Stephen Sulejman Schwartz,
verantwortlicher Direktor des Zentrums für den Islamischen Pluralismus, bittet
Moslems, die Fatiha und die surah Ya Sin zu rezitieren und dass
Nichtmoslems auch Gebete für den bosnischen Gelehrtenprofessor Muhamed Neziroviċ
von der Universität Sarajevo für romanische Sprachen abhalten, der vor kurzem
nach einer langen Krankheit verstarb.
Hamo Neziroviċ, obwohl Moslem,
war vielleicht der größte Gelehrte im Bereich der Bosnischen Sephardic Studien
auf der Welt. Seine Arbeiten umfassen das hervorragende Buch Jevrejsko
Španjolska Književnost (spanisch-jüdische Literatur), herausgegeben vom
Bosnischen Verlagshaus Svjetlost, nur wenige Wochen vor dem Ausbruch des
Bosnischen Krieges 1992. Der Hauptlager des Verlages wurde während des Krieges
zerstört, aber Schwartz schaffte es, 50 wertvolle Kopien davon nach dem Konflikt
ausfindig zu machen und zu retten. Hamo editierte auch die hervorragende
zweibändige Sammlung von bosnischen Sephardic Balladen und Lyriken, (Romancero
Judeo-Español), gesammelt von Samuel Elazar, veröffentlicht in Spanisch und
Bosnisch in Sarajevo und gingen verloren, als serbische Einheiten während des
Krieges den Svjetlost-Buchlager in Blažuj nieder brannten. Zudem wurden
das Haus und die Bibliothek Neziroviċs zerstört und verwüstet. Es war die hohe
Ehre für Schwartz, seine eigene komplette, umfassende Bibliothek von Sephardica
Hamo und der Universität Sarajevos zu schenken.
Hamo diente als bosnischer
Botschafter für Spanien während des Krieges. Er war ein hervorragender
Gelehrter, ein wahrer Freund der Juden und ein vorbildlicher Moslem, dessen
Verlust sich tief und schmerzlich groß ist. Weil die Todesanzeigen in Bosnisch
veröffentlicht werden, wird CIP diese übersetzen und sie veröffentlichen.
Fatiha.
Stephen Sulejman Schwartz
Verantwortlicher Direktor
Zentrum für den Islamischen
Pluralismus
Washington, DC, die USA
We here reprint Schwartz's "Homage to Muhamed Neziroviċ " from the book
Sarajevo Rose, London, 1995.
Homage to Muhamed Neziroviċ
Of the friends I have made in my Balkan travels, there is
nobody alive who is dearer to me, in certain respects, than Professor Muhamed
Neziroviċ of the University of Sarajevo. Hamo, as he is universally known, is
not prepossessing person. He is a scholar through and through, even though he
served as his country’s ambassador to Spain from 1994 to 1998. During the
Bosnian war, his home and personal library, in a zone quickly taken by Serb
troops, were entirely burned.
Hamo
deserves great honor for the centerpiece of his academic work: his publications
on the Bosnian Sephardim. This Bosnian Muslim has gone much further than any
Jewish scholar alive today in studying the Judeo-Spanish idiom and traditions
among the Jews of the South Slavic lands.
He was born in Sarajevo in 1934, in the mixed Muslim and Serb
mahala, or neighborhood, of Nadmlini. His family owned land and were
active in commerce; they had strong personal links with the Sephardic business
community. Indeed, an uncle, although Muslim, was a member of the Jewish choral
society, Lira, and toured Palestine with it in the mid-’30s. Hamo
himself, as a child, had an account in the Bank Geula, a Jewish bank
expropriated by the Germans during World War II. An aunt, who had gone from
Sarajevo to live in Bijeljina, often spoke bitterly of the arrest by the Nazis
of her three Jewish women friends, Mazalika, Mazalta, and Ordunja. She protested
their arrest, saying she did not wish to be separated from them, and a German
soldier warned, “If you love them so much, you can go with them.”
Hamo also has two brothers who
still lived in Sarajevo in 2003.
Hamo finished his elementary and secondary education in
Sarajevo, then studied Romance languages at the university there. After several
years as a secondary school teacher in Gradačac and Konjic, he was appointed a
university graduate assistant. He spent three years in France completing his
dissertation, Le Vocabulaire dans deux versions du Roman de Thèbes, which
he defended at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1975. He soon received his
first appointment to the faculty of the University of Sarajevo, where he remains
today, as Professor of French and Comparative Romance Grammar. Among his many
publications, he was editor for the cultural history of Bosnia-Hercegovina in
the Yugoslav Encyclopedia. He was decorated Cavaliere della
Repubblica d’Italia by the Italian government.
