Mark Levene
The Lost World of Salonica

Mark Levene - The Lost World of Salonica

- [Lauren] Today we are joined by Dr. Mark Levine, who is an emeritus fellow at the University of Southampton and in the Parkes Centre for Jewish and Non-Jewish Relations. His books on Jewish history, genocide, and climate change apart, Mark has over many years worked with Trudy Gold at LJCC. He is also co-producer of The Greek Project, Greek Study Tour Holidays with Intellectual Bite. All right, Mark, when you’re ready, I’ll hand over to you.

• Right. I’ve got a blank screen, Lauren, is that right? Or, no, no, no. That’s it. Okay, great. Right. Hello, everybody. This is a new departure for me. I’m here thanks to Trudy Gold, who I used to work with over many years, but quite a long time ago now mostly. And what I’m going to do in a couple of lectures, this one and another one at the end of March, is talk a little bit about the city of Salonika, or Thessaloniki, or if you prefer, Salonica. Or if you prefer again, Solun. A city with many names. But it’s the Jewish element of it I’m going to be primarily dealing with. Though, I suppose my take on Jewish history as somebody who’s taught it over many years is you can never take that alone. You have to always put it into a broader context and join up the parts. Anyway, these two lectures are going to deal not with the whole run of Jewish Salonika, which is a long story, though I will refer to something from how it arose, but it’s going to deal with a very particular period, and that is the period which I would suggest is the apogee of Jewish Salonika, the time when Jewish life becomes the dominant element in the city, not just demographically, but culturally, socially, economically, not necessarily politically, and that is a period from about 1878 to 1913. Now, if you’re not sure where Salonika, or today’s Thessaloniki is, we’ll come onto that in the course of things, because I’ll bring up some maps. But if you have little idea of this place, I thought we’d start with some pictures. Now, I’m going to, I mentioned I think from 1878 to 1913, something which is on my mind.

This is a period of seismic shifts, political shifts, in Salonika’s life, but of course, “seismic” brings up another thing at the moment. Salonika is on a earthquake zone. It’s on tectonic plates, which go across the Aegean through into Anatolia into today’s Turkey. And of course, one could say there but for the grace of God. Salonika has been destroyed by earthquakes in the past. I’d like us just to sort of have a think at the moment about how other cities not so far away, Gaziantep, Marash, Iskenderun, Adana, have been completely destroyed by earthquakes, and I suppose it shows, you know, things political are one thing, but there’s also the forces of nature. And maybe we ought to sort of have that at the back of our minds. Anyway, I thought the way I’d introduce this talk is with some pictures, and I thought there’s no better way than starting with an archive. And you can see this is mostly in Greek, but it translates “Albert Kahn, Archive of the Planet.” And I want to just say a few words about Albert Kahn as an entree into how we might appreciate what he did. Khan was a Alsatian Jew born in 1860. Like a lot of Jews from Alsace, he was very poor. His father was a cattle trader, his mother completely illiterate. The family moved to Paris as a result of the Franco-Prussian War. And there he was lucky enough to be contracted to a major Jewish bank, the Goudchaux Bank, and he became something of a futures trader and made an absolute mint, which I should hasten to add he lost completely almost in the great crash of the late 1920s. But in the interim, Kahn was a man with intellectual interests. He knew lots of interesting people like Rodin, and Henri Bergson.

But he also took himself on a trip to Japan where he started taking with his chauffeur lots of photographs, and he’d picked up on something which was very much novel at the time, a new way of making photographs, photographic plates, which were colour. It’s a method called autochrome. It was started by the Lumiere brothers. Don’t ask me how the process works, because that’s not really my field, but I know potatoes come into it as part of the filter for the colour work. Anyway, he had this notion, I think a rather important one, that the planet as it was, the human planet, was disappearing fast in the sense that all sorts of traditional ways of life were disappearing in the wake of modernization, globalisation. Remember, we’re talking about 1900 here, and he decided to commission photographers to go round the planet and take photographs of what they could see in colour. So Lauren, first photograph. Right. Not Salonika. You can see the most tremendous colour. And these are young women in traditional dress in Corfu in Greece. Let’s go on, Lauren, to another one. Wow. Yes. So one of his, one of his photographers went to India, and here we see a group of holy men in what was then called Bombay, now Mumbai. Closer to home, Lauren. Next one. Right, here we are. So here is the great port, the great Aegean, the great Levantine port of Salonika. And you can see lots and lots and lots of little boats in the harbour. Actually, if anything, he underestimates the number of boats you would probably see if you arrived as his photographer, or Auguste Leon, arrived in Salonika in 1912 and took this plate. Go on, Lauren.

