community Seder drew to a close with a lively
and lovely song in Ladino. Most people left for home, but some of us stayed to
join the young people who were playing rock music in an adjacent hall. When
I ﬁnally turned to leave I bumped right into Jakob Finci, president of the Jewish
Community of B-H. That was fortuitous because in the midst of introductions he
invited me to „see multicultural Sarajevo in action”, to return in two days for the
Community’s mini-Seder that is staged for diplomats, representatives of Sarajevo
varied cultural societies and Christian and Muslim clergy.
Like all the other guests, upon arrival at the synagogue I shook hands with
the presidents of the Jewish Community of B-H, of Sarajevo and of Mostar
who stood formally dressed in a reception line. Most of the guests were similarly dressed diplomats from the international community; others were locals,
including an Orthodox priest in long black robes, a Franciscan Catholic monk
in a brown cassock, and the Reis-ul-ulema, Bosnia’s highest Muslim cleric
in a cylindrical white fez. I talked with a woman who introduced herself as a representative of the EU; she repeated over and again what a wonderful man Finci
is and how much he has been doing for the city of Sarajevo.
I entered the social hall, looked around and saw a woman of about my age
seated alone at one of the tables. I walked over to her and introduced myself.
In return she told me that she was the President of the Slovenian Cultural Center
of Sarajevo. A moment later, we were joined by another smartly dressed and
outgoing woman, Greta Weinfeld Ferušić. The three of us immediately engaged
in a lively conversation until the ceremony began.
In Bosnian and in English, Jacob Finci welcomed the „multi-culti” audience
„to this celebration of Pesach in the year 5764, the world’s oldest continually
observed holiday”. He noted that Passover
commemorates a historical event, the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt,
but freedom is not won once and for all. There is an ongoing process of self-liberation, not only for the Jews but for every human being to live out his freedom. This
is not only a holiday with meaning for the Jews but for every citizen of Bosnia and
Herzegovina.

Jakob then introduced a „young rabbi from Israel”, who took over. „Every
year we read the Haggadah and explain every symbol on the table. In Bosnia
and Herzegovina every symbol of freedom is very important”. He explained the
meaning of three key symbols and continued, „During the Seder we drink four
cups of wine to remind ourselves of the four verbs that come before salvation. But
today, we will drink only one”. He recited in Hebrew the blessing over the wine.
Everyone raised their glass, sipped the wine, and ate their lunch.
The president of the Slovenian Cultural Center left shortly after lunch. Greta
and I continued to talk, and several people joined us as the afternoon turned to

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

61

dusk. When the representative of the Mostar Jewish community sat with us Greta
told me that during the war he saved a Muslim woman by saying that she was
Jewish and got her out from the Croat-Herzegovinian side where she would have
been killed. Later when we were joined by Danilo I asked him, „What’s it like to
be the president of the Sarajevo Jewish Community these days?”. He shrugged
his shoulders and said, „Before the war, sve mi smo bili zajedno – We were all
together”.
Danilo’s ambiguous answer echoed several replies I had already received to
the more broadly framed question, „What’s it like to be a Jew in Sarajevo these
days?”. A month earlier one of the synagogue’s receptionists told me, „It used
to be wonderful, but now, well, there’s not much to look forward to”. Branko’s
answer was more involved:
All kinds of people come in here; our doors are open to all. During the war we had
much to give, and we helped everyone – with food, medicine, convoys. And everyone loved us. Now we have nothing to give, and, let’s put it like this, the love for
us has fallen. No anti-Semitic demonstrations or manifestations, no, not here, not
against us. But without the interest, the love has fallen.

A few months later I asked Dragica, „How are things going these days for
Jews in Sarajevo?”. She replied:
I’m afraid to say that they are not getting any better. I believe it is because of what
is happening in the Middle East, yes, in Israel-Palestine. I heard on a TV program
not long ago, „No matter where they live, no matter where they are born, Jews are
always the enemy of Islam”. No, not on a news program; I can’t remember exactly,
but nothing like this was ever before broadcast on TV.

