Issue 55-56, April-May 2011

Unfortunately, Bulgaria has never eschewed the sort of antisemitism prevalent in the rest of Europe in general and Eastern Europe in particular. That said, over the centuries antisemitic sentiments have rarely turned violent. Bulgaria has never witnessed Russian or German-style anti-Jewish pogroms, and even in the darkest years of the Defence of the Nation Act, the state’s enforcement of anti-Jewish regulations was at worst tepid.

While the earliest acts of antisemitism predate the official Christianisation effected by King Boris I in 865, the first real anti-Jewish polemic appeared in the writings of early Mediaeval Bulgarian writers. Yoan Ekzarh, Presbyter Kozma and others now taught in Bulgarian schools often indulged in acrid antisemitic speech.

An instance of violent antisemitism occurred in the mid-14th Century when King Ivan Aleksandar divorced his Bulgarian wife and married a Jewess, Sarah. Sarah converted to Christianity, but the king still ordered mass lashings and banishment of a sect thought to be associated with Judaism. One possible explanation for this was the plague which was ravaging Europe at the time: popular belief had it that it had been started by Jews poisoning Christian wells. Another is that the Bulgarian aristocracy wanted an easy way out of its burgeoning debts, owed mostly to Jewish merchants and tradesmen.

Bulgaria was conquered by the Ottomans in 1393-1396.  An urban myth was put into circulation that the gates of Tarnovo, the Mediaeval Bulgarian capital, had been surreptitiously opened for the invaders by a Jew, an act of high treason that would condemn Bulgaria to 500 years of Ottoman "yoke." The myth lives on to this day. The great man of letters of the Bulgarian National Revival, Ivan Vazov (1850-1921), produced an unusually acrimonious rhyme about that "dirty Jew"; and as late as 1930 Angel Karaliychev, a popular writer of children’s fiction, published a story about this "Jewish treachery."

In the late 15th Century the number of Jews in the Bulgarian lands increased significantly when the High Porte in Constantinople welcomed thousands of Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal. The Sephardis were exempted from some Ottoman taxes and in some places even allowed to mint their own coins. Antipathy between the Jews and the indigenous Christians grew as these privileges were often seen as evidence of a Jewish confederacy with the occupying force. The folklore of those years abounded in images of Jewish usurers conspiring with the Ottomans against the Bulgarians. One example lasting to this day is the Orthodox rite of baptism: the godfather of a child says to the mother: "I took from you a Jew, I give you back a Christian."