Sephardic Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Sarajevo and the Ottoman Communities

Sephardim reached Ottoman Bosnia in the middle of the sixteenth century, arriving overland from Salonika, Constantinople and Skopje.

Sarajevo was the principal community. A Jewish quarter and synagogue were built there in 1581, and the community held around 350 to 500 people by 1700 and about 1,000 by 1779. Its business was trade with Dubrovnik and Venice, and later banking. Judeo-Spanish survived here longer than in most Sephardi communities.

Bosnia passed to Austria-Hungary in 1878, which brought an Ashkenazi community alongside the Sephardim. Around 10,000 of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and most of the community’s archives were destroyed with them.

That last fact governs everything on this page. For Bosnia, the records you need are usually somewhere else.

How did Sephardim reach Bosnia?

Not by sea. The Adriatic coast was Venetian and Ragusan, so Sephardim reaching Ottoman Bosnia came inland along the caravan routes from Salonika through Skopje, Bitola and Samokov.

Surnames record the route: Samokovlija from Samokov, Ovadija from Bitola, Uščuplija from Skopje (Üsküb), Elazar from Kyustendil, Kamhi and Levi by way of Albania.

The first arrivals were merchants without families. They lodged in the city khans and returned to Salonika for the festivals. Ottoman censuses of Sarajevo in the 1560s and 1570s record no Jewish households at all — which is a trap for the researcher, because the men were certainly there.

Later arrivals came under pressure from the west. War between the Ottomans and Venice in 1570, the trial of the merchant Izak Ješurin at Dubrovnik in 1622, and new customs duties at Dubrovnik in 1637 each pushed Jewish merchants inland. Thirty to forty families came from Constantinople and Salonika in the early seventeenth century. Jews arrived from Buda after the Ottoman loss of the city in 1686, among them Cevi Aškenazi, rabbi at Sarajevo from 1686 to 1689.

Movement between Sephardi communities continued throughout. Jews came to Bosnia from Bulgaria and Serbia, and went the other way.

How did they make a living?

Textiles first, then everything else, then money.

The earliest records show small transactions in cloth on the Sarajevo–Dubrovnik and Sarajevo–Skopje routes. By the later sixteenth century the network reached Novi Pazar, Sofia, Candia, and outside the empire to Venice, Ancona, Florence, Livorno and Split. The largest documented single transaction, in 1592, was 1,200 ducats. Goods were cloth, then spices, leather, resin, rugs, wax and wool.

Most Sarajevo Jewish merchants had a relative at Dubrovnik and agents in the other trading centres. That is the key to finding them.

Bosnian exports in 1773 were wax and leather. Imports were linen, silk, coffee, sugar, zinc, tin, glue, steel, lead, wire, hemp, porcelain, glass and paint.

Other trades appear late and in small numbers: a tinsmith at the end of the seventeenth century, a furniture maker, a watch trader, three pub keepers in 1786.

Lending mattered by the mid-eighteenth century. The Orthodox metropolitan Gavrilo Mihajlović was removed from office over loans from Jews, and the sons of Aron Ćolaković sued Orthodox bishops for 22,145 gold coins in 1778. Sunbul, a sarraf or money changer, collected soldiers’ salaries in 1765 and made a fortune.

By 1820 Jews rented 21 warehouses and 32 shops in the Gazi Husrev Bey waqf buildings — 30 per cent of the storehouses and 16 per cent of the shops — while making up about 9 per cent of Sarajevo’s population.

Folk medicine was a Sephardi trade under the Ottomans. The Papo family apothecary ran for some three centuries; it is reconstructed in the Jewish Museum at Sarajevo.

The trade routes reversed direction in 1878. Under the Ottomans they ran south and east to the Mediterranean and the Middle East; under Austria-Hungary they ran north and west. Textiles remained the trade: in the interwar period about 40 per cent of Jewish-owned shops in Bosnia dealt in cloth, clothing and fashion goods.

Where did they go?

Bosnia received rather than sent, until the twentieth century.

The early merchants moved constantly between Sarajevo, Mostar, Dubrovnik and Split, and one man can appear in two places: Mojsije Kuzina is “a Jew from Sarajevo” in one source and a resident of Mostar in another.

Some merchants left Bosnia in 1602 under Dželali Hasan-paša and returned after his execution; the families returning in 1614 came back from Dubrovnik and Hungary. Others went to Palestine — Moše Danon died at Stolac in 1830 on his way there.

After 1945 most survivors emigrated to Israel. Many who left during the 1992–95 war did not return. Descendant communities today are mainly in Israel, North America and South America.

