I
n March 1942, the Jews of Salonica in northern Greece sought to celebrate Passover. Their city had been under brutal German military occupation since April 1941. Their country was suffering a famine that would kill over a quarter of a million people. Wheat was scarce, unleavened bread (matzah, which Jews are commanded to eat during Passover) was rare. Nonetheless, they proceeded with Passover. Chief Rabbi Sevi Koretz issued guidance in Judeo-Spanish on how to observe the holiday with vegetables, fruit, and ground semolina.
Such resilience is a theme of Devin Naar’s Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece. Naar, a history professor at the University of Washington, has researched the history of Salonica’s Jews broadly and in many languages. He has found important details that would otherwise have been lost. Jewish Salonica should have assembled these facts with a convincing argument. Instead, it presents a disjointed tale of interesting anecdotes.
The Sephardic Jews of Salonica were unlike any other Jewish community, with a confidence, autonomy, and dominance over their city. They defined Salonica’s character for centuries after their arrival following the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. Although under Ottoman rule for more than 400 years, the city ran on a Jewish clock. As Naar notes, the historian Isaac Emmanuel called Salonica “Shabatopolis.” The port city had been such a stronghold of Jewish learning that Chief Rabbi Jacob Meir proclaimed in February 1908: “For from Salonica shall go forth Torah,” a play on Isaiah: “For from Zion shall go forth Torah.”
Once captured by Greece in 1912 during the Balkan wars, however, the Jews’ position changed drastically. After a massive fire during the First World War, the Greek state rebuilt Salonica in a manner that removed many Jews from the city center and made the rehousing of Greek Christians a priority. In the 1920s, an influx of Greek Christian refugees from Turkey turned the Jews from a likely majority into a clear minority in the city. Greek politics were unstable and sometimes violent, although Greek Christians preferred to attack one another rather than Jews. There were multiple coups, some successful, and over 30 governments between 1920 and 1936. Finally, in August 1936, General Ioannis Metaxas installed a dictatorship that achieved stability through repression.
Despite this turmoil, Salonica’s Jews maintained their self-government. In contrast to communities elsewhere that splintered, Salonica’s Jews had an accepted structure. There was a Communal Council, which was the executive, a General Assembly, elected on a limited franchise, and a rabbinic “Spiritual Council.”
The community was also administratively and politically adept, in contrast to the state. The construction committee built new homes that Greece could not. The community provided education and cooperated with the state to teach young Jews Greek. The Jews were willing to learn Greek, but the Greek government could not provide enough language instructors.
Although Greece treated Jews as a religious rather than an ethnic minority, the community understood being Jewish both nationally and religiously. Similarly, while Jewish communities in Western Europe were rapidly assimilating, with intermarriage rates of close to 50 percent, there were vanishingly few such departures in Salonica.
Naar is good at noting that all strands were present in communal politics. There were liberals who were wary of the power of the rabbis—which in the Ottoman era had included the ability to imprison Sabbath violators. There were three Zionist groups: Religious, General, and Revisionist. Greek Jews took their politics seriously. Naar gives us the story of how the General Zionists and Revisionists managed a Passover punch-up in the synagogue of the provincial town of Kastoria in 1934. When the General Assembly voted to approve the new chief rabbi in March 1933, the Communists dissented because they were against having a chief rabbi at all. Yet the Communists had a place in the assembly.
Salonica was a proto-Zion, a Jewish state of its own. Visiting in 1926, Ze’ev Jabotinsky said, “We are trying to establish in the Land of Israel something similar to what our eyes are seeing in Salonika.”
Naar brings some fascinating material to light and has made great use of the Judeo-Spanish press, a generally neglected resource. He writes poignantly about Salomon Naar, his grandfather’s brother, who provided the aged and infirm with milk and yogurt as they boarded the trains for Poland in 1943.
Too often, however, Naar’s history of Salonica Jews is obscured by an excessive interest in identity and a generous use of jargon. Naar’s introductory chapter is entitled “Is Salonica Jewish?” A better question is why Salonica matters. Instead of giving readers a compelling story illustrated by his research, Naar has five thematic chapters that overlap. All of the themes—communal institutions, schools, the chief rabbi, historians, and the cemetery—mattered all of the time. The impression is of journal articles stapled together.
