The Jewish Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina now numbers some 500 people, spread in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Mostar, Tuzla, Doboj, and Zenica.

Ottoman rule

The first Jews arrived in the regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1575.

As tens of thousands of Jews fled the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire welcomed Jews who were able to reach his territories. Jews fleeing Spain and Portugal were welcomed in – and found their way to – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Thrace and other areas of Europe under Ottoman control. Jews began to arrive in Bosnia and Herzegovina in numbers in the 16th century, with Jews arriving from the Ottoman Empire, and settling mainly in Sarajevo. The first Ashkenazi Jews arrived from Hungary in 1686, when the Ottoman Turks were expelled from Hungary Jewish community prospered in Bosnia, living side by side with their Bosnian Muslim neighbors, as one of the largest European centres for Sephardi Jewry outside of Spain.

Jews in the Ottoman Empire were generally well-treated and were recognized under the law as non-Muslims. Despite some restrictions, the Jewish communities of the Empire prospered. They were granted significant autonomy, with various rights including the right to buy real estate, to build synagogues and to conduct trade throughout the Ottoman Empire.Jews, along with the other non-Muslim subjects of the Empire, were granted full equality under Ottoman law by 1856.

Habsburg rule

The Austro-Hungarian Empire conquered Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, and brought with them an injection of European capital, companies and methods. Many professional, educated Ashkenazi Jews arrived with the Austro-Hungarians. The Sephardi Jews continued to engage in their traditional areas, mainly foreign trade and crafts.

World War I saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and after the war Bosnia and Herzegovina was incorporated into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the census of 1921, Ladino was the mother language of 10,000 out of 70,000 inhabitants of Sarajevo. By 1926, there were 13,000 Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Holocaust

Background

In 1940, there were approximately 14,000 Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina,  with 10,000 in Sarajevo.

With the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 by the Nazis and their Allies, Bosnia and Herzegovina came under the control of the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet-state. The Independent State of Croatia was headed by the notoriously anti-Semitic Ustaše, and they wasted little time in persecuting non-Croats such as Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

Deportation and murder

In September 1941 deportations of Jews began, with most Bosnian Jews being deported to Auschwitz or to concentration camps in Croatia. The Ustaše set up concentration camps at Kerestinac, Jadovna, Metajna and Slana. The most notorious, where cruelty of unimaginable proportions was perpetrated against Jewish and Serbian prisoners were at Pag and Jasenovac. At Jasenovac alone, hundreds of thousands of people were murdered (mostly Serbs), including 20,000 Jews.

By War's end, the Ustaše had murdered more than 500,000 Serbs, approximately 40,000 Roma (Gypsies) and 32,000 Jews.Among Bosnian Jews, 10,000 of the pre-War Jewish population of 14,000 had been murdered. Most of the 4,000 who had survived did so by fighting with the Yugoslav, Jewish or Soviet Partisans  or by escaping to the Italian controlled zone  (approximately 1,600 had escaped to the Italian controlled zone on the Dalmatian coast .

Jewish members of the Yugoslav Army became German prisoners of war and survived the war. They returned to Sarajevo after the war.

During World War II, the manuscript was hidden from the Nazis by Dr. Jozo Petrovic,  the director of the city museum  and by Derviš Korkut, the chief librarian, who smuggled the Haggadah out to a Muslim cleric in a mountain village near Treskavica — there it was hidden in the mosque among Korans and other Islamic texts.  During the Bosnian War of 1992-1995, when Sarajevo was under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces, the manuscript survived in an underground bank vault.

Afterwards, the manuscript was restored through a special campaign financed by the United Nations and the Bosnian Jewish community in 2001, and went on permanent display at the museum in December 2002.

Post-war community

The Jewish Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina was reconstituted after the Holocaust, but most survivors chose to emigrate to Israel.  The community came under the auspices of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia, based in the capital, Belgrade.

In the early 1990s, before the Yugoslav Wars, the Jewish population of Bosnia and Herzegovina was over 2,000,  and relations between Jews and their Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim neighbors were good.

Yugoslav wars

When the Yugoslav Wars broke out in 1991, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee evacuated 15,000 Bosnian Jews to Israel, and most chose to remain there after the wars.

Today

Today, there are some 500 Jews living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They enjoy excellent relations with their non-Jewish neighbors and with the Bosnian government, as it was throughout the history.  As a result of the ethnic balancing act involved in the UN-imposed Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jews and other minorities are forbidden in the Constitution of Bosnia from running for the position of president.^[17] Jakob Finci, a prominent Bosnian Jew and Bosnia's ambassador to Switzerland, and Dervo Sejdić, a prominent Bosnian Roma and member of the member of Bosnia's Roma Council, have launched an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights on the basis that Bosnia's Constitution violates the European Convention on Human Rights. A finding is expected in September 2009.