Section I. Jewish socialism and national anxiety in early Rizospastis (1911–1918): The making of a chauvinist discourse

The summer of 1917 marked a pivotal moment for Rizospastis when, after thirteen months of local operations in Thessaloniki, the newspaper relocated to Athens, establishing what would become its national headquarters. The first Athenian edition, published on July 23, signaled this significant transition under the management of Ioannis Petsopoulos, a young refugee from Istanbul and the paper’s co-founder. As both manager and owner, Petsopoulos, then only twenty-two or twenty-three years old, had emerged as a fervent advocate of liberal and democratic values, supporting the Liberals against the Royalists during Greece’s national schism (the bitter political divide between royalists supporting King Constantine’s neutrality and Venizelists advocating entry into the war alongside the Entente).Footnote ¹²

The new editor-in-chief, Nikolas Giannios (1885–1958), a thirty-three-year-old socialist journalist originally from the island of Andros in “Old Greece,” shared this revolutionary vision. After moving to Istanbul, he became involved in the multinational Socialist Center of Turkey and its Greek-language newspaper Ergatis (Greek for: Worker). Expelled by the Young Turks in 1911 for his radical activities, he resettled in Athens, where he co-founded the Socialist Center of Athens.Footnote ¹³ Together, Petsopoulos and Giannios drew on their shared experience in socialist journalism and advocacy to transform Rizospastis into an instrument of their political vision. Under their leadership, the newspaper retained its subtitle “A Newspaper of Democratic Principles” while expanding its national reach. Building on this revolutionary stance, this section explores how Jewish representation was constructed and contested in Rizospastis during its first two years in Athens. Following Karpozilos’s approach, this section traces the evolution of Greek socialism by focusing on the human mobility of those positioned at the margins of the nation. It also examines how that mobility triggered the construction of ethnic Otherness within the socialist press itself, as the arrival of “foreign” elements whose Greekness was “under constant negotiation,”Footnote ¹⁴ made them the focal point of a deeper ideological conflict within the Greek Left, and ultimately the target of the chauvinist discourse that this section sets out to analyze.

Alien status and anti-nationalism: The Macedonian question and the rise of a chauvinist discourse (1911–1914)

In September 1918, the relocated socialist daily Rizospastis opened its pages to a fierce polemic by Nikolas Giannios. Over seven consecutive issues, Giannios launched an incendiary attack on Abraham Benaroya and the Jewish Socialist Labor Federation of Thessaloniki, publishing articles with provocative titles such as “What is the Jewish Federation?,” “Who They Are and Where They Come From,” and “The [Pseudo] Socialism of the Federation.”Footnote ¹⁵ These sensationalist headlines framed Jewish socialism as a source of corruption and foreign intrusion, effectively constructing a nationalist-chauvinist discourse that sought to delegitimize the Jewish presence within the Greek socialist movement. This campaign unfolded at a critical juncture; during the summer of 1918, Benaroya was actively preparing the ground for the unified Greek labor movement that would officially materialize that autumn. To grasp the intensity of Giannios’s 1918 polemic, one must return to the long-standing ideological debate over the so-called “Macedonian Question”—a complex geopolitical dispute in the Macedonia region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that threatened to erupt into a world war. The dispute arose from the clash between the competing national movements of Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, each seeking to acquire this territory, still controlled by the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁶ Leading socialist intellectuals in “Old Greece,” including Giannios and Platon Drakoules, embraced a patriotic version of socialism closely tied to the Megali Idea (Greek for: Great Ideal). This refers to the nineteenth-century irredentist vision of uniting all Greek-inhabited territories, including Asia Minor and Constantinople, into a single Greek state, which defined the political project of liberating the “enslaved Greek brothers” living under Ottoman rule. This powerful sense of national identity was also intertwined with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Consequently, social-democratic intellectuals such as Nikolas Giannios argued that only once the unsolved national questions had been settled could the people begin to struggle for true freedom from capitalist domination.Footnote ¹⁷

By contrast, the Federation led by Abraham Benaroya rejected this patriotic ethos and advocated a class-based universalism. In the multiethnic environment of Ottoman Macedonia, the Federation sought to unite Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Turks under a single socialist movement inspired by the Austrian Social Democratic model. Before the Balkan Wars, it actively defended the preservation of Ottoman imperial unity as a safeguard of multiethnic coexistence and Balkan peace, and criticized all Balkan nationalisms, fearing that Greek annexation would replace Ottoman rule with an intolerant Christian authority.Footnote ¹⁸ Benaroya and the Federation had gained a hard-earned prestige within both regional and international socialist circles, especially in light of Benaroya’s leading role in the recent efforts to establish a unified Greek socialism shortly before the autumn of 1918, and it was this standing that Giannios sought to undermine through manipulative reports that recast the legitimate debate between nationalism and internationalism as a question of Jewish intrigue.