„Have you received any letters to that effect or seen such grafﬁti?”. I asked.
On the steps outside the Old Temple there was grafﬁti: Swastika = Magen David.
There are not many of these but I think it’s because of the Middle East and all the
inﬂuence of Saudi Arabia here. It’s a different version of Islam, one that we’ve never
had. Have you seen the young women in their long dresses and covering their heads?
I think it’s a little less now than immediately after the war. But I understand them.
During the war there were many humanitarian organizations that would only give
help to those who went to the mosque, who grew their beards, who put on the dress.
Those were desperate times, and I understand anybody who did that. And now there
is still a strong inﬂuence from Saudi Arabia, have you seen those huge mosques built
in the new sections of the town? Who knows what they are saying in there.

Dragica moved the conversation away from what was a painful topic: antiJewish sentiments in a city where Jews had never been conﬁned to ghettos, in

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a city known for its religious tolerance, a city that, although under siege, celebrated its Jews in „Sepharad 1992”, the 500 year anniversary of the Spanish expulsion. Yet Sarajevo is also a city where the Holocaust struck with all its venom
and reduced the Jewish population from 10-12,000 to less than a thousand souls.
On Sunday evening, April 18, 2004, the Community was about to begin its
Yom ha-Shoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day, commemoration. On a long table
in the synagogue’s social hall stood dozens of small white candles neatly lined
up behind white cards with family names printed on them in black. Six large
white candles draped in black crepe dominated the stage behind the table. People
drifted in and lit their family candles.
A disembodied voice was reading off name after name and their ages – from
tiny children to the very old, with every age in between. Four young people entered the hall and sat in the front row. One mounted the stage, said a few words to
the audience, led an opening prayer and lit the six large candles. Then the congregation president stood and stated that Yom ha-Shoah commemorates the six million who perished during the Holocaust. „We and the Jewish people throughout
the world remember the pogroms and the Holocaust that happened, and the antiSemitism that takes place still throughout the world. We are here to remember the
tragedy of six million civilians who suffered only because they were Jews”. He
called for a moment of silence.
The young people took turns reading from documentary accounts of the deportation of the Jews of Sarajevo and their interment in camps, and of Jewish
armed resistance to the Nazis in the Partisans. I asked Greta if Sarajevo’s Jews
were deported to Jasenovac. She said she was not sure, but to some place in
Slavonia in central Croatia, reminding me that she was not originally from here.
Jakob Finci, who certainly was, preferred not to dwell on the Holocaust. During
a pleasant lunch in June 2004 he told me that unlike most other places in Europe,
the Jews of Bosnia have been objects not of anti-Semitism but of philosemitism:
The Serbs say, look, we are brothers. Both of us were victims during World War II
of the Nazis and Ustaše, and today we are both victims of the Muslims. The Croats
came to me and asked for a copy of the by-laws of the World Jewish Organization;
they talk about their diaspora and say that like the Jews, they have been persecuted
and spread out all over the world. And the Muslims, they say, look, we have been
living here together in Sarajevo for the last 500 years. And every time I go on radio
or TV people call in to remember that our Community gave them this or that medication, took their children out on the convoy, or provided them or their parents with
food. No one has forgotten, and we still have our good name in Sarajevo.

But Jakob is not naive and after a pause he added:
In the last two years, with the last Intifada, there are now bad feelings about Israel.
I don’t know how many times I’ve gone on TV and radio and explained that we

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

63

Jews have been here in Sarajevo for 500 years – that „ethnic cleansing” was not
invented by the Serbs in the last war but 500 years ago in Spain. That Israel was
created in November 1947 by a U.N. vote that gave one part of the land for a Jewish state and another part for a Palestinian, Arab state, but that the Palestinian part
was controlled and occupied by Egypt and Jordan until 1967. Why did nobody talk
about occupied Palestine then?

