The most controversial claim of the Jewish people - that they are the chosen people, the people of the Law, the bearer of the ethical mission - embodies the Jewish concept of the uniqueness of Judaic identity. To quote American rabbi Michael Goldberg, God who reveals Himself on Mount Sinai is not just the God of the Jews, but the Jews are the people who must transmit His revelation to the others, they must be a 'kingdom of clerics and holy people'Rosenberg 1998: 3-7).
The irrational intuition of this mission of mediation between Him and "them" - even when this is but a hazy implication of a hardly articulable past, a vague premonition preceding experience - unconsciously generates among the Jews in the Diaspora integrative strategies of open development, as well as constantly changing parameters which destabilize the closed world of the community and require perpetual reformulation of the idea of identity. Duality is inherent to this idea. The tangible presence of the Jews among the peoples amidst which they live, incorporates simultaneous integration into and aloofness from the respective environment; simultaneous presence in and absence from the discursive universe of being. And while the Jewish people have expounded the interpretations of their "uniqueness" in written texts, "the others" have questioned precisely this claim and, by force of their dominant positions, have been institutionalizing norms corresponding to various degrees of hostility. The more ingenious this hostility, the richer the spectrum of Jewish identities and, notwithstanding the considerable difference of the models included in this collective noun, their "substantial agent" remains invariable. Survival becomes a function of the threat; the millennial preservation of the Jewish identity in the Diaspora is a result of mutating hostility.
Jewish history is an encyclopaedia of perpetually new attempts to survive: in different spheres, in a different historical context, in different situations and to a different extent, an endless series of daily ordeals which account for the exceptional diversity of the adaptive strategies of the Jewish people, developed in the course of their millennial exile. The sinister outcome of even the most futile of those strategies actually confirms the paradoxical assertion that the historically predetermined project of the dispersion of the Israelite tribe actually incorporates the component that is most relevant to their survival: doomed to be the perpetual "others," immersed in an invariably hostile environment, denied winning variants of support beyond their own community, they are forced to concentrate their entire survival energy on themselves.
The formation of Jewish identities is parallel with exercises in self-improvement. In a savage environment of competitive mercilessness, unquestionable superiority is the only winning option. A strategy which any community would opt for in identical circumstances as a logical consequence of the existential aspiration to self-preservation. This centuries-long historical experience determines particular priorities in the value-system of the Jews, which have left a mark on more or less all Jewish identities.
It is impossible to talk of a Jewish identity in the singular precisely because of the variety of experience. There is a vast multitude of Jewish identities, which are often so far from "the imaginary centre" that I wonder if there is anything, be it just a single common feature, that may classify them within the infinity of the notional collective noun of "Jewry."
The history of the Jews of the Diaspora is part of both the history of the Jewish tribe and the history of the countries settled by Jews. In this sense, Jewish history is part of the history of world civilization. Since any collective identity is formed by the historical and social experience of the community within which it develops, the identity of Bulgarian Jews may be studied only in the context of the variable interactions between the Jews and the Bulgarians.
Traces of Jewish presence in the Bulgarian lands are scattered in all sorts of and, often, controversial sources. Some scholars believe that Semites (Phoenicians or Judahites) may have populated the lands on both sides of Mt Hemus long before the dawn of the new age (Mezan 1925). In a letter to the Roman emperor Caligula (37-41 A.D.), the Judaean king of the Herodian dynasty Agrippa I mentions the existence of Jewish colonies in Macedonia (ibid.: 6). Prof. G.Katsarov reports that he has deciphered an inscription found in the village of Gigen, which attests to a Jewish settlement in those parts even in the 2nd century A.D.1 The community in Vidin is believed to be one of the earliest Jewish colonies in the country.2
It was probably in the Middle Ages that the large Jewish communities embarked on their - initially random and inconsistent - quest for identificatory strategies of survival in a Christian world which was increasingly hostile to non-Christians.