Giannios revisited the Ottoman period, citing a May 1911 article from Rabotnicheska Iskra (Bulgarian for The Workers’ Spark), a Bulgarian socialist newspaper, which accused “pseudo-socialist Benaroya” of encouraging Bulgarian nationalist separatism over Macedonia despite his professed internationalism.Footnote ¹⁹ By exploiting Benaroya’s Bulgarian background—he was born in post-Ottoman Bulgaria in 1887 and lived there for twenty-one years before moving to Thessaloniki—Giannios transformed these accusations into charges of “false socialism” and Jewish treason. Accusations of Jewish “double loyalty” reflected broader patterns in the Greek press of the 1910s. A landmark of this discourse appeared after the Balkan Wars in the Macedonian tobacco strike of 1914. In the spring of 1914, with the support and assistance of the Federation, a large-scale labor dispute broke out involving Jewish and Greek tobacco workers from Kavala, Drama, and Thessaloniki. Their demands, such as higher wages and limits on the length of the working day, were rejected by employers. The protest quickly spread across eastern Macedonia, and at its peak, some 30,000 tobacco workers were on strike for three weeks, clashing repeatedly with the police. The Greek press, which initially reported sympathetically on this unprecedented joint struggle, soon shifted its tone. The sheer scale and intensity of the strike, unlike anything Greece had previously experienced, provoked alarm. Since the majority of strikers were Jews, newspapers began to claim that socialist principles were merely a façade for a Jewish plot aimed at undermining Greece’s fragile sovereignty in Macedonia.Footnote ²⁰

Such tropes would later reappear in Giannios’s 1918 campaign, now reframed in the socialist press itself. Within the discourse surrounding the tobacco strike, the Greek worker was cast as the embodiment of “true socialism,” one that combined national patriotism, masculinity, and respect for religious and cultural traditions. By contrast, the Jewish worker was depicted as a distorted, anarchist version of the Greek socialist ideal.Footnote ²¹ The rhetoric was laced with inflammatory slogans: “None of [the strikers] is Greek,” “The red flag of socialism is raised against [patriotic] Hellenism,” and “This is not Bulgaria.”Footnote ²² Thus, the mainstream press systematically employed a chauvinist discourse, depicting Benaroya as a “domestic foreigner.” His background in Bulgaria, now an enemy state dissatisfied with the outcome of the Balkan Wars, combined with his embrace of internationalism, which was dismissed as rootless cosmopolitanism, cast lasting doubt on the loyalty of Jewish socialists to Greece and its fragile sovereignty over Thessaloniki.Footnote ²³ Given that much of the Salonikian Jewish community viewed the city’s incorporation into Greece as occupation rather than liberation, the Federation itself became a powerful symbol of Jewish anarchism.

This sense of estrangement was not merely collective; it also took on a deeply personal dimension in Benaroya’s encounters with Athenian socialism. When he arrived in Athens in May 1912, after his expulsion from Ottoman territories, Benaroya entered a world that spoke the language of workers’ emancipation yet felt foreign to him. The movement he found was not Marxian or internationalist but one sanctified by religion and closely tied to the Greek nation. Although he met prominent figures such as Giannios and Platon Drakoules, the atmosphere left him alienated. At the Athens Workers’ Center and the League of Working Classes of Greece, he discovered a movement far removed from the class-conscious socialism of Thessaloniki; its gatherings were adorned not with symbols of labor but with icons of Jesus. The gap was equally visible in practice: Before the May Day celebrations that year, Benaroya was asked to teach the participants socialist songs, a telling sign of how nascent the movement remained. During the celebrations, the police intervened and arrested the demonstrators, but after his comrades convinced the investigating officer that he was merely a foreigner who had stumbled into the gathering by mistake, Benaroya was released. This episode encapsulated Benaroya’s precarious position: present as an activist, yet treated as a foreigner.Footnote ²⁴ Occurring on the eve of the First Balkan War, this early encounter between “outsiders” and “others” foreshadowed the deeper ideological rift that would later divide Salonikian and Athenian socialism. Each movement operated within a distinct political framework—the Ottoman Empire versus the Greek nation-state—and only after the Balkan Wars and the incorporation of Thessaloniki into Greece would the depth of that gulf become visible.Footnote ²⁵