If you lose a Bosnian family, look next at Dubrovnik, Split, Salonika, Skopje, Bitola, Belgrade, Sofia and Vienna.

Why do so many Bosnian Jews share the same names?

Because Bosnian Jews followed the Sephardi naming custom strictly: the firstborn son named for the paternal grandfather, the second son for the maternal grandfather, the firstborn daughter for the paternal grandmother, the second daughter for the maternal grandmother.

The consequence is that a single extended family contains many men called Isak and many women called Estera.

The community’s solution was the nickname, and the nickname is usually what appears in the records. Bohor and Bohora marked a firstborn son or daughter. Braco — “little brother” in Serbo-Croat — marked the youngest son. Jacob became Jakica, Jaša or Jako; Estera became Esterka or Esterina; Isak became Siso or Izi; Moše became Moško.

These were not informal. People signed official documents with them. Dr Isak Poljokan, editor of Jevrejski Glas, signed himself Braco throughout his career.

For a researcher this cuts both ways. A record naming “Bohor Altarać” does not give you his given name — but it tells you he was a firstborn son, and therefore that his given name was his paternal grandfather’s.

Bosnian Sephardi surnames

Surnames fall into three groups.

Spanish: Altarac, Papo, Baruh, Alkalaj, Albahari, Salom, Kabiljo, Konforti, Kalderon, Musafija, Mevorah, Nahmias, Gracijani.

Hebrew: Levi, Cohen, Gadol.

Ottoman Turkish: Sarafić, from saraf, a money changer — a Banja Luka family who were money changers; and Sumbulović, from the Turkish for hyacinth.

A fourth group came from nicknames. Poljokan was a Levi family. An ancestor injured in the early nineteenth century was left with one eye, and was called poljokan, half-eyed man. The family had dropped Levi entirely by 1900.

A Bosnian surname may therefore be two centuries old rather than five. Do not assume an Iberian origin for a name simply because the family is Sephardi.

Why did Judeo-Spanish survive so long in Bosnia?

It remained the everyday language of Bosnian Sephardim until the Second World War, longer than in most communities. The reason is administrative.

The Alliance Israélite Universelle, whose schools taught in French and did much to displace Judeo-Spanish across the Ottoman Empire, never operated in Bosnia. By the time it was founding schools, Bosnia had passed to Austria-Hungary and was judged already provided for.

Bosnian Jews were never told their language was backward. They learned German and French at school under Austria-Hungary, and Serbo-Croat increasingly from the 1890s, but Judeo-Spanish was not displaced from the home.

La Alborada, a Ladino weekly, was published at Sarajevo from 1900. The interwar weekly Jevrejski Glas was in Serbo-Croat but printed in Judeo-Spanish when it wanted an emotional response — an election appeal ran “Djidios, mostrad muestra fuerza y escojed todos a vuestros representantes en el belediye de Saraj.”

Which towns had communities?

Sarajevo. The community was founded in 1565. The first known Jewish dwelling was in Sagrakdži Hadži Mahmud’s mahala; in 1581 Siyavuş Pasha built a large khan for the Jews, known to them as Il Cortijo or Cortijico and to others as Velika Avlija or Čifuthana, together with permission to build a synagogue.

It was not a ghetto: the gates were never locked, wealthier Jews lived elsewhere in the city, and poorer families paid minimal rent and moved out when they could. It burned on 8 August 1879.

Through the seventeenth century the community lived in two collective lodgings — Siyavuş Pasha’s khan and one in Sagrakdži Mahmud’s mahala. Individual houses in other quarters appear from the 1690s. By the nineteenth century Jews were concentrated in seven adjoining quarters at the commercial centre of the city.

Il Kal Grande / Il Kal Vježu (Old Temple, Stari Hram), 1581. Burned 1697 and 1788, rebuilt 1806–21. Jewish Museum from 1966; rededicated as a synagogue in 2004.
Il Kal Nuevo (New Temple), founded 1746, present building c.1870. Now an art gallery owned by the community.
Il Kal di la Bilava (Bjelave), 1900–01. Used by the Ustaše as a detention facility.
Ashkenazi synagogue, 1901–02, architect Karel Pařík, interior by Ludvig Oisner. The only one now in use, and the seat of the community.
Veliki Novi Hram (Great Sephardi Synagogue), 1930, architect Rudolf Lubynski — the largest domed building in the Balkans at the time. Sacked and burned in April 1941. The shell is now the Bosnian Cultural Centre.

