Mark Levene
The Lost World of Salonica
Summary
A portrait of the great Sephardi Jewish metropolis at its apogee in the years before the First World War. With visual testimony in part from Albert Kahn’s great photographic ‘archives of the planet.’
Mark Levene
Mark Levene is an emeritus fellow at the University of Southampton and in the Parkes Centre for Jewish/non-Jewish relations. His books on Jewish history, genocide, and climate change apart, Mark has for many years worked with Trudy Gold at LJCC. He is also coproducer of The Greek Project, Greek Study Tour Holidays with Intellectual Bite (www.greekproject.co.uk).
Right. Well, okay. They didn’t emigrate, some left actually, some of the Jewish stevedores, in other words the stevedores, the longshoreman, the ones who had skills working in the ports, a small proportion of them left before 1912 to work on the new Port of Jaffa. But the majority of them, after you see what, there is a sort of an attempt or a process by which after the Greeks are firmly in control in Salonika, they try and squeeze the Jewish, it is a Jewish monopoly by the way of the port in terms of the stevedores. And they try and squeeze this out, and almost en masse in the 1920s, the Jewish stevedores moved to British Palestine as it then was. On the Donmeh, I’m going to be talking about the Donmeh in the next lecture if you’re interested, and I think there are about 14,000 people who are Donmeh. And so this is a sort of, as I’ve said in the title to this next lecture, the other Jews of Salonika, ‘cause of course they are in some ways Jews, but they’re also Muslims. Get your head round that. Anyway, thank you.
Oh Lord, yes. Indeed it has. You mean Salonika? Well, we take tours there, including Jewish tours. But you’ll find if you ever go to Salonika, you’ll find a lot of Hebrew spoken because there are a lot of Israelis. Of course a lot of Israelis have family who came from Salonika who come there. There is a very beautiful and very, very good Jewish museum in the centre of Thessaloniki. But we can also thank the last mayor but last, a man called Yiannis Boutaris who was very open-minded, very different from some of his forebears who wanted to open up the city to its multi-ethnic legacy. And you now get not just Jewish tourists or Israeli tourists, you get a lot of Turkish tourists coming to Thessaloniki. And this, I think is, you know, is a very, very good thing.
Lingua franca there, well. The lingua franca was, politically it was Turkish, but in practise it was, it was Judesmo, the Jewish spoken language. But of course, as I’ve suggested, French is coming in as much more, and Italian, are coming in as the commercial languages for the city. So there’s no one overriding language. I’ll say this, though, just as a throw in, not least because of the questions about the Holocaust. The Jews of Salonika tended to speak Greek, which they were obliged to learn after the Greek occupation or liberation. And during the Holocaust Jews were, particularly older Jewish people, were very vulnerable because they spoke Greek with their Spanish accents. And so they were, you know, they were spottable in that sense.