The Yugoslav Experiment in Secular Jewishness

Abstract

While conducting ethnographic research in Yugoslavia, I heard Jewish individuals ask, 'Are we the final generation of Jews?' Like most peoples around the world, Jews show concern about maintaining their collective identity, especially when facing threats to their physical and cultural existence. For the purpose of this paper, an important fact is that those who asked this question belonged to a highly secularized community. The very Jewishness of some of the community's younger members had even been questioned by Jews living outside Yugoslavia. Religion, for most, was seen as part of their ancestral past and increasingly less viable in the contemporary modern world. In examining the Jews of the former state of socialist Yugoslavia as a test case, this paper asks a familiar question: can Jews maintain their identity and survive as a distinctive group without the beliefs and practices of the Judaic religion? In their case, the change in the scope of secularization was abrupt and dramatic because of the devastation of the Holocaust and a