Travnik. Synagogue Il Kal Santo built 1768, and a yeshiva founded the same year by Rabbi David Pardo. Kalkadoš replaced a wooden chapel in 1863. A school was built in 1877; school and temple burned in 1903. The synagogue of 1860 was demolished in 2008. The town museum holds ritual silver of the Konforti family, including two Esther scroll cases and a prayer book cover dated 5650 (1890), found in 1989 during building work.

Banja Luka. Sephardim recorded from the sixteenth century. In 1713 Jewish merchants of Banja Luka asked France to appoint one of them commercial consul of the city. A Sephardi congregation was formally established in 1850; the first synagogue, with a meldar attended by 23 boys, was built in 1870, burned in 1878 and rebuilt in 1880. An Ashkenazi synagogue followed in 1902 and a Sephardi Novi Hram and Jewish house in 1937.

Mostar. Jews settled from 1850. The synagogue of 1889 was the only one in Herzegovina; burned by Ustaše and German forces in 1944, later a puppet theatre.

Elsewhere. Congregations existed at Bijeljina (synagogue 1901), Bihać (1906), Derventa (1911), Gračanica (1890), Rogatica (1928, razed 2004), Tuzla, Višegrad (1905), Visoko (1886), Zenica (1903), Žepče (1903), Brčko, Bugojno, Jajce, Tešanj, Foča and Doboj.

In 1940 there were 24 Jewish communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina; only Sarajevo, Tuzla and Banja Luka had separate Sephardi and Ashkenazi congregations. Only four Bosnian towns had no Jews at all.

What Jewish cemeteries survive?

Ivan Čerešnješ identified 44 Jewish burial places in Bosnia and Herzegovina, of which 26 survive: Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Bihać, Bijeljina, Bosanski Brod, Bosanski Šamac, Brčko, Bugojno, Derventa, Doboj, Gračanica, Jajce, Mostar, Podromanija, Rogatica, Sanski Most, Mišinci, Srebrenica, Stolac, Travnik, Tuzla, Višegrad, Visoko, Vlasenica, Zenica and Zvornik. Several are reduced to a few stones or heavily overgrown.

No Bosnian cemetery appears to have been comprehensively transcribed. There are entries for Sarajevo in the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, but nothing approaching a full record of any site.

Old Jewish Cemetery (Kovačići), Sarajevo — founded around 1630 by Rabbi Samuel Baruh, who rented the land on Mount Trebević from the Muslim community; his own stone survives. The oldest burial ground of any religion in Sarajevo, and the largest Jewish cemetery in south-eastern Europe. About 3,800 graves across three and a half hectares, though a railway cut through the site under Austria-Hungary and destroyed the lower half.

The oldest stones are unlike anything else in Europe: large, rounded, lying horizontally, set into the hillside, quarried nearby and near-identical in size. Early inscriptions are in Hebrew only; later ones add Judeo-Spanish, often in verse. Stones from the Ashkenazi cemetery, closed in 1959, were moved here and some 900 remains placed in a common grave.

The cemetery overlooks Sarajevo and was used as an artillery and sniping position by Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992–95 siege. It was mined before their withdrawal; demining was completed in 1998.

Travnik — founded 1762, beside the Catholic cemetery. 250–300 stones, Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish.

Stolac (Krajsina) — the grave of Rabbi Moše Danon, chief rabbi of Sarajevo, who died at Stolac in 1830 travelling to Jerusalem. A pilgrimage site until the Second World War and again today. Restored 1989, a National Monument since 2003. Also holds two Jewish soldiers of the Austrian army, one named Arnold Silberstein (d. 1889).

Doboj — founded between 1876 and 1888, 100–150 stones, inscriptions in Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, Serbo-Croat and German, oldest 1887. Still in use.

Mostar — established between 1890 and 1904, 50–100 stones, oldest 1904. Still in use; the key is held at the petrol station opposite.

Visoko — mid-nineteenth century, 25–50 stones, maintained from Sarajevo.

Zenica — established 1875 at Raspotočje. Fenced but neglected.

Rogatica — established 1900. 16 stones plus about 10 older ones sunk into the ground.

Banja Luka — the cemetery of 1883 had rows of white marble monuments resembling medieval stećci. It survived until the end of 1976.

What records survive?

Bosnia has lost more of its Jewish records than almost any comparable community. There were three separate destructions.

The Holocaust took the communal and personal archives of Sarajevo, including the records of some forty voluntary organisations active in the interwar period.

The 1992–95 war displaced or destroyed archival material through neglect.

In February 2014, protesters firebombed the presidency building in Sarajevo. The Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina were on the ground floor. Most interwar and Second World War documents were destroyed. Austro-Hungarian material was largely preserved.

