Historiography of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia - Jovan Culibrk

Historiography of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia - Jovan CulibrkThe book Historiography of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia was initially created as an expanded research paper for a tutorial with the late Professor David Bankier in the Masters program at the Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It did not blossom into a doctorate due to the premature death of Professor Bankier, depriving Holocaust studies, not to mention the International Institute for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, of

The book Historiography of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia was initially created as an expanded research paper for a tutorial with the late Professor David Bankier in the Masters program at the Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It did not blossom into a doctorate due to the premature death of Professor Bankier, depriving Holocaust studies, not to mention the International Institute for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, of one of its coryphaei.

For Professor Bankier, this study - as necessary as it was in his opinion — represented only the beginning of joint work on the Holocaust in the former Yugoslavia. We agreed that the study of history itself is more important than the study of the writing about the history. Nevertheless, acknowledging the complexity of the state of the South Slavs (Yugoslavia), both during the Second World War and afterward, Professor Bankier agreed that it was impossible today to deal with that part of the Jewish catastrophe without a systematic knowledge of the sources and literature for its study. Even more importantly, the premature death of Menachem Shelah left Yad Vashem and Holocaust scholarship without its specialist on the former Yugoslavia, in a field still dominated by studies of the Holocaust in Poland and the USSR.

Because of the varied ways in which the "Final Solution" was applied in the territory of Yugoslavia, a number of fascinating precedents for the study of this topic emerged in the milieu of the rich and often unpredictable intellectual life of post-war Yugoslavia. As a result, this book has a certain duality, which is evident from its title: it primarily studies the scholarship about the destruction of European Jews that took place in the region of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but Historiography of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia also deals with the way in which historians in Yugoslavia regarded and studied the Holocaust.

University of Belgrade 2014, hardcover