There is no Israeli embassy in Sarajevo. Through 2005 the Israeli ambassador
to Hungary, stationed in Budapest, also held the title of ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the past few years, one ambassador, who is based in Jerusalem represents Israel in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro. In 2008 that ambassador participated in the mini-Seder for the multi-ethnic,
multi-confessional and international community where she delivered a speech
celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary.
The „State of Palestine”, however, is represented by an embassy and an ambassador in Sarajevo. Just about every evening on FB-H-TV (the governmentsponsored station of the Bosniac-Croat Federation) there is a report from the
Middle East. Most of these reports show Israeli soldiers ﬁring on Palestinian
civilians.
One evening Amila, who is from a secular Bosniac family, invited me, a native speaker, to attend her English conversation class and tell something about
life in America. I thought that I would talk about the vastness of the country, its
different geographical regions and the diversity of the population. But we never
did get to that. As part of my introduction I told the six women students and their
teacher that I haven’t been living full-time in America for a while because I teach
at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. The teacher interrupted, „And what do you
think of the poor Palestinian people?”. Before I could answer, she continued,
„I see the facts on TV every night – and not just our TV, but BBC and CNN –
of poor Palestinian people with no weapons, completely defenseless except for
stones being attacked by the Israelis and supported by Bush. This reminds us of
what we went through, and can you please tell me how the Israeli people react to
this suffering?”.
Just a little while earlier, when I told the class that I was an ethnographer
researching ethnicity and multiculturalism in post-war Sarajevo, the teacher interjected that it was not worthwhile to speak about the war and wartime experiences to anyone who was not here because it is impossible to understand what
happened. I told her that the same could be said about Israel, and brought her
attention to the Qassam rockets shot from Gaza to explode on the civilians of
Sderot, and the innocent people – Jews, Christians and Muslims – riding buses,
food-shopping, sipping coffee and dancing in discotheques who were blown up
by suicide bombers. But on that warm evening in 2004, this particular teacher
told me that she had never seen Palestinians with weapons on TV. She repeated

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her allegations and tried to rally her Bosniac students to agree that the Palestinians ﬁred on by Israeli soldiers were in the same abominable situation as they
had been in when their city was under siege and radical Serb aggressors ﬁred
down upon them.
The students did not join with her, but I wondered if this is what Dragica and
Jakob were referring to when they intimated that things are not as they used to be
for the Jews of Sarajevo. Is the logic that this teacher proposed more widespread?
Might it be inﬂuencing government policy among the Bosniac majority in the
FB-H?
Igor, known to everyone as Grga, told me about the problems he has been having with the government:
They want to get me into army service here... I went and told them that I did the
IDF in Israel. [The clerk – F.M.] asked if I had killed any Palestinians… [Grga was
a cook in the army and killed no one – F.M.]. And I said, „You should organize a Jewish component of the Federation, and then you can call me to serve in that Jewish
army. Look, there’s the army of the Republika Srpska, and in the Federation you
have two armies de facto, the Muslim one and the Croat one. If there was one army
for the entire state of Bosnia-Herzegovina then maybe I would serve. In the meantime, when you make a Jewish component, then you can call me”. If they call me
again, I don’t know what to do. I can go to Israel and study… and return as clergy.
They don’t call those religious guys. And besides I’ll tell them that they must provide me with kosher food and that I’m shomer shabbes [Sabbath observant – F.M.]!

