Gordiejew, P. B. - Playing With Jews in The Fields of Nations - Symbolic Contests in The Former Yugoslavia

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Playing with Jews in the Fields of

Nations: Symbolic Contests in the
Former Yugoslavia
P. B. Gordiejew
Published online: 15 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: P. B. Gordiejew (2006) Playing with Jews in the Fields of Nations: Symbolic
Contests in the Former Yugoslavia, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and
Culture, 12:3, 377-400, DOI: 10.1080/13504630600744252
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Social Identities
Vol. 12, No. 3, May 2006, pp. 377 400
Playing with Jews in the Fields of

Nations: Symbolic Contests in the
Former Yugoslavia
P. B. Gordiejew
Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:18 29 December 2014
The collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the rise of independent states in its place brought
out interesting and disturbing phenomena involving Jews and Jewish symbols. This paper
examines the following processes: 1) the loss of Jewish submergence in the political and
symbolic orders of that socialist state; 2) a short-lived philosemitism; 3) an appropriation
or ‘functionalization’ of Jews and Jewish symbols in contests over the moral superiority of
one’s nation; and 4) the return of classic anti-Semitism aimed at local Jewish places and
individuals and at spreading ideas of Jewish political and cultural domination. Also
described is how Jews engaged in welcoming or contesting encroachment on their own
symbolic space.
Introduction
Once upon a time there was a country called Yugoslavia. It was a diverse and beautiful
land held together, some argue, not by a powerful man called Tito or a single ruling
Party called the League of Communists, but by komšiluk, a cult of good
neighbourliness. Samuel Elazar, an elderly Sephardi Jew from Sarajevo*a city that
once was a symbol of brotherhood and unity, socialist Yugoslavia’s ideological version
of komšiluk *summarized komšiluk for me in 1986.
A man wanted to sell his house. Another man came to the house, wanting to
purchase it. He asks the owner, ‘How much is it?’ ‘One thousand five hundred gold
Napoleon dollars’. He says, ‘That is a lot’. ‘It isn’t much. I value the house at 500
Napoleon dollars, and the neighbour at 1,000 Napoleon dollars. I have good
neighbours. And that is worth more than a brother’.
Samuel wanted to make sure that I walked away from his apartment that day
convinced that good relations existed among the ethnic groups in Sarajevo.
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, DeBartolo Hall, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio
44555, USA. Email: pbgordiejew@ysu.edu
ISSN 1350-4630 (print)/ISSN 1363-0296 (online) # 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13504630600744252
378 P. B. Gordiejew
He preferred the one-party system because he believed that it had eliminated

animosities and hatreds among the ethnic groups, at least compared with how those
emotions and social conflicts had been expressed before the Second World War. He
pointed to the relationships in his own apartment building and neighbourhood,
located outside the centre of old Sarajevo, near the Miljačka River that bisects the city.
Members of various ethnic groups sit and drink coffee together. Komšija
[neighbours] come to check on my sick wife. It’s not like in the United States.
Isn’t that so?
Samuel died in 1989, before the siege of his beloved city, and so he departed this
world with his perceptions of interethnic harmony in Sarajevo and Yugoslavia intact.
By now we all know what happened. Yugoslavia, with its imagined and real
komšiluk and brotherhood and unity, is gone, dead and buried, and not likely to
return any time soon. How and why were komšiluk and brotherhood and unity
destroyed? More to the point for this paper, how and why were Jews, a nearly invisible
population in socialist Yugoslavia, appropriated for various symbolic contests played
out during the destruction of that multinational country? Furthermore, were Jews
appropriated to the extent of what today some might call ‘identity theft’ or ‘identity
piracy’ (see Harrison, 1999b)?
Place(s) of the Jew

Under the conditions found in socialist Yugoslavia, the formal Jewish community
occupied a very definite place in the symbolic order of the state. Elsewhere, I have
called this place ‘submergence’ (Gordiejew, 1999). Good or bad, the community
knew where it stood in relation to the rulers and the official version of history. In
socialist Yugoslavia, the rulers prohibited any ‘playing with Jews’. Their prohibition
covered everyone but themselves, which explains how they could act in breaking
diplomatic ties with Israel back in 1967.
Everything changed for the country’s Jews when they lost their deeply submerged
and secure place in the socialist order. It was only when Yugoslavia began to be torn
asunder and nationalistic projects burst out into the open that the phenomenon of
‘playing with Jews’ emerged. Under these new ‘apocalyptic’ conditions (Ramet, 1985),
Jews became more vulnerable to seemingly philosemitic appropriations and outright
anti-Semitic attacks. With Yugoslavia gasping its last breaths, Jews and other
minorities became vulnerable to larger nation peoples that believed it was they
who now faced a life and death struggle and thus would do anything to remain
culturally alive. In this struggle, as this paper demonstrates, ethnic nations not only
seek to differentiate themselves from other nations but sometimes appropriate the
identity symbols of others in order to be more like them (Harrison, 1999a, 1999b).
They will do this if they believe that, by means of identity theft, similarity more than
dissimilarity will bring them life or take away the life of others. In the wider scheme
of things, however, it was the unity and similarities of Yugoslav peoples that set them
Social Identities 379
off on campaigns to destroy the unity of the old order and anything that might
suggest commonality and resemblance. ‘Playing with Jews’ was one means of creating
similarity or dissimilarity in the interethnic contests.
The Invisible Jew

The Jews who remained in Yugoslavia following the Second World War, especially the
new leaders of the organized community, were intent on displaying loyalty to the new
state. This loyalty*demonstrated in the content of Jewish publications, displays of
key socialist symbols, participation in calendrical rituals of commemoration, and a
highly secularized orientation*did not result in public visibility. Even as Holocaust
victims, Jews were swallowed up by the anonymous commemorative status of
‘victims of fascism’ bestowed on all such victims, regardless of ethnicity or religion.
Contributing to the invisibility was the elderly demographic profile of the Jewish
population. One of my Serbian-Montenegrin friends once asked me, ‘What are they
like? Are they very ambitious? Can you recognize a Jew by his appearance?’ This was
the phase of the invisible Jew.
The Good and the Useful Jew

Emerging early in the destruction of Yugoslavia was the phase of the ‘good and useful
Jew’. As a community, the Jews of Yugoslavia began to come out of their place of
submergence in two ways: first, by presenting themselves to the Yugoslav public
through an exhibit, ‘The Jews of Yugoslavia’, which was accompanied by events open
to the public and numerous radio and television spots; and second, by taking a more
aggressive stance toward anti-Semitism in Yugoslavia. This new visibility was the
opposite of how the senior generation of leaders had steered the community along an
insular path of public invisibility. The younger, middle generation pushed to make
the community known to the public. David Albahari, a widely published writer of
short stories and novels, who followed Dr Lavoslav Kadelburg as president of the
Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia, told me before his departure to
Canada:
The Jewish community of Yugoslavia, if it would open its cultural programs to

