Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (63 page)

At the Paris Peace Conference, however, the idea of guaranteeing minority rights in law won the day and most states in eastern Europe were forced to accept the principle. In 1920, the Venizelos government passed legislation defining the constitutional position of Greek Jewry and this came into effect two years later. The rights and duties of the rabbinate were spelled out for the first time, the old property qualifications for voting in communal elections were scrapped, and all adult males over twenty-one were granted the vote. Jewish traders were allowed to make Saturday not Sunday their day of rest, and to keep their accounts in Judeo-Spanish.
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From the Greek point of view, the key to turning Jews into full citizens of their new country was language. Before 1912, few Jews in Salonica had bothered to learn Greek. From 1915, however, all Jewish (and Muslim) community schools in receipt of public funds were obliged to teach it. Jewish children were not forced to attend what Greek civil servants called “our schools”—whose instruction was described as “rather classical” and “incompatible with Jewish customs and nature”—and instead Athens invested in the Jewish schools themselves, providing language teachers, and later actual buildings. In this way, the younger generation learned Greek quickly and by the Second World War, many Jewish children were fluent, having taken part in school productions of such Greek classics as “Golfo the Shepherdess,” or the stirring story of Leonidas and the three hundred. After one school play, a Judeo-Spanish paper proudly reported in 1932: “Many Christian friends who followed the performance assured us that they could not tell that the actors were Jews, so beautiful and correct was their Greek. We single out Miss Emilia Nachmia, who played with naturalness the role of Syrmo, Miss Esther Habib, daughter of our chief rabbi, who played Froso, Miss Matilda Almosnino, who moved us in the role of Krinio …”
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For the older generation it was harder, of course. According to the satirists, Uncle Ezra would take the wrong bus because he didn’t know how to read the name of the destination, while Auntie Benuta’s Greek was so poor that when the postman arrived with a registered letter, she had to seek help from her niece, Sunhula. But even Judeo-Spanish
changed with the times, and Greek phrases rushed in. Albert Molho, a leading Jewish journalist, wrote in 1939: “Our assimilation to Hellenism is to be noted not only in the thousand and one manifestations of our public and private life. One sees it in our language as well: even when we speak
Judesmo
, one still sees we are Hellenes. Judeo-Spanish, which once overflowed with Turkish words … today shows clear signs of Greek influence.” By the late 1930s readers of some
Judesmo
publications wanted a page in Greek: “in my opinion,” wrote one, “the idea is not bad because as things are going, in time readers of Judeo-Spanish will be rare, since the younger people are reading Greek newspapers more, and in the schools [Judeo-]Spanish is no longer studied.”
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The language question reflected the spectrum of attitudes to assimilation more generally among the city’s Jews. French remained the language of the cultured elite, especially among those wealthy enough to send their children to the foreign schools. Local communists stood up for the continued use of Judeo-Spanish, the vernacular of the workers. But a middle-class minority stressed the need for fluency in Greek in order to “give Greece good Greek citizens who will, at the same time, be no less good Jews.” In the view of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, religion was a matter of private conscience, Judeo-Spanish a backward dialect holding up intellectual progress, and cultural assimilation a necessity. “If I speak about assimilation,” wrote one,

I do so not out of Greek patriotism but for the sake of Jewish interests. I believe that in order for the Jews to be able to live here, they need to assimilate to the environment in which they live. The fewer barriers there are between Greeks and Jews, the easier it will be for us to live here. Our purpose is not to be ostentatiously patriotic, but to safeguard the existence of the Jewish population. If assimilation is not the correct means of doing this, let us suggest another way.