It is not only among Bosniacs that the blurred boundary between (Bosnian)
Jews and Israel provokes reassessment of Sarajevo philosemitism and the Jews’
neutral Ostali status. If in the Muslim majority Federation sympathies rest with
Palestinian civilians and against the Israeli Defense Force, in the Republika
Srpska, Serbs have tried to rally Jewish support and express frustration when
solidarity is not forthcoming.
In 2002, in response to my question as to why she and her family left Sarajevo for the semi-rural surroundings of the Serbian Republic, Gordana, an attorney turned café-owner told me of her fear of Muslim brutality and added, „You
should know; it’s the same as you in Israel”. In June 2004, much the same thing
happened when I met with two spokesmen from the SDS, the ruling Serbian
Democratic Party in Pale. I began our conversation by asking R and B to explain
their party’s platform. They replied by describing the barbarism of the Muslims.
Instead of describing their party’s platform they drew analogies between my people and theirs:
R: You’re a Jew. You must know then that we Serbs and you Jews are very much
alike. Your people lost six million during the Second World War. One and a half
million Serbs were killed in the Second World War. Serbs and Jews are very much

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

65

alike; we have both suffered a lot, and we are both European civilizations surrounded by enemies.

I suggested that the problems of the Serbs and Israel are not the same because
the Jews faced a different population living on the land, using it and claiming
it as its own when they returned, as some say, or colonized, as others say, during
the 19th and 20th centuries. In contrast, Serbs have always lived in Bosnia along
with other ethno-religious groups.
R: You are an old people with a new state. We are an old state with new people:
mixed languages, mixed peoples [here he grimaces – F.M.]. And you have a strong
diaspora to help Israel. In America alone there are 15 million Jews, the richest
group in America.
FM: 15 million? 5 million!
R & B: 15 million, yes, 15 million. And the most inﬂuential. And the richest, Kissinger, Rockefeller.
FM: Rockefeller? He was Protestant!
„Shut up”, I silently tell myself. „This is an ethnographic moment!”
[…]
FM: (again) Would you now tell me about the party platform of SDS?
B and/or R (exasperated): How can it be that you as a Jew do not understand?
How many we lost in the First World War and then in World War II, in Jasenovac
during the fascist [Croat – F.M.] state! The Ustaše, that’s who killed these Serbs. In
Jasenovac, 700,000 Serbs from B-H, and 50,000 of them children, children! And
this was only 50 years ago. Serbs need the Republika Srpska as our security, for
protection. It is our only security against this aggression. You are a Jew. In 1940
there were 12,000 Jews in Sarajevo. And how many are there today?
FM: Maybe a thousand.
B/R: And do you know who killed them? Croats and Muslims. This was a catastrophe. Our peoples have shared together in suffering!

And so, while there is truth to Jakob Finci’s point that the Serbs invoke common suffering with the Jews, they also – or at least these particular Serbs – express frustration that the wealthier, more powerful Jewish nation has not supported their side.
This frustration can ﬁnd expression in more traditional, anti-Semitic ways.
On April 9 2004, which was Good Friday and the ﬁrst Sabbath after the Passover
Seders, David, announced that on B-H Radio-1 he heard an Orthodox priest state
in his explanation of their Easter holiday that the Jews killed their God, Jesus
Christ. „We must not remain quiet! This is our public radio station of Bosnia-Herzegovina. We must write a letter to send to the general editor of the radio
station and to the Minister of Culture. We must not remain quiet!”. A heated dis-

