In this week’s long read, Mads Jacobsen explores the Jewish experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina through the eyes of Sarajevo-born Rabbi Eliezer Papo. “If you imagine Bosnia to be a piece of somun, that piece of bread you eat during Ramadan, you cannot say that Jews are the water of that somun, nor can you say that they are the flour, but you can certainly say that they are the black seeds on the top of it. Now, could a somun survive without it? Yes. Would it still be the same somun? Certainly not. Jews are currently a small percentage of the Bosnian population, but they are an important part of the urban population, and they have contributed a great deal to the country. So, could Bosnia do it without Jews? Yes. Would it still be the same Bosnia? Certainly not”, explained Rabbi Eliezer Papo in an interview with the Post-Conflict Research Center. This year, the Jewish community in Sarajevo celebrated its 450th anniversary by hosting an international conference in the Ashkenazi Synagogue dedicated to folklore, linguistics, history and the relationship between the Jewish community and other communities. Following this anniversary, Mads Hoeygaard Jacobsen – an intern at the Post-Conflict Research Center – had the chance to interview Sarajevo-born Rabbi Eliezer Papo to talk about the Jewish experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the different epochs of the country’s history. “Every single life is marked by traumatic events,” started Rabbi Papo. “It is very traumatic to be born, and it is probably quite traumatic to die, but in between there is an entire life. Nobody reduces life to those two traumatic events. So, unlike the Jewish experience in many different parts of the world, their experience in Bosnia was a good one.” The earliest records indicate that Jews had settled in Sarajevo by 1565 and were of the Sephardic branch of Judaism, descendants of Jews who had lived in Spain and Portugal prior to being expelled in 1492. In order to illustrate to what extent the Sephardic Jews lived a robust existence in Sarajevo during the Ottoman era, the Rabbi pointed to a piece of jurisprudence that the Bosnian Jewish community contributed to the Halakha, or Jewish Law, in those years. On the Sabbath, it is forbidden for a religious Jew to light a fire, so how does one smoke? “Well,” explained Rabbi Papo, “if on Friday you take a nargilla and fill it with tobacco smoke without taking it into your lungs and then close the lid from both sides, you can use it during the Sabbath without the starting a fire…That’s the way Jews in Sarajevo lived. Think of it, if these were the questions Rabbis dealt with, investing time and effort into inventing a way to smoke on Sabbath, that means all other problems were solved and that life was very good and easy.” When the Sephardic Jews settled in Bosnia, they fell under the control of the Pact of Umar, a piece of Islamic jurisprudence. This law stated that non-Muslims within the Ottoman Empire would be provided security if they adhered to various strict prohibitions of their religious practices. One of the conditions proclaimed that non-Muslim religious buildings would be permitted to function, but no new buildings were allowed to be built and no repairs were to be made to those already existing. This presented a problem because no synagogues existed in Bosnia prior to the Jewish settlement in the sixteenth century. But the Sephardim soon began negotiations with the Ottoman administrators who, in the words of Rabbi Papo, said: “OK, you know what? Let us make this profitable for all of us. Our heart hurts when we have to break sharia, so you will have to pay for that.” The Rabbi continued: “If building a synagogue costs a million dollars, it would actually cost two million in the Ottoman Empire because you needed to bribe everybody along the way from Sarajevo, to Travnik, to Istanbul.” This system continued until the end of the nineteenth century when Bosnia came under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “When Austro-Hungary arrived, things changed from good to better,” explained Rabbi Papo. “I mean, the country was still occupied, but it was more like: goodbye to an old dying empire and hello to something much more enlightened. Jews started to thrive even more as new European concepts of freedom, citizenship, and equality, were brought to the country.” It was during the Austro-Hungarian occupation that the Sephardic Jews were joined by some of their Ashkenazi brethren who arrived from the Habsburg Empire, even though they had separate houses of worship and language. Jewish participation in public and political life during this period was also very high.