Antiquity Jews first arrived on the territory of present-day Serbia in
Roman times, although there is little documentation prior to the 10th century.
Ottoman rule The Jewish communities of the Balkans were boosted in the 15th and 16th centuries by the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing the
Spanish and
Portuguese Inquisitions.
Sultan Bayezid II of the
Ottoman Empire welcomed the Jewish refugees into his Empire. Jews became involved in trade between the various provinces in the Ottoman Empire, becoming especially important in the salt trade. In 1663, the Jewish population of
Belgrade was around 800. While the rest of modern-day Serbia was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire, territory of present-day
Vojvodina was part of the
Habsburg monarchy. In 1782, Emperor
Joseph II issued the
Edict of Tolerance, giving Jews some measure of religious freedom. The Edict attracted Jews to many parts of the Monarchy. The Jewish communities of Vojvodina flourished, and by the end of the 19th century the region had nearly 40 Jewish communities.
Principality of Serbia Many Jews were involved in the
Serbian Revolution, by supplying arms to the local Serbs, and the Jewish communities faced brutal reprisal attacks from the Ottoman Turks. During the liberation of Belgrade, contrary to the strict orders issued by Serb leader Karađorđe, some of the rebels destroyed Jewish shops and synagogues. Some Jews were killed and a part of them was forcibly baptised. Elsewhere in Serbia, Serb rebels expelled Jews from towns and small places. fleeing from Belgrade to Zemun, 1862 In 1830, Serbia was granted autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. With the reclamation of the Serbian throne by the
House of Obrenović under
Miloš Obrenović in 1858, restrictions on Jewish merchants were again relaxed for some time, but only three years later they faced isolation and humiliation. In 1861,
Mihailo Obrenović inherited the throne and reinstated anti-Jewish restrictions. In
1877 parliamentary election a Jewish candidate was elected to the
National Assembly for the first time, after receiving the backing of all parties. In the 1860s–70s, some Serbian newspapers began publishing anti-Jewish articles resulting in threats being raised against the Jews. In 1862, a fight broke out between the Austrians and Serbians and Jews in Belgrade had their rights revoked, similar to local uprisings in the 1840s. During the final stages of the 1877–1878
Serbo-Ottoman wars thousands of Jews emigrated or were expelled by the advancing
Armed Forces of the Principality of Serbia along with Turkish and Albanian families.
Kingdom of Serbia In 1879, the "Serbian-Jewish Singer Society" was founded in Belgrade to encourage Serbian-Jewish interaction and friendship. During World War I and World War II the choir was not allowed to perform. It was renamed the "Baruch Brothers Choir" in 1950 and is one of the oldest Jewish choirs in the world still in existence. The choir remains a symbol of community unification, although only 20% of the choir members are actually Jewish due to the dwindling Jewish population in the country (in World War II, half of the Jewish population of Serbia was killed). By 1912, the Jewish community of the Kingdom of Serbia stood at 5,000. Some 132 Jews died in the
Balkan Wars and
World War I and in their honour a monument to them was erected in Belgrade at the Jewish Sephardic cemetery.
Jews in modern-day North Macedonia got their full citizen rights for the first time when the region became a part of
Kingdom of Serbia.
Kingdom of Yugoslavia , 1920 In the aftermath of World War I,
Montenegro,
Banat,
Bačka,
Syrmia, and
Baranja joined Serbia through popular vote in those regions, and soon afterwards this enlarged Serbia united with
State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (from which
Syrmia had seceded to join Serbia) to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was soon renamed
Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Serbia's relatively small Jewish community of 13,000 (including 500 in
Kosovo), combined with the large Jewish communities of the other
Yugoslav territories, numbering some 51,700. Prior to World War II, some 31,000 Jews lived in Vojvodina. In Belgrade, Jewish community was 10,000-strong, 80% being
Ladino-speaking
Sephardi Jews, and 20% being
Ashkenazi Jews. In the inter-war period, the Jewish communities of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia flourished. The
Vidovdan Constitution guaranteed equality to Jews, and the law regulated their status as a religious community.
World War II The Kingdom of Yugoslavia attempted to maintain neutrality during the period preceding World War II.