The next encounter between Benaroya and Giannios took place shortly after the First Balkan War. In a Thessaloniki café, Benaroya’s excitement at seeing his old comrade was met with cold indifference. Giannios, now wearing the uniform of a Greek army officer, paid only a perfunctory visit to the Federation’s office before disappearing altogether.Footnote ²⁶ After the Balkan Wars, once the incorporation of Thessaloniki into Greece became permanent (formalized in August 1913 by the Treaty of Bucharest, which recognized Greek sovereignty over the city), Benaroya abandoned his earlier defense of the Ottoman status quo and began advocating autonomy for Macedonia within a broader Balkan federation. His anti-patriotic stance during the early years of Salonikian incorporation, at a time when the core of the Greek socialist movement remained staunchly pro-war, was soon reframed by opponents through the familiar motif of “Jewish intrigue.” This association between Jewish internationalism and political disloyalty paved the way for a new form of repression: political exile. Benaroya, along with Samuel Yona, another leading figure of the Federation, was deported to the island of Naxos. Although he spent more than two years in exile (1915–1917),Footnote ²⁷ the Federation’s remaining activists continued to uphold his ideological line, maintaining their anti-war position and organizational discipline throughout Benaroya’s absence.

From margins to mainstream: The discursive transformation of Jewish/Salonikian socialism (1915–1918)

Despite the campaign of state repression during the years of World War I and the National Schism (the royalist–Venizelist divide discussed above), Jewish/Salonikian socialism underwent a profound transformation. From a persecuted and stigmatized movement, often portrayed as foreign and subversive, it gradually emerged as a legitimate political force, increasingly integrated into Greece’s broader socialist and national landscape.Footnote ²⁸ Τhe first turning point was the parliamentary elections of May 1915, which was one of the defining moments of the National Schism. Nikolas Giannios and other socialists from “Old Greece” sided with Eleftherios Venizelos, the leader of the Liberal camp, who supported Greece’s entry into the war alongside the Entente powers (Britain, France, and Russia). Venizelos viewed the alliance as an opportunity to fulfill the Megali idea, aspiring to conquer Ottoman territories, particularly in Asia Minor.Footnote ²⁹ Greek left-wing support for Venizelos’s expansionist policy mirrored the wider stance of many Western European socialists, who had likewise endorsed their governments’ military objectives.Footnote ³⁰ The veteran socialist Platon Drakoulis expressed this position plainly, writing: “The only anchor for the salvation of Greece is cooperation with the Entente powers, since the Entente is fighting for [liberty, democracy, and] the independence of Europe,” against the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) embodying the remnants of the old order.Footnote ³¹ In these early years of the Great War, the rhetoric and resolutions of the Second International—once committed to peace and solidarity across borders—were effectively replaced with pro-war support.

The Federation, however, maintained a firm anti-war line and reaped significant dividends from this position. In the 1915 elections, it therefore supported Prime Minister Dimitrios Gounaris, leader of the right-wing People’s Party, who advocated neutrality and opposed entry into a military adventure that could endanger Greece. Unlike the pro-Venizelist socialist camp, which distanced itself from direct political contestation and limited itself to supporting the Liberal Party from afar, the Federation entered and integrated into the national political arena. In negotiations with the monarchist bloc, it was agreed to place two socialist candidates on Gounaris’s electoral list: Alberto Couriel, a Jewish refugee from Smyrna, and Aristoteles Sideris, a socialist lawyer who had broken with Giannios over the pro-war stance. Both were elected to parliament.Footnote ³²

Ιn his polemic articles of September 1918, Giannios condemned this alliance in sharp terms, denouncing it as a betrayal of the immediate interests of Greek socialism: “It is known to everybody that socialists do not form an alliance with conservatives and militarists against liberals, but with liberals [with their pro-labor attitudes and policy] against conservatives.”Footnote ³³ In addition, the inclusion of a representative from “Old Greece” on the Federation’s list marked the beginning of actual strong cooperation between Salonikian socialism and dissident socialists from the Greek mainland who, due to the continual pro-war agenda, had distanced themselves from Giannios. The Socialist Center of Athens, once a hub of radical thought, had by this time become home only to circles of right-wing socialism. The Federation’s political success was thus interpreted by its opponents as a triumph of so-called “Jewish socialism,” whose anti-nationalist and anti-war ideology allegedly hindered the assimilation of socialist principles among the Greek masses. For Giannios and his few remaining supporters, socialism could only become a genuine mass movement if it were not subject to a dominant foreign—namely Jewish—influence but instead “directed by the Greek socialist majority, guiding Greek socialism in its honest way.”Footnote ³⁴

