Devin E. Naar

Jewish Salonica (eBook, ePUB)

Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society.

Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews-Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists-reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 400
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. September 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503600096
• Artikelnr.: 48419052

Autorenporträt

Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Is Salonica Jewish?
chapter abstract
The chapter introduces competing visions for the future of Salonica during
the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), including bold proposals to transform it into
an internationalized city or an independent Jewish city-state. These
episodes illustrate the centrality of Salonica and its Jews in Ottoman and
Greek history and how new sources-local archives and newspapers-change our
understanding of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and consolidation of
Greece. Not preordained, the passage from Ottoman to Greek rule transpired
gradually. Aspects of the Ottoman framework-including tensions between the
allegiances of Jews to their community and to the state-echoed into modern
Greece. The story was complicated: could Judaism and Hellenism-two
historically antagonistic ideals-be reconciled in modern times?
1Like a Municipality and a State: The Community
chapter abstract
The first chapter explores the creation and development of the institution
of the Jewish Community of Salonica. Due to the autonomous status of the
Jewish Community, Jews relied upon it and its philanthropic
organizations-as if a municipality or a state, as one commentator observed-
to endure the transition from Ottoman to Greek jurisdiction, war, fire, and
economic crisis. In conflict and in partnership with the state, the Jewish
Community, through the Beit Din (rabbinical court), defined its members,
implemented Jewish marriage law (which some escaped through conversion),
managed Jewish popular neighborhoods for the impoverished masses, and
inducted Jewish men into military service. Allegiance to the Jewish
Community and to the state sometimes complemented each other, whereas other
times they stood in opposition.
2Who Will Save Sephardic Judaism?: The Chief Rabbi
chapter abstract
The ongoing debates over the role and nature of the spiritual and political
leader of the Jewish Community, the chief rabbi, forms the heart of the
second chapter. Deliberations among competing Jewish political factions
over the nature of the position of the chief rabbi reflected their
differing values and contested visions for the future of Salonica and its
Jewish residents from the late Ottoman until World War II. While Jewish
political groups largely agreed that the chief rabbi ought to represent the
city's Jews to their neighbors, the state, international organizations, and
Jewish communities around the world, they often disagreed over who the
chief rabbi ought to be and what kind of image he should project to the
world about the status of the Jews of Salonica.
3More Sacred than Synagogue: The School
chapter abstract
Jewish leaders believed that the future of Jewish life in Salonica would be
forged at school, a site that acquired a sacred aura for its crucial role
in educating Jewish youth. This chapter argues that schools became sites in
which to transform the children of the last generation of Ottoman Jews into
the first generation of Hellenic Jews, conscientious as Jews and as
citizens of their country. Focusing on the contested role of language and
its relationship to questions of identity and belonging, the chapter
emphasizes the ways in which the Jewish Community and the state partnered
to develop new Jewish educational opportunities, such as a rabbinical
training program, Greek state schools for Jewish students, Greek language
textbooks about Judaism, and Hebrew-language textbooks about Greece. On the
eve of World War II, when most European countries pushed Jews out of state
schools, in Greece, integration was reaching new heights.
4Paving the Way for Better Days: The Historians
chapter abstract
The fourth chapter charts how Salonican Jews' interest in their own history
migrated from the margins of public awareness during the late Ottoman era
to the very center of public attention during the interwar years. During
this period, Jewish intellectuals created narratives of their own
community's past in newspapers and other publications as a vehicle to unite
in the context of fragmentation and crisis, to imbed themselves in the
Ottoman context and, by rewriting their story, to advocate for a place
within the Greek context. From presenting Jewish history in Salonica as an
Ottoman-Jewish romance, they increasingly emphasized the historic synergies
between Judaism and Hellenism. In the process, local Jewish historians
varyingly envisioned their city as Jewish ("Jerusalem of the Balkans"),
Sephardic ("Citadel of Sephardism"), or Greek ("Macedonian Metropolis"),
and agreed that greater knowledge of their past would help them secure
their future.
5Stones that Speak: The Cemetery
chapter abstract
This chapter interrogates the place of the Jewish cemetery of Salonica-once
the largest in Europe-within the spatial, political and cultural landscapes
of the city from the late Ottoman era until World War II. It focuses on the
tactics that Jews deployed to safeguard their burial ground in the context
of nineteenth century Ottoman urban reforms, and in the face of
expropriation measures of the Greek state and the local university. Could a
Jewish necropolis remain in the center of a Greek metropolis? Jewish
leaders argued that the tombstones "spoke," that the inscriptions narrated
the integral role played by Jews-as Salonicans-in their city and in Greece.
The attempt to preserve the space of the Jewish dead constituted an effort
to secure the place of the Jewish living-and reveals the ultimate fragility
of the effort and the power of exclusionary nationalism.
Conclusion: Jewish Salonica-Reality, Myth, Memory
chapter abstract
The Holocaust decimated the Jewish population of Salonica, which was
reduced by more than ninety percent. In the wake of the war, Jewish
survivors in Salonica and those abroad emphasized images of their city as a
historically unmatched, mythic Jewish space. Part of the process of
mourning and infused by nostalgia, these images echoed the depictions of
the city from before the war that Jews developed as a way to integrate
themselves into their urban environment and secure their position across
the divide between the Ottoman Empire and the Greek state. Just as Jews
embraced the state ideology of Ottomanism, so too did Jewish elite later
engage with Hellenism and sought to reconcile their status as Salonicans,
as Jews, and as citizens. Although few Jews remain in Salonica today, the
city continues to come to terms with its past amidst financial crisis, and
to embrace its bygone Jewish history.