History of the Jews in Serbia
aspect of history
The history of the Jews in Serbia is some two thousand years old. The Jews first arrived in the region during Roman times. The Jewish communities of the Balkans remained small until the late 15th century, when Jews fleeing the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions found refuge in the Ottoman-ruled areas, including Serbia. The community flourished and reached a peak of 33,000, of whom almost 90% were living in Belgrade and Vojvodina, before World War II. About two-thirds of Serbian Jews were murdered in The Holocaust. After the war, most of the remaining Jewish Serbian population emigrated, mainly to Israel. According to data from the 2022 census, only 709 people declared themselves Jewish.
History
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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “History of the Jews in Serbia” is aspect of history. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through History, Jews and Serbia, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of the Jews in Serbia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.