Right, so now we’ve got a series of photographs to show you life as it was. And part of the reason I’m showing you this is that it must seem very, very different. I mean, it is very, very different from how Salonika looks today. You won’t see people dress like this, and you won’t see the differences between people. The thing about Salonika in this period is it’s a Jewish city, but it’s also a vastly multiethnic city. The shoe shines, the boys in the harbour area, it’s said, had to have a working knowledge of six or seven languages to get by. And I’ll say a little bit more about that anon. But you can see these are men, some of whom are wearing the traditional fez, because this is a period when this is not Greek as it is today, it was Ottoman, and they seem to be having coffee, but they may also be playing tavli or backgammon, , in this picture. Next one, Lauren. Group of Muslim people. Just again, it’s immediacy I think is very, very striking. So this, as I said, a community with a Jewish, a dominant population, perhaps there’s 120,000 people in the city, 60,000 of whom at least were Jewish, primarily Spanish speaking Sephardi Jews. But the community overall is mixed, and as we’ll come onto it, when we look at a map, there’s no ghetto in Salonika. This is a mixed city. Go on, Lauren. Right, now I mentioned seismic shift. This is just a sort of marker for one of those seismic shifts, not 1878, but 1912, 13. We’ll come back to this later on. 1912-1913 is really a caesura, a rupture in Salonika’s history because it is captured from the Ottomans by the Greeks in the first Balkan War.

And these gentlemen are the new Greek. How would you put them from a Greek point of view? They are liberators. From a Ottoman point of view and from a Jewish point of view, primarily they are occupiers. These particular men are wearing traditional Cretan uniforms, so they’re soldiers from the recently, Crete had recently become part of the state of Greece. Okay, carry on. Right, and this one looks like a jolly picture, too, but actually it’s not. This one is not by Auguste Leon, it’s by the other photographer who came at the end of the first and then second Balkan Wars. These are actually refugees who have left the area around Salonika, and these are actually what one today would call Slavaphone. They’re Slavic speaking, Bulgarian, sort of Bulgarian dialect speaking, and great swathes of this population were quite literally vomited out by the Greek liberators. This is a two-way thing, a three-way thing. There is ethnic cleansing in this arena during this war. And it’s every bit as vicious and nasty and violent as the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, in the 1990s. Interestingly, the Jewish community was not evicted. And I want to come onto that a little bit more in the next lecture I’ll be giving. Right, go on. That’s all right, Lauren. You’re doing the right thing. Right. Now, we’re coming back to the Jewish community.

You might think, “Oh, all this multicultural stuff. Where are the Jews?” And here we have really, I suppose, a posed picture, three Jewish ladies in very traditional dress, which would be dress which they would’ve worn in Spain, in the Iberian Peninsula in the 14th and 15th centuries. So it’s really a continuation of that, and it’s a reminder that what is this community? It’s a community which has lived in the eastern Aegean, in the Aegean area for 400 years, but it’s Spanish-speaking. The language that they speak is a form of Spanish called Judesmo or Ladino. Judesmo is more accurate or Judeo-Espanol. And again, a posed photograph, but something which seems quite… This is a picture much beloved by the person who’s written undoubtedly the best book on Salonika in this period, Mark Mazower, “City of Ghosts.” If you’re interested in Salonika in pursuing this, his book is worth reading. There’ll be a notice to do with that at the end. And again, this is something from a past which has more or less disappeared. This is a Jewish man wearing a fez. He’s one of the poor population of Salonika. Most Jews are working people or petty traders. I’m going to say a little bit more about that in a moment. But here he is, he’s got by himself a bunch of tobacco leaves. Tobacco is one of the great export commodities in this area at this time. But you know, so there’ll have been a lot of it. But here he is trying to sell it, and for who knows, maybe he spends all day trying to sell this bunch of tobacco leaves. Go on, Lauren, if you can hear me. Lovely.

Now, a group picture, and I think this one is very, very interesting for lots and lots of different levels. There is one particular individual who we can sort of, we can put a finger on and say we know who that is. The little boy, the not so little boy actually, on the left with the cap on, with his sort of arm, sort of his hand on his midriff, as it were. This is somebody called Leon Sciaky when he was a child at school. And he wrote a rather nostalgic book called “Farewell to Salonica.” And he’s here with his schoolmates, and in his memoir, he says how interesting it is to be with schoolmates, how they learned from each other because some were Armenian, some were Bulgarian, some were Greek, some were Muslim Turkish-speaking. It’s a whole melange. But this picture is also interesting because I think if you look at it, you can see there’s the old and the new, there’s people in quite modern dress, and there’s a priest on the right, a Greek Orthodox priest. There’s clearly working men amongst this picture. And what is also interesting about it is this is actually a workers meeting, and it’s a workers meeting not just of Jews, but of Bulgarians, of Greeks, of the population of working people. And that is rather interesting because what a man called Avraam Benaroya, clearly a Jewish name, sought to do in this period was to create a union of workers, which would be a multi-ethnic union.

