Sephardic Jews in Serbia: Belgrade, Zemun and the Road to Amsterdam

Serbia held one of the more important Sephardi communities of the Balkans, centred on Belgrade, and it is unusually well connected to the rest of the Sephardi world — northward to Amsterdam and London, westward to Sarajevo and Ragusa, and into the Ottoman heartland.

For a researcher, that connectedness is the point. A Belgrade family very often has a branch that surfaces in a record kept somewhere else entirely, and those outside records are frequently the ones that survive.

The community was overwhelmingly Sephardi and Ladino-speaking, descended from refugees who reached the Ottoman Balkans after 1492, though a smaller Ashkenazi presence grew up later in the north, in the Habsburg lands of the Vojvodina. Before the Second World War the Jewish population of what is now Serbia reached perhaps 33,000, most of them in Belgrade and the Vojvodina. About two-thirds were murdered in the Holocaust, and most survivors left afterwards, mainly for Israel. Around seven hundred people declared themselves Jewish in the 2022 census.

This page is about Sephardi genealogy. The Holocaust is covered only so far as it bears on records, because it is thoroughly documented elsewhere and because the community that existed before it deserves treatment in its own right.

Which names will you meet in the records?

Belgrade is the anchor, and it carries several names. Belgrade is the English form; Beograd the Serbian; Belgrado and Belogrado the Italian and Portuguese spellings you will meet in the Amsterdam and Livorno documents. The city sits on the Ottoman–Habsburg frontier, which is why it changes hands, and rulers, so often.

Zemun — across the Sava from Belgrade, and for most of the relevant period on the Habsburg side of the border — appears as Semlin in German and Zimony in Hungarian. It had its own Sephardi community, distinct from Belgrade’s and under a different government.

The northern towns of the Vojvodina — Novi Sad (Neusatz), Subotica, Pančevo — were Habsburg, and their communities were largely Ashkenazi, growing after Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance of 1782. The Sephardi story is mainly the story of Belgrade and Zemun.

The territory changed hands repeatedly: Ottoman, then by stages Serbian and Habsburg, then Yugoslav, then occupied and partitioned in the Second World War, then Yugoslav again, and independent since. Records follow the ruler, so a single family may appear in Ottoman, Serbian, Austrian and Yugoslav documents in turn.

How did the community begin?

The Sephardim came into Ottoman Belgrade after 1492, welcomed into the empire by Bayezid II. By the seventeenth century Belgrade was a substantial community — around 800 Jews by 1663 — and a centre of Sephardi learning out of proportion to its size.

The rabbinic record shows this. Belgrade produced or hosted a long line of scholars: Joseph Almosnino, chief rabbi of Belgrade, who died at Nikolsburg in 1688; the Pardo family, rabbis at Belgrade with a relative at Ragusa; the Magriso family; the Finci family, one of whom went on to be chief rabbi of Sarajevo; and later the Alcalay family, who bridged Belgrade, Sarajevo and Vienna across the nineteenth century.

These families were mobile across the whole Sephardi Balkans, and their names recur from Sarajevo to Salonica.

The community’s fortunes tracked the frontier wars. The Habsburg campaigns against the Ottomans at the end of the seventeenth century were catastrophic for Belgrade’s Jews — and this is where Serbia connects directly to the Western Sephardi diaspora.

Did Belgrade families reach Amsterdam?

Yes, and it is documented in our records.

When the situation at Belgrade deteriorated, families fled north and west, and some reached Amsterdam.

The Amsterdam civil marriage banns, which state where the bride and groom were born, name Sephardim born at Belgrade — Belgrado — in the 1670s and 1680s: Jacob Alaxem, born about 1672; Mozes Minhana, about 1675; Joseph Cohen, about 1680; Angel Vidal, about 1688; and Jechiel Salem. These are people who were born in Ottoman Belgrade and married in Amsterdam a generation later, and they are direct evidence of the refugee route.

The Cohen Belinfante family

The clearest case. A Belgrade family of that name reached Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century and established itself there so thoroughly that it appears across some twenty-five entries in the Amsterdam records — Elias, Meijer, Mozes, Raphael, Jacob, Salomon, Isaac, Zadok and more, spanning births from 1700 to 1785, with one branch (Selomoh Cohen Belinfante, son of Isaac) heading onward to Curaçao.

A family that began at Belgrade thus threads through Amsterdam, The Hague, Amersfoort and the Caribbean. If you are researching a Cohen Belinfante line, Belgrade is where it starts.

The rabbi Joseph Jacob Danon, born at Belgrade and dead around 1700, is recorded as having moved to Amsterdam and London — the same route, at the same moment.

What was life like under three rulers?

Belgrade’s Jews lived under Ottoman rule into the nineteenth century, and the Sephardi community traded — salt above all, and goods moving between the Ottoman provinces — and maintained its synagogues and schools.

The Serbian Revolution and the emergence of an autonomous, then independent, Serbia was hard on the Jews. As the Serbs fought the Ottomans, Jewish communities were caught between them and suffered reprisals; Jews were expelled from Šabac and Požarevac, and after the liberation of Belgrade faced decades of discriminatory taxation and residential restrictions.

Rights waxed and waned with each ruler through the nineteenth century — relaxed under one Obrenović, reinstated under another — until the Serbian parliament lifted all remaining anti-Jewish restrictions in 1889, following the independence guaranteed at the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 and the recognition of the Jewish religious community in 1879.

