Bojan Aleksov Livres

The Balkans provided the escape route for tens of thousands of German Jews, and remained a place of refuge until the Nazis brutally shut it off with the mass murder of Jewish refugees on the so-called Kladovo transport starting in September 1941, which can be considered as the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Responding to publications about the Western European and American exile experience of the Jews after 1933, this book offers comparative insights into the less trodden paths of the persecuted, illuminating the cultural and political context of the Balkan host countries, the response of local Jewish communities, and the reactions of common people and assorted criminals. The Balkans, often marginalised and loathed, emerges in hundreds of personal accounts of survivors gathered here, supplemented by extensive archival research, as a welcoming getaway, where thousands survived thanks to the Italian occupiers, illiterate peasants, and Communist-led Partisan resisters.

Bojan Aleksov's study portrays the origins and the spreading of the Nazarenes - the first Protestant Serbs - in South Hungary and Serbia as an indicator of social change among the Serbian people, whose demands and needs the Orthodox Church had failed to meet. In order to account for the success of Nazarene missionaries, it also illuminates the strategies employed by Nazarenes in expanding and maintaining their communities which range from communalism, group mores and practices, internal economic organization of the Nazarene communities and their attitude towards economic change, and finally the appeal of the Nazarene faith and worship. Looking at the social, economic, cultural and historical motives of conversions to Nazarenes, it examines in depth the Nazarenes’ challenge to the Serbian Orthodox Church and the latter’s belated response in the form of the so-called re-Orthodoxization (in line with newly invented tradition of the Serbian version of Orthodox Christianity - Svetosavlje) and the development of the mass Bogomoljci movement with its implications for the development of the Serbian national self-identification observed in the changes of the notions of Church, religion and piety, which finally (during the interwar period) resulted in a discourse that combined and fused the nation and the Orthodox Church and closed the long-lasting gap between the Church and the Serbian people/nation.