Who or what is Greek? Who is a Greek Jew? The answer is as amorphous as the terms Arab and Arab Jew in modern parlance. This ambiguity also applies to the term Yevani in Hebrew and its Yiddish antecedents. The real question is, who defines whom in political and historical terms? That question leads us to modern inquiries into memory and nationalism or ethnicity as defined by political scientists and folklorists.

The two volumes reviewed here examine these questions of identity from a modern perspective. Each challenges the lack of a serious history of the Jews in Greece that includes its complexity and multivalent analysis of the terms Romaniot and Sephardi and the more modern Greek Jew. For our purposes, we may use the following definitions of the first two terms before we examine the two authors' treatment of the last.

Romaniot is the lesser known and perhaps the most difficult of the terms. The word is a Jewish version of the sobriquet Roman that was used by the Greek Orthodox (Romaioi) from late antiquity to the nineteenth century. Both Jews and Christians were, after all, citizens or heirs of the Roman Empire, albeit now Greek speaking and Orthodox by faith; the Jews, too, were citizens, albeit second class, of that empire, for convenience called Byzantine by modern scholars. Until the sixteenth century, the majority of Jews in Greece were Romaniot, and alongside them were Jews who had a separate political identity subject to the Italian city-states and the emerging Ottoman Empire. Even the Karaites could possibly be designated as Romaniot as they contributed to the Greek-speaking Jewish majority in Istanbul.

When Sephardic Jews came to the Ottoman sultanate in the sixteenth century after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula, they began to call the native Romaniot Jews gregos. Thus the term Greek Jew can be traced back to the sixteenth century. As the nineteenth century progressed and Greek became the general Western term to describe the new kingdom of the Hellenes, the use of “Greek” Jew came to designate all those who designated themselves as Romaniot. By the nineteenth century, however, there had been for centuries a series of immigrations into the Balkans of primarily Italians and some North African and Near Eastern Jews, among them, Arabic-speaking Jews known as Mustariba in the sixteenth century.

The problem with the term Sephardic is that in the twentieth century, the prayer books for Salonika began to be printed in Israel according to the nusaḥ Sepharad; all those who used them came to be identified as Sephardim, even if their ethnic origin was not ultimately from the Iberian Peninsula.

Although the term Yevani appears in ancient and medieval texts to differentiate Greeks from Macedonians, by the sixteenth century, it came to distinguish the Greek Orthodox Cossacks from the Polish Catholics. In modern Hebrew, the word preserves both meanings of the Greek state and the Orthodox (Greek and Russian) religion. The term Yevanic has even entered the field of Hebrew manuscript study to refer to the Romaniot hand in the Balkans and its diaspora. Fortunately, the latter term does not enter either of the two books under review. Into this morass of ambiguity, these two new contributions add some nuanced shades of meaning.

Katherine Elizabeth Fleming offers a Jewish history of Greece that includes both Romaniot and Sephardic Jews under the emerging rubric of Greek Jew. She restricts her treatment to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece and its variegated Jewish communities. The book begins with the gem of a Romaniot synagogue on the Lower East Side of New York City, the only Romaniot synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. Founded in 1908, it celebrated its centenary in 2008. While a small percentage of the congregation was born in Greece or is descended from Ioannina “Romaniots,” intermarriage has diluted the original Romaniot founding members. Nonetheless, the entire congregation that extends to New Jersey and the boroughs of New York proudly identifies itself as Romaniot. Who would gainsay that identity? Surely not traditional rabbis who allow one to self-identify until a successful challenge obviates that identity. It parallels the movement in Greece (somewhat in the minority) among some Greek-speaking Jews of varied ethnic origins to identify themselves as Romaniot.

Fleming deals with variegated communities of ancient and modern origins in the southern Balkans that came to be called Greek. Indeed, as she notes, the term Greek was enforced on these different communities by conquest and assimilation into a kingdom expanding under the impetus of the megali idea that drove Greek history until the disastrous adventure in Asia Minor after World War I and had a brief resurrection during the jingoism of the victories against Italy in 1940–41 when Greek armies occupied southern Albania, claimed by Athens as Northern Epirus.

All of the Greek-speaking and Judeo-Spanish-speaking Jews from the kingdom of Greece who were deported to Auschwitz were identified by Ashkenazim as Greeks. Hence Fleming argues that this latest external designation of these Jews is the one they have now accepted in Greece, Israel, and the United States, even as the descendants of Iberian Jews proudly continue to call themselves Sephardim. Unfortunately, the state of Israel has subsumed Sephardim within a broader rubric of Mizrahim that includes basically all Jews who are not Ashkenazim, even those who are Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Indian, Chinese, Ethiopian, and others who do not fit into the politically (but not demographically) dominant Ashkenazim. Needless to say, Greek is “in” in Israel, and as Fleming points out, Greek music, food, dance, and visiting stars attract many to identify with them, especially if their ancestry can be traced to an area within the boundaries of modern Greece.

The text is most interesting in Fleming's attempt to define Greek Jews. It is weakest in its analysis of Jewish history during the various periods of the expanding kingdom of Greece; it tells us less about the history of Greece and its problems than Greek and Hebrew sources would indicate. The strongest section is based on Fleming's research in the British Archives on the Pacifico affair of the mid-nineteenth century; that event coincided with the beginnings of Britain's bully treatment of and aggressive assistance to Greece, an attitude that endured for nearly a century.Footnote ¹ Fleming has attempted to write the first history in English of Greece from a Jewish perspective and has succeeded to some extent, giving us a very readable and useful book that points up the difficulties of such a task. Bernard Pierron's summary of his vast and unmined dissertation (“Juifs et Chrétiens de la Grèce Moderne,” 1996) is still to be surpassed. The reader should be cautious of the Hebrew references and texts, and must be informed that many of the memoirs cited in their Greek editions are available in English, with full references available in the Bulletin of Judeo-Greek Studies.

Annette B. Fromm has more cautiously restricted her viewpoint to the Jewish community of Ioannina. She writes less from a historical perspective than from that of a folklorist, reflecting the discipline that guided her dissertation research. Fromm presented her dissertation in 1992 and its belated publication in 2008 is a welcome addition to the literature. Regrettably, a comparison of the two publications shows that there were only minor revisions of style. Moreover, the inadequate bibliography of the dissertation was not updated for the published volume. One might compare with profit Joshua Plaut's Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913–1983; the latter's field research overlapped Fromm's.Footnote ² She records superb and moving memories of Greek Orthodox–Jewish relations and the fullness of shared culture. Fromm's careful research observes the shift from a community in transition before the war and the bare survival of memories after the war among the decimated community. She notes that continuity of symbiotic secular pilgrimages to the locus of historical memory sustains the symbols in an aging Ioannina community of prewar ancestral memories. Her central point, however, is worth emphasizing: namely, that pilgrimage to Ioannina is a major factor in maintaining identity among her far-flung diaspora and the continued cohesion of the local community. The question remains, how many generations will such continuity last without new immigrant blood?

These two volumes, each informative despite limitations, complement each other and provide general data on the complexities of Greece and its populations, an endemic problem that confronts various contemporary interpretations of Greek nationalism.