Jewish Salonica

Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece

Devin E. Naar

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781503600089, 9780804798877
• eBook ISBN: 9781503600096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society.

Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

CHAPTER 1

LIKE A MUNICIPALITY AND A STATE

The Community

Dos djidios, tres keiloth.

Two Jews, three synagogues.

—Judeo-Spanish expression

In the wake of World War I, the Judeo-Spanish newspaper El Puevlo strikingly depicted the existence not of one but “two Salonicas” (las dos Salonikos). “Greek Salonica” offered a model of self-sufficiency, self-sacrifice, and compassion as evidenced in its extensive network of philanthropic institutions, like the esteemed Papafio Orphanage. In contrast, “Jewish Salonica,” embodied in the array of institutions and philanthropies run by the official Jewish Community, continued to struggle from the demoralizing impact of the fire of 1917 and lagged behind its Greek counterpart—a dynamic that the newspaper hoped would change. Part of the difference stemmed from the backing that Greek Salonica received from the municipality and the state, whereas Jewish Salonica materialized through the largely independent efforts of the Jewish Community. Each produced parallel and competing, sometimes intersecting and cooperating, versions of the city.¹ The editor of El Puevlo, Mentesh Bensanchi, went further by idealizing and personifying the Jewish Community as nourishing the city’s Jews: “If the Community could speak, she would say: ‘I am the embodiment of the Jews, and everything that could interest the Jews commands my attention.’”² The sway that the Jewish Community held over the city’s Jews even led Abraham Benaroya, the leader of the Socialist Workers’ Federation, to observe, in a less celebratory manner, that the Jewish Community “imposes itself on its members like a country does on its residents.”³

The descriptions of such a separate, robust, and autonomous Jewish community in twentieth-century Salonica was both unusual and anything but preordained. Largely self-governing Jewish communities, running their own affairs according to their own laws, once existed across Europe in the medieval and early modern eras. Ensconced in political and social environments defined by classes or estates (nobility, clergy, peasantry, townspeople, etc.), each of which operated according to different codes of law, the Jewish communities received special dispensations from the ruling authority, whether kings or noblemen in Europe or the sultan in the Ottoman Empire; there was nothing unusual about this. Beginning with the French Revolution, however, the established structures, including the estates and Jewish communities, were largely abolished as the old order of empires and privileges gave way to a new order of nation-states, rights, and duties that sought to transform, at least in theory, Jews and all the other residents of a given state into active citizens. Within the new framework, in which the new states demanded full and exclusive loyalty, there was increasingly less space for other entities to demand allegiance or to mediate the relationship between the individual citizen and the state. There was no room for “a state within a state.”⁴ During the French Revolution in 1789, Count Stanislas of Clermont Tonnerre, a deputy in the French National Assembly, portended the dissolution of the formal, self-governing Jewish communities first in France and subsequently across the continent: “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals. They must be citizens.”⁵ Even in the Russian Empire, home to the largest Jewish population in the world, the czar abolished the kahal, the executive council of the Jewish community, in 1844, although it continued to operate without official sanction.

The dynamics in the Ottoman Empire and Greece played out differently. During the period of Ottoman imperial reform in the nineteenth century, the Tanzimat, the status of non-Muslim communities (millets) was formalized and their institutions of self-governance, while limited by the state, were not abolished but rather modernized and codified. Simultaneously, the Ottoman state sought to transform all of its residents, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, into citizens with rights and duties. The competing demands for allegiance made by the new communal structures and the state existed in a precarious balance until World War I. At the conclusion of World War I, following extensive advocacy on the part of Jewish notables and despite serious disagreement among them, the Greek state renewed key aspects of the self-governing status of the Jewish Community of Salonica (Law 2456 of 1920). The perpetuation of the Jewish Community in Salonica signified the unexpected legacy of millet-style imperial structures, recast in the language of minority rights, in the context of the Greek nation-state.

Situated within the broader transition from Ottoman to Greek sovereignty in Salonica, the sui generis character of the Jewish Community of Salonica becomes clear. Rena Molho emphasizes the unusual situation, as Greece became the “only country in the world that recognizes its Jewish communities as legal persons of public law.”⁶ As certain aspects of the authority of the Jewish Community endured due to its legal recognition and the power derived from it—despite continual contestation among Jewish representatives and with the state—Jews in Salonica found themselves classified as both members of the Jewish Community and citizens of Greece in a dynamic that replicated that of the late Ottoman era. Despite, or perhaps because of, the tenuous balance that the dual affiliations provoked—and in spite of economic problems, political fragmentation, increased Hellenizing pressures, and greater social interactions between Jews and Orthodox Christians—the Jewish Community provided a sense of stability during a period of rupture and remarkably played a role for the Jewish masses that, in other countries, the municipality or the state would have provided. Indeed, the Greek state utilized the term koinotita to identify the Jewish Community—a term that also signified an autonomous “township.”⁷ It was precisely the dependence of the Jewish masses on the Jewish Community that led to El Puevlo’s description of “two Salonicas”: to what extent did the Jewish Community generate a parallel version of the city that protected the interests or limited the options of local Jews?