And to a degree in the period he was trying to do this after around 1908, he was remarkably successful. Okay, what we’re going to do now, having had some of Albert Kahn’s beautiful photographs, I’m just going to sort of widen this out a bit to look at other aspects of Salonika life in this period. Next one, Lauren. Right. I don’t know how many of you good folk have actually ever been to this city. Today, this spot is one of the central meeting spots. If you want to meet your friends, you want to go out for a coffee, you go along this great big road called the Via Egnatia, and the place you’d meet is where this is, it’s called Kamara, Arches. It’s actually the Arch of Galerius from Roman times. And that’s a reminder in itself, of course, that this is a very, very ancient city, goes back to Macedonian times. It was founded in 321 BCE. This clearly is not 321 BCE. This is in the modern Ottoman era, perhaps around 1900. And as you can see, all sorts of street urchins, children, people, mixed society, and very, very cluttered part of very close to each other. And that tells us something about the disaster which beheld Salonika a little after this event. Next ones, Lauren. Ooh, oh, lovely. This is good, isn’t it? This is actually one of my favourite pictures, though it’s got something rather sober, sombre at its heart. Again, I think this sort of rather clearly identifies Salonika as a city of many different parts. Again, a kafenion, a cafe, coffee drinking had become very important along with smoking by this time. And you can see different people wearing very different dress.

There’s some very modern looking individuals, probably from different communities. They may be what we would call Frankos, and I’m going to say more about that in a moment. But as you can see also at the centre, somebody who seems to be absolutely fleshless almost and begging, and this man is probably Roma. So again, a community of many different aspects and parts. Next one, Lauren. Right. Now, more about the Jewish community here. What were most Jewish people in Salonika in 1900? They were mostly working class. The vast majority of them were what were called hamals, in terms of the menfolk, anyway. They were either porters or longshoreman, stevedores or fishermen. And this, of course, makes it rather interesting. The majority weren’t petty traders, but there were of course lots of petty traders like the one we saw. They were working in and around the harbour, a harbour which is booming for reasons I’m going to go into in a moment, and they, I suppose, you know, the Ashkenazi word we’d use is they’re schleppers. There are a lot of people schlepping stuff around, and you’d see that. And of course it’s just reminded me, I’ve seen this in Istanbul where there’s people with huge things on their backs, and you know, you wonder how they carry this stuff. But this is how many of the ordinary Jewish folk in Salonika made a living. Next one, Lauren. Again, street scene in part of the central Jewish quarter. You can see the men, working men, wearing a fez, but it’s a family group. It would be very rare if it was the Muslim part of Salonika, but a family group.

They’re essentially in traditional dress, and you can see from the nature of the buildings, the way the top story juts out, this is very traditional. You’ll only see this in parts of modern-day Salonika these days. There’s an area up the hill called Anopolis, which was essentially at that time a Muslim area, and that has some of this from that, that has some resonance of how it looked back then. Next one, Lauren. Right. From the ridiculous to the ridiculous, I suppose. There is this contrast. There are all these thousands of Jewish people, families, working people who are essentially very, very poor. Doesn’t mean to say their lives are not changing, of course. And then there are an elite, an economic elite who built houses outside the Jewish quarter along the, what would you call it? The Paralia, the esplanade out of town to the east. And here’s an example of these houses. They’re now surrounded by modern day blocks, but they must have been very beautiful indeed in their time. This one’s called the Villa Fernandez, sometimes known as the White House, the Villa Bianca, and very much built to European pattern. Very often Italian architects who came to build houses like this one, and this one is owned by a man called Dino Fernandez, who is a member of the elite Jewish community. Which interestingly, most of these were not more than a few generations, a couple of generations living in Salonika. They were primarily entrepreneur families from cities like Trieste and Livorno in Italy and Italian speaking primarily rather than Sephardi speaking.

And they came into the city when the opportunity arose. And this comes very, very much after that first seismic shift I mentioned back in 1878 when the political contours of the area change dramatically, and I’ll show you a bit more on a map what I mean by that. But it’s a period when there is a sort of economic takeoff in Salonika, which makes this very Levantine, traditional Levantine port, something much more than that. It’s being opened up and penetrated by the Western World, and there is an acceleration of economic goings on here. So for instance, just to look at this family, the Fernandez and its sister family, the Allatinis. They seize the opportunity to start building things with the capital they have. They build a flour mill, which is a huge enterprise by Ottoman standards. It has something like 800 workers. And also this notion of the global context to what is happening in this part of the world, they want to ship the flour out to abroad. How are they going to do it? They’re going to have to put this into sacks. Where are the sacks going to come from? Well, so this is a period when jute and hemp sacks from Bengal in British India are available. But, so they create also a jute mill in Salonika. And so that’s also a major combine. But these sort of people, they’re building breweries, they’re building brick factories. And they’re also, as they expand and they try and develop these sets of arrangements, they also set up a major bank, the Bank of Salonika. Let me tell you a bit more about all that in a moment. Let’s just go onto the next photograph for a minute.

