Serbo-Croatian as a Language of Sephardic Literature: The Cases of Isak Samokovlija and Jacques Confino

Abstract

Abstract The early twentieth century saw a rise in Jewish writers in what is traditionally considered non-Jewish languages in the Balkans like in the rest of Europe. In light of this phenomenon’s significance, we pose the question why and how Serbo-Croatian became a language of Sephardic literature. The article questions the accepted narrative of ‘linguistic acculturation’ of Sephardic Jews in the Balkans and unearths the complex cultural, but also political background of this Jewish phenomenon using the examples of two prolific, recognized, and celebrated writers of Sephardic background, Isak Samokovlija and Jacques Confino. Through historicization of Sephardic multilingualism in Serbia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 1890s to the 1920s, it argues that the adoption of Serbo-Croatian was motivated equally, if not dominantly, by Jewish political aims in the region rather than the pressures of emancipation only. Samokovlija and Confino’s biographies and cultural choices, therefore, illuminate an unlikely Sephardic history.