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cussion followed; agreeing that silence was out of the question everyone present told David to write the letter and they will sign. One man remembered that
two years ago there was a discussion on a public B-H television program
that went like this: „During the 1930s, there was Catholic fascism in Spain
and in the 1940s in Croatia. Our last war was due to the Orthodox fascism of
those Serbs. And today Israel is an example of Jewish fascism”. David pounded
his ﬁst on the table and ended the discussion as he announced, „Now we must
pray!”.
But the conversation resumed over dinner. David asked me if I had heard of
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery, originally published in
1905 in Russia as an authoritative document that describes secret meetings of
Jewish rabbis conspiring to take over the world. He told me that it was recently
re-published in Belgrade. A few days later I saw that libelous book prominently
displayed in one of Sarajevo leading bookstores.
In his latest book, Arjun Appadurai delineates a seemingly universal Fear
of Small Numbers (Appadurai 2006). He claims that in contemporary nationstates the „movements, mixtures, cultural styles and media representations [of
ethnic minorities – F.M.] create profound doubts about who exactly are among
the «we» and who are among the «they»” (Appadurai 2006: 5). Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman (1998) looks speciﬁcally at the uncertain position of European
Jews, strangers who came and stayed. By the late nineteenth century, those Jews
became part of the citizenry but they remained outside the nation, representing an
irritating in-between-ness that provoked the question: Are they with us, or against
us, and how will we know for sure?
During the 1992-1995 Bosnian wars, many Jewish men took up arms to ﬁght
on the side of independent Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ofﬁcial stance of the Jewish
Community, however, was neutrality, a commitment to assist everyone in need of
food, medical care, medicines and communication with the outside world. Over
a decade after the war ended the Community’s neutral stance is being reassessed.
Some, like Moric’s friend, continue to laud the Jews for their humanitarian evenhandedness. Others, however, may be interpreting that neutral stance negatively,
as a statement of non-commitment. Kemal Bakaršić, who was B-H’s leading authority on the medieval Sarajevo Haggadah, told me in 2004 that the Jewish Community’s biggest mistake was in declaring that „this war was not our concern. The
Jews ought to have declared their allegiance to independent, Bosniac-led Bosnia
and publicly condemned the bigger evil of the other side”.
The Jews’ neutral stance, even in times of peace, can cause anxiety; it can be
read not as neutrality at all but as a cover for duplicity. While Bosniacs, Croats
and Serbs each claim connections to Bosnia’s Jews, the refusal of those Jews to
stand exclusively with them triggers the question: Who are you really? Are you
indeed Ostali, beyond the pale of B-C-S categorization? And if so, whose Jews
will you be if forced to choose?

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67

Endings

Conclusion 1: the Jews of Sarajevo belong to us all
Just about every time my young friend, Amar and I got together, he rued the
fact that „almost all [of Bosnia’s Jews – F.M.] who left during the war stayed in
Israel or went to the US. There isn’t even a rabbi in Sarajevo, and it shouldn’t be
like that. Jews have been a part of Sarajevo for 500 years. Lots of Jews survived
World War II, hidden by their Croatian and Muslim neighbors”. One day in 2004
while in the midst of these declarations, Amar interrupted himself to ask if I knew
the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah. „Go ahead and tell me”, I responded, and this
is what he said:
I like this story very much because to me it is typical of everything good in Sarajevo. The Sarajevo Haggadah was not printed here in Sarajevo but was brought here
from Spain by a Jewish family. For centuries it was in the home of a rich Jewish
Sarajevo family. Somehow it ended up at the beginning of the 20th century at the
shop of a Muslim merchant in the Čaršija who did not know its value. The Austrians bought it up for a cheap price for the new museum that they were building.
They sent it off to Vienna to assess its worth. For years it went missing, misplaced
somewhere among all the artifacts until it was found years later in some cupboard
where it had been placed. Then it was sent back to Sarajevo to the museum. Then
the Nazis came, and they heard about the Haggadah, and they, who were stealing
all valuables, wanted it. The director of the museum, who was a Croat, said to the
Nazi that came demanding it that another German had already come for it and took
it. Meanwhile, he had given it to a Muslim friend who buried it under the ﬂoor
of a mosque, and that’s where it was all during World War II. Then it was returned to the museum. Two days before the bombardment of Sarajevo it was put in
the safe of the National Bank, and it spent all the war years there. Now it is back
in the museum. I love that story because to me it expresses the spirit of the Balkans,
the spirit of Bosnia.

