Honorary Aryans

National-Racial Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of Croatia

N. Bartulin

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137339126
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

From 1941 to 1945, a small number of Jews were given the rights of Aryan citizens in Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain why these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, how they were justified by the race theory of the time, and how the "Croats of the Mosaic faith" were eventually rejected as racial aliens.

1

Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918

Abstract: This chapter outlines the modern history of Jews in Croatia from the Edict of Toleration issued by the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, which permitted Jews to settle in the Kingdom of Croatia (or Dalmatia–Croatia–Slavonia), to the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918. This period saw the numerical growth of the Jewish minority and its increasing influence in Croatian political and social life, as well as the parallel growth of anti-Semitic attitudes and ideas among certain political groups, who identified the Jews with the worst aspects of modern urban life and the ideologies of liberalism and socialism. The chapter goes into some detail on the reasons for the general emergence of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe, as well as the simultaneous evolution of race theory in both Europe and Croatia.

Bartulin, Nevenko. Honorary Aryans: National–Racial Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of Croatia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126.

Jews in the Kingdom of Dalmatia–Croatia–Slavonia

In contrast to the large Orthodox Serb minority, which had been settled in the Kingdom of Dalmatia–Croatia–Slavonia (i.e. the historic Croatian provinces) for centuries, the history of Jewish settlement in Croatia is of relatively recent origin. With the exception of the old Sephardic Jewish communities in the Dalmatian port towns of Split and Dubrovnik, existing from the late Middle Ages,¹ the numbers of Jews in other parts of Croatia were insignificant. Under Habsburg rulers in the early modern period, Jews and Protestants were not permitted to settle in the Kingdom of Croatia. In 1697 the common Hungaro–Croatian parliament forbade by law any non-Catholics from owning property in Croatia.² Jews were allowed to trade in certain goods on the territory of the Habsburg Empire until the end of the eighteenth century, and they also arrived in northern Croatia as travelling merchants from Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia. However, the law against Jewish settlement in Croatia was upheld by the Croatian parliament in 1729. In 1741 the Hungarian parliament confirmed (at the request of the Croatian parliament) the law that only Catholics could live on the territory of Croatia.³

Croatia’s position within the Habsburg Monarchy itself was determined by the Croats’ status as a ‘historic nation’.⁴ The term ‘historic nation’ referred to all those peoples (including the German–Austrians, Hungarians, Poles and Czechs), or more accurately, to the nobilities of these peoples, which possessed a tradition of statehood dating from the Middle Ages.⁵ Croatian historic state right was founded on the legal continuity of the medieval Kingdom of Croatia, institutionalised in the office of the Ban (viceroy) and the Sabor (parliament), which functioned long after Croatia’s incorporation in the Habsburg Monarchy in 1527. The nobility of Civil Croatia (north-west Croatia) saw itself as the rightful heir to the medieval kingdom and its former territories, lost in past centuries to the Ottoman and Venetian empires, which included Dalmatia, the Military Frontier, eastern Istria and parts of Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina (the parts known as ‘Turkish Croatia’ and ‘Turkish Dalmatia’).⁶ Formerly Venetian Dalmatia and Istria became Austrian provinces in 1815, and were administered by Vienna, in contrast to northern Croatia–Slavonia (Civil Croatia and Civil Slavonia), which had been in union with the Kingdom of Hungary since 1102, until both had passed to the Habsburg crown. Despite their administrative divisions, the historical political unity of the Croatian provinces was still legally maintained in the collective royal title of the Triune Kingdom of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia (Regna Dalmatiae, Croatiae et Slavoniae).⁷

The Croatian nobility comprised the Croatian ‘political nation’ or natio croatica; its ‘Croat’ identity was more territorial and political in nature than it was ethnic.⁸ Accordingly, through its constitutional tie to the Kingdom of Hungary, the natio croatica also considered itself a constituent part of the Hungarian nobility.⁹ However, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Croatian nobility began to resist the efforts of the Hungarian nobility to make Magyar the official language of the whole Hungarian Kingdom (including Croatia and Slavonia). This action on part of the Croatian nobles heralded the beginning of a modern Croatian national movement under the name of Illyrian in the 1830s.

Before that time, the ‘enlightened despot’, Emperor Joseph II, issued the ‘Edict of Tolerance’ and its annex, ‘Systematica Gentis Judaicae Regulatio’ in 1782 (applicable to Croatia and Hungary in 1783), which guaranteed the Jews of the Habsburg Monarchy freedom of movement and settlement, freedom of religion and education, though there still remained certain limitations on Jewish trading activities and Jews were not permitted the ownership of houses or land.¹⁰ Despite the Edict, Jews (and Protestants) in Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia were still not legally recognised as a religious community. Furthermore, after the death of Joseph II in 1790, many free royal cities in Hungary and Croatia–Slavonia resisted the Edict of Tolerance and sought to expel Jews from their towns.¹¹ Despite continual attempts and acts aimed against further Jewish migration and settlement, Jews managed to obtain permission to settle permanently in several major north Croatian towns, for example, in Osijek in 1776 and in Zagreb in 1806.¹² In 1840 the Sabor decided that it would ‘gradually’ grant Jews full equal rights in Croatia–Slavonia; this decision led to increased Jewish migration to Croatia and the establishment of a Jewish school in Zagreb.¹³ The Jews of Zagreb petitioned the Croatian parliament to grant them full civic equality during the revolutionary year of 1848 but the Sabor followed the Hungarian parliament in deciding to defer the question of Jewish emancipation.¹⁴

It was not until 19 September 1873 that the Sabor passed a law on the equality of the ‘Israelites’, which received the sanction of the King/Emperor on 21 October of the same year. The law granted the ‘followers of the Israelite faith’ religious freedom and all civic and political rights which belonged to followers of other recognised religions in Croatia and Slavonia.¹⁵ The law on emancipation bears witness to the fact that it was ‘inspired by the liberal teaching that all religions are equally valid before the law’, while permitting individuals to change their confession was based on the ‘classic liberal principle of freedom of conscience’.¹⁶ However, though t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 17821918
• 2  Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 19181941
• 3  Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index