outsiders, to people who are not Jews and who are not members of the community,
would have open places for discussion on things such as Zionism, Israeli-Arab
conflict, and other things. Whenever several people here tried to do a thing like
that, there were always people who objected to it. They said, ‘Why should we open
our community to other people? Who knows who would come?’ The eternal fear is
that somebody is ready to come to the community . . . If somebody wants to come
and destroy something, he can come anytime he wants. He wouldn’t need an open
discussion. I think that if the Jewish community and the Jews were louder, would
speak more about what really hurts them, it would be much better for not only Jews
but for other Yugoslavs, for it would help them to understand the whole situation.
380 P. B. Gordiejew
Outside the community, I recall how one Serbian doctor remarked to me in the
spring of 1989, ‘This is a good time for the Jews’. Lavoslav Kadelburg described the
period as one of ‘Jewish euphoria’. It was the time of the ‘good Jew’. Indeed, it seemed
that way to many, at least in some parts of the country.
Players on all sides sought to meet two aims in this war of words, statistical
accountings, television images of dead bodies excavated and reburied, and ceremonial
performances through which moral judgments about one’s ethnic neighbours and
brothers were taken to their limits. The first aim was to demolish and eradicate
Titoist Yugoslavia, in some places more directly than in others. In Croatia, even the
anti-fascist part was not exempt from eradication in the rush to separate the Croat
nation from socialist Yugoslavia’s unifying structure and ideology that discouraged
any expression of national separatism. The second aim was to reconstruct the
national being of one’s nation (nacija) under antagonistic conditions. With
Yugoslavia under destruction, the new rulers and their corps of ethnic janitors and
symbolic manipulators elevated the nation to what they held to be its rightful,
supreme place, sweeping away anything deemed alien (see Ugrešić, 1998). Individual
identity was swallowed by the collective national one, as was everything else in the
society and culture. As Danilo Kiš, the Yugoslav Jewish writer who lived in self-exile
in Paris until his death in 1989, wrote in his essay, ‘The gingerbread heart, or
nationalism’, even the kitsch gets nationalized (1985). Even Kiš himself got
Serbianized after dying, as his dead body was appropriated by Serbian nationalists
and displayed in a grand Serbian Orthodox funeral in Belgrade.
Perhaps seeing the newly visible Jews in a time of ‘Jewish euphoria’ planted in the
minds of certain intellectuals the idea that this was an opportune time to appropriate
Jews for projects of national reconstruction.
To successfully reconstruct the national being, one’s own nation had to be elevated
above all others, while other nations, especially one’s new enemies, were intentionally
excluded, diminished, lowered, defiled, and even eradicated*cleansed*from one’s
own national space. In this craze for ethnic cleanliness, suddenly plenty of work
appeared for ethnic janitors. The following anecdote is example of such a craze from
my fieldwork experience.
On all my previous visits to Belgrade, I loved to drink the dark thick brew called
turska kafa, Turkish coffee. So, during a visit in the mid-1990s, I sat down at one of
the city’s cafes and ordered myself some turska kafa. The waiter looked at me as if
words had never left my mouth. So I asked for turksa kafa again. He replied, abruptly,
‘Nema *There is no turska kafa. We only have crna kafa, black coffee’. ‘OK, bring me
some crna kafa’, I replied. The crna kafa arrived at my table. It sure looked like the
turska kafa I liked so much. In fact, it even tasted like that turksa kafa. But no longer
was it turska kafa, at least not to the Serbian janitors and their bosses. Anything
Turkish had to be removed from Serbian cultural space, even if Serbs had enjoyed it
for centuries. There was no place for it. Was this nothing more than a linguistic trick,
a language game? No, it was not. People were acting it out on other levels. What was
once good had now become bad. Even the coffee had been conscripted to contribute
to the reconfiguring of ethnic spaces and the distributions of moral worth attached to
the ethnic communities within and outside those spaces. I shall show that this process
applied to Jews as well. When I began my research in the mid-1980s, there were no
Jews from the perspective of the ordinary Yugoslav. A few years later Jews had
appeared in the social drama being played on the Yugoslav stage as the ‘good and
useful Jew’. But was the new visibility good for the Jews?
Playing With Jews in the Fields of Nations

For the rival nations (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo Albanians)1
participating in the symbolic contests associated with national reconstruction, the
Jews appropriated in these contests were not so much flesh-and-blood persons as they
were game pieces thought to be imbued with extraordinary power. The contestants
seemed less interested in real persons and more in Jews as symbols they could
manipulate to help reach political and cultural goals. These symbols were believed to
possess the power of transformation and not merely of representation.
The following anecdote provided by one of my field informants illustrates that it is
not only certain Serbian intellectuals who believe that Jews are tapped into a source of
extraordinary power but that a regular tailor, representative of all the regular Jovans
and Majas, believes it as well.
One woman told me this. She’s married to a Jew. She’s a Serb. She says, ‘You know
what happened to me a few days ago? I took some of my husband’s clothes to the
tailor to have mended’. The tailor asked, ‘For whom?’ ‘Atijas’. He says, ‘You’re Jews’.
‘No, but my husband is a Jew’, she answers him. To which he says, ‘You know, the
Jews are mixed up with God; they will save us’. Among the people it is like this. It is
mixed together. He said it in a folk way, a common way. The Jews are mixed up
with God. You must not touch them . . . You see, it is ingrained, even in the average
man. You see this more and more.
The cultural phenomenon of ‘playing with Jews’ brings to mind James Frazer’s
principles of sympathetic magic and its two principles of contagion and similarity: to
have had or to be in contact with Jews or to be like Jews is to acquire the powerful
and good qualities of Jews, even to become and to be Jews. It was not just one Serb or
Jew who has shared the idea that the Serbs are the thirteenth tribe of Israel. In this
way Jews are used to construct essentialized national-moral communities. To be in
close association with Jews or to share the historical experiences and qualities of Jews
is to be ‘good’. Serbs, self-declared ‘eternal friends of Jews’, are thus ‘good’, whereas
Croats, declared by Serbs as a ‘genocidal people’, are ‘bad’.
The contestants were not merely political players but also moral agents seeking to
amplify their own moral worth and diminish the moral standing of rivals. But under
what circumstances do moral judgments become so vigorous? These judgments
escalate and intensify during periods of intergroup conflict, especially during phases
of transition when the established political and cultural orders collapse or are
destroyed and actors strive to replace the old orders with new ones within an
382 P. B. Gordiejew
antagonistic environment. Under these conditions there is an acute sense of urgency

to keep one’s cultural organism, the nation, alive at any cost. Identity*past, present,
and future*is at stake. One strategy is to go on the offensive and accuse one’s social
rivals of being defiled and guilty for horrendous evils, thus condemning them to a
place of low moral worth. Existing in-group symbols are often used in making these
judgments, but sometimes symbols believed to be extraordinarily powerful are
appropriated from other groups believed to have symbols of universal reach. These
are symbols manipulated to place groups and their members on scales of defilement/
purity, shame/honour, exclusion/inclusion, guilt/innocence, animality/humanness,
difference/commonality, and opposition/solidarity.
Inflating the value of one’s own symbols and devaluing those of ethnic rivals, or
seizing control of valued symbols and transposing their meanings is a form of
immortality striving described by anthropologist Ernest Becker in his books Denial of
Death and Escape From Evil. Here, it is the glorious and eternal nation that provides
immortality, and thus anything that will achieve that aim, even if it entails stealing
from others that which gives life, will be deemed acceptable and moral. In late and
post-socialist Yugoslavia, Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Slovenes all appropriated Jews
and Jewish symbols in order to convey such meaning and level judgments against one
another, thereby hoping to achieve political and moral aims*the elevation of status,
prestige, moral superiority, and the legitimacy of one’s own national state in the
international order of nations and states. Perhaps also what we have seen in the
creation of national being is the racialization of culture*that is, turning culture into
something ahistorical, essential, and fixed, either in the form of romantic mystical
essence (the ‘Kosovo option’*giving up an earthly kingdom for a spiritual one) or a
biological one (the Serb imposition: ‘Croats are a genocidal people’).
Jews as symbols were used to either construct commonality with Jews (Serbs with
Jews) or qualities perceived to be associated with Jews or construct difference from
Jews (Croats from Jews from Serbs). The true aim was to create distance between
Serbs and Croats, the major players in the conflict. The unintended consequence,
however, has been the construction of greater distance between Serbs and Jews even as
the Serbs and the few prominent Jews that remained in the Society of Serbian-Jewish
Friendship declared a commonality between these two peoples.
The Contests
The processes of destroying Yugoslavia and reconstructing individual and separate
national beings involved at least four different kinds of symbolic contests. Below, I
describe three of the kinds as they have been defined and delineated by anthropologist
Simon Harrison:
Each of the four contests is a strategy for manipulating political and identity
symbolism so as to affect the distribution of a group’s symbolic and moral capital.
In the course of their use, [identity] symbols can undergo four corresponding
sorts of change *valuation (higher /positive tactic) or lower /negative tactic),
innovation (addition), proprietorship (ownership or usage rights), and expansion

