Table of Contents

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: 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.

About the Author

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

Reviews

"A vital contribution to Sephardic history, Devin Naar's book lovingly but objectively fills in the Greek Jewish story of the interwar period. Jewish Salonica speaks through the words of its subjects, drawing on a dazzling array of local Jewish sources and casting this understudied period in a wholly new and dynamic light."
*New York University, author of Greece: A Jewish History*

"Richly documented and a pleasure to read, this study offers a compelling account of how the Sephardic Jews of Salonica experienced the transition from being subjects of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman empire to living as a minority in the Greek nation-state. A must-read for anyone interested in the history of this unique community."
*University of California, Irvine, and author of Emissaries from the Holy Land*

"[Devin Naar] has achieved something of signal importance with this volume. He has assembled a uniquely detailed profile of a leading Sephardic community under the Ottoman Empire and the succeeding Greek national state out of archives in Russia, Greece, Israel, the United States, and Spain."
*Middle East Quarterly*

"But Naar has not written a standard chronological history; rather, his study is a deep analysis of the Jewish community and its various components that proudly faced the challenges of the shift from a favored Ottoman millet to a beleaguered—both internally and externally—community in serious decline."
*Association for Jewish Studies Review*

"[Jewish Salonica] clearly contributes to our store of knowledge on the relationship between the transition from a multicultural empire to a homogenous nation- state, as well as on the changing meanings of such concepts as Sephardic, Jewish, community, self-governance, autonomy, the modern state, Ottoman, Greek, and Turk in the age of competing nationalisms."
*New Perspectives on Turkey*

"Naar by all means has successfully created more than a dignified memento to those [Salonican Jews] who perished [in the Holocaust], providing a significant and appealing scholarly contribution to Jewish studies, intellectual history, and identity formation, which will undoubtedly become a reference point for further research."
*The Journal of Modern Greek Studies*

"Naar's book successfully changes the way we remember the interwar period for Salonican Jewry, from a period of decline to one of creativity in the face of severe obstacles, from imagining them as passive victims, to active agents who sought to perpetuate their role and presence in the ever-changing city as they attempted to find a space for themselves as 'part of Greece without relinquishing their Jewishness,' as Hellenic Jews, a dual status preserved from the Ottoman era."
*International Journal of Middle East Studies*

"Jewish Salonica by Devin E. Naar... is a very important new addition to the history of Sephardic Jews and the transition of Salonica from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek state, a history of "Jewish Salonica" as the title suggests....It is a significant book that will make a lasting contribution to the history of Jews in Salonica/Thessaloniki."
*H-Nationalism*

"Naar's innovative book constitutes a substantial contribution to the Sephardi studies and fills countless gaps, specifically with respect to Salonica under Greek rule. Naar's longing to his ancestral city... did not diminish from his ability to precisely draw the image of this important and divided community in the eve of its existence, while stressing the liveliness and vitality expressed by this community and its institutions until transported to death."
*Europe Now*

"Jewish Salonica is an excellent book that invites broader discussions about ruptures and continuities between empires and nation-states. It highlights how minority groups refashion themselves during these transitions by inventing new strategies to negotiate their boundaries, redefine their identities, and protect their space with the aim of preserving the interests of their communities and preventing their decline. Jewish Salonica is a major contribution not only to Jewish history and Sephardic studies but also to Mediterranean, European, postcolonial, human rights, Ottoman, and Middle Eastern studies. It will be of great use for scholars, students, historians, and policy makers interested in understanding the complexities of empires and nation-states and the status and rights of minorities within these contexts."
*Journal of Modern History*

"Drawing on untapped community archives dispersed around the world as well as extensive Judeo-Spanish newspapers and memoirs, Naar's book is a key contribution to the history of Sephardi Jews and a timely intervention in debates about the post-Ottoman "unmixing of peoples" in the era of the nation-state....Thanks to Naar's exhaustive and creative efforts, the community's transformation and mobilization as simultaneously flourishing and struggling is fleshed out in a fascinating and inviting narrative"
*American Historical Review*

"Captivating and riveting....[Naar] sets out to give the Jews of Salonica/Thessaloniki a voice, to understand them from the inside, to grapple with their trials and tribulations to evidence their agency, collectively, and individually in the face of change and growing adversity."
*Sephardic Horizons*