Devin Naar’s book on the changing structure of Salonica’s Jewish community offers an insightful analysis of how the Sephardic Jewish community became embedded in the political frameworks of Ottomanism and Hellenism from the late Ottoman period to the Nazi occupation of the city between 1941 and 1944. The book, consisting of five interrelated chapters, highlights how different actors of the Jewish community developed strategies to negotiate their political positions in the city’s changing political landscape. In the first chapter, Naar focuses on the impact of the institutionalization of the late Ottoman millet system (a self-governing organization based on religious affiliation) on the Salonican Jewish community. The chapter suggests that this institutionalization played a pivotal role in the formation of local Jewish identity during the transition from empire to nation-state. The second chapter deals primarily with the competing discourses and political agendas regarding the nature and status of the Salonican chief rabbinate from the late Ottoman period through World War II. The author argues that, although the chief rabbis continued to exert religious power over the Jews of Salonica, different groups in the city disagreed over their political status. The workings of communal schools constitute the focus of the third chapter, which emphasizes the changing role of language and curricula in the identity formation of Salonican Jews. The fourth chapter explores how changing political and cultural dynamics in the city during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to modern Greece affected the Jewish community’s interest in their own history. Naar claims that, during the interwar years, different political groups began to pay special attention to writing the history of Salonican Jews in order to strengthen their position in the city. The fifth chapter, which is largely descriptive, examines the ways through which the Jewish community sought to protect Salonica’s Jewish cemetery—one of the largest in Europe—from the late Ottoman era to World War II. This final chapter demonstrates that, although the Jewish burial ground sustained damage during the late Ottoman era, the city’s subsequent Hellenization in the interwar period transformed this Jewish necropolis into a contested space.

Although Naar’s analysis of the experiences of the Jewish community under the late Ottoman rule relies mostly on secondary sources, he nevertheless manages to convincingly show that Hellenization, as the ideology of Greek national state in the first decades of the twentieth century, developed as a prolonged process involving zigzag negotiations between the Greek state and the Jewish community’s representative bodies (the Communal Council and the Chief Rabbinate). Since he does not draw upon Ottoman sources, his understanding of the workings of the late Ottoman Jewish communal body is shaped mainly by the contours of the well-known millet system. Throughout the book, Naar does not problematize how different sectors of the Salonican Jewish community perceived the ideology of Ottomanism and shaped the functioning of self-governance within the millet system. Because he conceptualizes Ottomanism and modern state formation through the prism of these self-governing structures, he does not question the diverging interests of the different social sectors of the Jewish community regarding the demands of the state-sponsored ideology of Ottomanism.

Theoretically, Naar argues that “Ottoman Jewish leaders, who did not propose an alternative to empire, committed to the promise of Ottomanism” (p. 20). Despite the nearly total absence of a social perspective on Jewish society, the book convincingly shows throughout that Salonica’s incorporation into Greece in 1912 did not mark the end of the community’s self-governing capacity. In this connection, the author remarks that “in the case of post-Ottoman Greece, as in other Ottoman successor states, imperial-style dynamics did not disappear” (p. 282). Jewish Salonica, he contends, recognized both the continuities and the ruptures that existed between the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece, while also shifting attention away from the state and toward the people. Naar further adds that some sectors of the Salonican Jewish community continued to justify their positions in the changing political spectrum even after the Greek takeover. In doing so, they developed “Hellenized Ottomanism” as a legitimate form of expression, with the autonomous mode of ruling outliving the Ottoman Empire. The author’s inquiries into the discourses revolving around the fire of 1917, the status of the Jewish cemetery, the management of communal schools, and the election of the chief rabbi after the 1920s reveal that, in order to reinvent their position within a changing political spectrum, the Jewish literati and political notables, as citizens of a national state, continued to use a modified Ottomanist rhetoric even after the city had come under Greek rule.

In these political discourses, however, it should be noted that, in the eyes of the author, the main agents are always presented as being the intellectuals, religious leaders, and political elite of the Jewish community. Although Naar’s introduction promises to offer insight into the anxieties and aspirations of inhabitants from all segments of the Jewish community, throughout the book he focuses mainly on the ideas of Jewish elites rather than on the competing views of ordinary Jews. In this respect, he seems to perceive the political body of the Jewish community as being a representative agent of all Jews in the city, and thus he interprets the relevant sociopolitical changes from an institutional perspective that does not allow us to hear the voices of common people. In fact, although Naar meticulously makes use of hitherto rarely used local Judeo-Spanish newspapers as well as Greek records, including numerous archival materials, these sources focus primarily on the collective characteristics of Jewish people in the city, a phenomenon that partially explains the rather limited perspective of the author’s research into the connection between “communal” interests and changing social hierarchies. For example, the author does not discuss how Salonica’s religious, political, and economic elites solidified a concept of self-governance in such a way as to protect the boundaries of the social hierarchy within a political environment where different social groups were challenging their social hegemony. In fact, it is only in the book’s examination of debates over the elections of new rabbis, of the management of school curricula, and of the organization of educational activities that the author portrays different sectors’ alternative opinions in an exhaustive manner. This relative absence of social analysis also elucidates why the chapter on the articulation of historical narratives among the Jewish literati is the strongest part of the book. Here, Naar aptly suggests that intellectuals developed competing historical narratives about Ottoman and Greek Salonica, narratives which reflected their own political and ideological interests. In this sense, one might easily argue that, despite the claims made in the introduction, Jewish Salonica provides a primarily elite-centered intellectual and political history of the city.

In parallel to this “elite-centric” view, Naar also seems to reduce social complexities to ideological and political substructures. For instance, he characterizes such organizations as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Zionists, the Socialist Worker’s Federation, and the Mizrahi in a rather essentialist manner as static entities: “religious” Zionists, “nationalist” Zionists, the “liberal” Alliance, the “integrationist” Alliance, the “socialist” Federation, and so on. Throughout the book, Naar claims that ideological markers and boundaries of identities were quite flexible and permeable during the transition from empire to nation-state, yet he himself seemingly sticks to a categorization of the different sub-sectors of the Jewish community that treats them as monolithic entities. Yet notwithstanding such shortcomings, the book nevertheless 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.