Right, again, just to give a sense of change, the accelerating pace of change. This is actually from the album of a scholar called Devin Naar, and it’s from the family album. And again, I think what’s just interesting about it, the man, this man standing up is Devin Naar’s grandfather. The man in front of him is his father, who is clearly a rabbi, with his wife next to him. And I suppose what’s interesting about it is the way they’re dressed. There’s people in very traditional dress here, but the young man and the sister and one or two others are clearly in more modern dress. And this is giving us the shape of things to come. And this of course tells us something else I think, which I’ll throw in at this point. Traditional education, essentially yeshiva or Talmud Torah based is being rapidly replaced by schools where young people are being taught in French or Italian or possibly German because these are the languages of commerce which are becoming central to the new Salonika. And this is very much the new scene. And of course it means that people may be, as in this family, they would be- be home, could be in the street, or if they are finding work in something commercial, they’re probably going to be speaking something more like French or Italian. Next one, Lauren. Hello? Ah, right. So what are we looking at? Here’s a picture of Salonika from 1916 after the great rupture of 1912, of which more in a moment. This is, if you like, part of the aftershock because actually the front of this photograph, you can’t actually see it, is a great British naval gun and it’s looking towards Salonika.

And this is the period when there are in the First World War armies in Salonika, Allied armies, French, Russian, Italian, Serbian, all manner of armies which are here. But at least you can see here the contours of Salonika, its walls which go all the way around the top. The wall along the seafront has been knocked down to make way for a new port and harbour. So this is something which is about the way the city is radically changing, but you can still see that there are minarets everywhere. So this is a Jewish city, but it’s also a Muslim city and an orthodox city. Oh, and I should throw in one other thing which I think is rather important from a Jewish point of view. If you look to the very far right of the picture where there is a sort of barren hill on the right. That isn’t so barren. That is the area of the Jewish cemetery, and it is absolutely vast. It’s now the site of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and I can say a little bit more about that anon, though I’ll throw in one thing now. My coworker in The Greek Project, the holiday tours we now organise, went to study at the Aristotle University, and before I told her she had no idea that underneath their feet was this great Jewish cemetery. Next picture. Right, the opening up of Salonika. No more just little boats, but great big boats and all sorts of things are happening in this part of the world. This is boats are coming in and out carrying tobacco, flour. Tobacco is a major export in this period because it’s a very special form of tobacco, which is grown to the east in Thrace, a sort of a Balkan variety, a Balkan aroma, a Roman variety which is then mixed with other forms of tobacco and becomes very, very popular in Hungary, in Austria.

And this of course has to be shipped somewhere. There is also at this time, the 1880s, the 1890s, this is the key period of the takeoff, the period when the Bank of Salonika is formed, the period when the brewery and the flour mill is created. This is also a period where there is a railway line brought in all the way from Vienna and Budapest all the way down to Salonika. Interestingly, so this is also opening up this Levantine port, this essentially Ottoman port to European capital, to European traders, to European trade. And it’s interesting that that railway line in itself is largely financed by a man called Baron de Hirsch, who some of you may know something about as very significant in, not just in Jewish philanthropy, but in sort of elite Jewish life in Western Europe. Next one, please. Right, just so that you know, I’ve left this a little late, haven’t I? But just so that you know where we’re talking about, this is a modern map of Salonika. And on this map you can see that Salonika is in Greece. And it looks like this has, from the modern map, that this has been always divided up into these different countries. What one has to get one’s head round is that all this area until the early 19th century all parts of the Ottoman Empire, and even after the retreat of the Ottoman Empire in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, still this considerable area around Salonika was still part of the Ottoman Empire. So if we look at the next picture, the next map, Lauren, you’ll see that here is the Ottoman Empire, really very much following the contours of the late, of the Eastern Roman Empire as late as 1878. And if you could sort of spot where Salonika is, it’s sort of almost in the middle of that Aegean Sea.

