Devin E. NAAR
JEWISH SALONICA: BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND MODERN GREECE
Stanford University Press, 2016, ISBN: 9780804798877
Reviewed by Dani Kranz1
Captivating and riveting are adjectives that spring to mind to describe Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece. Devin E. Naar crafted a book that does justice to his agenda, outlined in the preface. He 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. His passion is that of a historian, but also that of a descendant of Salonican/Thessalonikan Jews; he cares about the ”subjects” of his research and describes and analyzes them in respectful, loving detail.
Sketching out the live-worlds of some members of his family as a starting point to chronicle his way into Jewish Salonica, he allows a first insight into the diversity, and subsequently its loss and destruction. Yet, the lives of individual characters like the members of his family do not fill the pages of his book. Naar is concerned with prominent Jews, high ranking officials, and other Jews of importance. He is focused on an elite history and how the Jews that formed the elite attempted to maneuver the changing scenery. Commoners, for lack of a better term, are mentioned at the side-lines although the author admits that significant numbers of Salonican, and later Thessalonikan, Jews lived modest, at times impoverished lives. If and how these Jews navigated the shifts from being Ottoman Jews in a Jewish majority city to forming a minority in Hellenizing, modern Greece will be the issue of a different project. In addition, how gender, family, and kinship relations reacted to the vast changes of the relative short period are for another volume. By this token, Naar’s work can and should pave the way for follow-up research.
In terms of time, the period covered here only spans a couple of decades. These brought vast changes: empires fell apart and nationalization projects took (violent) shape; European colonialism reached its height; the First and Second World Wars brought enormous destruction; a multiple genocide took place in Europe (and beyond). For obvious reasons, violence, in the form of changes that brought (structural) violence with them, runs through the undercurrent of Naar’s narrative: violence, physical, structural, legal, became a defining parameter of Jewish existence during this period.2
Framed by the introduction and conclusion, the author gives vivid insights into different reactions to the changes that occurred. He also outlines that the demise of Salonica’s Jewish community had already begun well before the German occupation. It began, so he argues, with the incorporation of Salonica into modern Greece in 1912. This change was far more than a change of name; Salonica was lost, Thessaloniki was born. A population exchange occurred in the wake of the Greek/Turkish War that saw more than one million Christians displaced from Asia Minor to Greece, in place of the Muslim population which suffered the same displacement in the opposite direction. Nationalization, not to say monoethnicization, projects had come into full swing; the pressures on “ill-fitting national minorities” increased. Jews were trapped in this position in Greece, and elsewhere.
Naar chronicles that this situation was not always so. Jews in Ottoman Salonica formed the majority, but more so, Jews comprised one of the many ethnic groups of the population mix of the Ottoman Empire, which knew self-governing communities by the millet system. Comparatively, the autonomy of these groups was pronounced, as the first chapter of the book indicates. The Jewish community comprised a municipality and a state to itself, regulating internal affairs, and negotiating with the outside. This structure was going to change irreversibly, when Salonica became Greek. The side-by-side structures of the different communities were discarded in favor of a Hellenization project with the aim of mainstreaming those who lived in modern Greece into Greek citizens. Intergroup aggravation increased in this context, an issue Naar analyzes, and which Paris Papamichos Chronakis,3 drawing on Naar’s work, puts into sharper focus. Jews had become misfits in the Hellenizing project and could not do right by anybody. If they were perceived as Zionistic, they were constructed as treacherous Greek citizens; if they insisted on being Greek Jews they encountered Christian-based anti-Semitism. Furthermore, the pressure on the labor and housing markets increased with the population influx from Turkey: economic competition increased and conflict lines became ethnicized. The nationalization project, coupled to the minority status left very little room for maneuvering. Yet, those Salonican/Thessasolonikan Jews who did not emigrate invested enormous energy into refashioning themselves as Thessalonikan Jews, if not as Greek Jews. These different efforts are at the focus of the chapters.
Naar depicts how the Jewish Community reacted, and how the Jews tried to manage the swirling waters of changing powers, unfolded in Chapter Two. The Chief Rabbi was faced with the role of restructuring the Community internally. How was Sephardic Judaism supposed to pan out in a society that proclaimed Christo-normativity, and in which Jews shifted to becoming ill-fitting others? How should Jews grapple with the new time-frame; in Ottoman Salonica businesses were closed on Saturday, Shabbat, while in Greek Thessaloniki, Saturday was a working day. On Sunday all shops were closed. Special permits for some businesses to remain open on Shabbat were issued by the rabbi to ease the situation. The problem at issue was bigger: what was to become of the community, its practice, and its particularities?