(eradication and replacement). (1995, p. 255)
The focus on the cases that follow is on contests of valuation, proprietorship, and
expansion.
Valuation Contests
In valuation contests, the rivals agree on the significance of the symbols but not their
values. Valuation contests involve
the ranking of symbols of the competing groups’ identities according to some

criterion of worth such as prestige, status, legitimacy, truth, sacredness, or moral
worth. All that may therefore change as a result of the contest is the relative
positions of these symbols along some scale of value. (Harrison, 1995, p. 256)
Nation and National Being

The nation is a symbolic organism incorporating symbols of national exclusiveness,
purity and immortality. The biggest valuation contest is over the moral worth of
one’s nation and rival nations. Each nation attempts to demonstrate symbolically
its legitimacy and superiority. Attempts to value or devalue the nobility of one’s
ancestors, the legitimacy of one’s claims to victimhood, the truthfulness of one’s
version of the past, and the sacredness of one’s national sites are all symbolic
contests about the moral worth of nations. Serbs try to maintain distributions that
portray Croats as having an evil, dark history, and of being anti-Semitic and
Serbophobic. Croats counter by trying to ‘correct’ what they see as a maldistribu-
tion of symbolic and moral capital. The Croats have gone one or two steps further.
They have tried at least to equalize the moral statuses of the two peoples. For
example, they claim that the acts of Serbian quisling Milan Nedić were equivalent
to those of the head of the fascist Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić; that
Serb Chetnik acts of genocide were equivalent to acts of Ustasha genocide; that
Belgrade was the first city declared free of Jews; and even to reverse the moral
statuses, casting the Serbs as the great oppressors and perpetrators of crimes against
humanity.
How did contests over the nations and their respective distributions of symbolic
and moral capital come to involve Jews? Having been targeted in an intentional,
premeditated way*one third for conversion, one third for expulsion, and one third
for extermination, the Serbs see themselves as morally superior to all the majority
nations of the former Yugoslavia. They place themselves together with the Jews as
victims of genocide. The Ustasha camp of Jasenovac was not just any concentration
camp; for Serbs, it is the both their Golgotha and Auschwitz, where, they claim,
700,000 of their people were murdered by the fascist Croats.
384 P. B. Gordiejew
Who is the winner in such contests? Is it the nation that demonstrates it is the
greatest (symbolic) Jew*that is, which (1) is an ancient but still dynamic people?
(2) is always the sacrificial victim of genocidal others? (3) is God’s chosen people?
(4) has the most noble ancestors and culture heroes? (5) has a sacred homeland that
is being threatened by outsiders? (6) exists in real and mythical time, having
become immortal by turning down an earthly kingdom for a heavenly and eternal
one? (7) is ready to fight militarily for their people and sacred homeland? and (8) is
the target of phobic reactions on the part of other ethnic and religious groups? For
example, these reactions include propaganda directed against a Serbian conspiracy to
rule over all the former peoples of Yugoslavia.
In October 1993 eight prominent Jewish intellectuals, all members of the Serbian-
Jewish Friendship Society, released a statement that classified the international
sanctions against the Serbs as a ‘cold’ and ‘silent’ genocide.
Since this genocide by economic embargo is not being carried out in nazi-type
concentrations [sic] camps[,] by gas-chambers and crematoriums, or by punitive
military expeditions which could be named as hot genocide *or more precisely as
holocaust, being a Greek term nowadays generally applied to the genocide against
the Jews during World War II *this genocide as perpetrated against the Yugoslavs
[read: Serbs] during 1992 and 1993, should be called silent or cold genocide .
(Tadić et al ., 1993)
The same document described the shaping of
a relentless and artificially induced Serbophobia . . . The diffusion methods and the
false accusations used in the Serbophobic campaign bear all the characteristics of
the initially religious and then later chauvinistic anti-Semitism. For example, the
allegations concerning mass-rape of Moslem women are comparable to slanderous
affirmations about ritual murder; the propaganda dogma about Greater Serbia
corresponds to the myth about Jewish aspirations to dominate the ‘Aryan’ world;
the fabrication about the Serbian plundering of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia
directly retraces the myth about Jewish greed and usury; and so on.
The statement concludes with a section addressed to Jews outside the former
Yugoslavia, calling on them to ‘unmistakably recognize the similarity and the
congeniality between Serbophobia and anti-Semitism’.
Philosophy professor at Melbourne University, Igor Primoratz, a former resident of
Belgrade, describes how Serbs, some Serbian Jews, and some Israelis use ‘the World
War II argument’ to maintain the distributions of moral capital that place the Serbian
nation on higher moral ground. He summarizes the argument and then proceeds to
criticize how it was used to justify symbolic and physical violence.
The Croats and Muslims were Nazis in World War II, and persecuted and
exterminated the Jews. The Croats and Muslims are Nazis. Accordingly, they richly
deserve whatever they are getting today, and there is no reason whatsoever for us
Jews to feel any sympathy for them. The Serbs, on the other hand, were anti-Nazis,
freedom fighters, and friends of the Jews. That entails a ‘historical obligation’ on
[the] part [of Jews] to understand their cause and be at their side today . . . No
matter what they might do . . .
Faced with this argument, one might want to ask two questions: are the historical
claims true and, if so, should they decide the moral and political issue here and
now? Anybody who knows anything about the history of Yugoslavia knows that the
historical claims are false *or, more accurately, that they amount to a half-truth,
which has rightly been called the most dangerous kind of lie. For every Yugoslav
nation had both its collaborators and its partisans. In the case of Croatia, the ratio
between the two was particularly asymmetrical: while the Ustasha numbered in the
tens of thousands, Croat partisans numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But I
want to focus on the second question. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that
the factual, historical part of the World War II argument is true *that practically
all Croats old enough at the time to do so did opt for Nazi Germany and the
puppet Ustasha state set up in Croatia, and took part in the crimes that state
committed during the war, or at least supported the commission of those crimes in
some way. Would the conclusion of the argument then follow from its premises?
Even after being exposed to it time and again for almost three years now, I still
find the World War II argument quite extraordinary. For what it says is that the
wholesale slaughter of Croat civilians and the devastation of their country taking
place today are somehow justified, indeed deserved, by the misdeeds the parents
and grandparents of these Croats committed half a century ago. But how? The idea
does not begin to make sense *except if one adopts a certain type of moral
reasoning that is alien to modern Western civilization, since it contradicts one of its
basic notions: that of individual, rather than collective, responsibility. (Primoratz,
1996, pp. 197 98)
In Serbian mythology, Prince Lazar, who died in Kosovo in 1389 at the hands of the
Ottoman Turks, rejected an earthly kingdom in favour of nobler ideals*victimhood,
sacrifice, and the hope of resurrection*and this choice is to be compared with the
temptations of Christ (Judah, 1997, p. 37). Žarko Korać, a member of the Belgrade
Jewish community and former Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia, believes that ‘this
point is so fundamental that it is not a metaphor, it is primordial’ (Korać, cited in
Judah, 1997, p. 37). What it tells the Serbs is
we are going to make a state again. Just as Jesus is ‘coming back’ so is Lazar. It
means that because we opted for the kingdom of heaven we cannot lose, and that
is what people mean when they talk about the Serbs as a ‘heavenly people’. In this
way the Serbs identify themselves with the Jews. As victims, yes, but also with the
idea of ‘sacred soil’. The Jews said ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ and after 2000 years
they recreated their state. The message is: ‘We are victims, but we are going to
survive’.
Here are the words of Enriko Josif, recognized for his musical compositions but
perhaps best known in recent times for calling the Serbs a ‘heavenly people:’
[The Serbs are] the people I regard as truly exceptional. I want to say that just after
Jews, the Serbs belong to the most eschatological people in this 20th century.
Deep down in my heart, I am grateful to God that I was born in this
extraordinary country that was so benevolent toward the Jews . . .
386 P. B. Gordiejew
. . . We are the soul-mates of the Serbs as two eschatological peoples and as two
peoples of terribly similar destinies. Something eschatologically miraculous is
happening with the Serbian people as it was happening yesterday to Israel. This is
why it is a holy duty of every Jew to understand that. Jasenovac for the Serbs
is exactly the same as Dachau was for us . . . I beg you then *do not participate in
persecution, in verbal attack, on the Serbian people because the Serbs are our
brothers in soul, our eschatological brothers . . . [Serbs] are an exceptional people,
and it is horrible what was done to them . . .
I will repeat: a true media genocide, a media Auschwitz, was perpetrated on the
Serbian people! The Serbs were dehumanized and portrayed as monsters exactly as
the Jews were portrayed through centuries, and in particular with [Nazi]
propaganda.
I watched this cartoonish show of horror. I saw the Serbs labeled the same way
Hitler labeled the Jews *as cripples, devils and Satans . . .
. . . [L]et me tell you the meaning of what Isaiah said. He said, ‘A people you did
not know but will call upon’. Is that not a clear proof? You know who the Serbs are
but are so horrifyingly against them in following the current trends. When Isaiah
says ‘that people will flock to you’ that simply marks our destiny of people who
were hunted, persecuted only yesterday. They came to us. They now have our
destiny . . . (Almuli, 2002)2
Proprietary Contests
Proprietary contests are conflicts over the ownership and usage rights of symbols.
Dipping into the symbolic arsenal and appropriating the symbols of other groups
may be treated as a hostile act, even as identity theft. Harrison notes that a
‘precondition of a proprietary contest is a consensus among the rivals as to the
prestige value of the symbolic property for which they are competing’ (1995,
p. 258).
Appropriation of the Star of David