But if we go to the next map, and this is where we might start talking about the wider political situation just a little, by 1913 after these two great Balkan Wars, this territory, the Ottoman territory had retreated dramatically, and Salonika is no longer in the Ottoman Empire but in Greece. Now, if we go to the next map, I’ll explain this just a little bit more. Next one, Lauren. Right. Now. So here’s the first sort of great caesura. In 1878, it sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it? The Russians attempt to invade parts of the Ottoman Empire. They raise the standard that they’re doing so on behalf of persecuted Christians societies in Romania and Bulgaria, and they attempt to create a very, very large Bulgaria on the back of their victory, which is in 1877. The other great powers won’t have this because they see the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire as being unfavourable to their own interests. And so there is a congress in Berlin in which Jewish matters are also brought up. The Congress of Berlin presided over by Bismarck, also with a bloke called Disraeli there as a significant player. They create a framework for Ottoman control in this yellow area to be maintained, but effectively because the Ottoman Empire by this stage is bankrupt through all the wars it’s fought, the economic control is under a European financial commission, a sort of public debt commission. So the Ottomans themselves are hamstrung by their financial position. And the paradox of this, because the bank, the Ottoman Bank as it’s called, the Imperial Ottoman Bank, is controlled by British, French, and Austrian bankers.

And because the new situation, the new dispensation allows for Europeans to come and live in the Ottoman Empire and not to pay Ottoman taxes, there’s a system called capitulations which allows for this. This is a period in which this part of the Ottoman Empire, Rumelia as it’s called, or later, Macedonia, is very much opened up to Western economic interests. So for instance, if you can, if you are not a Muslim, and you could go to the Italian consulate and ask for Italian citizenship, it also means you’re covered by capitulations, you also don’t have to pay taxes. So- Coming to live this area, but commercial minded people, very often Jewish, in Salonika who also take on an additional or not an additional, Italian or French nationality. So this makes for complexity and it also makes for something very dynamic, which is happening in the city. Next one, Lauren. Right. So here we have a sense of the layout of Salonika in this period. There were lots of synagogues. They were traditionally named after the different communities which people had come from in Iberia in the 15th century, yeah, the 16th century. Sorry for that. Just as a background here, why are there Jewish communities here? In 1431 the city is captured by the Ottomans, and on this occasion under the rules of mediaeval warfare, because it resists the Ottomans put the city to the sword. Everybody is slaughtered or taken off the slave market. So for the best part of three quarters of a century or more, the city is sort of like a charnel house.

As the Ottoman Empire starts rising to its own ascendancy, it’s looking to restart the city of Salonika, and hey presto, who are available as potentially very loyal inhabitants, but refugee migrants from Spain, where of course as I guess most of you know, Spanish-Portuguese Jews were evicted after 1492. So we end up here with a, though there had been other Jewish communities living here, we end up with a dominant Spanish-speaking, Spanish cultural Jewish community living at the heart of the harbour area and the market area by the harbour front by the waterfront, initially with all these different synagogues representing where they came from, but eventually coalescing into one. Under the Ottoman system, something called the millet system, they were allowed a very large degree of cultural, social, and religious autonomy. They weren’t bothered by the state in terms of how they organised their education. This wasn’t of interest to the Ottomans. What the Ottomans wanted was a loyal population. And the paradox about the Jews as opposed to some of the other communities, particularly around 1900, is they were very loyal. But you can also see from this map, there are other communities. There’s a Greek quarter, there’s the Turkish quarter, and at the top of the Turkish quarter was the garrison of the Third Army, very important military garrison for this area. And you can also see, and this is significant to what I’ve been talking about earlier, there’s also something here called a Frank or Franko Quarter, and this relates to not just Western Jews, but Western commercial people who are now able to come and live in this city. Next one, Lauren. Right. Again, I just thought I’d throw this one in, and I’m going to run towards the end now ‘cause I see I’ve reached 7:45.

This is just interesting, this is actually from 1932, a bit later, but it’s an encouragement for people to learn what they actually very often knew anyway. It’s by a newspaper. There were lots of Jewish newspapers by 1900, just like there were lots of schools and there were lots of clubs, and so on. The papers were sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in French, occasionally in Hebrew. And this is something promoting the notion of learning different languages or knowing the languages of Salonika, four of which are referred to here, dictionnaire, French. Hebrew, and dictionnaire also in Ivrit for Judesmo. So a multifaceted city, which was of course very polyglot. Next one, Lauren. Right. So we’re getting to the caesura here. I hope you haven’t got entirely the notion this is sort of happy valley, that everybody is living cheek by jowl, they are living cheek by jowl, and it’s all happy stuff. It’s actually in the period after 1878, there are a lot of tensions both in Salonika and its hinterland. There’s actually quite a lot of low-level violence because both Greeks and Bulgarians in particular are vying to take control of this city. There are tensions also of an economic variety between particularly the Greeks and Jewish traders in Salonika. There’s no pogroms as such. There’s nothing like that in the history here, but there are tensions, and sometimes the tensions intrude into Salonika itself.

