Jewish Salonica and the making of the "Jerusalem of the Balkans, " 1890-1943 [electronic resource]
Keywords: History.

This dissertation tells the story of the Jews of Salonica as they grappled with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of the Greek nation-state. The limited scholarship regarding Salonica--a strategic Aegean port city once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world--has presented the city's Jews as the victims of imperial dissolution who suffer from decline in the face of subsequent Hellenizing measures prior to their annihilation in the Holocaust. In contrast, this dissertation brackets the destruction and erasure of the Holocaust and challenges the teleology of nation-state formation by situating the Jews of Salonica as the protagonists, as historical actors imbued with agency both within the context of the late Ottoman Empire and the Greek nation-state throughout the interwar years. Until the Second World War, competing representatives of Salonican Jewry actively continued to shape their fate, to represent their voices as Salonicans and as Jews, as Ottomans and subsequently as Greeks, to each other, their neighbors, and the international community. In short, this dissertation seeks to tell the story of Salonican Jews in their own words. Through their own words, and the actions they provoked and embodied, Salonican Jews made the "Jerusalem of the Balkans." This is the first study that seeks to convey the voices of Salonican Jews primarily through sources produced in the Sephardic Jewish vernacular, Ladino: the local periodical press and previously unstudied communal archives dispersed across the globe. By reference to the new sources, this dissertation argues that Salonican Jews re-invented their city as the Jerusalem of the Balkans--a distinctively Jewish site and symbol--amidst the turbulent first decades of the twentieth century, and within a cauldron of competing claims about Salonica as Ottoman, Greek, Bulgarian, European, and Oriental. Within this context, Salonican Jews promoted images of the historical grandeur of "Jewish Salonica" as a substitute for lost imperial allegiance, as a means to counter their own sense of increasing marginalization, and as a strategy to re-root themselves in the aftermath of empire, in the new Greek nation-state, and on the map of twentieth century Europe. The chapters of the dissertation explore the processes through which Salonican Jews claimed a space for themselves in Salonica and claimed Salonica as a Jewish space through writing the history of "Jewish Salonica, " crowing their community with a new chief rabbi, and documenting and defending their vast cemetery. By deploying new tools--print media, historical scholarship, modern schooling, and mass politics--Salonican Jews propagated their message. The invention and naturalization of the image of Salonica as the Jerusalem of the Balkans constituted the most enduring expression and legacy of the collective Salonican Jewish voice in the twentieth century. As a legitimate mode of self and communal expression at the fault line between empire and nation-state, local identity offered serious competition to other categories of belonging, such as nation, religion or class, sometimes complementing these affiliations and other times militating against them. While engaging with Jewish, Greek, Ottoman and Balkan historiographies, this case study of Salonican Jewry therefore complicates our understanding of the repertoire of strategies available to Jews as they sought to cope with the collapse of empire and to re-establish their moorings, as a minority, in the contested spaces and imaginaries of the modern nation-state. By believing in the capacity to interpret their past and to shape their destiny, Salonican Jews embodied--and simultaneously challenged--the very meanings of "modern, " "Jewish, " and "European.".