Yet these ideological disagreements soon hardened into open hostility. By the summer of 1918, Giannios launched a virulent anti-Jewish campaign in Rizospastis, attacking the very idea of a transnational, multilingual, and multicultural labor politics, that is, the inclusive socialist vision that Benaroya had long championed. As the prestige of Benaroya and the Federation reached unprecedented heights, Giannios’s rhetoric escalated, but it proved to be a losing battle. The nationalist, patriotic, and pro-war discourse offered little consolation to a population that by 1917 was increasingly exhausted by hunger, poverty, and war fatigue. The hardships of prolonged conflict created fertile ground for anti-militarist and anti-war sentiment. In this atmosphere, the Federation, together with the Western socialist groups, reaffirmed its anti-war position in early 1918, regaining renewed moral and political resonance among the Greek working-class circles.Footnote ³⁵ Venizelos was keenly aware of this growing discontent and moved closer toward Benaroya. In 1917, he released Benaroya from exile,Footnote ³⁶ and during their meetings in the summer of 1918, he granted permission to convene a national congress of all Greek trade unions in October.Footnote ³⁷ This marked the first practical step toward the realization of the Federation’s vision of internationalism at the national level: the establishment of a Pan-Hellenic labor movement. This vision gained increasing acceptance among non-Jewish socialists as well. Clear and decisive voices in favor of advancing cross-border solidarity, contrary to the right-wing agenda, were heard from socialist circles in “Old Greece,” underscoring the broadening appeal of Benaroya’s project.

Despite Rizospastis’s efforts to suppress alternative perspectives, these voices found refuge in Valkanikos Tachydromos (Greek for Balkan Courier, 1919–1920), a Salonikian daily that championed the Federation’s commitment to unity and class struggle. The Socialist Labor Organization of Athens issued a forceful repudiation of Giannios’s claims, stating unequivocally: “The Federation has never closed its doors to non-Jews,” and dismissing as “completely false and malicious” the allegation that the Federation sought Thessaloniki’s Turkification or Bulgarization.Footnote ³⁸ It further asserted that Giannios’s faction represented only a marginal element within the Socialist Center of Athens, an organization they dismissed as existing more on paper than in reality. Meanwhile, other socialist organizations across Greece rallied behind Benaroya’s unification efforts, declaring full solidarity with the Federation. Benaroya himself entered the fray, publicly challenging Giannios to participate in a committee tasked with investigating his allegations.Footnote ³⁹

This heated dispute did not remain confined to the labor press but spilled over into the Jewish bourgeois newspapers. In January 1918, after repeated claims that Benaroya supported ceding Greek Macedonia to Bulgaria, El Pueblo informed its readers of the Federation’s categorical denial, which stated: “No socialist party would ever consider supporting national demands.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Wishing to preserve its respectable, law-abiding image—in contrast to how Jewish socialists were portrayed in Rizospastis—the Jewish bourgeois press reacted with great concern, taking a firm stand against the anti-Jewish discourse. In late January 1918, El Liberal condemned Rizospastis’s anti-Semitic assertions, particularly its claim that “money is the homeland of the Jews, [and therefore] they will always betray Greece.”Footnote ⁴¹

On September 23, 1918, multiple fronts and mounting pressure forced Giannios’s withdrawal from Rizospastis’s editorial board. The Federation’s protests against his leadership garnered support from other working-class groups,Footnote ⁴² while the newspaper’s owner, Petsopoulos, advocated for a revolutionary direction at odds with Giannios’s factionalism. The Socialist Center of Athens, while continuing to back Giannios’s anti-Federation stance,Footnote ⁴³ acknowledged that his position at Rizospastis was no longer tenable and urged him to resign.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet Giannios’s departure from Rizospastis did not end his campaign. One of its lowest points came at the founding congress of the Socialist Labor Party of Greece. During the heated debates over the party’s constitution, the right-wing Greek socialists fought a rearguard battle. Article 3 declared: “The Party may be joined, regardless of gender, race and religion, by anyone who accepts the fundamental principles of the program, fulfills his obligations, as stipulated by the constitution and the internal regulations, and accepts the decisions of the International and National (Greek) Congresses.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Immediately after its approval, Giannios vehemently condemned it, declaring: “A man cannot become a socialist in one day.” As the discussion escalated, and it became clear that the congress would adopt and integrate the socialist theses of the “others” (namely, the Federation), Giannios made a desperate, final move. Before storming out of the congress with his comrades, he issued a direct threat against Benaroya: “I admit that there are issues to be solved only with a pistol.”Footnote ⁴⁶

By mid-November 1918,Footnote ⁴⁷ as Benaroya achieved a historic breakthrough in unifying the labor movement—establishing The General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE, October 1918) as well as The Socialist Labor Party of Greece (SEKE, November 1918), both committed to internationalist principles—Giannios resumed his attacks. However, now relegated to publishing in his own magazine Socialismos (Greek for Socialism), his influence diminished sharply due to its limited circulation. The formation of these labor organizations, rooted in transnational politics despite Giannios’s opposition, sealed the failure of his ethnocentric vision for Greek socialism.Footnote ⁴⁸