In February 1989, striking Albanian miners in Kosovo captured the attention of an
international audience. In that same month a television program broadcast
throughout Yugoslavia presented Slovene politicians and intellectuals, gathered in
Cankar Hall in Ljubljana, the capital of the Republic of Slovenia, promoting political
pluralism and criticizing the Serbian repressive policy toward the Albanians in
Kosovo. To communicate their message more forcefully the Slovenes appropriated the
Jewish Star of David symbol, and juxtaposed it with the words, ‘Kosovo*My Land’.
Star of David badges with the same message were being sold on the streets of the city.
The symbol’s high recognizability in form and meaning endowed it with an
interethnic communicative range few symbols have. Many older Yugoslavs saw
Jews wearing the Star of David badge during the war and knew what the symbol
stood for. Its denotative meaning is that of Jewish suffering, particularly during the
Holocaust. The intent of the Slovenes was to symbolically transpose the Muslim
Albanians of Kosovo, whom the Slovenes saw as oppressed by the Serbs, and also, in
the broader social drama unfolding between the Slovenes and Serbs, the Slovenes
themselves, into Jewish victims of the Serbian fascist oppressors and hegemonists.
The event in Cankar Hall triggered a passionate reaction from Serbs and Jews.
Serbs in Belgrade came out into the streets and gathered outside the Federal Assembly
in Belgrade. The following slogans could be seen in the crowd: ‘Kosovo is Serbian
land’; ‘We will defend you, Yugoslavia’; ‘On whose behalf does the Slovene and
Croatian leadership speak?’ ‘Down with false brotherhood and unity’; ‘We do not give
up Kosovo*we live in harmony’; ‘Yugoslavia, Serbia is defending you’; ‘Slovenes,
remember Serbian bread’; ‘Slovenes, shame on you’. More slogans were being
shouted: ‘Serbian has risen’; ‘Slovenia lies’; ‘Let’s go to Kosovo’ (FBIS, 1989a, p. 73).
The Jewish community and Jewish individuals responded with passion. They
perceived the appropriation and manipulation of the Star of David as an abuse

(zloupotrebe) of the symbol. Individual Jews expressed their anger through the
popular media. The Jewish community of Belgrade and the Federation of Jewish
Communities of Yugoslavia released statements condemning the act. In a press release
the Federation stated that the abuse of this Jewish symbol served to widen the chasm
between the peoples of Yugoslavia. The Federation filed criminal charges with the
Ljubljana District Prosecutor and City Secretariat for Internal Affairs. The report
stated
We are proposing that criminal proceedings be initiated against the people and
creators responsible for the badge and are asking that its continued manufacture
and distribution be banned. (FBIS , 1989b, p. 59)
The Federation informed international Jewish organizations of the actions. Thus

began a more aggressive strategy of the Yugoslav Jewish community to defend its
symbolic space and avoid being sucked into the nationalist vortex. In a meeting of the
Federation’s Worker’s Council, the strong and familiar Titoist language of borba
(struggle) began to be used: ‘If the distribution and selling of the badge does not stop,
the Federation will begin a borba toward stopping this activity’ (Zapisnik, 1989). In
response to the Federation’s actions, the Slovenian youth magazine Mladina printed
the aphorism, ‘What do these Jews want? Money, probably’. The Jewish community
then criticized the Slovenian intellectual establishment for failing to condemn anti-
Semitism in Slovenia, such as the published aphorism and the serial reprinting of The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the magazine Tribuna. Laslo Sekelj was a Jewish
intellectual and frequent contributor to the popular press. He criticized the Slovene
intellectuals for condemning Serbia’s repressive policies against the Albanians in
Kosovo while keeping silent about anti-Semitism in their own republic of Slovenia
(Sekelj, 1992).
Back in 1989, Aleksandar Mošić, a senior leader of the Jewish community of
Belgrade, stated in a newspaper interview that nothing in Yugoslavia is strange for
him. However, when he saw the Star of David badge, he said the hair on his dead
388 P. B. Gordiejew
stood up. In response to the Slovenian accusation that the Serbs were applying fascist
measures against the Albanians, Mošić replied,
We all know very well, perfectly well, what persecution is, what a pogrom is, and
what genocide is. The Star of David incident was a misuse; it was not an expression
of anti-Semitism. It is a manipulation. This kind of combination *a juxtaposition
of a key Jewish symbol and the political message * implies that the Albanians in
Yugoslavia are under Nazism, and that the Serbs, that is the Serbian authorities, are
in the role of the Nazis (Politićka Ekspres, 1989 )
When David Albahari asked people why the appropriation of the Star of David was a
misuse or abuse of the symbol, people could not give him an answer. They just said,
‘Something moved me’. Albahari was the only person in the Federation of Jewish
Communities of Yugoslavia who voted against the proposition to sue the Slovenian
youth magazine Mladina for its use of the Magen David. He defended his position:
‘It’s a symbol. I can’t be against those who criticize Rushdie for using one symbol, and
then against those who use another symbol’.
Society for Serbian-Jewish Friendship

