60 · Ömer Turan
and if there had not been such heavy oppression, the population of the
Turks in western Thrace might have been about 600,000.^41
Serbia
During the Serbian rebellion, most of the Muslims and Jews who were
living in and around Belgrade were killed or forced to leave their homes.
The remaining Jews faced heavy pressure from the Serbians after its au-
tonomy. After Prince Milos Obrenovic was deposed, in 1839, anti-Jew-
ish laws and practices followed. Jews were forced to close their shops
on Sundays and national holidays. They were accused of murdering
a Christian in Smederevo, like the Damascus blood libel of 1840. They
were stripped of all civil rights. They were obliged to live in only certain
parts of the cities. Their property was confiscated. In fact, in 1859 during
his second term in the Principality of Serbia, Milos Obrenovic abolished
all the anti-Jewish regulations, but after his death in 1860, the Supreme
National Serbian Committee reversed his edict. In 1861, the representa-
tives of the Jews appealed to the new Serbian prince and demanded their
rights. They dared to mention that even before the Principality, during
Ottoman rule, they had enjoyed equal rights with the other peoples of the
Ottoman Empire. Jews were accused of being Ottoman spies. Anti-Jewish
activities continued in Serbia after 1862 as well. Serbian-educated elite,
intellectuals, newspaper editors, parliamentarians, and writers were the
leaders of anti-Jewish campaigns in the country.^42
Serbia gained its independence in 1878. According to the Berlin treaty,
the rights of the Jewish and Muslim communities were guaranteed; Ser-
bia agreed to consider all the religious sects as equal. However, the equal-
ity of the citizens in the Kingdom of Serbia was only instituted in the
constitution of 1888. During the reign of Peter I, in the early twentieth
century, the Jews of Serbia were allowed to live in peace undisturbed
for a generation.^43 There were 60,000 Jews in the Serbian-Croatian and
Slovenian Kingdom in the 1920s. Most of them were living in the cities.
There were anti-Semitic tendencies in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, and
Ljubliana. Their national church also involved itself in anti-Semitism in
the 1930s. Ustasha ideology, which developed in the second half of 1930s,
received many elements from Nazism, including anti-Semitism. The first
examples of anti-Semitism were propaganda, and then some new laws