Dr Saul Mezan believes that one of the most interesting events in the Mediaeval history of Bulgarian Jews is the accession of the Jewess Sara. Sara was of Judahite-Byzantine descent. Converting to Christianity, she married tsar Ivan Alexander and reigned 20 years (1335-1355) under the adopted name of Teodora. The Jewish community prospered during most of that period, although at the end of her reign the "zhidove" (plural of zhid, a pejorative term for Jew in Bulgarian) were subjected to persecution (few if any details about this persecution are on record). That was in 1395. In a few months, Bulgaria would ultimately fall under Ottoman domination.
In Spain, the age of tolerance for the Jews was drawing to a close. Anti-Semitic waves had more or less already swept over the rest of Europe. In 1181, Philip II, Augustus closed down the yeshivas3 in Paris. In 1211, rabbis emigrated from France and England into Palestine. In 1217, Philip II, Augustus decreed that the Jews were to wear identifying badges. In 1248, Louis IX had all Jewish manuscripts in the French capital burnt, and six years later expelled the Jews from the kingdom (Attali 1991: 48). The only place on earth where the Jews were tolerated and protected was Spain. The ever stronger Catholic Church, however, made it clear that it would no longer tolerate the policy of the Spanish kings. Mass persecutions started after the death of John I of Castile (in July 1390). One part of the Jews rebelled, another left the country, half converted to Christianity... This sparked a major debate among Jewish communities wherever they might be, a debate that has continued right to the present day, five centuries after their expulsion from Spain: should we continue isolating ourselves from the world and risk breeding hate or, on the contrary, should we open up to the influences of the others and risk yielding to the temptations of the non-believers and becoming assimilated? Will this affect the preservation of our Jewish identity and if yes, in what way?...
Despite the mass conversion to Catholicism, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon issued the Edict of expulsion of all Jews from Spain in 1492. The first refugees from the Iberian peninsula settled in the Bulgarian lands that same year. A large group of Sephardim started building communities along with and near the Romagnese4 [Romanyoti] in Nikopol, Sofia, Philipopolis, Tatar-Pazardjik... The Sephardic Jews became the definitive component of an otherwise heterogeneous mosaic of Bulgarian Jewry comprising settlers from Germany, Greece, Italy, Southern France and elsewhere (Moskona 1970: 109).
In the centuries of Ottoman domination (14th-19th century), the Jewish communities lived in the empire more or less in peace, but without making any tangible progress or achieving significant prosperity (Mezan 1925: 16). They kept a low profile on the provincial periphery of Balkan timelessness, where the belated Renaissance was yet to come. Various legends, incomprehensible myths and texts written in a language that few people knew, accumulated over the indistinct matrix of common origins dominated by the orally transmitted imperative of Jewish Law - the magic centripetal resource of the stability and continuity of Jewish self-identity. The self-identity of the Jews who settled in the Bulgarian lands intertwined two fundamental identificatory components: the Sephardic tradition preserved by the Jews from Spain and the Mediterranean region (the Pizanti, Papo, Calo, Yevani, Barouh and other families), and the Ashkenazic tradition of the Jews from Germany, Hungary, France, Poland (the Ashkenazi, Tadjer, Gryunberg and other families). The two principal groups of Jews speak a different language, have different rites, a different cuisine, a different music, and pray in different synagogues. The Jews are thus divided into two typologically different constructions within a community which is seen from "the outside" as uniform, with no distinction between the so- called Spanish-rite and German-rite Jews. The synchronic relations between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim probably result from the interdependence of the two types of Jewish cultures in Bulgaria, which have not had an opportunity to develop in-depth essential contrasts in their outlook. No significant cultural centres were established in these lands, and the Bulgarian Jews did not become involved in the fundamental theological debates under way in central Europe in the 18th century following the emergence of the new religious movement of the Hasidim in Podolia (Wilensky 1975). The influence of the Talmudic currents was not felt in Bulgaria, even though the grandson of Joseph ben Ephraim Karo, born in Toledo and expelled from the city after 1492, who worked for 32 years on the Shulhan 'arukh, a religious code of Judaism which still (Mezan 1925 and Diamond 1998: 178) serves as the basis of jurisdiction at religious tribunals, lived precisely in Nikopol and Pleven.