My first encounter with Hamo was not personal, but involved my purchase
of his two-volume edition of the Elazar anthology,
Romancero
Judeo-Español, in Sarajevo in
1991. Later, I discovered some copies of Hamo’s
Jevrejsko
Španjolska Književnost
[Jewish
Spanish Literature] lying unnoticed in bookstores,
after most of them had been destroyed during the 1992–95 war.
One of Hamo’s most significant contributions is his article “La
Istoria de los
Žudios de Bosnia de Moše (Rafael) Atias (Zeki-Efendi),”
delivered to the Fourth International Congress of the History of the Spanish
Language, held in La Rioja in 1997. This paper offers an indispensable
panorama of intellectual life among the Sarajevo Sephardim at the end of the
19th century.
In it, Professor Neziroviċ – one should
not use a nickname in seriously describing his scholarly work – recalls the
founding of the weekly newspaper La Alborada
[The Dawn] in 1900.
La Alborada
carried as its subtitle, Periódico
Instructivo-Literario organo del Žudaismo de
Bosnia y Erzegovina. This publication was issued in
Judeo-Spanish, mainly using square Rashi Hebrew type, by the poet Abraham Aaron
Capón. Capón was born in 1853 of a rabbinical family in Rushchuk, on the
Bulgarian bank of the Danube (the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti was from the same
town). He had first attempted to launch La Alborada
in
Ploesti, Romania, in 1898–99, although a letter indicates it was printed in
Rushchuk. But the enterprise had
failed. Capón
had then decided to emigrate to America, but on the way he stopped in Vienna,
where he was delayed by a great influx of Russian Jews heading across the
Atlantic. He met a Jew from Bijeljina named Meir Danon, who invited him to go to
Sarajevo; he went and remained there until his death in 1930. In a short
biography published in the Elazar Romancero Judeo-Español, Capón is
credited with a “majestuosa personalidad.” He worked as a religious and secular
teacher, and he was an enlightener; when he arrived in Sarajevo his
sophistication surprised the rest of the Jewish believers, as did his dedication
to the study of scientific and Hebrew topics. He wore European dress, rather
than the traditional Ottoman costume still typical of Sarajevo. Later in his
life he wrote theatrical pieces and poetry.
La Alborada lasted only seven and a half months in
Sarajevo, but it had a considerable impact. Congratulations on its foundation
were sent by the Rabbinate of Turkey and the Jewish Academic Youth of Vienna and
Sarajevo. Its most important contributing writer was one of the most
distinguished Jewish citizens of the city: Moshe ben Rafael Attias, known as
Moshe Rafajlović and as “Zeki-Effendi,” author of a History of the Jews of
Bosnia. This work was signed “El Amante de la Luz” [The Lover of
Light].
Zeki-Effendi was born in Sarajevo in 1845 to a leading family,
and was educated in a Turkish state school open to members of all confessions,
but mainly attended by Muslims. The curriculum was Islamic, and Zeki-Effendi’s
study there was notable, although not unique among Sarajevo Sephardim. He
travelled to Istanbul where he carried out further religious studies, and his
knowledge of Islamic culture led him to a devotion to the outstanding Persian poet and
mystic Muslihud’din Sa’adi, the 13th-century author of the Gulistan, or
Rose Garden. Returning to Sarajevo, he entered the Turkish official
service and rose to a high position in the tax authority. With the arrival of
the Austro-Hungarian occupation in 1878, he remained employed as financial
counsellor.
Both Capón and Zeki-Effendi wrote standard Castilian, not
Judeo-Spanish, although their texts were printed in Hebrew letters. In 1911, the
great Spanish scholar of Sephardic balladry, Don Manuel Manrique de Lara, toured
the Balkans in Attias’s company, collecting oral texts in Bosnia, Serbia, and
Kosova. Capón commissioned Zeki-Effendi to write an authoritative history of the Bosnian
Jews, and Moshe ben Rafael Attias has become especially identified with the
historiography of R. Moshe Danon, “the rabbi of Stolac.”
Another of the most interesting aspects of Zeki-Effendi’s
history is his indication of the communal role of the waqf or Islamic
endowment of the great Ottoman governor Gazi Husrevbeg, to whom the tenants of
the original Jewish
residences, as well as Jewish shopkeepers in the Bezistan
market paid rents. Other fascinating items include a record of departure for
Safed, the Palestinian center of Lurianic Kabbalah, by one of many distinguished
rabbis.