Zemun, across the river, was a different world — Habsburg-governed, with its own Sephardi community operating under Austrian law and connected to the Vienna and wider Habsburg networks.

By the early twentieth century Belgrade’s Jewish community was around ten thousand, roughly eighty per cent Ladino-speaking Sephardim and twenty per cent Ashkenazim.

Where else do Serbian Sephardim appear?

Because the community was so mobile, its members surface in records kept elsewhere, and these are worth searching directly.

Vienna, above all. The Habsburg capital drew Serbian Sephardim throughout the nineteenth century, and the Vienna Sephardi burial and community records name people born at Belgrade and Semlin — the Russo, Farchy, Albala, Levi and Alcalay families among them. The Albala name is a notable one: the Belgrade community leader and diplomat David Albala belonged to this family.

Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. A striking number of Belgrade rabbis and scholars ended their lives in Ottoman Palestine, and the biographical dictionaries of that community record them — the Almosnino, Pardo, Magriso, Finci and Alcalay names again, moving between Belgrade, Sarajevo, Sofia and the holy cities.

Sarajevo and Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The Bosnian and Dalmatian Sephardi communities were closely tied to Belgrade’s by family and rabbinic office, and their records overlap.

If you lose a Belgrade Sephardi family, look to Vienna first, then to Sarajevo and the other Yugoslav communities, then to Amsterdam and the Land of Israel.

Synagogues and cemeteries

The Sephardi cemetery in Belgrade, at 1 Mije Kovačevića Street, is the principal surviving genealogical site, with some four thousand gravestones and a Holocaust memorial. The Ashkenazi cemetery lies opposite it.

Transcriptions of names from the Serbian Jewish cemeteries are available online through the Makabijada project, and this is the natural starting point for anyone with a Belgrade family.

Of the synagogues, little survives in use. The Sephardi synagogue in Cara Uroša Street in Belgrade is gone as a working synagogue; the Sephardi synagogue at Zemun, photographed in the 1930s, was damaged by Allied bombing in 1944 and later demolished. The one functioning synagogue in Serbia today is the Belgrade (Ashkenazi) Synagogue in Kralja Petra Street. The great synagogues of Novi Sad, Subotica and Niš survive as cultural venues.

What records survive?

Serbian records are fragmented by the changes of ruler, but a good deal survives and much is now digitised.

The Historical Archives of Belgrade hold a Jewish Digital Collection, searchable online, and this is the first place to look for Belgrade families. The Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia, the State Archives of Serbia, and the Jewish Digital Library of the Republic of Serbia hold further material. The Cervantes Institute’s “Sephardic Routes of Belgrade” is a useful orientation to the community’s topography.

Because the community lived under Ottoman, Serbian and Habsburg rule, the records are correspondingly split:

Ottoman-period material — court registers, tax records — sits in the Ottoman archives and has barely been searched for Jewish content.

Serbian civil and administrative records begin in the nineteenth century.

Habsburg records cover Zemun and the Vojvodina, and connect to Vienna.

External Sephardi archives — Amsterdam, Vienna, Sarajevo, the Land of Israel — carry the families who moved.

JewishGen’s cemetery project (JOWBR) indexes a number of Serbian Jewish cemeteries, including Belgrade, Zemun, Niš, Novi Sad, Subotica, Pančevo and others.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Holocaust in Serbia is documented; the centuries before it far less so, at least genealogically.

The Belgrade cemetery is transcribed and online, which is a real asset. The rabbinic and scholarly families are traceable through the biographical literature.

But the Ottoman-period records have not been worked for Jewish genealogy, the connection between Belgrade and the Western Sephardi communities has only begun to be traced through material like the Amsterdam banns, and the ordinary families — as opposed to the rabbinic dynasties — remain hard to follow before the nineteenth century.

The mobility that makes the community so interesting also makes it hard: a single family’s record may be scattered across four archives in four languages.

Sephardic World lectures relevant to Serbia

Organisations and repositories

Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia — savezjos.org

Jewish Community of Belgrade, and the Jewish Community of Zemun

Jewish Historical Museum, Belgrade

Historical Archives of Belgrade — Jewish Digital Collection, jdz.arhiv-beograda.org

State Archives of Serbia — arhivsrbije.rs

Jewish Digital Library of the Republic of Serbia — jevrejskadigitalnabiblioteka.rs

Makabijada cemetery transcriptions — makabijada.com

Stadsarchief Amsterdam — for the marriage banns and the Cohen Belinfante family

Help us find records

We are looking for:

A full transcription of the Belgrade Sephardi cemetery, cross-referenced to the community records
Ottoman-period court and tax registers naming Jewish parties at Belgrade
Records of the Zemun Sephardi community under Habsburg administration
Further Amsterdam, Vienna or Livorno records naming Belgrade-born Sephardim
Documentation of the Cohen Belinfante family’s Belgrade origin, before Amsterdam
Registers of the Belgrade and Zemun synagogues — births, marriages, burials, membership
Family papers from any Serbian Sephardi family

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Serbian Sephardi research means a Belgrade community whose records are split across Ottoman, Serbian and Habsburg archives, and whose families scattered to Vienna, Sarajevo, Amsterdam and the Land of Israel — so the record you need is often the one kept somewhere else. The cemetery is transcribed and the digital collections are growing, but tracing an ordinary family back before the nineteenth century is demanding work. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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