The Jewish communities of the Balkans remained small until the late 15th century, when Jews fleeing the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions found refuge in the Ottoman-ruled areas, including Serbia.

Jews first arrived on the territory of present-day Serbia in Roman times,[citation needed] although there is little documentation prior to the 10th century.

[4] While the rest of modern-day Serbia was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire, territory of present-day Vojvodina was part of the Habsburg monarchy.

[6] During the liberation of Belgrade, contrary to the strict orders issued by Serb leader Karađorđe, some of the rebels destroyed Jewish shops and synagogues.

[13] During the final stages of the 1877–1878 Serbo-Turkish wars thousands of Jews emigrated or were expelled by the advancing Serbian Army along with Turkish and Albanian families.

[17] The waxing and waning of the fortunes of the Jewish community according to the ruler continued to the end of the 19th century, when the Serbian parliament lifted all anti-Jewish restrictions in 1889.

[3] Jews in modern-day North Macedonia got their full citizen rights for the first time when the region became a part of Kingdom of Serbia.

[citation needed] The Vidovdan Constitution guaranteed equality to Jews, and the law regulated their status as a religious community.

Milan Stojadinović, the prime minister, tried to actively woo Adolf Hitler while maintaining the alliance with former Entente Powers, UK and France.

Nonwithstanding overtures to Germany, Yugoslav policy was not anti-Semitic: for instance, Yugoslavia opened its borders to Austrian Jews following the Anschluss.

[22] Under increasing pressure to yield to German demands for safe passage of its troops to Greece, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, like Bulgaria and Hungary.

In Serbia, German occupiers established concentration camps and extermination policies with the assistance of the puppet government of Milan Nedić.

The main race laws in the State of Serbia were adopted on 30 April 1941: the Legal Decree on Racial Origins (Zakonska odredba o rasnoj pripadnosti).

As a result, Emanuel Schäfer, commander of the Security Police and Gestapo in Serbia, famously cabled Berlin after last Jews were killed in May 1942: Similarly.

[3] Of the Jewish population of 16,000 in the territory controlled by Nazi puppet government of Milan Nedić, police and secret services murdered approximately 14,500.

Historian Christopher Browning who attended the conference on the subject of Holocaust and Serbian involvement stated:[29] Serbia was the only country outside Poland and the Soviet Union where all Jewish victims were killed on the spot without deportation, and was the first country after Estonia to be declared "Judenfrei", a term used by the Nazis during the Holocaust to denote an area free of all Jews.Serbian civilians were involved in saving thousands of Yugoslavian Jews during this period.

Miriam Steiner-Aviezer, a researcher into Yugoslavian Jewry and a member of Yad Vashem's Righteous Gentiles committee states: "The Serbs saved many Jews.

[5] David Bruce Macdonald states that Serbian nationalists used Jewish imagery, such as the Legend of Masada, in order to justify claims of Kosovo by comparing anti-semitism and serbophobia.

[40] In 2013, downtown Belgrade was covered by posters, reportedly distributed by the Serbian branch of Blood & Honour, accusing Jews of being responsible for the 1999 bombing of the former Yugoslavia.