Jakov "Jaša" Tomić (; 23 October 1856 – 22 October 1922) was a Serbian journalist, politician and author from the Serbian region of Vojvodina, which was part of the Austrian Empire when he was born. Modoš, a town in the Serbian part of Banat, was renamed in his honor in 1924. Biography At the time of his birth in 1856, the town of Vršac was part of the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar crown land in the post-1849 Habsburg monarchy. His Serbian Orthodox Christian family had thrived significantly from trade in the region. He attended elementary school in Vršac, then gymnasium in Timișoara and Kecskemét. He was a volunteer in the Herzegovina Uprising, after which he attended medical faculties in Vienna and Prague, but later transferred to the faculty of philosophy and philology. Thereafter, Tomić was involved in Serb politics in Habsburg-controlled parts of present-day Serbia (Serbian Vojvodina). Combining interests in socialism and Serbian national politics as did many of his generation, namely Svetozar Marković, Mihailo Polit-Desančić, and Nikola Pašić, he eventually found himself much less of a socialist than an ardent Serbian patriot. Tomić was the editor of Srpsko kolo and Zastava magazines and founder of the People's Freethinker Party (Narodna slobodoumna stranka), which in 1891 became the Radical Party (Radikalna stranka). In 1889, following a series of articles regarding nature of his employment at Zastava, in which he implicated his wife Milica Miletić, Tomić stabbed to death a liberal political rival, Miša Dimitrijević, the editor of Branik magazine, in Novi Sad. Dimitrijević alleged that Milica, who was the daughter of famed lawyer and Novi Sad mayor, Svetozar Miletić, who in turn was the founder of Zastava, arranged the position of editor for Tomić as a part of a dowry and mentioned in a daily journal that he was in a possession of a letter that demonstrated this intention and sent the letter in question to Jaša in written correspondence. He served seven years in prison for murder, emerging in 1896 with no loss of political zeal. Not only political but economic issues had far-reaching importance to him. Tomić, then the most vociferous opponent of the hierarchy, the leader of the Serbian radical party and son-in-law of Svetozar Miletić, blamed the clergy for driving people away from churches because of its insistence on controlling church and autonomous finances: "Whoever has to worry about how to spend so