Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (64 page)

In the critical elections of 1928, which marked Venizelos’s triumphant return to the political stage and ushered in four years of Liberal rule, the system was fully implemented for the first time. Venizelos claimed disingenuously that it was needed—if only temporarily—to guard “the traditions and special interests” of this “ethnic grouping.” Jewish voters gave him the benefit of the doubt and returned two deputies who both declared their willingness to adhere to the Liberal line. But after the elections, Venizelos said that until Salonica’s Jews
felt themselves to be Greek citizens, the system would be retained by the state “to defend itself against a possible abuse of the vote.” It was against this background that the pro-Liberal Jewish League for Assimilation was founded.
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When Venizelos fell from power in 1932, under the impact of the economic depression, however, a new anti-Venizelist administration declared the separate Jewish electoral college unconstitutional and scrapped it.
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Relations between Venizelos and Salonican Jewry now reached an all-time low. When many Jews again voted against the Liberals, Venizelos himself interpreted the move as “an act of hostility against half of Greece.” “Do you want war, Israelites? You will have it!” declared a Venizelist newspaper in 1933. Venizelos was finally adopting the intransigent positions his supporters in the city had been urging on him. In 1934, he told a journalist from the
Jewish Post
that “the Greeks do not want the Jews to influence Hellenic politics … The Jews of Salonica follow a national Jewish policy. They are not Greeks and do not feel as such. Hence they ought not to involve themselves in Greek affairs.” And he went on to say: “The Salonican Jews are not Greek patriots but Jewish patriots. They are closer to the Turks than to us … I will not allow the Jews to influence Greek politics.” It was a far cry from the conciliatory statesman of twenty years earlier, and one further sign that the great politician was losing touch with his country. In 1912 he had combined ardent nationalism with a belief in Hellenism’s power to incorporate and assimilate its minorities. Now that confidence had waned, and a harsher, shriller tone emerged.
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T
HE
C
AMPBELL
R
IOT

T
HE PRONOUNCEMENTS
of national politicians were what made the headlines, but on this issue local activists were driving the Liberal machine. Venizelists in Salonica were far more outspoken than their leaders in Athens. The need to be sensitive to international opinion weighed less with them, and they spoke directly for interest groups in the city who saw the Jews as competitors or threats. Febrile hostility towards communists, Bulgarians and Jews combined with a sense of economic competitiveness among the refugees pushed some nationalists in an increasingly vicious direction.

One of their main weapons was the local press. Greek journalists had greeted the 1914 strike of tobacco workers as a sign of the
dangers of letting “foreign races,” with no sense of loyalty to the blue-and-white flag, flourish in the city. In those days Venizelos himself, despite exiling two prominent Jewish labour leaders, had deplored gutter press anti-Semitism. But with the coming of the refugees, some newspapers again singled out the Jews for attack.
Makedonia
, in particular, a leading Venizelist broadsheet, was supportive of the separate electoral college, and critical of the community’s supposed reluctance to assimilate. In fact, the paper did its best to whip up animosities and played a prominent role in the one outbreak of anti-Jewish violence the city (and country) witnessed before the Second World War—the Campbell riot.
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After the 1928 elections, relations between the Liberal Party and the Jewish community had seemed cordial enough. Indeed in December 1930, a Liberal mayor was elected in the city with strong Jewish support. Nevertheless, it was in this period that a translation of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was carried in local Greek newspapers, while
Makedonia
publicised “scandals” which, as they put it, revealed “the eternal hate of the Jews for Hellenism.” According to them, the city’s Jews were a compact and highly organized group, conspiring to take over the municipality and the other organs of state, and seeking to undermine Greece. Referring to the country’s minorities, in the aftermath of a row over the teaching of Greek history in the local
Mission Laique
school, the paper warned: “Either they will acquire a Greek consciousness, identifying their interests and expectations with ours, or they will have to seek a home elsewhere, because Thessaloniki is not in a position to nurse in its bosom people who are Greeks only in name whereas they are the country’s worst enemies.” Such intemperate language, deployed month after month, carried more than a whiff of violence, and soon led to worse.
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In June 1931 a new athletics hall was built by the local branch of the Zionist Maccabi sports organization, and the opening ceremony was attended by representatives of the city’s other sports and scouting organizations, both Jewish and Christian. Immediately after this, however,
Makedonia
published what turned out to be an explosive revelation: it claimed that Salonican Maccabi delegates had participated in a congress of Bulgarian
komitadjis
in Sofia where they had denounced Greek rule in Macedonia and called for autonomy. The accusation was nonsense, but it was dangerous nonsense, linking Jews and Bulgarians in a way calculated to inflame Greek nationalists. A farrago of half-truths and falsehoods sufficed to allow
Makedonia
to raise the
temperature and to accuse the Jewish community as a whole of lack of patriotism, cosmopolitanism and indeed treachery.