With this story, Amar is suggesting that the Sarajevo Haggadah, a unique
illuminated manuscript, and the Jews of Sarajevo, one community among the
Others, belong to all of us, to the city of Sarajevo and to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The narrative demonstrates that, despite the nationalist parties and B-H’s ethnically overdetermined governmental structure, all the people(s) of the region are
united in a pan-ethnic unifying Bosnian way that involves mutual responsibility,
a bit of trickery, a lot of tolerance, and respect.
The story of the Sarajevo Haggadah meshes with that told to me by Klara of
„Sarajevo Purim”: In every age there are mean and powerful people who wish to

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bring harm on the Jews, but most Bosnians, be they Catholic, Muslim or Orthodox; Bosniac, Croat or Serb, will rally to protect the Jews because they contribute
to the common heritage; they are part of the Bosnian „us”. Toward the end of July
2004 one of the older men of the Jewish Community expressed to me that very
sentiment:
I just want you to know that I was here during the entire war. Bosnia is my homeland. Sarajevo is my homeland. The Bosnian people are my people. During the
Second World War, Muslim neighbors hid me and my family, and three other Jewish families as well. When the war came, I volunteered to serve in the B-H army.
It’s my land; it’s my people. Yes, my children are in Austria, in Graz. It’s better for
them there. Not for me. This is my land, my people.

Conclusion 2: Bosnia belongs to its constituent nations (along with
Others)
Over ﬁfteen years after Dayton, Bosnia-Herzegovina may be one internationally-recognized state, but in reality it is more a wary coalition of rival nation-statelets where citizens’ rights accrue more through the B-C-S nations than
as state-guaranteed individual liberties (McMahon 2004; Mujaj 2005). The republic’s constitution stipulates a tri-person, tri-national presidency and that the
members of the upper house of parliament come solely from among the constituent peoples. In that B-C-S scheme of things, the ambiguous Ostali status makes
of Jews and other Others second-class citizens.
During the summer of 2006 Jakob Finci, who is an attorney as well as the
president of the Jewish Community of B-H, challenged these constitutional measures by initiating a lawsuit against the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the
European Court of Human Rights. Dervo Sejdić, who identiﬁes as a Rom, joined
him in the suit. Together they argued that the B-C-S eligibility requirements for
the Republic’s presidency and election to the upper house of parliament were
discriminatory. After prolonged hearings, in December 2009 the two men
were granted a favorable ruling.
Be that as it may, the governing structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina includes
no direct channel or mandate for implementing the European Court’s decision.
In fact, its implementation would require amending the republic’s constitution,
which, given current conditions, is highly unlikely. The leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s major nationalist parties are not eager to alter the Dayton-born B-C-S
balance of power that has been at the core of government for 15 years. Every
so often liberal voices can be heard that suggest overhauling B-H’s governing
structure to eliminate the ethnically based entities in favor of a unitary state of all
citizens. These voices, however, are weak and easily squelched by the ofﬁcially

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

69

recognized and rights-possessing B-C-S constituent nations who jealously guard
their bailiwicks.
Even if it were possible to bend these legal structures, ethnic mistrust remains
strong and grassroots support for the tri-national balance of power persists. Despite repeated messages from the Ofﬁce of the High Representative urging B-H’s
citizens to forge a „sea change” in their nationalist attitudes, Bosnia’s nationalist
parties have consistently won the popular vote since the ﬁrst multi-party elections
in 1990 (Hayden 2007).
In April 2008 a history lecturer at Sarajevo University told me about a discussion she held with her class on these issues. She asked the students, „Why
not identify inclusively as Bosnians rather than exclusively as Bosniacs?”. They
replied, „Because Serbs and Croats always put the nation before the whole state,
if we didn’t insist on our Bosniac identity, we would be ignored and exploited”.
Likewise it is not uncommon for Croats and Serbs who vote for their nationalist parties to express fear of a Muslim-Bosniac takeover, as they hark back to
the onerous minority status that their ancestors bore when Bosnia was part
of the Ottoman Empire. And given the violent end to Yugoslavia, political parties
advocating non-ethnic or pan-ethnic socialist solutions to Bosnia’s woes have
difﬁculty recruiting adherents. Thus, ﬁfteen years after the end of the war, the
question, „Whose Bosnia?” must be answered with the same ambiguous statement as that written in the DPA: the Bosniacs, the Croats and the Serbs as constituent nations (along with Others). The Ostali, as represented by Jewish Jakob
Finci, and the Rom Dervo Sejdić, may have won their case for equal rights and
representation in Strasbourg, but not in Sarajevo where the governing structure
of Bosnia-Herzegovina remains solidly in the tri-national hands of its constituent
nations.

