Greece’s old Jewish city: Salonika
Paul Mirengoff of Powerline has written a post about the Greek city of Salonika (also known as Thessalonki) and the fate of its Jews during World War II. It’s a beautiful piece, unusually personal because his father-in-law was a Jew born in Salonika, who was fortunate (or prescient) enough to emigrate to France during the 1920s and to live out WWII in Casablanca, thus surviving the conflagration.
I had heard of Salonika before, in the context of the Holocaust, particularly in the writings of the late great Primo Levi, who encountered the Greeks of Salonika at Auschwitz.
You can read an essay about Levi’s portrait of the Jews of Salonika here. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
…Salonika and the fate of its Community have not been studied much, maybe because the enormity of what had happened elsewhere to much larger communities shadowed this particular event geographically distant and smaller in numerical terms. [Primo] Levi was the first to understand, in times when silence fell over Salonika and Salonikan Jews, even for the reticence of the survivors themselves, and the first to present a picture almost as a glimpse that could let us reconstruct the life of a Community long forgotten and deeply emblematic of life in a Lager…
As a matter of fact the Greeks began to gradually distinguish themselves from the other prisoners [the bolded quote is from Levi’s book]:
First among them [the merchants in the camp’s black market] come the Greeks [from Salonika], as immobile and silent as sphinxes, squatting on the ground behind their bowls of thick soup, the fruits of their labour, of their cooperation and of their national solidarity. The Greeks have been reduced to very few by now [the vast majority had died in transit or been killed on arrival], but they have made a contribution of the first importance to the physiognomy of the camp and to its international slang in circulation…These few survivors from the Jewish colony of Salonika, with their two languages, Spanish and Greek, and their numerous activities, are the repositories of a concrete, mundane, conscious wisdom, in which the traditions of all the Mediterranean civilizations blend together. That this wisdom was transformed in the camp into the systematic and scientific practice of theft and seizure of positions and the monopoly of the bargaining Market, should not let one forget that their aversion to gratuitous brutality, their amazing consciousness of the survival of at least a potential human dignity, made of the Greeks the most coherent national nucleus in Lager, and in this respect, the most civilized» (Levi, 2013, p. 59).
But although I’ve suggested that you read the entire essay linked above (as well as Levi’s masterpiece Survival in Auschwitz), it is the longer history of the Jews of Salonika that I’m writing about here, a history I’d been unaware of till recently.
Not only was the Jewish presence in the city two thousand years old, but for many centuries the Jews of Salonika constituted a majority of the city’s inhabitants:
Sephardic Jews immigrated to the city following their expulsion from Spain by Christian rulers under the Alhambra Decree in 1492. This community influenced the Sephardic world both culturally and economically, and the city was nicknamed la madre de Israel (mother of Israel). The community experienced a “golden age” in the 16th century, when they developed a strong culture in the city. Like other groups in the Ottoman Empire, they continued to practice traditional culture during the time when western Europe was undergoing industrialization. In the middle of 19th century, Jewish educators and entrepreneurs came to Thessaloniki from Western Europe to develop schools and industries; they brought contemporary ideas from Europe that changed the culture of the city.
Jews had became the dominant population of the city not long after the expulsion from Spain; they were invited in by the Ottomons, and found it to be a refuge:
Immigration was great enough that by 1519, the Jews represented 56% of the population and in 1613, 68%…
The yeshivot [Jewish schools] of Salonika were frequented by Jews from throughout the Ottoman Empire and even farther abroad; there were students from Italy and Eastern Europe. After completing their studies, some students were appointed rabbis in the Jewish communities of the Empire and Europe, including cities such as Amsterdam and Venice. The success of its educational institutions was such that there was no illiteracy among the Jews of Salonika…
Salonikan Jews were unique in their participation in all economic niches, not confining their business to a few sectors, as was the case where Jews were a minority. They were active in all levels of society, from porters to merchants. Salonika had a large number of Jewish fishermen, unmatched elsewhere, even in present-day Israel.
The Jewish speciality was spinning wool.
Later, as more of the Western European countries began to accept Jews, the Jews of Salonika became more isolated. Hard times increased for centuries and were both economic and spiritual. Later, persecution increased as well, and then of course the Nazis came, although before that, migration had reduced the Jewish population of the city by nearly half, from about 93,000 to about 53,000.
