Devin Naar traces a five-decade odyssey through the modernization of Salonica (Saloniki, Selanik, Thessalonica, Thessaloniki) until the destruction of its ancestral Jewish community (mainly Sephardic since the sixteenth century) during World War II. This half-century odyssey was tumultuous: the Ottoman Caliphate was rapidly approaching its dissolution, beginning with the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 (centered in Salonica), through the Balkan War that brought Salonica into the Greek kingdom, the beginning of a decade of Anatolian refugees culminating in the great fire of 1917, and the succeeding three decades of the vicissitudes of state-sponsored Hellenization of the city.
But Naar has not written a standard chronological history; rather, his study is a deep analysis of the Jewish community and its various components that proudly faced the challenges of the shift from a favored Ottoman millet to a beleaguered—both internally and externally—community in serious decline. He delves into specific topics that define the outlines and contents of this vibrant and complicated community, using sources from archives in the Salonican Jewish community, Israel, the Soviet Union, France, the United States, and numerous private collections.
The first chapter begins with a question: Is Salonica Jewish? After all, the city was multiethnic and the Jewish community itself was also multiethnic as well as polyglot. But the center of the city had been Jewish since the sixteenth century, and Greek Jews had been living by the port for nearly two millennia. Jews, who were ever present in the port area from stevedores to managers, dominated the urban economy and the main market. Many bankers and professionals, including doctors, were Jewish. The dominant language was Judeo-Spanish, in which even the other ethnic groups could communicate. Many of the Jews rarely came into contact with non-Jews outside of government or private schools, since the community had numerous religious and secular schools of its own.
But intellectuals, journalists, and community leaders had to look to the future and the changing masters of the city. True, they were Jews living in an autonomously governed city dominated by Jews, speaking their own language, and reveling in their Spanish heritage. The questions arose: Should they learn Turkish to show loyalty to those who had welcomed the refugees from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and granted them autonomy? And after 1912, how should they relate to the Greek government, which was actively promoting the Hellenization of the city, and the myriads of Anatolian Greeks, some of whom were Turcophones?
The community attempted to resolve the question of loyalty and how to identify themselves through politics and education. The new Judeo-Spanish press was actively involved in attempting a range of options. However, one branch of the educated class pursued a steady traditional path, namely the Talmud and Torah, for they were Sephardic Jews first, and traditions counted above all. Naar follows the complicated path of the modernization of the rabbinic leadership from a troika of three rabbis under the Ottomans to the chief rabbinate of Salonica to the chief rabbi of Greece. The communal leadership evolved from local rabbis to prominent Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardic leaders from outside the community and innovative leaders, who especially promoted Modern Hebrew following the initiatives of Zionists in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. Eventually, they searched for a modern Ashkenazic rabbi with a university degree to lead the community through the modernization process, eventually hiring Zvi Koretz, who, to his misfortune, presided over the destruction of the community, despite his political and rabbinic successes.
Salonica's Jewish leadership was fragmented, as Naar shows, among traditionalists, who formed the Mizrahi party; socialists, who were loyal but class conscious; and Zionists, who promoted the Yishuv in Palestine and the teaching of Hebrew. Their raucous discussions have been preserved in virtually untouched records in Salonica or in archives obtained from the Soviets, who had captured them from the Nazis and kept them as war booty. Their recovery is a story in itself, and in this and other stories, Naar excels in weaving them into his narrative.
Chapter 4 details an interesting parallel to the development of modern Greece and its intellectuals. In a series of trenchant vignettes, Naar follows the careers of the historians of Sephardic Jews and Salonica from the late nineteenth century through to World War II. Their pride, recalling that of the hidalgos of Spain, created a history of Salonica that had not existed before and was generally ignored by the Ashkenazim. Jewish Salonica became the theme that permeates the authors' five-decade odyssey, and these authors placed Salonica at the forefront of the Sephardic world as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, the ‘Ir ve-’em be-Yisra'el (a hendiadys from the book of Samuel, preceding by six centuries the appearance of the Greek term “metropolis”), and “Madre de Israel,” first mentioned by a sixteenth-century Portuguese converso.
Chapter 5 discusses in detail the largest extant Jewish graveyard in the world and its destruction. This story summarizes the failure of the Jewish reaction to local modernization, the power of the state, and the growing animosity of the local Greek population led by nativist intellectuals. This huge expanse of graves covering some eighty-four acres and containing some 400,000 graves with about 100,000 inscriptions was a living treasure eyed greedily by the new Aristotle University of Thessaloniki supported by the local bureaucracy. With the support of officials in Athens, they persuaded the occupying Germans to obtain it, and the community turned it over as a ransom for thousands of Jewish men sent on forced labor under insalubrious conditions, with Jewish women successfully hounding the rabbis to agree to this destruction. The Greeks swept in and destroyed the graveyard, recycling its precious epitaph-filled gravestones and bricks for local purposes at bargain prices.
The community followed this fate in the succeeding years, and some 48,000 of 50,000 of its Jews disappeared in the crematoria of Birkenau. Naar, an American by birth and education, a Salonican by sentiment, whose nostalgia permeates this exceptional book, has written a readable and scholarly paean to his ancestral city. Much of this story has been known, but Naar has deepened it based on his research, and has given us a moving epilogue to the millennial chapter of a Jewish community and the Jewish city into which it developed in its latter centuries.
There are, however, lacunae. The Dönme, for example, flourishing survivors of the Sabbatian messianic hysteria, were a powerful element in the modernization of the Ottoman city and an influential component of the Young Turk Revolution. Of all the groups discussed above, one is prominently absent: the lower class, whose members struggled for their daily bread and who patronized the tavernas and coffeehouses to the sounds of bouzouki music. They were the major victims of the Nazi onslaught, and their story deserves to be told in the same detail as that of the middle and upper classes.
