Introduction and Research Objectives
Following the expulsion from Catholic Spain in the late fifteenth century, the Iberian Jews, now known collectively as Sephardim, settled mostly in the European part of the Ottoman Empire. The Sephardim became an integral part of the Balkan urban population. This book will essentially describe the evolution of Sarajevo’s Sephardim through Sarajevo Jews’ reflections on belonging to Bosnia and Herzegovina (and in Yugoslavia prior to 1991), Israel and Spain today.
A great deal of research on the Sephardim deals with linguistic issues, more precisely, with Judeo-Spanish, which some Sephardic communities preserve until today. Among the many topics that have been explored are phenomena of language contact, language mixing as well as attrition and obsolescence (Astrologo-Fonzi 1992; Shewmon Seitz 2008). I will instead shift the focus from the dominant research paradigm—Romance studies and contact linguistics—to South Slavic studies and the linguistic and sociolinguistic status of the former Serbo-Croatian language.
The Sarajevo Sephardim have long reflected the complex relationship between language, religion and ethnicities in their own loyalties. The interviewees I spoke to seemed to be uniquely positioned to offer their views on the contemporary linguistic situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina—where the three mutually inter-comprehensible varieties of a single regional language have transformed into three distinct national standards (Bosnian , Croatian and Serbian). Almost no research has been conducted on Sephardic identity formation and their language choice after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the simultaneous disintegration of the Serbo-Croatian language (cf. Greenberg 2008: 13, 162).
As an ethnographic and sociolinguistic work, this book hopes to facilitate an understanding of cultural minorities in Europe and of the delicate interplay between language and ethnic and/or religious identification. Furthermore, my study of the Sephardim in Sarajevo bridges South Slavic and Sephardic cultural spheres. In other words, my subjects inhabit both. From this perspective, my work highlights the experiences of the Sephardic community in Sarajevo and its members’ identity in post-conflict, post-Yugoslav Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole. In many ways, I am telling the story of Yugoslavia through the lens of Jewish history.
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Sarajevo Sephardic Jewish history is at the margins of Yugoslav area studies. Nevertheless, the history of Yugoslav Jewry is linked to broader questions of Jewish history and identity, Jewish and more specifically Sephardic studies and the Holocaust. One of the main goals of my research is to tap into an intergenerational cultural memory to tell the story of this marginal group. Many of the interviewees have lived in both former Yugoslavia and the independent Bosnia, while they also form part of the global Sephardic community. These subjects undoubtedly developed ambiguous and interesting definitions of religion, language and national belonging along the way.
Even though the traumatic experiences in the history of the Sarajevo Sephardic community serve as a backdrop to this work, I wanted to instead focus on what has actually remained Jewish and/or Sephardic rather than what vanished. To do this, I analyzed the different South Slavic and Sephardic contexts of my subjects’ experiences and focused on the question of language as a basis of identity. My aim was basically to discern and analyze linguistic, ethnographic and historical data in order to describe the cultural-historic paths of the Sarajevo Sephardim.
The social transformations the Jewish populations in the former Yugoslavia have faced and continue to face differ from those encountered elsewhere in Europe. This work is an attempt to fill those lacunae and elucidate a little-explored history by shedding light on the ways in which historical conditions have shaped contemporary, multilayered framings of identification among the Jewish population in Sarajevo today.
Other scholars have explored similar issues but in very different cultural contexts. Bärbel Treichel (2004) applied a similar method when writing about bilingualism and multiculturalism in Wales. On the basis of autobiographical narratives gleaned through interviews, Treichel analyzed language use among individuals in the context of the discursive, social construction of a collective Welsh identity. Marcy Brink-Danan’s (2012) work on Turkey’s Jewry today is a parallel anthropological study to mine. Brink-Danan (2012: 9, 20) concludes that most Jews he spoke to in Istanbul regard themselves both as secular Jews and as Sephardim. More recently, Devin Naar’s (2016) book on Jews in Salonica explored post-Ottoman developments in a similar fashion to my work on the Sarajevo Sephardim.