Chapter Three looks at the school. Naar argues that the school, that is the Jewish school, was more sacred than the synagogue. The school became the interface to educate the first generation of Hellenized Jews: Jews who spoke Greek, who could manage in the modern nation state as Greeks, and who still remained Jews. This strategy turned out to be successful. Identification with the Greek nation state occurred, although the love was only partially requited, as the next chapter outlines. One of the key historians of Jewish Salonica survived the Holocaust by way of obtaining Spanish citizenship, for example. Greek Jews who had only Greek citizenship did not fare that well. “Paving the way to better days: The historians” is a chapter that grants fascinating insights into the hope that providing history to Jews themselves would strengthen their self-confidence in the period of rapid Hellenization. At the same time, the historians hoped to impact the non-Jewish majority, who, so they hoped, would accept Jews as integral to Salonican history, and to the Thessalonikan present and future. This chapter alone, which goes into the area of historiography and introduces the individual historians in loving detail makes the book worth reading: it is intriguing.
Differently, sadly, morbidly, and infuriatingly fascinating is the next chapter that focuses on the cemetery and its eventual destruction. While Jewish religious law barely knows any exemption to the sanctity of the dead, the cemetery was about more than religious ritual. It was about Jewish – Salonican Jewish – life. It was about Jews being welcomed to the Ottoman Empire in 1492. It was about Jews being an integral part of the societal structures. Given its location in a central area it was physical proof of just how central the Jewish community had been in shaping of Salonica since its arrival. With the collapse of the socio-political structures the space for Jews – dead or alive – decreased until it was annihilated. Naar describes the conflict about the Jewish cemetery in appropriately charged terms. The sprawling Greek metropolis was not willing to leave space for the Jewish necropolis. He is clear that local Greek actors were the driving force behind the dispossession and destruction of the Jewish cemetery, while the German occupiers did not care about the place of the dead Jews.
Despite this terrible conclusion, Naar’s book is not written in the style of a fatalistic tale of epic catastrophe. He carefully depicts, by way of example, how societal and social structures changed and how Jews attempted to master them. By that token, Jewish Salonica is a fine example of local history. Hopefully it will advance comparative studies of other cities of the former Ottoman Empire that saw vast population changes, or more broadly, cities which were deprived of their Jewish population bit by bit, starting from the collapse of empires, through the Holocaust and to the present.
Speaking of the present, Bea Lewkowicz4 has previously covered the story of Jews in post-Shoah Thessaloniki, the period where Naar leaves off. The Jewish community never returned to its historic importance and glory, yet, the topics that Naar focused his attention on, Judaism, education, history, remain pressing. Both Naar and Papamichos Chronakis interrogate how far one is Greek, how far is one a Jew, and how can one bring these two poles of identity together? It would wonderful if historians and social scientists of Salonica/Thessaloniki would work co-operatively because thus far it seems that scholars of Jews in Greece suffer from the same binary as scholars of German-speaking Jews; they replicate the break of the Shoah. Either one studies the “before” or the “after.” It is time that this binary be overcome because “something” continued despite all odds. Studies like Jewish Salonica could pave the way, and hopefully will.
1 Dani Kranz is a DAAD exchange professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Ben Gurion University, Israel, and director of Two Foxes Consulting, Germany and Israel. Trained in anthropology, social psychology, and history, her thematic expertise covers migration, ethnicity, law, state/stateliness, political life, organizations, as well as memory politics. Her current work concerns the genesis of moral economies in post-1945 Germany.
2 Alisse Waterston chronicles the history of her father, a Polish Jew, in the wider framework of the violence of a century. Alisse Waterston, My Father’s Wars: Violence and the History of a Century (London: Routledge, 2014).
3 Paris Papamichos Chronakis, “Between Liberalism and Slavophobia: Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the (Re)making of the Interwar Greek State,” Jewish Social Studies, 25, no. 1 (Fall 2019): pp. 20-44.
4 Bea Lewkowicz, “Greece is My Home, But ...’ Ethnic Identity of Greek Jews in Thessaloniki,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 4, no. 2 (1994): 225-240; Bea Lewkowicz, The Jewish Community of Salonica: History, Memory, Identity (London: Vallentine Mitchell: 2006).