Brilliant Jewish soloists, who existed thanks to the community but were in no way typical representatives of that community, appeared on the intellectual horizon of the then empire. With their public activity, Joseph Karo, as well as other prominent thinkers, provided new arguments in favour of the frequently promoted in various circles assumption that the Jews are a people of individuals rather than a community of subjects. Such arguments may ensue from the fact that the individuals in question - albeit strongly dependent on and promoted by the group - attain self-realization beyond the community, approaching the entire range of the public sphere as if it were a scene for self-expression.
Unique copies of manuscripts of the leading Talmudic thinkers, including some of the earliest commentaries on texts by Maimonides5, have been found in Bulgaria. However, those and other important texts of Jewish thought, which had based their analysis on moral choice even in prehistoric times, attest to an intellectual life that has been created elsewhere and is not typical of the orientation of Jews in Bulgaria. The social portrait of Bulgarian Jews offers one of the explanations for that.
At the turn of the century Bulgarian Jews had distinct similarities with and differences from the majority. In 1905, they comprised 0.93% of the total population and, according to the 1926 census, they numbered 46,565, or 0.85% of all Bulgarian nationals (Piti 1938: 8). The Jews were mostly an urban populace (97.2% lived in towns), half of them were residents of Sofia (Piti 1938). Their professional orientations were shaped by several factors: the Mediaeval guilds barred Jews from many trades, which has since predetermined their choices. They had no arable land. They were denied or provided only limited access to the professions from almost the entire range of public administration - Jews could not become judges, public lawyers, legal advisors at government ministries and other institutions. Some Jews were nevertheless promoted to senior positions in the social hierarchy: Menashe Bakish in Rouschouk, Hadji Moshon Garti, Samuel Anavi and Yitzhak Kalev in Philipopolis, etc. (Mezan 1925: 194), but that was mosty before rather than after the 1878 Liberation from Ottoman rule. The majority of Jews were employed in trade, industry and the crafts (tailoring, millinery, shoemaking, carpentry, saddle- making, printing, etc.); few, if any, were employed in agriculture, public institutions, government and administration. Of the free professions, the Jews chose to be lawyers, physicians, dentists, pharmacists, money-lenders, engineers, commissionaires, entrepreneurs, industrialists, rentiers, etc. Poverty was the main distinctive feature of the Jewish masses. The Jewish quarters of Yuchbounar and Konyovitsa were among the poorest neighbourhoods in Sofia (Piti 1938: 23-36). Few could afford to go into the higher spheres of intellectual occupation. Contrary to elsewhere in Europe, Yeshivas - academies of Jewish learning and Talmudic academic centres of all-European relevance, typical of the large Jewish communities - were not created in the Bulgarian lands. The Jews were preoccupied with their physical rather than spiritual survival.
The poverty of Bulgarian Jews explains the absence of both prominent intellectuals and thinkers, and explicit anti-Semitism in Bulgaria. Needless to say, there have been cases of anti-Semitism, but they have rather been "amateur" and imitative.
B. Arditi identifies three periods of anti-Semitic writings:
? After the Liberation, when certain publications alleged that Jews performed ritual murder and used Christian blood;
? The White Guard period after World War I, when titles such as The Grave-Diggers of Russia, Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion and The Killer Jews, appeared;
? The period after 1933, which abounded in pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic brochures.
Unlike many other parts of Central and Eastern Europe, however, those periods did not lead to pogroms against the Jews.
The unenviable financial status of the Jews also explains why Zionism has been very strong in Bulgaria. In 1896, a year before the first world Zionist congress, there was already a Dr. Theodor Herzl Society in Sofia (Vassileva 1991: 17). From an imaginary mainstay of identity, the Zionists turned the homeland into a strategic objective and hope for material prosperity. Their leanings tended to be leftist. Herzl's ideas were also attractive for the expectations of a strong welfare state; an own state. In the interwar period, many Bulgarian Jews were recruited to Zionism.6 A debate between the opponents of Zionism and the Zionists, between the supporters of Alliance Israelite Universelle7 and the schools (meldar or heder) where Hebrew was taught not only as a language of religious needs, but also as a language of national unification, was under way at that time. This debate per se was a distinct manifestation of the two diametrically opposite views on the fateful choice of Jewry: life in the Diaspora or aspiration to an own state. Today, 50 years after the creation of the state, Jews outside Israel are still wondering which is the right choice...