Soon after the Slovenian appropriation of the Star of David, the first public gathering
of the Serbian Jewish Friendship Society took place in March 1989 in the Serbian
Writers’ Club, a very well-known site on the literary and political landscape. Twice the
police had rejected the Society, ostensibly for the reason that it violated Yugoslavia’s
ideology of brotherhood and unity. The overt political content of the gathering
caused Filip David, a Jewish writer and dramatist, to withdraw from the Society. He
criticized the Society for doing exactly what it had attacked the Slovenes for doing*
manipulating Jews and Jewish symbols for political aims related to the growing
national conflicts and to enhance the image of one’s nation in the world order of
nations.
Thirteen Serbian and nine Jewish intellectuals, all males, composed the founding
group of the Society. Sixteen of these men were members of the prestigious Serbian
Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), the same group that was responsible for the
now infamous Memorandum of 1986 , which set forth the grievances of the Serbian
nation. ‘That’s a ‘‘Little Academy’’. It has prestige’, boasted co-founder and president,
Ljubomir Tadić. He further noted at the time that the Serbian founding members
were not popular with the state and were called ‘the opposition’. Among the members
of the original executive committee of the Society was David Albahari who saw two
factions operating in the founding group. The first included those who were
genuinely interested in friendship as explicitly stated in the Society’s aims. Albahari
did not believe that these individuals harboured a hidden political agenda. The other
faction, however, either started with an unstated motive or saw an opportunity to use
the symbolic association with the Jews for Serbian political purposes. ‘Friends use
friends’, another of the Jewish founding members told me. The split within the
founding group was representative of the same division among Serbs and Jews, and
among the journalists who reported on the Society. In the Belgrade Jewish
Community there were members who thought that the Jews should throw all of
their support behind the Serbs. When these same members of the community were
asked about the appropriation of the Star of David, they gave long statements to the
press about how good the Serbs were to the Jews. They tended to exaggerate how
good the relationship between the two peoples had been in the past. In the second
group were individuals who ‘tried to see things the way they were’. They hoped that
the Society would bring new possibilities to the community, given the community’s
limited resources.
At that first public gathering, Ljubomir Tadić’s speech was entitled ‘On Friendship
and Hatred’. Here is a part of the speech:
We have established the Society of Serbian-Jewish Friendship in an unhappy time

when hatred is spreading unrestrained throughout the country. We, the founders of
this Society, believe that our aim, at this same time, is to call for reason and to
oppose the troubled currents of irrationality that threaten to drown us . . . It is said
that friendship exists most often among people of the same nationality, although
there exist experiences that completely contradict that. Today it is very difficult to
speak, for example, about friendship between some South Slavic peoples. The Jews
and Serbs do not share any kinship, but they represent two peoples who never
fostered any unfriendly feelings between them. More specifically, among the
Serbian populace, anti-Semitism as the most distinct form of enmity toward Jews
never took root, regardless of the fact that in individual phases of the history of the
emergent Serbian state, during the Obrenović dynasty, there existed an unstable,
even negative orientation on the part of the rulers toward the Jews . . . [but] anti-
Semitism among the Serbs was not widespread. (Tadić, 1989)
Tadić went on to point out the historical bases for friendship between the two
peoples. The strongest tie, he noted, is the
common fate that the two peoples, including the Rom, suffered as victims of
genocide during the Second World War . . . All of the war criminals and all of the
victims of genocide, unfortunately, have not yet been established, and this remains
one of the most important aims of our Society.
Tadić then made a specific reference to the appropriation of the Star of David symbol
by the Slovenes.
The Society is established at a time when intolerance and hatred is spreading

throughout the land and when propagandists of chauvinism in the Yugoslav
northeast [a reference to Slovenes and Croats], imaginary democrats, cynically hid
their hatred, this time toward the Serbs, behind the Star of David, the symbol of the
suffering of the Jewish people, completely forgetting that also in Kosovo the Nazis,
from the ranks of the Albanian population, formed the notorious SS division
Skenderbeg. But the Serbs and the Jews, this we ceremonially announce as our oath,
have not established our Society in order to menace or alienate, nor that any of us,
390 P. B. Gordiejew
in the maelstrom of chauvinism, fish in troubled waters. We want to show by our

example that friendship is a valuable virtue, and hatred is an evil.
Whatever his stated intent, Tadić constructed with his words a binary classification
scheme of moral worth that had the effect of further alienating the Croats and
Slovenes. In his use of Cicero’s saying, ‘Friendship can exist only among the good’,
intentionally or not, he placed the Serbs and Jews on the side of the good and the
others on the side of evil. In so doing, he gave credence to the myth of eternal and
uninterrupted friendship of Serbs and Jews. Elsewhere in his speech he stated,
I hope that I will not be mistaken if in conclusion I say that only those peoples and
individuals who felt, so to speak, something of the Jewish fate on their own skin can
be, and remain, the friends of the Jewish people.
When placed and understood in the context of the dismantling of Yugoslavia and the
increasing conflicts over nationhood and national being, these words become volatile.
For this was a time when the Croats began to reconstruct their own national being
and state. It was important for them to excise the stain of shame that they believed
that the Serbs were intent on keeping in place. The stain of shame is the ‘dark history’
of the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist state whose rulers, the Ustasha,
implemented a genocidal campaign that repulsed even some German observers. The
Serbs, on their part, essentialized the Croat national being as genocidal.
Lavoslav Kadelburg, the highly influential president of the Federation of Jewish
Communities of Yugoslavia, at first was cautious but welcoming in saying that the
Jewish community was not in a position to turn down offers of friendship. The
president of the Zagreb Jewish Community publicly denounced the Society as
‘strongly hitched’ to Serbian political maneuvering (Danas, 1990, p. 39). In Belgrade,
Jews were divided. Some felt that friends do not have to form friendship societies.
And,
where were these friends when we needed them a few years ago? Where were these
friends when Yugoslavia broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967?
Another of my informants pointed out the hypocrisy of the Society criticizing the
Slovenian appropriation of the Star of David while remaining conspicuously silent
about how Serbs had appropriated the same symbol back in 1982. In that year, in
Belgrade’s Marx and Engels Square, a Serbian crowd set ablaze an effigy with the Star
of David and the word ‘Jude’. This silence demonstrates that nationalism entails not
only remembering the past but also forgetting it or even getting it wrong.
Jasenovac
Except for a large monument erected after the Second World War, no memorials or
material remains of the Ustasha concentration camp on the site of Jasenovac can be
seen. Still alive and strong, however, are the memories of individuals who suffered in
the camp or whose relatives were murdered there. During his rule, Croatian president
Franjo Tudjman proposed transforming Jasenovac into ‘a place for all war victims’,
whether victims of fascists or victims of communists (anti-fascists). He called this
proposal pomirenje, reconciliation. Between 1990 and 1993, this word was heard
frequently in Croatia. Instead of reconciliation, Tudjman’s actions had antifascists
and reincarnated fascists fighting one another once again. It seemed that the new
nationalist rulers and their reincarnated fascist supporters, many of them from the
Croatian diaspora, were having their way in changing the symbolic landscape of
Croatia (Goldstein, 1993).
For Tudjman, the ‘Jasenovac myth’ had to be demolished because it was used,
mostly by Serbs, to support the theory of ‘the genocidal nature of every and any
Croatian nationalism’ (Milentijevic, 1994, p. 234). Tudjman had asked,
Isn’t the purpose of the Jasenovac myth exaggerated to create a black legend of the
historical guilt of the entire Croatian people, for which they must still make
retribution? (Tudjman, quoted in Milentijevic, 1994, p. 234)
He estimated the number of dead at Jasenovac at 30,000, contesting the Serbian