The rabbinical history of the Bosnian Jews is one of the
numerous topics discussed in Professor Neziroviċ’s 1992 volume
Jevrejsko Španjolska Književnost. This work
provides a uniquely thorough picture of a regional Sephardic culture, discussing
features of its dialect, religious and literary genres, folklore and artistic
literature, with exemplary texts and analyses thereof. It is a book well
deserving of translation and publication in other
languages.
Professor Neziroviċ delivered an excellent summary of
Sarajevo
Sephardic history at a conference
on Spain and Hispanic Culture in the European Southeast, in Athens in 2000, with
the title “El Lugar de la Comunidad Sefardí de Bosnia entre las Comunidades
Sefardíes de Europa y el Mediterráneo.” He told me that at the conference he
conferred with Marius Sala, a great Romanian scholar of Romance linguistics.
Sala’s volume Estudios
sobre el judeoespañol de Bucarest (1) was the first book on the topic I ever bought,
in San Francisco in 1976, while staring into Sarajevo cigarette tins, soon after encountering Kalmi
Baruh. I brought the book with me to Sarajevo. Hamo had lost his copy when the
Serbs burned his house, and I gave mine to him, with others that were difficult
for him to obtain.
Hamo
said Sala had agreed with him that Sarajevo should become a new center of
Sephardic studies. And I, of course, also concur; we have several times
discussed how beneficial it would be for the University of Sarajevo to include a
Center for Balkan Jewish Studies. But these sentiments may also echo that found
in the paper “El Lugar de la Comunidad Sefardí de Bosnia …,” where it is noted
that in 1924 the Sarajevo newspaper Jevrejski Život [Jewish Life]
criticized “the Sephardismo of Sarajevo, a Sephardismo absolutely
detached and separatist, that wishes to see Sarajevo as a center of
pan-Sephardism because Sarajevo, according to the opinion of the promoters of
this idea, is the capital and most central city in the
entire Sephardic world.”
The
same paper notes that the first collectors of Sephardic ballads were the Bosnian
rabbis HaKohen Moshe ben Mikael (1702) and HaKohen Bahar Moshe David (1794).
This is the tradition I have tried to support, and to which Muhamed Neziroviċ
belongs. He also points out that in the darkest moments of fascism in
Bosnia-Hercegovina, during World War II, the Islamic communities of the country
directed “Muslim Resolutions” to the Axis occupiers, calling for the protection
of life and property of all Bosnians, regardless of religion. The topic of these
resolutions is absent from academic discourse in the West; but its legacy also
unites us.
The contribution of Muhamed Neziroviċ to Sephardic studies
represents an indispensable resource for Jewish cultural history. But his
position in Sarajevo may be the seed of a vision. Sarajevo has been scarred by
the same intolerance of the non-Christian “other” that led to the Holocaust. Its
university, which once graduated numerous doctors and other professionals
employed throughout the Muslim world, today struggles toward reconstruction. I
have
often been told by Eastern European diplomats and intellectuals of their
ambitious plans for new memorials to Jewish martyrdom in World War II. But I
have several times proposed that rather than create new museums, one of the
governments or universities in southeast Europe should endow a department of
Sephardic studies, with the mission of preserving books and manuscripts and
providing a home for visiting scholars from Spain, Israel, and the United
States. I am prepared to offer my own small contribution to such a program, in
the form of Sephardica I have collected. But I can imagine no better place for
such an effort than Sarajevo, and no better person to lead such a program than
Muhamed Neziroviċ, my friend and mentor.
Hamo
is a true son of Sarajevo and a truly righteous Gentile.
Note
(1) México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Dirección
General
de Publicaciones, 1970.
Bibliography
Elazar, Samuel M., ed. Romancero Judeo-Español, 2 vols,
Sarajevo, Svjetlost, 1987.
Neziroviċ, Muhamed, Curriculum vitae furnished by M.N.,
Sarajevo, 2001.
—— “La
Istoria de los Žudios de Bosnia de Moše (Rafael) Atias (Zeki-Efendi),” in
Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de Historia de
La Lengua
Española, La Rioja, 1997.
——
Jevrejsko Španjolska Književnost, Sarajevo,
Svjetlost, 1992.
—— “El
Lugar de la Comunidad Sefardí de Bosnia entre las Comunidades Sefardíes de
Europa y el Mediterraneo,” Conference on Spain and Hispanic Culture in the
European Southeast, Athens, 2000.
[Based on an article published in
Forward, August 15, 2003]