Conclusion 3: Noncompliance with EU demands places Bosnia-Herzegovina on the (non) European borderline of the bafﬂing Balkans
Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch declared on December 22, 2009 that, „The European Court has made it clear that race-based
exclusion from political ofﬁce, such as that suffered by Jews and Roma in Bosnia,
has no place in Europe”. If one were to read that statement positively, it would
mean that as a European country Bosnia-Herzegovina must and will remedy its
discriminatory practices. Conversely, a negative reading of that statement concludes that with a constitution that stipulates the exclusion of Jews and Roma
from political ofﬁce, Bosnia is outside of Europe. Europeans (i.e. those persons
and institutions representing the EU) thereby have the right and responsibility to
pressure B-H to change its non-European ways which would enable the country
to join the continent of which it is geographically part.

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The Ofﬁce of the High Representative has been endowed with that mission
since it was established in 1996. Although many inside B-H as well as outside
agree that EU membership is the country’s only viable path, Bosnia continues
to confound it overseers by failing to comply with the EU’s stringent and often
contradictory demands. During his term in ofﬁce the ﬁfth High Representative,
Miroslav Lajčak (2007-2009) reminded the citizenry that to join Europe they
must undergo a sea change in their nationalist attitudes, and comply with the
terms of Dayton. Citing frustration with the post, Lajčak resigned as High Representative in February 20095.
In April 2008 while participating in the Jewish Community’s mini-Seder, the
Italian ambassador surveyed the joyful „multi-culti” scene and convivially remarked to me that, „The EU is the only way for Bosnia to go! It will take some
time, but it will come about. People will see what EU membership did for Ireland
and Portugal. They will pressure their government to make a change so they can
join Europe”.
A few days later, Elvir, a Bosniac in his early 30s who had served from 1992
through 1995 as a front line soldier in the Army of B-H echoed the ambassador’s
sentiments. Agreeing with HR Lajčak that the Serbian Republic must not be allowed to secede from Bosnia-Herzegovina he said, „No one should be rewarded
for his or her aggression. I think it will take a long time, but people here must
change their mentality, and we will enter Europe as a united country”. Despite
their very different circumstances, both men concurred that Bosnia is not and will
not be part of democratic, modern, and prosperous Europe until Bosnians change
their mentality and their government.
Over the years, ever hopeful that the European Union would support the political and economic reconstruction of their country, I heard similar statements
from most of my conversation partners in Sarajevo. But in 2008 some expressed
doubt about Europe’s goodwill. Melisa, a young researcher of Bosnian prehistory asked, „Why is B-H in such a mess?” and then provided an answer: „It must
be good for the EU to have us this way. They can point to us as a problem and
take the problem away from themselves. It must be good for someone to have
us as a place of dirty laundry-trade in crime, drugs and women, I’m sorry to say.
Someone is proﬁting from this”. Likewise, Mustafa, a carpet vendor in the Old
City, asked,
Who is responsible for the situation here in Bosnia? I’ll tell you who, Europe! And
when will things get better? When Europe ﬁnishes her work here and leaves…
Europe is no friend of the Bosniac people. A uniﬁed Europe is what they want,
a Christian uniﬁed Europe. Europe is a stara kurva [an old whore – F.M.] and
5
According to the RFE/RL Balkan Report of March 12, 2009, his replacement, Valentin Inzko, „is
likely to be the last high representative appointed”. As of this writing in January 2012, Inzko remains in
ofﬁce as the High Representative.