Makedonia
was just one newspaper, of course, and by itself could have had little influence. Even inside the city, where it played a powerful role, it was known for its extremism on this issue and criticized by other papers, Venizelist and anti-Venizelist alike. However, nationalist groups combining anti-communism and anti-Semitism were emerging for the first time in Greek politics. An organization of army officers stationed in northern Greece circulated pamphlets that accused the Jews of responsibility for Bolshevik crimes as well as for the Asia Minor disaster. In 1923, the Central Union of Anti-Jewish Youth was established in the city, and joined later by groups like the rightward-leaning All-Students Union and the Anti-Communist Youth Organization of Macedonia. Another nationalist students’ association at the university warned Greeks not to be fooled by Jewish professions of loyalty and patriotism. Reprising the tactics of the previous generation, it called for “a savage boycott”:

The Jews are those who edit three French language papers and one in Greek; those of whom three quarters are foreign subjects getting rich in Greece; those whose paper
Avanti
calls on honest Greek soldiers to turn their arms against their officers … those who work as hard as they can to make Salonica a free city run by the Jews; those, finally, who denigrate everything Greek and calling themselves Maccabis participate in congresses of
komitadjis
and declare themselves in favour of the autonomy of Macedonia.
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In June 1931 the campaign in
Makedonia
intensified and ethnic violence erupted. A mob ransacked the Maccabi offices, stones were thrown at Jewish homes and synagogues, and cases of attempted arson were reported. Jewish shopkeepers closed their shops in protest, Jewish students tried to prevent the distribution of inflammatory pamphlets, whilst in parliament government and opposition alike denounced the troublemakers.
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Delegates from the Jewish community appealed to the local authorities to step up security around some of the outlying Jewish settlements. But the government under-estimated the gravity of the situation. On Sunday 28 June, squads of nationalists attacked one Jewish neighbourhood, only to be beaten off by the locals. The next evening a
crowd estimated at nearly 2000 people, drawn largely from the adjacent refugee quarters of Toumba and Kalamaria, rampaged through the so-called “Campbell” settlement, home to 220 poor Jewish families who had moved there after the 1917 fire. They were expecting trouble and many had barricaded themselves inside their dwellings. But they were forced to flee when the mob set fire to their shops and houses. In unsuccessful attacks on two other neighbourhoods, the inhabitants managed to drive off the attackers.

