A Bosnian Serb nationalist could combine philo-Islamic views with virulent antisemitism

Evidence

In contrast to Serbia, in Bosnia (known from the 1870s as Bosnia- Hercegovina) the Orthodox Serbs in the nineteenth century comprised a minority. Like Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina was inhabited by Orthodox, Muslims and Catholics. The two largest ethno-religious groups were the Orthodox Serbs and the Muslim Bosniaks. Bosnian Serb nationalism consequently manifested the conflicting desires both to define itself against the Muslims and to include them within the Serb nation. The Bosnian Serb socialist nationalist Vaso Pelagić celebrated Bosnia-Hercegovina’s Islamic heritage and spoke glowingly of the Islamic religion: ‘the Turkish religion is of a democratic nature’; ‘In Islam there are no princes or paupers, according to the Qur’an, but only Muhammedans.’ Pelagić believed that medieval Bosnia was inhabited by members of the Bogumil Christian sect and that, on account of the ‘democratic nature of the Muhammedan religion and administration’, members of this sect turned Turk en masse ‘because due to their faith and freedom of thought they had been persecuted by both Orthodox and Catholics’; conversely, the Ottoman government had been ‘towards other faiths much more tolerant and human than many Christian governments and states’. In 1871, Pelagić called on Orthodox Serbs to ‘unite fraternally with Serbo-Muhammedans and Serbo-Catholics’ in the struggle against Ottoman rule. Pelagić was, however, the author of an antisemitic tract in which he promised to inform readers of ‘the horrors that the kikes and their gospels—the Talmud, are preparing for the entire non-kike world’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1053

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the voluminous scholarship on how 19th-century Balkan nationalisms selectively repurposed Islamophilic and antisemitic tropes; also to debates about antisemitism as transferable from Jews to Muslims in the European imagination (relevant to the book’s core shared-story thesis).