This view was opposed chiefly by the Zionists. They accused the Alliance of betraying Judaism and demanded a prominent place in the school curriculum for Hebrew. Relatively unimportant before the First World War, Zionism became far more popular in the 1920s. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had been hailed with enthusiasm in the city, and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s visit in 1926—unlike his earlier, pre-war one—elicited exuberant demonstrations outside his hotel.
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But while many sympathized with the Zionists’ desire for an assertion of Jewish
ethnic identity, they felt there was little point wasting “hour after hour learning a language such as Hebrew, which is of no use to anyone here.” As a Greek analyst of these language battles remarked:

Even now, when no restrictions are placed on the teaching of Hebrew … Hebrew is neither learned properly nor is there any need for it in the everyday lives of the Jews.
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The truth was that behind these struggles over language lay new attitudes to politics. By eliminating the old property qualification from community elections, the Greek authorities had unwittingly undermined the old Ottoman Jewish notable class and reduced the power of its assimilationist message. Both the communists and the Zionists profited from this and were able to draw upon the votes of the thousands of the poor, including those who had suffered most from the fire and its aftermath. In addition, for much of the interwar period the post of chief rabbi was vacant and this meant that there was no one to play the kind of unifying role which Saul Modiano or Ascher Covo had done half a century earlier.

The first communal elections in 1926 were a two-way fight between the communists and everyone else—Zionists and assimilationists alike—who banded together into a so-called Jewish Union to stop the left. They elected fifty-eight candidates as opposed to twelve communists. But deep ideological divisions existed among the opponents of the latter—chiefly over how far to accommodate Greek demands for assimilation. In 1930, while the communist vote stayed constant, the Zionists split into different factions. At this point, Zionism, though internally divided, was undoubtedly the leading political force within the community. Yet four years later, in the last communal elections of the interwar period, both the communist and the assimilationist votes held steady, while the vote of the pro-Jabotinsky radical Zionists collapsed. The truth was that Salonica’s Jews were so deeply divided along ideological lines that they were more or less incapable of unified action. Communal democracy and the collapse in the power of the old Ottoman-Jewish bourgeois elite made administering community affairs harder rather than easier. Many voters evidently felt alienated from politics, and in 1930 there was an abstention rate of perhaps 50 per cent. But the accusation that the city’s Jews were a hot-bed of socialism was misplaced: the extreme left was always a minority cause, though it was a larger minority—typically between 15 and 20 per cent—
than among non-Jews. The main trend was that a large part of the community first embraced and then lost faith in Zionism.
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The idea of founding a Jewish national home in Palestine gained currency in the city only from the start of the twentieth century. After Chief Rabbi Jacob Meir arrived from Jerusalem in 1907 the movement acquired a network of clubs, schools, newspapers. The 1917 fire, by destroying the old neighbourhood synagogues around which local networks of power and authority had formerly been based, also helped to foster the new kind of ethnic (rather than strictly religious) definition of community which the Zionists espoused.
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Yet even though Jews began to emigrate from 1910 onwards, they went mostly to France and Italy, or across the Atlantic. The figures are uncertain, but by 1930 thousands of Salonican Jews had settled in Paris, and there were smaller communities everywhere from New York to Naples. Some dock-workers,
hamals
and fishermen did make their way to Haifa and Tel Aviv, and there was a spurt of departures after anti-Semitic disturbances in Salonica in 1931. But the actual numbers involved were probably relatively small. As many as 20–25,000 Jews emigrated from the city before the war but probably only about a quarter of these, if that, ended up in Mandate Palestine.
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Well before the Arab Revolt of 1936, the sense had grown that Zionism did not have the answer to the problems of Salonican Jewry. The economic slowdown was just as acute in Palestine as in Greece, and the British were only issuing about two hundred entry permits annually. Moreover, the Greek authorities themselves did not want the Jews to leave. Emigration “would
not
be in our interests,” noted a civil servant, for it was the rich and the enterprising who tended to go first, making unemployment worse.
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By the end of 1933 Greek sources reported that the numbers of those who wished even to visit Palestine had fallen away. The Revisionists’ disappointing performance in the 1934 communal elections was an indication of the changing mood.
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Not that there had been any shortage of critics of the Zionists within the community. On the left, Jewish communists distinguished themselves by the ferocity of their attacks, perhaps because they were competing for the same votes. They called the Zionists in charge of communal affairs a “filthy clan of gangsters,” termed others “Jewish fascists,” and castigated the “criminal politics” of those who had thoughtlessly encouraged the masses to dream of emigration. One Judeo-Spanish Marxist weekly,
The Staff
, defined its outlook at the top of its front page as “extremist communist tendencies, clear and
open, with no mercy or personal favours right or left, against the Jewish religion and the bourgeoisie, against Zionism and the Jewish colonization of Palestine.”
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But a no less impassioned critique came from so-called moderates like the historian, writer and educator Joseph Nehama. By the 1920s Nehama was convinced that mourning the “good old days” of Ottoman rule was a waste of time. It was necessary now to work positively with the Greek authorities and Zionism was a distraction, if not worse. Some “assimilationists” put forward a theory of Greco-Judaism and argued that patriotism and the preservation of one’s own ethnic identity were not incompatible. They stressed their common bourgeois credentials in the fight against communism, and in December 1928 they founded the Association of Jewish Assimilationists whose goal was “to create and develop amongst Salonica Jews feelings utterly identical with those of their fellow-citizens irrespective of religious persuasion, without however distancing themselves from the Jewish faith, the Jewish tradition and the spirit of Jewish solidarity.”
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Yet Zionists and anti-Zionists alike faced the same problem. The Jewish community did not exist in a vacuum, but in a state shaped by the twists and turns of mass politics. Political success and failure did not lie only in their hands but depended as much if not more upon the attitudes and policies of the Greek authorities. Jewish affairs were a marginal matter in Greek national life. But the great issues of the day—the monarchy versus the republic, refugees against natives, Venizelos versus his enemies—left their imprint upon all Salonica’s inhabitants, not least its Jews.