Chapter 2 of this book will begin by looking at the concept of intergenerational memory and discussing this in relation to theories of identity formation and the sociology of language. I describe and analyze identities that are “hybrid” in the sense that the subjects feel they belong to various culture groups simultaneously. I also trace the ways in which these hybrid identities are formed through the interplay of various linguistic “ideologies,” that is, internalized systems of unconsciously held ideas about language and identity that the subject experiences as “natural” and commonsensical, and which give rise to specific behaviors and attitudes.
Chapter 3 discusses the historical context of the formation of various linguistic ideologies that in turn influence the self-conception(s) of the work’s subjects. In particular, the chapter traces key historical changes and transformations as these affected the official status and actual well-being of the community under analysis. To set the stage for my analysis of contemporary data, I draw a historical sketch of the identity-creating factors ‘Spain,’ ‘Yugoslavia’ and ‘Israel.’ I thereby trace the linguistic and sociohistorical setting of Sarajevo Sephardim. Contemporary Sarajevo Sephardim will be placed juxtaposed against historic events or a selected chronology in order to help us grasp the changes in identification and to pinpoint transitions in the sociopolitical realities experienced by Sarajevo Jews. The chapter further contains narratives from Sarajevo Sephardim in relation to their thoughts on belonging to ‘Spain,’ ‘Yugoslavia’ and ‘Israel’.
Chapter 4 will introduce the reader to the position of Sephardim in Sarajevo today. The chapter focuses on the interviewees’ identification with present-day Sarajevo. Among other aspects, I will discuss how the interviewees remember their rescue during the Holocaust and how they reflect on the ongoing economic crisis and the phenomenon of Islamization in today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina—specifically in their hometown of Sarajevo—as well as the rise of anti-Semitism in the city. In respect of Jewish identity, I will explore the role of the economic crisis and of the Islamization of the Sarajevan society in shaping local Jewish identities.
Drawing from recent studies, Chap. 5 will look at other cases of linguistic and ethnic identity formation in European minority groups. These other examples will emphasize the close relationship between language and ethnic/religious identification that I am exploring in my study of Sarajevo’s Jews. I will refer to these other examples when I introduce some of my conclusions on identity in respect of the Sarajevo Sephardim. This chapter will essentially explore how the other analogous examples can be helpful for understanding my own case study or, at least, help us see the predominant phenomenological contours.
In conclusion, Chap. 6 provides a summary of the main arguments made throughout the monograph and will thus offer some conclusion on the very questions that led me to begin my research journey in the first place.
Methodology
This book employs a so-called qualitative approach to history, one in which participant observation is used in order to fully grasp a broad spectrum of identity conceptions among the subjects. The whole goal of my research to date has been to seek a profound understanding of the subjects’ approach toward a Jewish identity and minority membership. The core of the book thus consists of empirical findings from interviews with Sephardim in Sarajevo. I combine these empirical findings with the theoretic framework that will be developed in Chap. 2.
To find interviewees, I contacted the Sarajevo Jewish Community Center—specifically its president, Jakob Finci, and its nonresidential rabbi, Eliezer Papo—in May 2013. I am conscious of that—because I looked for informants through a Jewish institution, they would most probably identify as Jews. Still, I wanted to find out how the interviewees would understand Jewish identity. Moreover, I did not assume that just because they (presumably) have Jewish roots, they affirmed Jewish identity a priori.
Supplementary to secondary literature research, the bulk of the argumentation in this work is based on a series of face-to-face interviews with nine Sarajevo Sephardim from different generations that were conducted between 2014 and 2018 in Sarajevo. The questionnaire used can be read in Appendix B. Appendix A provides sociodemographic data such as age, place of birth, occupation, and linguistic skills as well as recent census figures. I conducted all the interviews as conversations and did not collect written responses.
Importantly, I did not anticipate any specific results, so I did not lead the interviewees in any particular direction, nor did I furnish ready-made answers (Heyl 2001: 371; Kvale and Brinkmann 2010).1 I generally sought to examine whether existing theoretical concepts regarding identity and its construction were valid or at least partly useful in light of the interviews themselves, and not the other way around (cf. Esaiasson et al. 2012).
I conducted the interviews in Bosnian and they were recorded. A local translator and a cameraman assisted me during the interviews. I produced a short film from the materi...