The winter of 1918 marked a pivotal shift in the public representation of Jewish socialism: Internationalism had become a recognized ideological framework within Rizospastis itself, providing Benaroya a newfound platform to share his vision with a broader audience. This turning point was especially evident in January 1919, when Benaroya published his first article in Rizospastis, titled “Certain Explanations. Our Struggle. So that a Few People Remain Silent.” The article strategically addressed organizational concerns, with Benaroya emphasizing GSEE’s tactical independence from political parties, a calculated compromise that mitigated factionalism while accommodating diverse elements within the trade union movement. Benaroya then expanded his argument, using the article to define his broader ideological vision of internationalism as integral to the Greek labor movement’s cohesion. From his position on SEKE’s three-member audit committee, he took a long-term perspective, predicting that “each individual worker” would gradually “gain social education … which would lead him to choose the appropriate party.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Speaking in August 1920 at the inauguration of the Socialist Club in Kaminia, a working-class neighborhood of Piraeus, Benaroya framed “poverty, persecution, and jail terms” as formative struggles that would ultimately lead the working class to “side with the Socialist Workers Party.”Footnote ⁵⁰ By articulating working-class consciousness in universal terms grounded in shared hardships, his rhetoric moved beyond a mere defense against accusations of Jewish particularism. Even as the mainstream Greek press weaponized his Bulgarian birthplace as proof of his alien status, Benaroya’s Greek-language articles actively demonstrated his commitment to a pan-Hellenic internationalism. This capability was rooted in his two and a half years of exile in Naxos, where he mastered the Greek language. Returning in January 1917, he was uniquely equipped to project a socialist vision that transcended ethnic divides, ultimately rendering obsolete any attempts to depict Jewish socialism as inherently sectarian.Footnote ⁵¹

Section II. From ethnic to ideological Otherness: The transformation of the Greek socialist movement, 1919–1924

The years 1919–1921 marked a decisive transformation in Rizospastis’s political identity, as it evolved from an independent democratic newspaper into the official organ of the Socialist Workers’ Party (Communist) of Greece. In early 1919, the editorial board publicly declared this shift, calling for a political vision that transcended the earlier struggle for parliamentary democracy. The paper’s growing influence was recognized at SEKE’s second congress in April 1920, where its circulation, which had extended to around 10,000 copies, was celebrated as evidence of its expanding reach among the working class.Footnote ⁵² At the same time, the modest contributions of Jewish laborers to Avanti, the party’s Ladino-language organ, reflected the enduring solidarity of Salonikian workers and their vital role in sustaining the socialist press.Footnote ⁵³

This period signaled a transformation of Otherness in the discourse of the Greek left. The criteria by which political communities defined insiders and outsiders were being actively redrawn: The chauvinist attacks that had once targeted the Jewish and multiethnic character of the Federation were now obsolete. Rizospastis no longer depicted Jews as an alien or sectarian force but increasingly incorporated Benaroya as a symbol of class unity transcending national and religious boundaries. Ethnic alterity, in other words, was giving way to a new framework of belonging, one whose boundaries would soon be redrawn once more.

Under Ioannis Petsopoulos’s approval,Footnote ⁵⁴ the 1920 Congress placed Rizospastis under direct party control—a move consistent with Vladimir Lenin’s influential theory of the press, which had become the model for socialist parties worldwide after the 1917 Revolution. Lenin argued that labor newspapers must act as collective organizers under strict party discipline.Footnote ⁵⁵ This principle carried direct implications for the production of Otherness: A press operating under strict party discipline would increasingly define belonging not through ethnic or national criteria, but through ideological conformity. Following this principle, the Central Committee appointed the thirty-year-old Giannis Kordatos—a key figure in the Greek labor movement and one of its foremost Marxist thinkers—as press representative.Footnote ⁵⁶

By July 1920, Rizospastis began circulating as the official party organ,Footnote ⁵⁷ bearing the subtitle: “Socialist Newspaper of the Socialist Labor Party of Greece, under the Political Control of the Central Committee.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This marked the beginning of a new era: Despite frequent changes in editorial leadership and ongoing state repression, the paper remained a consistent voice for workers’ emancipation. Its alignment with SEKE’s goals ensured that the press served the collective interests of labor rather than individual agendas.Footnote ⁵⁹ Within this framework, Rizospastis also began to integrate Jewish workers more explicitly into the broader socialist struggle, enacting, however temporarily, the inclusive vision that Benaroya had long championed and that this section now sets out to trace.