There’s also, by the way, a Macedonian body which wants to create autonomy for all the peoples in Macedonia, and it sparks off a rebellion in 1903, which leads to, oh, banks being blown up in Salonika and French warships being blown up in the harbour. So, there’s some quite dramatic goings on here. There’s also economic tensions, of course, strikes, sometimes strikes by tobacco workers, Jewish tobacco workers included, against the the big powerful bosses. It’s interesting though, I should just throw in here if, you know, if somebody’s saying, “Well what about the politics of Salonika in this period?” Both Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi for the Zionists were here to sort of see what was going on in Salonika. And they didn’t have much of a role to be honest, because the Jewish labour union, or the labour union, Jewish-led labour union was already up and running and certainly didn’t need them. Zionism is rather latent here, not least because people are very proud of . The fact that this is an almost autonomous Jewish society of its own. Nevertheless, here’s the big rupture. In 1912, the first army to reach Salonika in the Balkan Wars, there’s a race for Salonika, is not the Bulgarian Army who arrive 14 hours too late, it’s the Greek Army. And I suppose, you know, the normal thing about, you know, he who controls, he who’s there first is the one who controls is the head of the Greek Army marching past the white tower on the harbour front arriving in Salonika.

And one might, I would argue that from a Jewish point of view, this is actually, though one would obviously think forward to the Holocaust 30 years later, this is actually the beginning of the end. The Jewish apogee has reached its height under Ottoman control even after the great Young Turk Revolution of 1908. This is still very much a society in which Jewish economic, cultural, and social life is in the ascendant. But after 1912, it’s going to go downhill. And there’s an aftershock to that. Next one, Lauren. Yeah, just to say something of this now about, you know, forces of nature. In 1917 when the city is occupied by all these Allied armies, there is a fire which happens in the Muslim quarter and it spreads rapidly. It’s in August, this fire, it’s very hot, and it spins rapidly across the harbour area of the city and almost the entire traditional Jewish quarter is destroyed, and the Jews of this quarter become internal refugees. And that becomes part of the mix of what is becoming a sort of several-fold disaster for the Jewish community. Next one, Lauren. Right. So just to get a sense of things demographic, you can see in 1900 looking at the orange area, the Jewish community is rising to its peak, as I said, at least 60,000. The next major community is the Muslim Turkish community, and the Greeks are marginal. Today, the Greek community is overwhelming, though to complicate matters, and we can talk about this another time, perhaps, most of those Greeks, their DNA is Pontic. In other words, it’s from the Black Sea. And I would have to do a whole other lecture to explain that.

Today the Jewish population of Salonika is about 0.01% of the population. It is essentially, alas, geriatric, and it’s about a thousand people. It doesn’t mean set’s non-existent, but a tiny proportion. Carry on, Lauren, we’re almost there. Some things to read. Mark Mazower, as I said, “Salonica, City of Ghosts.” Devin Naar’s “Jewish Salonica.” A more upbeat interpretation of the post-1912 Salonika. There’s lots, if you look up, if you’re interested in the pictures like I showed you, not only is some of the Albert Kahn’s pictures available on Google, “The Archive of the Planet,” but if you start googling for videos, you’ll find that there are lots of videos of Salonika from this period. Indeed, also, if you’re interested, and I’ll come onto this in just a moment, there is, you’ll find a beautiful set of pictures, a video of pictures on our Greek Project site. I’ll say just a bit more in a moment on that. Two more to go, I think, Lauren. Next one, please. Just as a thank you to Albert Kahn, this great philanthropist, this great believer in peace. And of course, you know, suffered two world wars, fortunately died in his bed in 1940 in Paris. But the legacy for him is “The Archive of the Planet,” which is next to his very beautiful garden, I believe, in Boulogne-Billancourt, very close to Paris if you ever want to visit, and it’s been recently revamped as a exhibition site. Last one, I think, Lauren. One more to come. Lauren? Oh, lovely. Right, finally. Sorry to put in a plug but may be useful if this has whetted your appetite a little bit. This is the site for the project, for the study tours we organise, not only do we organise study tours to Salonika and the surrounding area, but we also do bespoke tours. So for instance, if a group of people wanted a Jewish tour of Salonika and the surrounding area, we would be very happy to accommodate you. Hope that’s a starting point. Thank you very much.

Q&A and Comments:

Q - [Lauren] Carol is saying that, “The colour photographs are quite marvellous for the time they were made. As they were done on glass plates, there is some elongation of the faces on some and not all of them. Is that because the glass is not perfect sometimes?”