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

71

a very smart and wily one at that. Europe could have ended our war, and now they
could just lay down the law and be done with it.

Accusations of EU arrogance and proﬁt-making notwithstanding, Melisa,
Mustafa and dozens of other Sarajevans are hard-pressed to suggest alternative
routes for their country. Saudi Arabia and Iran are not even considered viable patrons. Pointing to former president Bill Clinton as someone who understands the
liberal nature of Bosnian Muslims, many stated a preference for American leadership. But since there is no going back to Tito’s Yugoslavia, and because the US
has insisted that the European Union take on the primary problem-solving role
for a country situated in the heart of Europe, EU supervision might be the country’s only option. Bosnia-Herzegovina thereby remains (in) a maddening state,
defying EU demands and frustrating its High Representative, placing it on the
precarious border and making it undeserving of a place at the EU-table.
As B-C-S Bosnians continue to struggle with their country’s uncertain transitions, the number of parenthetically rights-vested Ostali dwindles; some simply
choose to identify with one or another constituent nation, while other Others opt
to forge their future as citizens of nearby Europe, or further aﬁeld in Israel, Australia, Canada and America (see Markowitz 2010: 82-83, 93-102, 111). Although
their numbers are small, Sarajevo’s Jews in their practices and politics attract the
attention of their neighbors by performing communal rituals of solidarity, raising
a voice of resistance to tri-national divisiveness, and providing a meeting place
for „multi-culti” Bosnians. The Ashkenazi synagogue and the Jewish Community
that it houses thereby continue on as cultural mainstays of Sarajevo, even if they
are precariously perched on unsettling conﬁgurations of rights and power.
Whether posed from the perspective of „home” or „abroad” or by foreign
anthropologists or natives, this essay has shown that the intricately interrelated
questions, „Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?” have no neat, ﬁnite
answers. Instead, I have demonstrated that Bosnia-Herzegovina, its constituent
nations and its parenthetically rights-vested Others remain entangled in an uncertain present continuous of postwar and postsocialist transitions that test the mettle
of politicians and the analytical abilities of those of us striving to formulate an
Anthropology of Europe.
Key words: multiculturalism, ethnic conﬂict, Bosnia-Herzegovina, violence, ethnicity,
identity, Europe.

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Appadurai A.
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Fear of Small Numbers, Durham: Duke University Press.
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Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern, in: B. Chayette, L. Marcus (eds.), Modernity, Culture and the Jews, London: Polity, pp. 149-156.
Bhabha H.
1990
The Third Space, in: J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 207-220.
Friedman F.
2004
Bosnia: A Polity on the Brink, New York: Routledge.
Hayden R.M.
2007
Moral Vision and Impaired Insight: The Imagining of Other Peoples’ Communities in Bosnia, „Current Anthropology” 48: 1, pp. 105-131 (including
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To End a War, New York: Random House.
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Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

73

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Fran Markowitz
WHOSE JEWS? WHOSE BOSNIA? WHOSE EUROPE?
(Summary)
Bosnia-Herzegovina’s governance depends on a constitution that was drafted in Dayton, Ohio. It designates the Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs (along with Others) the country’s
constituent peoples. Although Jews have been residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina for 500
years, with the country’s new constitution they have disappeared from ofﬁcial records
into the residual category of Others. This article considers how, nonetheless, the Jews
of Sarajevo persist as an active community and a named group even as its identity is being deﬁned by others. The interrelated questions, „Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose
Europe?” have no neat, ﬁnite answers while Jews-as-Others and Bosnia as an ethnically divided and overdetermined, EU-supervised country remain precariously perched on
unsettled and unsettling conﬁgurations of rights and power.
Key words: multiculturalism, ethnic conﬂict, Bosnia-Herzegovina, violence, ethnicity,
identity, Europe

Item sets: Lud 2

Media: T.96_markovitz.pdf

Cyfrowa Etnografia

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe? / Lud 2012, t. 96

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