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Stolac — the name means “stool” in the South Slavic dialects - is a beautiful village on the river Bregava, which cuts through the bleak, limestone mountains of Hercegovina, about 20 miles southeast of Mostar, the region’s main city.

It is sacred to Bosnians of all faiths, and was proposed as an international cultural site by the Bosnian government. The village’s surroundings include a massive deposit at Radimilje of pre-Islamic Bosnian burial monuments, or stecci, of inconceivable value for the world Bosnia is a country with five historical

identities: Muslim, Sephardic, Serbian, Croatian, and Gypsy.

Although Sephardim have been absent in numbers since the Holocaust, they once accounted for one out of six residents in Sarajevo, and their literary achievements, mainly involving poetry and song, are well known to Bosnians. But Stolac is especially important to Jews as the location of the grave of a rabbi, Rav Moshe Danon. Beginning in the mid-19th century, Sephardim made regular pilgrimages

there from Sarajevo and elsewhere in Bosnia. The story of the rabbi of Stolac, as Rav Danon is known to surviving Bosnian Sephardim, reveals many facets of the mountainous country’s existence, and deserves to be retold — along with its contemporary postscript.

Rav Moshe Danon did not serve as rabbi in Stolac, and was not born there; he is associated with the town only because he died near it, on the road to Eretz Israel. But the events that led to his departure from Bosnia for the Holy Land are legendary, reflected even in beautiful Sephardic balladry. The tale begins in 1819, when a mentally-disturbed Jew named Moshe Haviljo, living in the old Turkish city of Travnik north of Sarajevo, converted to Islam and took the name “Dervish Ahmed.” The title “dervish” should have indicated an affiliation with the less-rigid intellectual traditions of Balkan Muslim mysticism. But whatever the circumstances of his apostasy, Haviljo soon emerged as a ferocious enemy of the Jews.

He posed as a holy man and miracle worker, and began inciting Muslims against his former coreligionists. Another Jew, Benjamin Pinto, went to the governor of the province, and denounced the swindles and lies of “Ahmed.” Soon theconvert died, or was killed. But in the words of a Sarajevo grand rabbi and community chronicler, Dr. Moritz Levi, writing almost a century later, “ignorant folk among the Muslims, believing the convert to be a true miracle-worker, lamented his death and complained to the new Turkish governor, Ruzhdi-Pasha. “The convert’s death provided a prete t for Ruzhdi-Pasha to attack the Jews in general.

The small and poor Jewry of Travnik did not offer much of a target, and they were left in peace. But the governor’s eyes had turned to the Jews of the great city of Sarajevo; he demanded a payment of 50,000 Austrian gold groschen from them, as indemnity for the dead convert. He then ordered the arrest of ten of Sarajevo’s leading Jews, beginning with Rav Danon, the outstanding Jewish spiritual leader in the country.

Furthermore, the fine was increased to 500,000 groschen to be paid within three days, or the Jews would be executed. Panic seized the Sarajevo Sephardim as they faced a wholesale assault on their security and their rights. The situation looked extremely grim. But then a well-known Sarajevo Jew, Rafael Levi, who was greatly respected by Muslims, had the idea of appealing to his neighbors’ humanity. On the night before the hostages were to be executed, Rafael Levi went to the coffee houses where he knew Muslims met and talked, and exhorted them with an emotional description of the dreadful threat hanging over the Jews.

The Muslims were profoundly touched, and consoled Levi for the tears he shed as he spoke. Then, “all together, as if they were one,” the Muslims swore an oath, pledging to give up their lives, if necessary, to save the arrested Jews.

Before dawn the next morning, some 3,000 Bosnian Muslims armed themselves, surrounded the governor’s palace, seized the jail, and liberated Rav Danon and the other imprisoned Jews. The Bosnian Muslims later denounced Ruzhdi-Pasha to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. A decade afterward, Rav Danon left for Palestine, but he died near Stolac in 1830. Annual pilgrimages to his grave, on his birthday,