T
HE
I
MPACT OF
G
REEK
P
OLITICS

T
HE 1917 FIRE
and the plan that followed it had left the Jewish community fragmented, impoverished, marginalized and resentful at what it regarded as discriminatory treatment by the Greek state. These feelings were somewhat allayed three years later by the relatively favourable provisions on schooling, language and self-government in the law on Jewish communal life. But with the arrival of the refugees, a frostier note crept back into Greek-Jewish relations. The 1920 law had explicitly allowed traders to close on Saturdays instead of Sundays in order to observe the Jewish Sabbath. But after the Asia Minor disaster the issue was reopened when Prime Minister Papanastasiou
urged young Jews to emancipate themselves from old “narrow religious conceptions,” and refugee representatives asked for obligatory Sunday closing. Some guilds, with mixed Greek and Jewish memberships, proposed the “English working week” as a compromise. The struggle was a bitter and public one, but eventually the Sunday trading law was passed. Its proponents used the language of equality before the law to justify the same day of rest for all, but as contemporary observers noted, the only plausible reason for abandoning the 1920 agreement was to give the newly arrived refugees in Salonica an economic advantage over their Jewish competitors. The latter—if observant—would be obliged to close two days of the week, the former only one. But the refugees were now a greater power in the city than the Jews, and held its future in their hands.
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While the government could at least nominally justify the ban on Sunday trading on the basis of its desire to treat Jew and Christian alike, it could not argue that way in defence of its decision to make Salonica’s Jews vote in a separate electoral college. This was deliberate political ghettoization. In elections before the Asia Minor catastrophe Jews had always voted alongside Christians for the same candidates. But in 1920 the Liberals marked out special electoral districts in the city for Jewish voters, and three years later, in the elections for the constituent assembly, a separate electoral college was set up. Supporters of the scheme claimed this was needed to stop Jews disproportionately affecting Greece’s fortunes. They supposedly lacked patriotism, and had contributed to the country’s misfortunes by voting against Venizelos in his shock 1920 defeat—a move which in the eyes of his devoted followers was equivalent to treachery: “Thanks to the Thessaloniki Jews,” wrote one, “we lost Eastern Thrace, and the Asia Minor disaster occurred, which was terrible for our nation.”
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The truth was that the separate Salonica college made sense only in terms of the interests of Venizelos’s Liberal Party—“for reasons of party and electoral calculation,” as Venizelos himself actually admitted later.
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