The Construction of the House of the Jewish Church-School Community in Belgrade and the Process of Jewish Emancipation

Through the construction of the House of the Jewish Church-School Community in Belgrade,¹ based on the project by architect Samuel Sumbul (1887– 1947), the process of the emancipation of the Belgrade Jewry in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (SCS) (1918–29) was complete (Figure 1). This representative public edifice became a functional entity with the Bet Jisrael synagogue, to which it was physically connected. These spaces of Jewish religious and creedal practices, educational activities, social and communal manifestations, and political events were united as meeting places of representatives of the Jewish community and the state at the time. The House of the Jewish Church-School Community, being the head office of the Rabbinate and the public Jewish institution, is studied through its numerous functions and its importance in the lives of the Jewish population in interwar Belgrade. These observations are an examination of the school’s visual shaping and artistic articulation. This important space has not been subject to comprehensive scholarly observation and interpretation, which is the aim of this article. Through a historiographic approach, this work analyzes the role of the House of the Jewish Church-School Community in shaping the Jewish community’s identity in Belgrade. Through analyses of archives, periodicals, and field research, the history of the construction of the Community House will be unveiled, because it has not been explored meticulously until now. A study of its architectural morphology is included with this research.

The presence of Jews in Belgrade, in the area of Jalija, mostly populated by the Sephardic population, was recorded as early as the 16th century.² As a visible minority, Jews functioned in Belgrade in accordance with the Ottoman cultural model, similarly to other major cities in the Balkans under Turkish rule, such as Sarajevo and Thessaloniki. The lives of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire, predominantly of Spanish descent, sharing a common Ladino language, and having mutually strong trade and family connections, determined the forms of representation and expression of the Jewish community’s identity. In this way of life, the distant boundaries of exchange within the Ottoman cultural sphere facilitated the maintenance of ethnic identity.³ The period after the national revolutions and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire changed the position of Jews with the newly created Christian states in the Balkans. There, they fought for civil equality, establishing a trusting relationship with the new authorities and adjusting the representations of their Jewish identity to the new political situation.⁴

During the 19th century, the Jewish community in Belgrade was large and important. It owned several synagogues, a school, a ritual bath (mikve), and a cemetery.⁵ This community predominantly consisted of merchants and craftsmen who actively participated in the life of the Belgrade trade bazaar, which served as a place for meeting other people and as a location of mutual cultural exchange.⁶ The position of Jews was regulated by laws in the Serbian principality (1815–82) and later in the Kingdom of Serbia (1882–1918), moving from distrust to gradual integration into the new Serbian society. One of the important stages in this process was the participation of Jews in the Balkan wars and the First World War (1912–18), which was documented by their death toll and tales of heroism. Their sacrifices to their country were interpreted as proof of loyalty to the kingdom of which they were subjects.⁷ This was exactly the reason that the phrase about Jews being “Serbs of Moses’s faith” was coined.⁸ The wider currents of European Jewish emancipation and the Haskalah movement, equivalent to those of the Enlightenment, lasted from the last decades of the 18th until almost the end of the 19th century. Such movements facilitated the ways of including this minority into Serbian society, following the model of Central European Jewry.⁹ The last stage of the integration of Belgrade’s Jewish community in the life and political structure of the Kingdom of SCS is considered to be the period beginning with...