Inclusion and class solidarity: The pan-hellenic turn of 1919–1921

During Rizospastis’s early years as an organ of the SEKE, Benaroya remained central to its coverage of Jewish issues. Moving beyond the earlier portrayal of Jews as outsiders in Greek socialism (1918), Rizospastis now (1919–1921) incorporated Benaroya into a pan-Hellenic perspective, framing working-class identity through universal struggles rather than ethnic divisions, which was a strong rebuttal to attempts to delegitimize Jewish socialists. This editorial shift became evident amid the Venizelos government crackdown on the labor movement soon after SEKE’s establishment. Facing a national schism, economic depression, and rising social unrest, the pro-capitalist administration deployed security forces against labor activists, including SEKE’s key leaders. This repression aimed to limit SEKE’s influence, deter labor activism, and reinforce a capitalist status quo, reflecting the government’s effort to suppress socialist organizing.Footnote ⁶⁰ Among those targeted in the administration’s crackdown was Benaroya. On April 17, 1920 (May Day eve),Footnote ⁶¹ Rizospastis published a striking article titled “Give Us [Back] Benaroya.” It condemned his arrest and exile in July 1919 as a “shame,” denouncing the Venizelos government’s failure to present any legitimate charges against him.Footnote ⁶² In an earlier publication from December 1919, Rizospastis emphasized that Benaroya’s only “offense” was his role in SEKE’s Executive Committee, which had submitted a Congress-approved memorandum in November 1919. This memorandum sought to “improve the economic conditions of the workers”—a legitimate demand that the government ignored.Footnote ⁶³ Rather than addressing these labor concerns, the Venizelist administration responded by exiling Benaroya and three other SEKE Executive Committee members to the isolated island of Folegandros.Footnote ⁶⁴ Three months later, in October 1919, while the three SEKE members were released, Benaroya remained in exile, with no formal charges brought against any of them.Footnote ⁶⁵

During his ten months of imprisonment (July 1919–April 1920), the Venizelos administration offered no explanation when repeatedly questioned about the accusations against Benaroya. In October 1919, El Poublo, an anti-Bolshevik Ladino newspaper that had, since July 1919, taken the unusual step of covering Benaroya’s imprisonment and the protests surrounding it—likely influenced by growing Pan-Hellenic labor frustrations—wrote that Athens had announced: “The investigation against Benaroya has concluded, [with the decision that] the militant laborer will be judged in a martial court for his role in recent strikes.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This decision provoked outrage: Rizospastis condemned it as a “sort of Dreyfus case for the Greek workers.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The paper’s major explanation for the continued detention in Folegandros was reinforced in the piece of April 17, 1920, which praised Benaroya as the “honest fighter of workers’ ideology” whose “only [actual] crime … is working for the political and professional organization of our workers … contributing to their awakening and seeking their redemption from the nails of capitalism.”Footnote ⁶⁸ By adopting this rhetoric, Rizospastis positioned Benaroya as a symbol of the working-class struggle and issued a warning to publicize this injustice worldwide if he were not freed.

By December 1919, Rizospastis had already taken the lead in a sustained pro-Benaroya campaign, targeting the Venizelos regime and seeking to rally broader support for his cause, both in Greece and internationally. That month, shortly before his visit to Thessaloniki, the International Union of Printing Laborers sent Venizelos a telegram “demanding that he order the liberation of our union member and delegate of the Confederation of Workers of Greece, Benaroya, assuring you that he is a law-abiding and conscientious worker and citizen.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Rizospastis also published similar appeals from laborers of Volos and from Albert Couriel, a former member of the Federation and now a SEKE parliamentarian, who in January 1920 denounced the government’s actions in parliament.Footnote ⁷⁰

Beyond domestic protests, Rizospastis highlighted international solidarity, reporting in late December 1919 that the French socialist daily L’Humanité had taken up Benaroya’s cause, describing him as an “active socialist” and “a victim of the reactionary Venizelos.”Footnote ⁷¹ The French paper emphasized the severity of his situation, noting that this was his second exile and that his health was deteriorating due to consumption, effectively rendering his exile “equivalent to a death sentence.” Following Venizelos’s parliamentary defense of Benaroya’s detention, the Greek Socialist Group in Paris issued a unanimous protest through L’Humanité in January 1920, condemning the “arbitrary act” against their “loyal comrade.”Footnote ⁷² One of the high points in the campaign for Benaroya’s liberation came on April 30, 1920. On the eve of May 1, Rizospastis dedicated its pages to International Workers’ Day, intertwining cultural themes (featuring writings by Lenin and Maxim Gorky), social critiques (exposing the harsh realities of capitalism and the dire conditions of Greek laborers), and political calls to action (urging labor protests and strikes against state repression). On this backdrop, Rizospastis prominently featured Benaroya’s case, reinforcing his status as a key figure in the Greek socialist movement.

