Sharing the Same Fate: Muslims and Jews of the Balkans · 61against the Jews were issued. In 1940, it turned into mass deportation
and killings.^44
In October 1940, about six months before the beginning of the war
in the Serbian-Croatian and Slovenian Kingdom, anti-Jewish laws were
promulgated. All Jews in Belgrade, Serbia, and Banat were killed by
the summer of 1942. “Serbia was the first European state to be declared
Judenrein.”^45 As a result of anti-Semitism in Yugoslavia and the migration
to Israel, the population of the Jews dropped to 6,000 after World War II.^46
Due to the war and other difficulties, most migrated to Israel, the United
States, and Europe. The number of Jews in Serbia is not more than 1,000
at present.
Serbia eliminated its Muslim population during the early nineteenth
century. However, after the Balkan Wars, it incorporated today’s Mace-
donia and Kosovo, and after World War I, it annexed Bosnia-Hercegov-
ina. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Muslims migrated to
Turkey from Bosnia before the Balkan Wars,^47 and from Macedonia and
Kosovo during the Balkan Wars, Muslims were still dominant in those
regions. Even though the Serbian-Croation and Slovenian Kingdom was
propagating that “we are brothers and religion is not very important in
our brotherhood,” Muslims were second-class citizens in this new state.
Therefore, many Muslims, Turks, Albanians, and Bosniaks migrated to
Turkey. Between 1918 and 1941, the number of Muslims in the Serbian-
Croatian and Slovenian Kingdom was about 1.5 million. After World
War II, the Kingdom became Socialist Yugoslavia under the leadership of
Marshal Tito. The second-class citizenship status of the Muslims contin-
ued in Yugoslavia. Anti-religious policies of the Socialists were applied
harshly toward the Muslims. Their properties were nationalized. Some
of their rituals were banned. Several mosques were closed, and religious
leaders were arrested. Therefore, hundreds of thousands of Turks and
Muslims, especially from Macedonia, migrated to Turkey.^48
During the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the suffering of the
Muslims increased. Following Slovenia and Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina
also separated from Yugoslavia in 1992. Serbian nationalists attacked the
Muslims, burned their houses and mosques, raped the women, and car-
ried out the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Bosnians. In her war
diary dated 18 August 1992, Zlatka Dizdarevic describes how the last
seven hundred Jews were leaving Sarajevo where they had lived for five