Leon Saltiel
THE HOLOCAUST IN THESSALONIKI: REACTIONS TO THE ANTI-JEWISH PERSECUTION, 1942-1943
London: Routledge, 2020, ISBN: 9780367193843
Reviewed by Steven Bowman1
Commemorated in this most recent book on the Thessaloniki tragedy during World War II is a detailed pathology of the persecution and destruction of a major Jewish community during its two-year death cycle. The major emphasis is the relations with their fellow citizens who, in the main, ignored their plight and indeed profited from their devastation and deportation. Saltiel also writes about the non-welcome following liberation from the lagers of the some eight hundred battered remnants of the four hundred and fifty year-old Sephardi community that had until the twentieth century dominated Thessaloniki demographically and economically during previous centuries
The Jewish community did not deserve this neighborly neglect, although the exploitation of the victims is almost understandable in light of the tragic history of Thessaloniki in the twentieth century. First was the replacement of the moribund Ottoman regime by a fiercely nationalistic Hellenic government that was at odds with the monarchy in Athens. Still, the Jewish community showed its loyalty to the prior rulers by hosting the deposed Caliph in his first exile. The subsequent destruction of the Ottoman presence was but a harbinger of the fate of the Jewish memory in the city
The second was the flood of Christian refugees, survivors of the Greek invasion of Anatolia in the 1920s and the Turkish ethnic cleansing (1912-1923) of the millennial Greek Orthodox population nearly completed in the mid-1950s pogrom in Constantinople, renamed as Istanbul in 1930 from the medieval Greek eis ten polin. The Jewish community was active in succoring the Greek Orthodox refugees immediately on their arrival. Then the economic collapse of 1929 further crippled an already impoverished community of poor Jews whose intellectual and economic center had been devastated by the great fire of 1917 and incited old and new Greek hostility
Third was the flood of refugees from Thrace, victims of the Bulgarian ethnic cleansing during the World War II as part of a Nazi ally’s attempt to Bulgarize this potential outlet to the sea, a policy pursued since World War I. The growing animosity towards Jews was exacerbated by the influx of Nazi infiltrators and their new anti-Semitism. The abandonment of many homes by the deported Jews in 1943 and diverse population was welcomed by the local Greek government. How sad the twin tragedies meshed into the nationalist policies of twentieth century Greek policies. Yet the death of the ancient Jewish community mainly Sephardi, but with Romaniote and Ashkenazi enclaves as well as foreign Jewish immigrants, was observed and recorded by the administrations in Thessaloniki intent upon graecizing this ancient capital of the Greek speaking Macedonian – Megas Alexander with its many ethnic minorities (Armenians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavians, Albanians, Vlachs, and others).
A major tragedy alongside the destruction of the Jews and the loss of their extensive property was the destruction of the ancestral graveyard, one of the largest in Europe. The Jewish community was compelled by circumstances to turn over the graveyard to the government of Thessaloniki which had sought to expand eastward since the early twentieth century. This expansion was blocked by this extensive area that lay just outside the Byzantine walls. Already the first building of what later became the Aristotle University was built under Ottoman rule. Now the prospect of acquiring the whole area which the city had been negotiating with the community throughout the 1920s and 1930s was eagerly pursued with the assistance of the Nazi occupiers. The historical scandal, as was noted by German civilians working in Thessaloniki at the time, was that this was the only graveyard in Europe desecrated during the war. It was indeed the city’s shame alongside the subsequent abolishing of the historical memory of Jewish Salonika. It is ironic that Greeks and many scholars are now bewailing the Turkish attempts to erase Orthodox memories and their churches, just as Thessalonians erased and recycled Turkish monuments and their mosques and graveyards in the throes of their new nationalism. But who cares about the Jews and their history? The silence has been deafening until this new generation of young scholars opened the closets of dusty archives and brought to light the shame of that interwar generation that avidly recycled the bones and stones of its once prominent community, ninety-seven per cent of whom were incinerated in the bowels of Moloch Saltiel’s now published dissertation benefited from his own archival research and from a bevy of publications by recent PhDs who have plowed through the many extant municipal, business, and private archives in Thessaloniki. The Jewish archives had been absconded by the Nazis along with the treasure of manuscripts and books assembled over the centuries by that learned community known as the Metropolis of Israel. The author includes numerous translations of local contemporary sources, many by the Communist-led resistance and liberal elements. Much of this earlier research is evident in The Holocaust in Greece (George Antoniou, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2018), in which Saltiel also appears but such research is not mentioned in his extensive, albeit incomplete bibliography of relative scholarship.
Contemporary Thessaloniki is atoning first by reexamining its wartime misdemeanors and by slowly honoring the memory of its lost treasure. Saltiel’s book has been recognized by the city at a recent Holocaust Commemoration Day. Jewish veterans of the war against Italy and Germany are remembered as are the andartes who were persecuted by Right wing governments after liberation; and many Jews were later freed from prison after the succeeding Civil War provided they accepted exile with loss of citizenship to British Palestine, now Israel. Jewish monuments in Salonika, often desecrated and repaired, are visible to visitors who tour after visits to the Jewish Museum and other sites, many from the Ottoman period now closed and abandoned. Thessaloniki is more interested in its Macedonian, Roman, and Byzantine remains but youthful guides do study and tour the Jewish sites. The university which hosts the ghosts of 500,000 Jewish graves under its grassy knolls has a tasteful monument to the destroyed Jewish community (some 55,000 deported) occasionally desecrated by hoodlums, but such is the nature of anti-Semitism, to spit on the dead and spew hate on the living.
Thessaloniki is slowly coming to grips with its past no longer ignored. It honors the remnant that survives and indeed flourishes among the shadows of its own dark memories. Jews and Judaism are studied at the university and bookstalls are replete with translations and local scholarship. Young Saltiel, a scion of that community, has given us a mature and comprehensive analysis and reflection of a unique aspect of the Holocaust of Sephardi and Romaniote Jewry.
1 Steven Bowman is emeritus professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati and author of Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece (London, 2006) and The Agony of Greek Jews 1941-1945 (Stanford 2009). He is currently engaged in a documentary based on these two books.