A - No idea, Carol. Sorry. I’m not a photographic expert. This is of course a method which is in its infancy. But I suppose I’m struck by the fact that not only are they very fine photographs, but they’re in colour. But I’m afraid I can’t help you on that very specific question.

Q - [Lauren] Great. Ruth is asking, “When was Aristotle University built over the Jewish cemetery?”

A - All right, that’s, yes. This is sobering. Ruth, I very particularly haven’t talked about the Holocaust in Salonika or in Greece. If, you know, if you’re interested in that, I could possibly do it another time. The interesting thing about 1912, is the new dispensation is Greek, but Thessaloniki as it now is, is subsidiary to the Port of Piraeus next to Athens. And so, Thessaloniki in Greek terms is looking for a role. And what one of the roles the municipality is angling for is to build a university, a university which will be a sort of great Balkan university. They start eyeing up in the 1920s the Jewish cemetery, which is east of the walls. And this is a catastrophically sad story, and it’s also one of German-Greek collaboration because when the Jews are deported from Salonika in March 1943, even before that has happened, the Germans give the go ahead to the municipality to smash up all the stones, the gravestones, and this paves the way for the Aristotle University to be created in the decade after the Holocaust. So this is a very, very problematic story. If you’re interested in it, there’s a guy called, I think it’s Leon Saltiel, that’s S-A-L-T-I-E-L, who has written specifically about that. And you’ll also find there’s a book called “The Holocaust in Greece.” One of the pieces is by me. You’ll find more on the Jewish cemetery and it’s fate in that. Hope that helps.

Q - [Lauren] Thank you. Alec is asking, “Is the Baron Hirsch the same who developed the cattle farms

A - Yep.

• with Jewish gauchos-

• Yep. Absolutely. It’s the very same, and one could have a whole lecture on Baron de Hirsch. He’s responsible also for a hospital, or at least his family encourages him to provide some of the capital for a hospital which is open to all in Salonika. The railway station is named after him. And again, sombre afterthought to this, when the Jews are herded into a ghetto, this is only for a matter of months, when the Germans are in charge from 1941 onwards, they are then later herded into a ghetto and it’s called the Baron de Hirsch Ghetto. And that’s, you know, there’s a sort of a rather perverse ironic twist to that, isn’t there? Anyway. Yes, next one.

Q - [Lauren] Lynn is saying, "Thank you for an excellent lecture. Is it true that thousands of Jews emigrated to Israel in 1917 after the fire? And what proportion of the Muslims in Salonika were Donmeh?”

A - 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. Next one please.

Q - [Lauren] Erica’s asking, “Are the Macedonians Greek?”

A - Oh, blimey. Let’s not go there. This is such a big question and it’s not one to which I can give you a sort of yes, no, in, out. It’s this… Where does one begin here? There is a site we go to on one of our Greek tours called Vergina, which is the site of the Macedonian royal tombs from Alexander’s time. And by the time of Alexander, of course, this is going back to 300 BC, the Macedonians had been Hellenized. But that was in classical times. Today there is a political state of Macedonia where the population is Slavic speaking. The peoples of Macedonia who were Slavic speaking under the Greeks were almost entirely ethnic cleansed, but the Greeks call Macedonia, or part of Macedonia which belongs to them, Greek. Now, can you see how convoluted and Byzantine already this is just from the few words I’ve said already? The question is too direct. One would need a lecture-worth of history lesson to unravel the complexity of this without making it completely opaque. I hope that’s okay as a starting point. Next one.

Q - Great. Lorna’s asking, “Has this location become popular with tourists?”

A - 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. Yes. Next. Have I come across rabbi-

• [Lauren] Sorry.

• Yes? Is that…

Q - [Lauren] Yes. “Have you come across a Rabbi Eliyahu Frances who was born there around 1880 and lived in 1928?”

A - No, I’m afraid not. And I suppose, it’s sort of a very personal thing. No, I don’t know everybody in Salonika. I certainly don’t know everybody Jewish who was linked to Salonika, but I presume this is a family question, it relates to family. And yes, I come across all sorts of people on many occasions who ask me exactly questions like that. And I’m afraid the answer is no, I don’t personally know. David Rappaport.

Q - [Lauren] Yep, David is asking, “If the Nazis destroyed the community late in the war.”

A - 1943, March 1943. But again, it’s more complex than that. As I’ve said, there’s also issues of collaboration, there’s also issues of the Bulgarians, how they behaved nearby, you know, and that’s another dark history because we have this assumption about the Bulgarians being the good guys, which in this part of the world they absolutely weren’t. But yes, the community is, there are about 50,000 Jews in Salonika. It’s a much diminished community actually in 1943, and the number who survive is really quite minuscule. It’s not non-existent, but again, that would be deserving of another lecture, perhaps sometime.

