Abstrakt
The Holocaust has become a globally recognized benchmark for suffering and the archetypical paradigm of victimhood. As such, it was put into the center of the Serbian victimhood narrative extensively promoted by the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) since the late-1980s.
In this article, I examine how the SOC articulates the link between the Holocaust and the genocide of Serbs during the Second World War and how it deals with other victims (particularly Jews). Based on primary sources that include the Serbian Orthodox press and documents of the Jasenovac Committee of the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the SOC, I identify dominant patterns of the portrayal of Jews in the SOC's hegemonic narrative of the Holocaust after 2000.
The research findings show that by emphasizing the "brotherhood in suffering" between Serbs and Jews, the SOC has functionalized Jews so as to highlight and generalize Serbian martyrdom, thus neglecting the broader context and total destructive effect of the Holocaust for Jewish people as well as the SOC's own problematic stance towards the Jewish question during the Second World War. In this way, the study may contribute to better understanding of the Serbian martyrdom narrative as well as towards the role of the Jewish trope and the Holocaust memory in the concept of victimhood in general.