The “Campbell riot,” as it became known, shocked public opinion in a country where such events were unknown. There were few fatalities—one was the Christian baker of the quarter, whose premises had been attacked by the rioters—but the neighbourhood was abandoned by its former residents and eventually sold off to the Greek authorities. The government ordered army and police patrols onto the streets, promised compensation to the Jewish community and pledged a full-scale investigation into the affair. Yet the parliamentary debate that followed was far from reassuring. Deputies with strong refugee connections protested that “men filled with patriotism and nationalism cannot be characterized as bands of malefactors.” Stylianos Gonatas, the governor-general of Macedonia, declared that he could not see what there was to censure in a group set up “to exalt national sentiment” and to defend the “established social order.”
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Not surprisingly, many Jewish families began to feel that the outskirts of the city were no longer safe, and moved nearer the centre, lodging in schools and other community buildings. Others made plans to emigrate, or visited the foreign consuls to ask for protection and permission to raise foreign flags above their houses. It was a huge psychological blow to a community already reeling from the effects of depression and discrimination. “The largest part of the Jewish population,” wrote a journalist, “already so hard hit economically, sees itself today ambushed by misery, an irremediable, despairing misery.”
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The trial, the following year, of those responsible illuminated Salonica’s shadow world of extremists. Among the defendants was the editor-in-chief of
Makedonia
, Nikolaos Fardis, whose inflammatory articles had done so much harm. But the key defendants were the organizers of a previously little-known militant fringe party called EEE—the National Union of Greece. Founded in 1927 by refugee merchants who resented Jewish competition, this was registered as a mutual aid society whose members—Christians only, according to the statutes—helped each other find work. In reality it was an
ultra-patriotic paramilitary organization. Georgios Kosmidis, who set it up, was an illiterate Turkish-speaking refugee trader, a small-timer best known for his impressive moustache. Predominantly Venizelist, EEE nevertheless prided itself on standing above party politics and organized its members on quasi-military lines. Most of its three thousand members in Salonica were refugees who saw the Jews as old allies of the Ottoman Turks, and hated communists as much if not more. Its shock-troops wore uniforms and helmets, and some would go on during the German occupation to become members of the collaborationist Security Battalions.
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Like other such groups, EEE was the kind of marginal political force which needed violence and publicity. Campbell was their moment in the limelight: their work otherwise involved scrawling anti-Jewish graffiti and slogans on walls, throwing stones, and making the occasional attack on cinemas, cafés and bookstores frequented by the left. Standing in municipal elections in February 1934, it won few votes and despite the support provided by visiting fascists from Germany and Romania, it collapsed later that year as a result of factional in-fighting. But it was part of a more enduring network of right-wing groups whose activities were to make a deep impact in the coming decades.

What really made them significant was the support of mainstream politicians. It was not merely that the defendants at the 1932 trial were acquitted, nor that the organization was never closed down by the authorities. The links were closer than that. Representatives of EEE had met with the governor-general of Macedonia on the eve of the troubles, and he was clearly sympathetic to their aims as his comments in the subsequent parliamentary debate showed. Welfare Minister Iasonides, a leading interwar refugee politician, also backed them. They took part in official parades on national holidays and received subventions from the municipality and major banks. And there were rumours that neither the police nor the army had showed much energy in pursuing them at the time.
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The truth was that Venizelist Liberals especially, and many others in the civil service and the army, shared some of the attitudes that motivated the rioters. They were more sophisticated in their expression, and more conscious of the need to consider the impact of anti-Semitism upon Greece’s international image. Nevertheless, Greek nationalism—riven with anxiety in the aftermath of the Asia Minor disaster—operated through an ethnocentric view of the world, much as Zionism did. It saw Jews in communal terms, and under-estimated
the variety of views and opinions that existed among them. And despite their public statements, few people really believed that Jews, however assimilated, could become Greeks.

A startling illustration of how deeply such attitudes had penetrated the administrative elite is provided by the confidential memoranda of the director of the Thessaloniki press bureau, an intelligence service set up (revealingly) in the foreign ministry to monitor the city’s Jewish press. On 5 July 1931, he analysed the background to the Campbell riot. Its root cause he attributed to Jewish “provocation” to Greek sentiment over many years. The very formation of the Maccabi groups was one such act; as for the press, no one could deny, he wrote, “that the Jewish newspapers have always been provocative.” He went on to imply that it was the failure of leaders of the Jewish community to reply publicly to
Makedonia
’s original allegations that had led to the “sad and bloody actions against the Jewish population” when, as he put it, “Greek public opinion—rightly or wrongly—took to the streets and engaged in acts of violence.”
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