estimate of 700,000 Serbs alone killed at Jasenovac. His version of ‘reconciliation’
dissolves the historical difference between perpetrators and victims of fascism.
Furthermore, Tudjman cast some of the Jews of Jasenovac in the role of collaborators
in the genocide. Reconciliation Tudjman-style was an attempt to purify, to remove
the guilt and stain of shame from the Croat nation. But his technique, his means to
this end, was to acknowledge the value of Jasenovac and to share rights of symbolic
usage.
Expansionary Contests
Lastly, expansionary contests occur when
a group tries to displace its competitors’ symbols with its own symbols . . . A feature
of an expansionary contest is that it can result in the disappearance of the defeated
side’s identity. (Harrison, 1995, p. 263)
Kosovo, the Serbian Zion

If asked, would they would flock to Kosovo to live in this sacred territory, most Serbs
would reply, they would not. Kosovo may exist in their field of dreams, but there is no
flocking there to make it home. It is as an emotive symbol that Kosovo is most
powerful. Kosovo was the seat of the great medieval Serbian kingdom and remains,
for the Serbs, their holy land, their Zion and their Jerusalem. The Serbs, a number of
whom see themselves as the lost or thirteenth tribe of Israel, have expressed this
symbolic association explicitly. The Serbian writer-turned-politician, Vuk Drašković,
wrote an open letter to the writers of Israel in which he proclaimed the tie between
392 P. B. Gordiejew
the two peoples. He wrote how during the two world wars ‘every foot of Serbian land
became Jerusalem and the tragedy of that City was enacted all over the country’. He
further wrote:
Our misfortune, however, continues. Just as in Turkish times, we are being impaled
in Kosovo, the most sacred part of Serbian land . . . And this does not happen in
Kosovo only, although in that cursed and damned Zion of ours the anti-Serbian
hysteria has reached its most violent peak. It is as if we were that 13th, lost, and
most unhappy of all Israel’s tribes . . . Accept this letter, please, as a toast to
suffering, for we at least, Jews and Serbs, have been used to drinking out of such
cups. At least we, Jews and Serbs, have learned and tasted the truth of the saying
that there is no heavenly gift more precious than the suffering of the innocent
(Drašković, 1985)
Drašković concluded his open letter with the words:
I greet You as brothers with that oath which our ancestors heard from the Jews the
meaning of which is carried by every single Serb banished from Kosovo: ‘If I ever
should forget You, let my right hand forget me, o Jerusalem!’
Many consider Drašković an extremist, but other Serbian intellectuals have also
uttered such comparisons and sentiments. Even a sniper on a Sarajevo hillside told a
Western reporter,
Serbs, we are just like Jews. We are God’s people, chosen to suffer. Hungarians,
Turks, Germans, Germans again. Now it is Croats and Muslims. So you see, always
we are victims. (Horwitz 1993)
Nor are such utterances comparisons restricted to Serbs. Jews from Serbia, such as
Enriko Josif and others, have expressed the tie of Serbs and Jews based on the
common histories of suffering of the two peoples, including what they perceived to be
the recent ‘media genocide’ and ‘cold genocide’ upon the Serbs.
Renaming of Public Spaces

Another example also implicates Franjo Tudjman. Among the numerous renamings
of public sites in Croatia, the Square of Victims of Fascism in Zagreb was changed to
the Square of Great Croatian Rulers. This act went beyond proprietorship of an
existing symbol of antifascist terror and suffering to eradicating that symbol and
replacing it with one far different in meaning. The dissociation with antifascism in
order to emphasize the new Croat nation erased a part of history that is also Jewish
history. This act of erasure mobilized the Jews of Zagreb to form the first public
demonstration by Jews after the Second World War. The Jews of that city joined the
remaining left-wing (League of Social Democrats) and supportive journalists to
condemn the act as a negation of the antifascist past (Weiss, 1990). Anti-
Communism had come to mean anti-anti-fascism.
The vice president of the Zagreb Jewish Community sent a letter to the mayor of
the city expressing the community’s displeasure with the renaming of the Square. He
wrote:
Among Zagreb’s victims of fascism to whom this square is dedicated, there are
more than 8,000 Jews who were members of our community. The Square of
Victims of Fascism is the only marking in the city of Zagreb that with its name
includes a remembrance of our onetime members, who significantly contributed to
the development of Zagreb, and who died innocently . . . We think that it is
inappropriate to wipe away this memory, and it would have a very negative
reverberation on many sides. (Jevrejski Pregled , 1990)
The new Croat rulers attempted to reorder the past by changing the landscape in a
way that diminished or denied those parts of the past that did not fit the image of the
new nation. As the Croat writer Slavenka Drakulić put it,
[M]any antifascists had been tortured and killed in Ustashe prisons situated on the
Square and in nearby streets. The protesters wanted to honor the memory of the
50,000 Croats who participated in the antifascist movement during the war, 20,000
of whom died fighting fascism or as victims of its terror. Changing the Square’s
name would, in their view, mean not only suppressing the antifascist past of
Croatia, but rehabilitating the first independent Croatian state, an openly fascist
state committed to a racist policy against people who were not Croats. Many
thousands of Jews, Serbs, Gypsies, and communists died in the Jasenovac
concentration camp run by the Ustashe regime led by Ante Pavelić. Today it is
simply a falsification of history to ignore that regime’s fascism and emphasize only
its independence. (1993a, p. 21)
What reason did the renaming commission give for its renaming campaign?
‘Everything that would disturb the national being, the national identity and a rich
Croatian heritage’ would have to be removed’ (cited in Drakulić, 1993a, pp. 2122).
With the removal of names connected to the antifascist movement, does this mean,
asks Drakulić,
we might well conclude that not only Communists but also antifascists ‘disturb
the national being’ of Croats? And if Communists and antifascists become
nonpersons, then who is left? Apparently only the fascists who supported the
Independent State of Croatia would remain. Do the Croats really accept that they
should be identified with the Ustashe, and if they don’t, why don’t they say so?
(1993a, p. 22)
In these acts of symbolic encroachment and expansion, antifascism itself was not
only devalued but also eradicated in favour of nationalist symbols. In the case of
Croatia in the early years under Franjo Tudjman’s nationalistic Croatian Democratic
Union (HDZ) party, in its zeal to separate and differentiate Croatia politically and
culturally from socialist Yugoslavia’s memorial culture of antifascism and Serbs’
claims to being the victims of Croatian fascism, antifascism lost out. Along with the
394 P. B. Gordiejew
Square of Victims of Fascism, hundreds if not thousands of other sites associated with
antifascism were obliterated from the new Croatian landscape.
Betrayers of the Nation