In addition to the aforementioned editors’ article “Give Us [Back] Benaroya,” Rizospastis published Benaroya’s own article on Labor Day—just as it had in its April 17, 1919, edition—elevating his status within Greek socialist circles on both occasions. The first article, published in April 1919, appeared just weeks before Benaroya’s imprisonment. In it, Benaroya condemned the anti-worker policies of several Western regimes between 1915 and 1917, before shifting focus to the labor movement’s resurgence after 1918. He framed this revival as a demonstration of “the great socialist power” underscored by mass general strikes that became central to Greece’s 1919 Labor Day celebrations.Footnote ⁷³ His second May Day article, published in April 1920 while he remained imprisoned, reinforced this message by emphasizing the rapid awakening of “tens of thousands” of Greek workers. He highlighted their growing class consciousness and organizational strength within “local federations, workers’ centers, the GSEE, and SEKE.” Despite ongoing repression and bourgeois manipulation, Benaroya portrayed May Day as a dual symbol: both an assertion of Greek labor’s defiance of domestic oppression and a commitment to the global proletarian struggle to “free the world from the grip of greed.”Footnote ⁷⁴

This second article, which reflected the rising class consciousness of early 1920, was written and published while Benaroya was still in exile. In his memoirs, he describes the daily life of political exiles, including those in Folegandros, noting that their isolation was not absolute. “Working-class exiles had their organization, their ‘collective,’ which coordinated efforts for their sustenance as well as their education … they spent their time reading and writing.”Footnote ⁷⁵ However, he highlights a major challenge: “the most difficult thing was obtaining books, newspapers, and maintaining correspondence,” recounting the creative and unconventional methods they used to bypass restrictions. Yet, for this particular May Day publication, no such subterfuge was necessary. Given that Rizospastis had long operated under strict censorship, its ability to publish Benaroya’s article while he remained a political prisoner suggests a shift in the official attitude. Just seven days later, on April 23, 1920, Rizospastis announced that the Greek Council of Ministers had decided to “liberate comrade Benaroya,”Footnote ⁷⁶ likely in a direct response to mounting domestic and international pressure.

Bolshevization and the new ideological other (1922–1924)

The liberation of Abraham Benaroya on April 23, 1920, marked a defining moment for the Greek socialist movement, transforming his personal narrative of exile into a unifying symbol for working-class solidarity.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Socialist Workers Party organized a series of celebrations that elevated Benaroya from an individual leader to a representative of the broader revolutionary struggle. Party proclamations underscored this collective vision, with one declaring, “The honor to Comrade Benaroya is an honor to the Working Class.”Footnote ⁷⁸ This statement deliberately framed Benaroya as the embodiment of proletarian resistance. The meticulously planned welcoming events, which took place from May 11 to May 18, 1920, were not merely expressions of gratitude but highly orchestrated political demonstrations. One call to action urged workers to see beyond the individual and embrace the collective ideal, stating, “We are obliged to greet in his person the idea of our struggle, which was so savagely persecuted by the bourgeoisie.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This framing emphasized Benaroya’s symbolic importance as a unifying figure in the labor movement, resonating deeply with the working class. His elevation as a representative of proletarian resilience was not merely a top-down initiative by Rizospastis but found widespread support among workers nationwide.

In Athens, Benaroya’s reception on May 11, 1920, held in one of the city’s largest theaters, was both a celebratory occasion and a potent political statement of solidarity. The SEKE and affiliated organizations led the arrangements, highlighting the working class’s unity and determination to advance their cause. Congratulatory messages poured in from across the country, affirming Benaroya’s release as a victory for the socialist struggle. A second major event on May 17, 1920, at the “Splendid” cinema in Athens, saw thousands of workers from various sectors attending, transforming the occasion into a powerful protest against capitalist oppression. The event’s official invitation declared, “This working-class show is a protest against the persecution of workers by the plutocracy.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Benaroya’s liberation thus became more than a personal milestone; it was celebrated as a broader triumph of collective power and resilience, reinforcing the labor movement’s ongoing struggle against exploitation.

While most of the reports here are cited from Rizospastis, the Ladino press also covered these celebrations, as it did Benaroya’s imprisonment. This extensive coverage reflected the celebrations’ pan-Hellenic significance, marked by the participation of grassroots activists as well as labor movement leaders, including the heads of the GSEE and SEKE.Footnote ⁸¹ Benaroya himself addressed the crowd during the May 18, 1920, celebration at the “Splendid” cinema. He situated his personal experience within a global narrative of revolutionary struggle, drawing parallels with international socialist martyrs: “The socialist movement can only be compared with Christianity in its first days of its appearance,”Footnote ⁸² he proclaimed, positioning the workers’ movement as a transcendent, universal cause. This universal framing extended to his rhetorical approach, which emphasized a transnational working-class identity that superseded individual or ethnic divisions. Benaroya highlighted instances of persecution in England, France, Belgium, Germany, and Russia, framing them as interconnected struggles within a shared global fight against oppression. This perspective was further reinforced through his references to revolutionary figures like Karl Liebknecht, Ferdinand August Bebel, and Rosa Luxemburg, all of whom endured imprisonment or martyrdom for their commitment to the cause.