What survives:

Record type	Years	Where
Sidžili (Ottoman court registers), Sarajevo	1557 onward	Gazi Husrev-beg Library, Sarajevo
Ottoman census and poll-tax registers	1604, 1690, 1696, 1725	Ottoman Archives, Istanbul
Mestvica’s register of Sarajevo	1841	Published, Sarajevo 1970
Sarajevo community births and deaths	Austro-Hungarian period onward	Sarajevo Historical Archives
Austro-Hungarian administration	1878–1918	Historical Archives of Sarajevo
Ustaše government records	1941–45	Historical Archives of Sarajevo

Registers for Bosnian communities other than Sarajevo are believed lost.

The Pinkas. The register of the Sarajevo community: a bound book of 15 × 25 cm in Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish, in Rashi script, recording tax lists, officers, rabbis and cantors, debts, and the community’s decisions.

The first was begun in 1580/1 and burned. The second, of 1720, was the oldest document the community held; a German officer took it in 1941 and it has never been recovered. A third, 1830–88, held accounts only. The most recent was of 1925.

Rumours after the war placed the 1720 Pinkas in an Austrian or German library, possibly at Leipzig. One page is said to have been found in a Russian archive, though this was never followed up. Recovering it would be the single most significant find in Bosnian Jewish genealogy.

Community registers. The vital registers were entrusted to the religious teacher Jakov Maestro in 1941.

Where else should you look?

Dubrovnik State Archives. The most important external source for the early period, and earlier than the Ottoman material. Jorjo Tadić worked it in Jevreji u Dubrovniku do polovine XVII stoljeća (Sarajevo, 1937), which names Sarajevo Jews from the 1560s.

Ottoman Archives, Istanbul. Detailed census (mufassal) and poll-tax (cizye) registers. The 1604 census of the Bosnian sanjak is published.

Croatian State Archives, Zagreb. The main source for the Holocaust in Bosnia, which fell within the Independent State of Croatia.

Archives of Yugoslavia and the Jewish Historical Museum, Belgrade. The Jewish Historical Museum holds the largest collection of material from the former Yugoslav communities, much of it now digitised. The Archives of Yugoslavia hold interwar material, including a good freemasonry archive.

Vienna. For 1878–1918. Ana Sirić Pavlović describes the Vienna archives as substantially unexploited for Bosnian Jewish research.

National Library of Serbia and National and University Library, Zagreb. Periodical collections, the Zagreb holding being the largest of Jewish periodicals, much of it on microfilm.

Yakir Event Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Created by Yugoslav Jewish immigrants to Israel. Photographs, personal papers, and manuscripts including drama by Laura Papo Bohoreta.

Jevrejska digitalna biblioteka. A free online repository founded by Bosnian Jews living in Serbia, holding rare books, periodicals and survivor testimony that are difficult to find elsewhere.

Venice, Ancona, Livorno, Split. Trading partners of the Sarajevo merchants.

Who is named in the Ottoman-period sources?

Individuals named in sources for the Ottoman period, chiefly from Aladin Husić’s study of the Sarajevo sidžili and the chronology drawn from the community Pinkas.

Sarajevo, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Isak son of Rafael (1565, the earliest documented dwelling, in Sagrakdži Mahmud’s mahala) · Mojsije Kuzina (c.1570s, merchant, recorded at both Sarajevo and Mostar) · Mošiko Yehuda, Solomon Yehuda and Aslan Yehuda (1604, the only three household representatives recorded that year) · Izak Ješurin (1622, merchant, tried at Dubrovnik) · Samuel Baruh (rabbi 1623–49, from Salonika; the first rabbi of Sarajevo and founder of the old cemetery) · Nehemija Hija Hajon (born Sarajevo, rabbi, c.1665) · Cevi Aškenazi, Haham Cevi (rabbi 1686–89, arrived from Buda) · Isak Cevi (rabbi 1691–1716) · Šem-Tov Cevi (rabbi 1716–32)