The archives of the Jewish Community of Salonica as well as the local press reveal the multiple ways in which Jews of all varieties, sometimes willingly and other times begrudgingly, continued to interact with the Jewish Community, relied on the Jewish Community to intervene with local or state authorities, or requested that the Jewish Community serve as a surrogate for the latter two institutions. On other occasions, Jews advocated for the reform—or the abolition—of Jewish communal institutions or sought to escape their authority. After elucidating how the Jewish Community, its institutions, and its functions crystalized during the Tanzimat, this chapter turns to the debates following Salonica’s incorporation into Greece that resulted in the state reluctantly granting legal standing to the Jewish Community in 1920 and then reflects on the status of Jews in comparison to other minorities in Greece and to Jews in Turkey. The remainder of the chapter highlights the defining roles played by the Jewish Community of Salonica, which reserved the power to determine and manage its membership, to operate a rabbinic tribunal (beth din) to impose rabbinic marriage law and enforce communal boundaries, to administer public housing projects for the Jewish masses, and to negotiate with the state regarding Jewish military service. Each domain tested the limit to which the Jewish Community in Salonica could bridge the gulf between the Ottoman Empire and the Greek nation-state for the city’s Jews.

From Congregations to Community

When the German occupation forces in December 1941 compelled the long-time chancellor of the Jewish Community, Daout Levy, to compose a history of the Jewish Community of Salonica, Levy selected a telling starting point. He did not begin in the first century, with the Romaniote Jewish presence in the city during the apostle Paul’s visit; nor did he begin in 1492, another obvious possible starting point that marked the mass arrival of Sephardic Jews fleeing from Spain. Instead, he began in 1870, the year that the Communal Council was formed as the supreme governing body of the Jewish institutions in the city, and thus the year the Jewish Community of Salonica, as he knew it, was born.⁸

Prior to the formal institutionalization of the Jewish Community with the creation of the Communal Council during the nineteenth-century era of reform, the Tanzimat, the Ottoman state had developed a complex set of practices to manage its relationships with the diverse non-Muslim populations granted permission to reside within the imperial realm. Jews, Armenians, and Orthodox Christians benefitted from extensive opportunities or privileges of self-government in exchange for a pledge of loyalty and for a special tax (cizye). Within this framework, kehalim or “congregations” reigned supreme among Ottoman Jews from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The kehalim constituted the primary, largely autonomous Jewish governing bodies that managed their own affairs independently, as if each were “a city unto itself.”⁹ Each kahal (or kal, as pronounced among Sephardic Jews) served as a synagogue, court of law, school, charity, and burial society, and appointed one of its members as kahya or vekil, an intermediary responsible for negotiating taxes with the Ottoman state.¹⁰ In order to better represent their collective interests to the state, the congregations in Salonica agreed to form the kolel de la sivdad, the “(Jewish) collectivity of the city.”¹¹

During the nineteenth century, the primary legislation of the Tanzimat aimed to transform its Muslim, Christian, and Jewish populations into Ottoman citizens, but at the heart of the project lay a tension. In seeking to create an inclusive Ottoman identity irrespective of religious affiliation, the Ottoman state also officially recognized and formalized the structures of the Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian millets, which reminded the various populations of their duties not only as citizens but also as members of their communities. While the Ottoman state limited the judicial powers of the non-Muslim courts, which were no longer sanctioned to try criminal cases or to adjudicate commercial disputes, it also codified previously informal non-Muslim representative and organizational bodies through the promulgation of statutes to govern the inner workings of each community. The statutes called for the establishment of elected councils to govern the affairs of each of the newly and formally recognized Communities.¹²

The Communal Council (Konsilio Komunal) served as the executive branch of the Jewish Community of Salonica’s self-government and was overseen by the president. The members of the Communal Council were drawn from the General Assembly (Asamblea Djenerala), a legislative body and miniature Jewish parliament to which representatives were elected. These governing bodies also operated in conjunction with the Rabbinical Council (Konsilio Ruhani, literally, “spiritual council”), overseen by the chief rabbi who also supervised the Beth Din (rabbinical court).¹³

Initially, only those Jewish men in the city who were wealthy enough to pay the pecha, a 2 percent capital tax assessed and collected by the Community, could vote or run in communal elections. From an initial 300 pecheros (those capable of paying the pecha), 1,300 men qualified in 1913. On the eve of World War II, the number of pecheros had increased dramatically to 3,733.¹⁴ The pecha provided key revenue for the Jewish Community to run its various institutions and accounted for about 15 percent of the total budget in 1929 and about one quarter in 1934.¹⁵ Despite the greater numbers of those capable of paying the pecha—and the greater income derived from it—the Judeo-Spanish press complained about the sometimes mendacious manner in which the wealthy and their “cliques” continued to find their way into leadership roles by exchanging political “favors” (hatires) in the “shadows.”¹⁶

A major, democratizing reform instituted in 1921 partly transformed the established dynamics. Zionists, Jewish Socialists, and Jewish liberals pressured the General Assembly to introduce universal male suffrage in communal elections by granting Jewish men aged twenty-one and over the right to vote regardless of their ability to pay the pecha. The number of registered voters therefore increased exponentially, from those select few who could pay the pecha—300 in the late nineteenth century and 1,300 in 1913—to more than 7,000 in 1934. The remarkable increase in the number of voters—although still only a minority of the city’s Jews—demonstrated that more Jews had become actively involved in the Jewish communal political process than ever before. The irony was that, even as the total membership of the Jewish Community of Salonica decreased during the first four decades of the twentieth centu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Transliteration
• Introduction: Is Salonica Jewish?
• 1. Like a Municipality and a State: The Community
• 2. Who Will Save Sephardic Judaism? The Chief Rabbi
• 3. More Sacred than Synagogue: The School
• 4. Paving the Way for Better Days: The Historians
• 5. Stones that Speak: The Cemetery
• Conclusion: Jewish Salonica: Reality, Myth, Memory
• Archival Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Series List