These examples deeply resonated with Greek workers, who saw their own struggle reflected in Benaroya’s resistance. The most impactful moment came in his call for unified defiance: “We will meet bourgeois violence with organized workers’ violence.”Footnote ⁸³ This declaration transformed personal suffering into a strategic call for collective resistance, explicitly linking local Greek challenges to broader international revolutionary movements. Benaroya argued that “persecution has pushed the workers into more methodical organization and education,” highlighting how adversity not only tested but also strengthened working-class solidarity. The celebratory slogans surrounding Benaroya’s liberation reinforced this universal vision. Statements such as “Long live the Socialist Workers Party,” “Long live the Greek proletariat,” and “Long live the social revolution,”Footnote ⁸⁴ deliberately foregrounded collective identity over individual or ethnic distinctions. Party documents consistently portrayed Benaroya not through the lens of ethnicity but as a revolutionary leader defined by his unwavering dedication to class struggle and the fight for workers’ rights.

In the months following his release, Rizospastis continued to cover Benaroya extensively. The newspaper reported on his involvement in political events, including the parliamentary elections of November 1920,Footnote ⁸⁵ his speeches as SEKE’s representative at a labor assembly in Thessaloniki,Footnote ⁸⁶ and his experiences with state repression, such as a thirteen-month imprisonment following a labor protest in Volos in 1921.Footnote ⁸⁷ Beneath these somber and taxing accounts lay the undercurrents of a significant rift that emerged in the early 1920s within the labor movement. This internal division pitted the founding generation, who adhered to a social-democratic ideology, against newer members advocating a shift toward communist principles.Footnote ⁸⁸ One indication of this division appeared in Rizospastis: The 24-year-old secretary of the youth organization of SEKE, Jack Ventura, who had supported joining the Third [Communist] International in October 1922—contrary to Benaroya’s position—protested seven months later that the party had not invited Benaroya to a three-day congress held in May 1923.Footnote ⁸⁹ Ultimately, the emergency congresses of 1924 confirmed the ascendancy of the more radical faction. Many of these younger socialists were refugees and displaced persons arriving from Turkey, Russia, and the Caucasus, who were deeply influenced by the Russian Revolution of 1917. Confronting the conciliatory, social-democratic model of the founding generation, this new cohort sought to impose a Bolshevization of the Greek political system. In February 1924, just months before the Bolshevization Congress, the radical left faction orchestrated the expulsion of Benaroya and other leading socialists who opposed the party’s turn toward communism.Footnote ⁹⁰ At the end of that year, the party officially endorsed the Twenty-One Conditions, joined the Third (Communist) International, and renamed itself the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).Footnote ⁹¹ This ideological turn altered Benaroya’s portrayal in Rizospastis, the party’s official organ. The newspaper reported that “the expulsion of Benaroya is approved on the grounds that his position in the struggles of the party was used by some to undermine its existence as the revolutionary party of the proletariat and to foster an anti-communist political organization in opposition to the program of the Communist International.”Footnote ⁹² Benaroya’s expulsion was not based on anti-Semitic accusations; rather, it reflected the triumph of the demand for Bolshevization and the adoption of the Comintern’s foreign organizational model. The new KKE, driven by a global communist policy demanding full alignment, viewed Benaroya and his allies as an ideological threat to its very existence as the revolutionary party. Thus, Otherness was redefined: not as ethnic alienation, but as non-compliance with the transnational political orthodoxy originating in Moscow.

By the mid-1920s, Rizospastis had fully aligned with the party’s stance, and Benaroya’s removal symbolized his near-complete erasure from its pages. In the years leading up to World War II, only a single reference to him appears. In a detailed article from February 1927 on the ideological conflicts within the Greek labor movement, Rizospastis revised its depiction of Benaroya, branding him a false socialist whose “personal defects, conspiratorial tendencies, and oversized ego” had harmed the labor party.Footnote ⁹³ While Giannios’s editorship (1917–1918) attributed these flaws to Benaroya’s Jewish origin, the post-1918 Rizospastis maintained its supranational labor perspective, characterizing Benaroya’s perceived shortcomings in political and ideological terms rather than ethnic ones. This shift reflected the broader transformation of the Greek Left, which was increasingly prioritizing class-based internationalism over narrow nationalist or ethnic distinctions, even as it simultaneously engaged in internal purges and ideological policing.