The celebrated Croatian Jewish actress Mira Furlan’s story illustrates what happens
when an individual transgresses in the eyes of the nation, that is, when an
individual violates a moral norm and being of the ethnic nation. In Mira Furlan’s
case, the transgression involved her going from Zagreb to Belgrade, the territory of
the enemy, in order to participate in an international theatrical festival. Travelling
to Belgrade was nothing new for her. She had previously acted in both Zagreb and
Belgrade. Previously, Mira Furlan had received the accolades of the people of
Croatia. Immediately after becoming a betrayer of the Croat nation Mira Furlan
was devalued to the point of defilement; her former adoring fans had turned her
into a disgusting object. She was dirt, matter out of place, according to the well-
known phrase of Mary Douglas. We see this use of filth imagery and sexual
perversion imagery to make moral judgments of Mira Furlan’s behaviour and her
very being*to show that anyone who cavorts with the enemy is the worst kind of
person imaginable and the only way to purify the nation is to eradicate this person
from their midst.
The Zagreb public spared no words when reacting viciously to what they perceived
as her collaboration with the enemy. According to Slavenka Drakulić,
The people who called her on the phone did not ‘merely’ threaten: they called her a
‘Chetnik whore’, they graphically, to a detail, described how they would torture her
to death, which parts of the body they would cut off. (1993b, p. 78)
Even her friends and colleagues renounced her.

Suffering through her dismissal from the Croatian National Theatre and the
endless verbal assault that served to diminish her and finally to eradicate her by
forcing her to leave Croatia, Mira Furlan mustered her rapidly diminishing self in
order to write an open letter, which was published first in the popular Croatian news
magazine Danas and a few days later in Belgrade’s daily newspaper Politika.
It seems that I’ve been chosen . . . to be the filthy rag everyone uses to wipe the mud
off their shoes . . .
Listening to . . . the incredible quantities of indescribably disgusting messages
from my co-citizens. I longed to hear at least one message from a friend . . . But
there was none . . . Nevertheless, I am grateful to them, to those noble patriots who
kindly promise me a ‘massacre the Serbian way’ . . .
There is nothing but despair, nausea and horror. I no longer have any decisions
to make. [Others have] decided I must shut up, give up, vanish; . . . they have
abolished my right to come home to my own city, . . . Can the horror of war be
used as a justification for every single nasty bit of filth we commit against our fellow
man? Are we allowed . . . to justify our silence by the importance of the great bright
national objective? . . .
It is hard to write without bitterness. I would like to be able to do that, because

we should ‘Love Our Enemy’. I wish we all could. Herein perhaps lies the solution
for all of us. But I fear we are very far from the ways of the Lord. His is the way of
love. Not hatred . . .
Everyone is so caught up by the great cause, that small personal fates are not
important any more. How many friends do you have to betray to keep from
committing the only socially acknowledged betrayal, the betrayal of the nation?
How many petty treacheries, how many pathetic little dirty tricks must one do to
remain ‘clean in the eyes of the nation’? (Furlan, 1991)
Her open letter failed to halt the public’s assault. In response to the Croatian public’s
outcry, Slavenka Drakulić wrote,
Those in the know explained that her mother was Jewish and her husband Serbian:
this suddenly became the key to her case, because if it wasn’t for him *who had
obviously made her do it *all this wouldn’t have happened. (1993b, p. 82)
Drakulić contends that what really upset her theatre colleagues was that Furlan
‘articulated a moral position, a position of non-compliance and individual choice’.
The Bad Jew

The enchantment and love affair with the ‘good Jew’ and the ‘useful Jew’ endured
only a brief time. Shortly thereafter ‘good Jews’ and ‘Jewish euphoria’ had
disappeared only to be replaced by ‘bad Jews’ responsible for Serbia’s demise and
diminishment in the international order of nations. How did this happen in a place
with so few Jews? And how could it happen if the claim of the Serbian intellectuals in
the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society of an uninterrupted and eternal friendship
between the two peoples in a place where anti-Semitism had never taken root was
true (see Sekelj, 1980, 1992, 2005)? How could ‘the good’ have turned ‘bad’, especially
in such a short time? Is the explanation to be found in the phenomenon of ‘anti-
Semitism without Jews?’ Serbia had become a pariah nation, struggling to overcome
its new aggressor image, and the international sanctions made everyday life difficult
for its citizens. But there was more to come. NATO forces would come militarily into
Kosovo and bomb Serbian cities, including Belgrade. How could this have happened?
Who was to blame? Could its ‘good and useful Jews’ be responsible for all this bad
stuff happening to good heavenly people? Could the blame be placed on the actual
Jews living among them, all 3,000 or so living in Serbia? For the accusers, the first
‘bad Jew’ was the ‘abstract Jew’ and ‘foreign Jew’ (Byford, 2003), particularly the
‘American Jew’ who controlled the flow of political, economic and cultural power.
Preparing the way for such a folk understanding of the Serbian nation’s diminish-
ment and shame were the spreading of conspiracy theories of Jewish world power.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in various incarnations, appeared in bookstores
and in serial form in popular magazines all over the former Yugoslavia. Television and
the Internet were also responsible for the dissemination. One can enter the
396 P. B. Gordiejew
ultranationalistic and racist Serbian website Serbian Defence League (formerly

CompuSerb) and find the photographs of all those ‘powerful ‘‘Jews’’’ controlling
the destiny of Serbia. The website authors even transformed Tito into a Jew, calling
him ‘Josif Walter Weiss’. Anyone who dares criticize Serbian actions is charged with
Serbophobia.
Ratibor Djurjević returned to Serbia in the early 1990s from the United States. He
was on a mission to free the ‘NewSerbs’
from enslavement to the weak mentality of the godless West, [and] to reveal the
anti-Christian Satanic conspiracy directed above all against the Serbs. (Čolović,
2002, p. 204)
In all his publications about this conspiracy, the same narrative reappears: the
Judeo-Americans, Judeo-Europeans, and Judeo-Masonic conspirators, are respon-