Milan Stojadinović, the prime minister, tried to actively woo
Adolf Hitler while maintaining the alliance with former Entente Powers, UK and France. Nonwithstanding overtures to Germany, Yugoslav policy was not anti-Semitic: for instance, Yugoslavia opened its borders to Austrian Jews following the
Anschluss. Under increasing pressure to yield to German demands for safe passage of its troops to Greece, Yugoslavia signed the
Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, like Bulgaria and Hungary. Unlike the other two, the signatory government of
Maček and
Cvetković was overthrown three days later in a British-supported coup of patriotic, anti-German generals. The new government immediately rescinded the Yugoslav signature on the Pact and called for strict neutrality. German response was swift and brutal: Belgrade was
bombed without the declaration of war on 6 April 1941 and
German,
Italian,
Hungarian and
Bulgarian troops invaded Yugoslavia. In
German-occupied Serbia, German occupiers established concentration camps and extermination policies with the assistance of the puppet government of Milan Nedić. The Nazi genocide against Yugoslav Jews began in April 1941. The terriotry of Serbia was completely occupied by the Nazis. The main race laws in the State of Serbia were adopted on 30 April 1941: the
Legal Decree on Racial Origins (Zakonska odredba o rasnoj pripadnosti). Jews from
Syrmia were sent to Croatian camps, as were many Jews from other parts of Serbia. In rump Serbia, Germans proceeded to round up Jews of
Banat and Belgrade, setting up a concentration camp across the river Sava, in the Syrmian part of Belgrade, then given to
Independent State of Croatia. The
Sajmište concentration camp was established to process and eliminate the captured Jews and Serbs. As a result,
Emanuel Schäfer, commander of the Security Police and Gestapo in Serbia, famously cabled Berlin after last Jews were killed in May 1942:
Serbien ist judenfrei. Similarly,
Harald Turner of the SS stated in 1942 that:
Serbia is the only country in which the Jewish question and the Gypsy question has been solved. By the time Serbia and Yugoslavia were liberated in 1944, most of the Serbian Jewry had been murdered. Of the 82,500 Jews of Yugoslavia alive in 1941, only 14,000 (17%) survived the Holocaust. dedicated to killed Serbs and Jews in
Novi Sad raid There was a similar persecution of Jews in the territory of present-day Vojvodina, which was annexed by Hungary. In the
1942 raid in Novi Sad, the Hungarian troops killed many Jewish and non-Jewish Serb civilians in Bačka. Historian
Christopher Browning who attended the conference on the subject of Holocaust and Serbian involvement stated:
Serbia was the only country outside Poland and the Soviet Union where all Jewish victims were killed on the spot without deportation, and was the first country after Estonia to be declared "Judenfrei", a term used by the Nazis during the Holocaust to denote an area free of all Jews. Serbian civilians were involved in saving thousands of Yugoslavian Jews during this period. Miriam Steiner-Aviezer, a researcher into Yugoslavian Jewry and a member of Yad Vashem's Righteous Gentiles committee states: "The Serbs saved many Jews." As of 2022, Yad Vashem recognizes 139 Serbians as Righteous Among Nations, the highest number among Balkan countries. According to
Yad Vashem, the
Chetniks initially had an ambivalent attitude towards Jews and, given their status early in the war as a resistance movement against Nazi occupation, a number of Jews served among the Chetnik ranks. As the
Yugoslav Partisans grew in number and power, the anti-communist Chetniks became increasingly collaborationist and Jewish Chetniks switched to the partisan ranks. Subsequently, after the first half of 1942, Chetnik propaganda with chauvinist and antisemitic themes became a constant. In various places in Serbia in the period from the middle of 1942, several hundred Jews were hiding, mostly women and children. According to the testimonies of surviving Jews, the Chetniks of Draža Mihailović persecuted the Jews in that area, and took part in their killing. On many occasions, the Chetniks also handed them over to the Germans.
Socialist Yugoslavia The Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia was formed in the aftermath of World War II to coordinate the Jewish communities of post-war
Yugoslavia and to lobby for the right of Jews to immigrate to
Israel. More than half of Yugoslav survivors chose to immigrate to
Israel after World War II.
Breakup of Yugoslavia Prior to the
Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, approximately 2,500 Jews lived in Serbia, This theory is supported by Jovan Byford who writes that Serbian nationalists used the Jewish question for the martyrdom myth characteristic of Serbian nationalist discourse in the 1980s.
Contemporary period Manifestations of antisemitism in Serbia are relatively rare and isolated. According to the
US State Department Report on Human Rights practices in Serbia for 2006: "Jewish leaders in Serbia reported rare incidents of anti-Semitism, including anti-Semitic graffiti, vandalism, small circulation anti-Semitic books, and Internet postings". In 2013, downtown Belgrade was covered by posters, reportedly distributed by the Serbian branch of
Blood & Honour, accusing Jews of being responsible for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. The Serbian state recognizes Judaism as one of the seven "traditional" religious communities of Serbia. The only remaining functioning
synagogues in Serbia are the
Belgrade Synagogue and the
Subotica Synagogue. ==Demographics==