The creation of the State of Israel was the political result of the worst tragedy in the history of civilizations: the Nazi industry of human extermination which took the life of six million Jews. At the same time, Bulgaria was Nazi Germany's only allied country to save its Jews from the gas chambers. In 1934, they numbered 48,565 (Piti 1938: 9). A series of historical circumstances and psychological factors contributed to that. One of the most important among them was the attitude of Bulgarians to the Jews.
This attitude is partly the product of popular prejudices and stereotypes, and partly follows official policies which, in the different historical periods, have responded differently to the political coalitions and axes in which the country has been involved. This applies particularly to the period after 1933, when the pro-Nazi organizations of the so-called legioneri (legionnaires) and brannitsi (defenders) were founded in Bulgaria, and when numerous anti-Semitic publications appeared, the majority of them short-lived and targeting the quasi-intelligentsia (Arditi 1972). They were explicitly fascist and were published by National Socialist circles. The image of the Jews, according to those texts, was of "cosmopolitans, sentimental and fake humanists, international profiteers [who] fit with insolent and insatiable greed into the body of the people."8 In their overwhelming majority, however, the general public, even if not openly sympathetic with the Jews, were definitely not anti- Semitic.
The social status of the Jews was not very different from that of the majority. There was no segregation. Bulgaria did not have Jewish ghettos. The strong integrative potential of the Jews facilitated their visible but discreet presence in everyday relations with the Bulgarians. All this, as well as the general spirit of tolerance in these lands, were the favourable psychological factors which exerted a tangible influence in the months of preparations for "the final solution to the Jewish question" in Bulgaria.
Yet this grim secret - the prepared deportation - did not remain unknown to the public: and that prompted all other actions which would ultimately force a Reich ally to take an unprecedented course of action.
The friendship of a Bulgarian and a Jewish family, the Peshevs and the Barouhs from the town of Kyustendil, whose children had grown up together, proved to be the human story which, by its significance, was equal to or even outweighed all factors which helped save almost 50,000 people.9 Those factors included: a petition signed by 44 MPs against the deportation of the Jews (Barouh 1991: 92), protests by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and Bulgarian intellectuals, the monarch's inability to stand up to either the Reich or to public opinion in the country on the issue of the final solution to the Jewish question. The deportation was not cancelled but postponed. This postponement, which proved the other crucial factor for the rescue (the turn of the tide on the Eastern Front rearranged Berlin's priorities and relegated "the Jewish question" to the background), came at a very high cost. The Bulgarian government organized the deportation of all Jews from the occupied territories to the death camps; Bulgaria saved "its own" and deported "the alien" Jews (Matkovski 1982: 178-182). Of 11,363 "alien Jews, just 12 survived (Barouh: 82). Along with everything mentioned above, one may also argue that the Bulgarian Jews were saved because they were poor and well integrated in society. Their proletarianization and the leftist leanings of the Jewish intelligentsia, as well as their natural protective reaction to the Nazi threat, made Bulgarian Jews the largest ethnic group in the anti-fascist resistance in Bulgaria (Chary 1972: 48 and Yearbook: 1980 1983, 1985).
The social characteristics of the Bulgarian Jews, the strong influence of Zionism, and nationalization and the abolition of private property after the new regime came to power, are all factors which contributed to the mass emigration of Jews after the creation of the State of Israel. The basic concepts of the Jewish philosophy of social order, developed politically by Theodor Herzl, proved stronger than the communist views of those Jews who contributed to the change of regime: from 25 October 1948 to 16 May 1949, 32,106 people emigrated from Bulgaria into Israel in organized groups (Vassileva: 123).
Even though Bulgaria was the only other country in Europe except Britain which had more Jews after, than at the beginning of the war, just four years later the centres of Jewish life were practically extinguished.
Emmy Barouh