A monument to fallen Jewish soldiers in the wars fought between 1912 and 1919 at the Sephardic cemetery in Belgrade

Abstract

A decade after the end of the First World War a memorial to Jewish soldiers who took part in the Balkan Wars, as well as in World War I, was built at the Sephardic cemetery in Belgrade. This memorial was designed by the architect Samuel Sumbul and created in Belgrade. The complex monumental and sepulchral entity in question played an important role in creating a lasting memory, among both the Serbian and the Jewish public, and of permanently marking out the role and participation of Jews, as subjects of the Kingdom of Serbia, in the process of liberating the original state and creating the subsequent one. This memorial to Jewish soldiers reflects the ideological and political complexity of relations between the Jewish community and the Serbian state, as well as those between the Jewish community and the subsequently formed Kingdom of SCS (Serbs, Croats and Slovenians), which developed to a point whereby Jews were called Serbs of Moses' Faith, under the Karadordević dynasty. The building of the monument had the goal of highlighting the role of Jews as patriots who participated in the creation of a nationally heterogeneous state (the one in which the monument was built) and also as loyal subjects of the dynasty under which they fought in this war. This sort of monumental memory legitimized the belonging of the Jewish people to the broader state community through the principle of spilt blood and military merits, taking into consideration, in particular, the centuries old Jewish experience of resisting assimilation and safeguarding personal religious and national identity. Observed from this vantage point, the monument reflects the complex discourses within the framework of which these parallel identities and narratives are visually constituted and expressed.