Now there is a Jewish Museum in Salonika (see this). A community is a community, and a museum is just a museum. But it’s something.
The U.S. Sixth Fleet used to visit Salonika, or Thessaloniki. I don’t know if they still do. Unfortunately, we knew little of the history, and found little to amuse us there. Looking back, it is a shame that more efforts were not made to acquaint crews with the history of the locales we visited. Aircraft carriers had Chaplains, and they set up tours for the ships in port, and no doubt sponsored other cultural opportunities. But, they reached relatively few.
There is one vignette from Salonika that I retain some fifty years later. My wife had come over for a short visit, and we were in a small shop to buy a doll in traditional Macedonian dress for our daughters. The woman shopkeeper spoke no English, and we spoke no
Greek. In some European cultures we would have been written off, but this woman persevered with good humor, as did we. The sale was eventually consummated amid gales of laughter all around over our cross cultural struggles.
My room mate on that deployment was second generation Greek. When we visited Istanbul, he managed to be elsewhere. He feared that he would be recognized as Greek, and his name would certainly give him away. Actually, he went with his own wife and son to the Greek mountain village from which his father emigrated. As an American Naval Aviator, he was treated as a hero; but, his wife was treated like the women of the village, and she did not enjoy that at all.
Oldflyer, I was aboard the USS FD Roosevelt (CVA-42) late 69 early 70. I remember the visit we made to Salonika. Interesting place. Of course being enlisted we saw liberty a bit different. I remember getting a Coke that was bottled there. I found that fascinating. There was a USO there too, if I remember right. We could make a call home. Now of course sailors have the internet.
This post was very interesting. I too wish we would have known more about the history of the city. I was just out of college with a BA in History. I would have loved the info in this post.
The observations of the Jews in the concentration camp, how they acted, reminds me of stories of the Greek soldiers during the Korean War. If a higher level solider died/killed, the next in line took over. Strong unit cohesion. Even in the POW camps.
What did you fly?
Lynn, since you asked, I started my career in the venerable AD-6 Skyraider (it was later corrupted by the universal designation system–no doubt another McNamara brainstorm–into the A-1H, and the much loved nickname–Able Dog–degenerated into Spad for reasons I never understood.) Our primary mission in the late 1950s was nuclear attack. If worse became worst, we were going to cruise across enemy territory at 50ft and 162 knots and in the highly unlikely event that we ever reached the target, loft a bomb with a maneuver aptly named the “idiot loop”. The fact that we accepted that scenario as more–or less–reasonable, and trained for the “idiot loop” constantly, tells you all you need to know about our intellectual capacity. Fortunately for all, worse never became worst.
I finished in A-4s; and at the age 50 started my airline career in Boeing 727s. I am four times retired. Once from the USN, twice from airlines via bankruptcy, and finally from British Aerospace. Now you know more than you ever cared to know.
Thanks Oldflyer. From Props to Jets.
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Paul Mirengoff’s comment sparked this comment by Neo, and I am grateful for both. There is so much history and each day it grows more distant. My own connection to these horrors is yet more remote but I offer it anyway, not so much as evidence of the suffering of the Jews of Salonika, or anyone from Greece, as the suffering of any human being caught in this cruel and pointless machine.
My father-in-law led an infantry platoon across Europe in 1944-5 and this is an approximation of what he, at 96, finally felt able to tell us.
Refeeding Syndrome
Over Christmas
We had been bled
Hard at the Bulge
And then for months
We fought Eastward
Through dragons’ teeth
Laced with tracers
That took many
O my brothers
Late in April
Reaching Munich
Tough as gristle
Nothing of war
Could still shock
And this shocked us
The guards in flight
Left uniforms
Dropped their weapons
Unlocked the gates
As if to free
The men we found
Who were too weak
To leave their bunks
Or stand to meet
Their rescuers
What I recall
Like a sickness
Was how they died
From what we gave
Some on the meat
From ration cans
Simply choking
But with others
Poisoned by food
Too rich for them
It took a week
Their blood damaged
By such rich stuff
Hearts unsteady
Beyond our help
And our learning
Later their cases
Were written up
“Refeeding syndrome”
Being a thing
We could watch for
And try to treat
By keeping back
And doling out
What instinct said
We should provide
Seventy years
I kept this down
Like half-chewed food
And even now
I can’t say much
More than these words
But O those men
O how we fought
In ignorance
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