Sarajevo Sephardim in Yugoslavia and their Linguistic Identification

The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent rise of national-states in the Balkans led to an increase in exposure to Western-style modernization and ultimately to two World Wars. This chapter highlights issues pertaining to linguistic identification within the Sephardic community in the most recent iteration of Yugoslavia (1945-1992) in comparison to the situation of the Jewish minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. The chapter recalls memories of Sarajevo Jews from the post-World War II Yugoslav state, and it reflects upon the loss of the Serbo-Croatian mother language after Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Moreover, this chapter moreover explores the interviewees conceptions of Judeo-Spanish, the language that was spoken by Jews in Sarajevo until the Holocaust. The aim of the chapter is thus to generate knowledge of conditions for linguistic identity formation. Furthermore, the chapter clarifies which language the Sephardi Jews opted for after Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990’s, as a result of the sociolinguistic disintegration of Serbo-Croatian. In this regard, the aim is also to shed light on how ideological preconditions have affected identity formation as it expresses itself in linguistic behavior.