This is a shame because Naar recalls otherwise forgotten figures, such as the historian Baruch Ben-Jacob, a teacher who popularized local history by publishing in Judeo-Spanish. Naar’s account of the search for a chief rabbi is important. Salonica could not keep Bension Uziel, one of the giants of Jewish law whose rulings still inform Sephardim. Instead, after many candidates and a decade, the community hired Koretz, an Ashkenazi with a doctorate, to be its religious leader. Naar is, however, too averse to controversy to tell readers whether he believes “the perception of Koretz as a collaborator” is apt. The answer is that Koretz did collaborate with the Germans after two spells in prison, unlike Greek state officials who collaborated without coercion. Koretz then opposed the Germans, earning him a third incarceration.
Indeed, no sooner does the history come into focus than Naar distracts with what Orwell referred to as “prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set.” Jewish Salonica has “ruptures and continuities,” “categories of belonging,” a “multilevel sense of belonging,” “layers of identity,” “value-laden dichotomies,” “orientalist tropes,” a “discursive framework,” “multiple affiliations,” “complexities and contradictions,” and “the contested role of language and its relationship to questions of identity and belonging.” The Jewish school was “a key locus of contestation.”
These euphemisms prevent Naar from confronting the force that diminished and ultimately helped destroy Salonica’s Jews: Greek chauvinism. The history of Jewish Salonica is more than the history of the Jews of Salonica. It was not just Jews who were “imbued with agency.” Greek chauvinists also possessed it and had more effect than the Jews because of the support of the Greek state and, during World War II, the German occupiers.
Naar, however, wants to overturn the historical consensus that after 1912 the Salonica community declined because of Greek state pressure, with a brief respite under Metaxas. The community was vibrant and fought for its rights, but its deterioration is undeniable. Emigration led to Jewish numbers dropping from some 75,000 in 1917 to around 50,000 in 1941.
Equally, Naar’s claim that inter-war Greek democracy was not that detrimental to the Jews cannot withstand the hostility to the Jews of Eleftherius Venizelos, inter-war Greece’s dominant political personality. Venizelos held the Salonica Jews (and Muslims in northeastern Greece) responsible for his defeat in the November 1920 elections. This setback, Venizelos argued, led to the Greek defeat at the hands of Turkey in 1922. Resentment at the Jews, encouraged by the yellow press, led to their being forced to vote separately in elections from 1923 to 1933 so that the “alien” would not be the “arbiter.” A Greek law in 1924 demanded that Salonica close for business on Sunday, not Saturday, legislation aimed against Sabbath observance.
By contrast, Metaxas provided the Jews a modicum of protection. He censored the press and suppressed anti-Semitism and Fascist paramilitaries. Metaxas was still a nationalist. He enforced the teaching of Greek to Jews and other minorities. He also had the Jewish community concede 12,300 square meters of its historic cemetery, 3 percent of Europe’s largest Jewish graveyard, to the Aristotelian University of Salonica. The British Foreign Office reported that the Greek authorities extorted the land “in the best totalitarian manner.” However, to claim, as Naar does, that this began the process of destroying the cemetery minimizes the significance of the actual razing of the cemetery and its 350,000 graves by Greek collaborators as of December 1942. Naar believes that the Germans “unwittingly solidified the Hellenization of the city.” Quite the opposite, the Germans exploited Greek nationalism in Salonica. The Greek authorities were their eager partners.
Naar is so careful not to tread on Greek nationalists’ toes that he adopts their language. He refers to “Slavic-speaking Orthodox Christians” who speak a “Slavic idiom.” This is the ethnically correct terminology for Macedonians, whose existence as a separate people the Greek state continues to deny.
In the end, readers are left with a book that is less engaging than Mark Mazower’s Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950. This is a missed opportunity. Naar’s work, unlike Mazower’s is not tendentious and is grounded in Jewish sources. The pity of it all is that the history of Salonica’s Jews merits a magisterial history. Unfortunately, Naar has not provided it.