Sarajevo, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. David Pardo (rabbi from 1765, founded the yeshivot at Sarajevo and Travnik) · Isak Pardo (rabbi 1781–1810) · Sunbul (sarraf, 1765) · the sons of Aron Ćolaković (creditors, 1778) · Mirkado (furniture maker and watch trader) · Jakov, Benjamin and Mordohaj (pub keepers in the Beytü’l-Yahud, 1786) · Hajdariko, Avram and Solomon (holders of çiftliks at Pofalići, 1818–19, the only non-Muslims granted the tax relief attached) · Moše Danon (chief rabbi from 1815, died at Stolac 1830) · Danijel Salom, called Uščuplija (benefactor; bought the land at Stolac and rebuilt Danon’s monument) · Isak efendija Salom (born Sarajevo 1804, studied medicine at Parma, the first Bosnian physician with a university degree) · Meir Menahem Danon (rabbi to 1839) · Moše Perera (rabbi 1839–49) · Benjamin Danon (rabbi 1849–52) · Šimon Hasson, called Rav de la Kisela (rabbi 1856–58) · Lizica Bihora (grain merchant, fled to Jerusalem 1845)

Surnames recorded in Bosnia include Abinun, Albahari, Alkalaj, Altarac, Atijas, Baruh, Danon, Elazar, Finci, Finzi, Gadol, Gaon, Gracijani, Hajon, Kabiljo, Kajon, Kamhi, Kalderon, Konforti, Levi, Maestro, Mevorah, Montiljo, Musafija, Nahmias, Ovadija, Papo, Pardo, Perera, Poljokan, Romano, Salom, Samokovlija, Sarafić, Sumbulović, Tuvi, Uščuplija.

The Sarajevo Haggadah

Made in Barcelona around 1350 and carried out of Spain, the Sarajevo Haggadah was in Italy in the sixteenth century and reached Bosnia by an unknown route.

The Koen family sold it to the National Museum in 1894; the Jewish community could not raise the price itself. It was hidden from the Germans in 1942 by the museum’s librarian Derviš Korkut, who smuggled it to a mosque in a village near Treskavica, and it was kept in a bank vault through the 1992–95 siege.

It belongs to the state, not to the Jewish community.

What changed after 1878?

Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia in 1878 and annexed it in 1908. Ashkenazi Jews arrived with the administration as officers, officials and professionals, and founded a separate community at Sarajevo in 1879. A few Ashkenazim were in Bosnia before this but do not appear in the censuses.

The 1879 census recorded 3,426 Jews; that of 1910 recorded 11,869, of whom 85 per cent were Sephardi. In the 1921 census Judeo-Spanish was the mother tongue of 10,000 of Sarajevo’s 70,000 inhabitants.

La Benevolencija, founded 1892, was the community’s educational and charitable society, funded by the wealthier Sephardim. It began by supporting Sephardi apprentices, extended its work to Ashkenazim, and later to Jewish communities across Yugoslavia — including a deputation sent to relieve the poverty of the Jews of Bitola.

Germany invaded in April 1941 and Bosnia became part of the Independent State of Croatia. Nearly 5,000 Sarajevo Jews were deported in 1941 and 2,000 more in 1942, mostly to Jasenovac and Auschwitz. Of about 14,000 Bosnian Jews, some 10,000 were murdered; 1,292 remained in 1945. Those who survived did so largely by reaching the Italian zone, many of them held on the island of Rab, or by fighting with the Partisans. Forty-nine Bosnians have been recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

The Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities of Sarajevo merged in 1946. La Benevolencija was closed under socialism and revived in 1992, when it ran a clinic, pharmacies, a soup kitchen and evacuation convoys through the siege of Sarajevo.

Around 1,000 Jews live in Bosnia and Herzegovina today.

Sephardic World lectures on Bosnia and the Balkans

The Jews of Bosnia — Francine Friedman (2021)
Sources for Bosnian Sephardic research — Ana Sirić Pavlović
The Holocaust in Yugoslavia — Esther Danon Gitman (2022)
The Lost World of Monastir: Sephardic Jews in Ottoman and Yugoslav Macedonia — David Mendoza (2024)
Researching Jewish Ancestors in the Ottoman Empire — David Mendoza (2023)

Help us find records

We are looking for:

The Sarajevo Pinkas of 1720, taken in 1941, and the single page reported in a Russian archive
The Sarajevo community’s vital registers, entrusted to Jakov Maestro in 1941
Transcriptions of the Sarajevo sidžili entries naming Jews
Any transcription or photographic record of the Kovačići cemetery, particularly one made before 1992
Photographs or transcriptions of the Banja Luka cemetery, cleared in 1976
Material on the smaller communities: Bijeljina, Derventa, Gračanica, Žepče, Tešanj, Bugojno, Jajce, Foča
Family papers from any Bosnian Sephardi family

Please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we work under whatever conditions you set.

Research services

Bosnian research means Ottoman court registers in Turkish, Austro-Hungarian records in German, and community records in Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish and Serbo-Croat, split between Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Belgrade, Vienna, Istanbul and Jerusalem — with much of the local material destroyed. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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