Q - [Lauren] James is asking, “With so many different communities in the city, what was the lingua franca?”

A - 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 spotable in that sense. Does that help? Anyway, next one.

Q - [Lauren] Isaac says, “You mentioned the Jews coming from Spain. Were there not Romaniote Jews who settled in Greece before the Spanish Jews arrived in Greece?”

A - One might would say not even settled. They were indigenous to the society. They go back 2,000 years. There were Romaniote Jews, of course. And again, somewhere we’ll be going on one of our tours next year will be to a place called Ioannina, which until the Second World War had an a Romaniote-speaking community. The thing about the Spanish Jews is they were so overwhelming in number when they arrived here, is that if there were any traces of other Jewish groups, Romaniotes included, in the area, they tended to become subsumed within this Spanish-speaking dominance. So it’s not that there weren’t Romaniote Jews, but certainly in the Salonika area and its hinterland, Spanish Judesmo became the dominant Jewish language.

Q - [Lauren] Thank you. Alan’s asking if, “You will be explaining why the demographic changed after 1912 and through 1939.”

A - Yeah, well I can do that further, but, I mean, as I said, there is the paradox that the Jews were not ethnically cleansed by the Greeks like the Bulgarians were, and the Muslims were also deported in 1924 under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne. Again, lots of- The Jews weren’t included in that, but politically and economically the Greek community wanted to put a sort of vice on the ability of the Jewish community to prosper as it had done under the Ottomans. It’s as what’s her name, Judith Fleming would say, this is a community under siege. And so it’s not that the Jewish community disappears in the period before the Second World War, but it radically has to either adapt to the new Greek reality or emigrate. And this is of course what happens not just to Palestine, though, you know, as I’ve already said the stevedores emigrate to Palestine, but a lot of Jews, particularly those who are French speaking, they move to Paris. Yeah. Next one.

Q - [Lauren] Judith says that her “father was director of the Bank of Salonika Istanbul, and why did it move there?”

A - Bank of Salonika. Probably because it went bankrupt and because it didn’t, you know, because as I’ve already explained, the Jewish-owned, and in terms of shares controlled company was not what Greek, Greek wanted Hellenization of the economy, just like all dirigiste economies do. And the Jews were seen as problematic in terms of this Hellenization. So I can’t give you the date and time, but my guess is this is why this happened eventually. And the Allatinis and the Modianos and the other great Jewish elite families either left or they were bought out, or they went bankrupt. Next one, please.

Q - Linda’s asking, “Will you be covering the Holocaust in Salonika in your next lecture?”

A - Yes. No, what I’m doing in these two lectures is looking at this particular period before the Holocaust because it’s the Jewish community in a vital sense. It’s not a community which is on the verge of destruction. It’s a community which has all sorts of developments going on and political ramifications which come out of that, particularly when we start looking at the role of the Donmeh, which has all sorts of implications, not just on the Jewish scene. If people would like me to talk about the Holocaust in Salonika, I can do that in a further lecture to be sure.

Q - [Lauren] Francis is asking, “Am I correct that many Jews left Salonika for Istanbul at the end of the 19th century?”

A - I’m not sure if that is particularly true. If anything, the Jewish community was on the rise and other people were coming into the city. At this time, both communities, Jewish communities were growing. As I’ve also implied, unlike other communities which became vulnerable for different political reasons, the Armenians and the Greeks in particular in the Ottoman Empire, until 1908 or so, the Jewish community was a very loyal community and particularly if you were commercially inclined, cities like Salonika in particular, but Constantinople also were places where it was possible to make a living if you were commercially inclined. Last one. “Was there any further community further east at Kavala?” There most certainly was. There was communities in Kavala, in Xanthi, in Vrama, in all these communities. And that’s something else one could talk about. The communities in Kavala were particularly, and Xanthi, were particularly associated with the development of tobacco, and they become very critical in that development. So the answer is most certainly yes.

Q - [Lauren] And we have one last question, if you can explain what the Donmeh are.

A - Well I’m going to do that if you can hang on till next time rather than do it now. Seem a bit churlish, but I’m going to be talking about the Donmeh, the Sabbateans, in the next lecture. So hang on till the end of March, whenever it is, I think it’s March the 27th, and we’ll talk more then. And don’t forget what I said about looking up The Greek Project and you can find out more about what we do on the ground looking at the Donmeh and Jewish communities in Thessalonikians nearby. Does that help?

• Wonderful. Yes, thank you so much, Mark. This was a fabulous and beautiful lecture, so thank you so much. And you’re leaving us all on the edge of our seats for your next one in March.

• Okay, lovely. You all have good evenings, and hello and goodbye from the Welsh borders. Go well. Well, bye.