sible for the enslavement of the Serbs. Whether communism or secular democracy,
they use whatever means possible to keep the Serbs enslaved. Ivan Čolović, a social
scientist and a Serb, writes that to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, Djurdjević
invented a distinction between the Jews, descendants of Moses, and the Judeans,
descendants of the Pharisees. But he often forgets this distinction of his and attacks
Jews directly: ‘the Jews are the ancient enemies of Orthodoxy and all Christianity’
and are ‘a rightly persecuted nation’ (Čolović, 2002, p. 204). Among Serbs there has
been no public outcry against such spreading of anti-Semitism. Only a few voices
have condemned Djurdjević’s campaign, including Aca Singer, president of the
Federation of Jewish Communities, and Ljubomir Tadić, president of the Society
for Serbian-Jewish Friendship. Djurdjević’s movement among the young ‘NewSerbs’
ultimately failed, as his workers failed to meet his rational, American standards of
work. In the end, they accused him of what he had accused them of*being anti-
Serbian. For these young NewSerbs, Rajko Djurdjević, too, had been transformed
into ‘Rajko the Mason’ (p. 206). Furthermore, by applying their logic that casts
Masons as Jews, one could conclude that Djurdjević’s workers had transformed him
into ‘Rajko the Jew’.
What have Jews done in response to these conditions? Some left for good; some left
but came back; some have kept a low profile; some have sided with the majority
nation; and then there are those like the writer Filip David (1994) who answers his
own questions:
Regarding the place of the Jews, the question is, what to do in this situation? To
be quiet because you are afraid, or to speak loudly what you think about the
situation? I choose to speak very loudly. I think it is the only way . . . It is a
question of morality, of principle. That is the reason why I speak, not only
against anti-Semitism but also against all kinds of irrational hate, ethnic
cleansing, and about concentration camps . . . I am connected to this place until
my death. Was it better to be here and fight or to live some place where you are
nothing, really nothing?
The organized Jewish community likewise, has fought aggressively against what it has
judged to be a ‘functionalization of the Jews’ (Sekelj, 1991) or outright anti-Semitism,
including going to court.
Conclusion
Serbian intellectuals sought to inflate perceptions of dissimilarity between Serbs and
Croats by inflating perceptions of similarity between Serbs and Jews. And they went
much further than trying to demonstrate similarity on one or two points. Some, both
Jews and Serbs, went so far as to transform Serbs into Jews (Jewish Serbs), claiming
that both share a unique combination of qualities. The Serbs have copied Jewish
qualities and discourses with and without the consent of the Jews. The Slovenian
appropriation of the Star of David is also a case of appropriating what may be
considered an inalienable identity possession of the Jews in order to transform

themselves and Albanians into (symbolic) Jews. There was nothing in their own
national arsenal that would accomplish these transformations. In the end, however,
these acts of identity appropriation had the effect of expanding the dissimilarity and
distance between Serbs and Jews, as many Jews felt that they, Jews, served merely as
pawns in dangerous political games. That the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of men
like Ratibor Djurdjević found fertile soil in Serbia belied still further any notion of the
eternal friendship of the Serbs and Jews.
Perhaps it is permissible to enter the moral fields of the nations and make a
judgment of my own, with the help of Miroslav Volf, a theologian at Yale Divinity
School, who was affected deeply by the events in his country. In his 1996 book,
Exclusion and Embrace, Volf discusses two kinds of transgressions committed by
peoples in ethnic conflicts. The first kind he calls a transgression against binding.
Groups that commit this transgression refuse to enter into any kind of unifying
structure. The second kind is a transgression against separation. Groups that
commit this transgression refuse other groups a space or even an identity of their
own; they tend to swallow other groups and thereby enlarge themselves. Both kinds
of transgression have the same result. In the end, each group really seeks an identity
with itself, a most unfortunate or perhaps impossible way to live. The Croat nation
under Franjo Tudjman was an example of the former, seeking separation from
anyone and anything that is different from what was or is part of the Croat nation.
When weighing the fascist Ustasha past against the antifascist past, it appears that
for many Croats during Tudjman’s rule the Ustasha past won (mainly through the
silence of the masses) simply because it was Croatian and the antifascist past was
associated with communist Yugoslavia. Thus, Franjo Tudjman, while warning of the
dangers of fascism, could simultaneously interpret the fascist Independent State of
Croatia (NDH) as a legitimate historic aspiration for Croatian nationhood. The
Serbs are an example of the latter transgression. Their rulers, like Slobodan
Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, and Ratko Mladić, sought to expand the Serbian
nation well beyond the borders of Serbia. Spurring on their efforts was the return
398 P. B. Gordiejew
of the mythic Serbian past into everyday consciousness. Television helped make that
happen. Certainly the other nation peoples perceived Serbian rhetoric and actions
as part of a plan to create a Greater Serbia. The same transgression operated to
some extent within the Society for Serbian-Jewish Friendship. In a relatively short
time, the Society in Serbia itself became less and less Jewish in its membership and
more and more inclined toward attaining Serbian political aims. Jews were
swallowed up in the process. Having culturally appropriated the Jews, the NoviSrbi,
the NewSerbs, no longer needed a cultural other. They had become the ‘Jews of the
Balkans’. They had become the thirteenth, lost tribe of Israel. They persuaded
themselves that they had played with Jews and won the biggest prize while losing,
yet again, the earthly kingdom.
Acknowledgements
Support for the research on which this article is based came from the International
Research and Exchanges Board, the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, and the Center
for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh. Parts of this article
are reprinted by permission from Paul Benjamin Gordiejew (1999) Voices of Yugoslav
Jewry, State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. I also wish to thank
Amy Gordiejew for her reading of the article and editorial suggestions.
Notes
[1] The players referred to in this article as ‘Serbs’ ‘Croats’, and ‘Slovenes’ are segments of the
ethnic populations of former Yugoslavia. They do not represent all Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes.
[2] Srpska-mreza.com is a nationalistic Serbian website that includes material that suggests
what has been called ‘an eternal friendship of Serbs and Jews’. The quotation used here is
from Jaša Almuli’s interview with Enriko Josif. Almuli, a retired journalist, is a former
president of the Belgrade Jewish community. The quotation included here is found in his
2002 book.
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Gordiejew, P. B. - Playing With Jews in The Fields of Nations - Symbolic Contests in The Former Yugoslavia

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On: 29 December 2014, At: 12:18

Social Identities: Journal for the Study

Playing with Jews in the Fields of

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630600744252

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Playing with Jews in the Fields of

ISSN 1350-4630 (print)/ISSN 1363-0296 (online) # 2006 Taylor & Francis

He preferred the one-party system because he believed that it had eliminated

Place(s) of the Jew

The Invisible Jew

The Good and the Useful Jew

The Jewish community of Yugoslavia, if it would open its cultural programs to

Playing With Jews in the Fields of Nations

antagonistic environment. Under these conditions there is an acute sense of urgency

innovation (addition), proprietorship (ownership or usage rights), and expansion

the ranking of symbols of the competing groups’ identities according to some

Nation and National Being

The same document described the shaping of

Appropriation of the Star of David

perceived the appropriation and manipulation of the Star of David as an abuse

The Federation informed international Jewish organizations of the actions. Thus

Society for Serbian-Jewish Friendship

We have established the Society of Serbian-Jewish Friendship in an unhappy time

The Society is established at a time when intolerance and hatred is spreading

in the maelstrom of chauvinism, fish in troubled waters. We want to show by our

He estimated the number of dead at Jasenovac at 30,000, contesting the Serbian

Kosovo, the Serbian Zion

Drašković concluded his open letter with the words:

Renaming of Public Spaces

new nation. As the Croat writer Slavenka Drakulić put it,

Betrayers of the Nation

Even her friends and colleagues renounced her.

It is hard to write without bitterness. I would like to be able to do that, because

The Bad Jew

ultranationalistic and racist Serbian website Serbian Defence League (formerly

Judeo-Americans, Judeo-Europeans, and Judeo-Masonic conspirators, are respon-

considered an inalienable identity possession of the Jews in order to transform

David, F. (1994). Fragmenti Vračnih Vremena . Belgrade: Belgrade Circle.

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