Jews of Greece

[akritas]

Ancient Times to the 1940's

Jewish presence in Greece dates at least to the mention by Strabo in approximately 85 B.C.E. that Jews could be found in all the cities of the eastern Mediterranean (VII 7 4). There may well have been Jews, if not Jewish communities, living in Greek cities as far back as the Babylonian Exile (586-530 B.C.E.). After the wars of the Maccabees, between 170 and 161 B.C.E., many Hellenized Jews left Judaea and settled in the new commercial centers, such as Alexandria and Antioch, of the Hellenistic world. From these communities smaller groups moved to some of the coastal Aegean cities such as Ephesus, Smyrna, Thessaloniki, and, according to tradition, Chalkis. Jewish communities also may have been founded on Crete at this time. In any case, by the time of the Apostle Paul there were flourishing Jewish communities in most of the major Greek cities.The scanty surviving evidence concerning the Jews of the late antique and Byzantine periods indicates that the Jews in Greece lived more or less as did their Christian neighbors. The famous 12th century record of the Jews of Greece compiled by Benjamin of Tudela during his travels through Greece indicates a uniform dispersion of Jewish communities. The Jewish community of Thebes was so closely identified with the silk industry that Roger II of Sicily (1095-1154) forcibly moved almost the entire community to Sicily to introduce the silk industry in his Norman kingdom. In Crete, under Venetian rule after the fall of Constantinopole to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Jews were producers and exporters of agricultural goods. Kosher wines and cheeses from Crete were sent as faras the Baltic port of Lubeck

In general terms the Jews of Greece during this period can be described as “Romaniot” Jews, i.e. , Jews of the empire of the “second Rome”, Byzantium. Their status under Byzantine rule was peculiar, but they were protected by law and only rarely do contemporary sources convey the impression of persecution. Life was not made easy for them, lest they forget their refusal to accept the Christian Messiah, but they were recognized at least as descendants of the Chosen People. Integration into the cultural pattern of Greek life can be seen in the loss of Hebrew by many communities. Some communities tried to maintain at least the form of Hebrew by writing out whole sections of the Tanah in Greek using Hebrew script, as in the illuminated Book of Job from Crete (Ms. Gr. 135 Bib. Nationale). Other communities must have been assimilated completely. In the Mani, in southern Greece, the inhabitants claim to be descendants of “lost” Jews , claims now mixed with legends of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Despite this assimilation, on the eve of World War II there were still several communities of Romaniot Jews in Greece claiming unbroken continuity back into antiquity. Kerkyra (Corfu), Zakynthos (Zante), Ioannina, Arta, Preveza, Patras, Chalkis, and Volos still maintained traces of the old Romaniot minhag, or liturgy.

By the third quarter of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire had supplanted the Byzantine. Ottoman policy toward minorities was based on Islamic law, which recognized both Jews and Christians as a separate millet (nation) with religious and , to an extraordinary extent, legal autonomy within their own communities. This tolerant millet system encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe who had been feeling the brunt of Christian persecution, notably, in the late 15th century, in Spain. This immigration was welcomed by the Ottomans because of the economic stimulation it brought. In 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella proclaimed the Edict of Expulsion for the Jews of Spain, Sultan Bayezid II proclaimed that Jews from Spain would be welcome in the Ottoman Empire, and over 20,000 Sephardic or Iberian Jews arrived in Thessaloniki the same year. Soon afterwards 36,000 Jews left Sicily, many of them to settle in the Balkans.

Within a generation a Judaeo-Spanish culture had been transplanted to many centers in the Ottoman Empire. This was not always done smoothly. Many of the Sepharadim were Marranos, Jews who had converted to Christianity in the 14th century, thereby being able to participate in much of Europe’s cultural and intellectual life. Their reconversion to Judaism was sometimes difficult, and their pride and sense of cultural superiority caused friction in their dealings with Romaniot Jews. Whatever the difficulties, the former Romaniot communities of Constantinople, Edirne (Adrianople), Thessaloniki, and Rhodes were forced by the weight of numbers and cultural superiority to adopt not only the minhag but also the language of the newcomers. A new, and certainly one of the most exciting periods of Balkan Jewry began. In 1497 the first book printed in Constantinople was published in Hebrew, well over two hundred years before the first Greek books were printed in the Balkans. Some Jews, notably Joseph Nasi (1520?-1579) during the reigns of Suleiman the Magnificent and Selim II, rose to high positions in the Ottoman service.

The Greek War of Independence brought disaster to the Jewish communities in the Peloponnesos, where the revolution erupted in 1821. The Jews, because of their close associate with the Ottoman administration, were massacred along with the Turks. The Jewish communities of Mistras, Tripolis, and Kalamata were decimated; the few survivors moved north to settle in Chalkis and Volos, still under Ottoman rule. Patras lost its ancient Jewish community, which was refounded only in 1905.


By the late 19th century much of the energy of the Greek state was being spent in attempts to regain those southern Balkan territories historically associated with Greek history and language. National “Hellenic” consciousness became the ideal, and Jews, along with the other non – “Hellenic” peoples of the country, found themselves in the process of Hellenization. This was not much of a problem to the Jews of southern or northwestern Greece, for as Romanios they already were Hellenized to a great extent in both language and custom. For the Sepharadim in northeastern Greece, however, who came under the Greek rule after the Balkan Wars of 1912/3, there was a problem.


Thessaloniki was a bizarre city even by Balkan standards. At the turn of the century its population was approximately one-third Greek and more than one-half Jewish, with the balance made up of Turks, Bulgars, and other nationalities. The language of government and law was Osmanli, but the general commercial life of the city was conducted in the language of the Sepharadim, Ladino, the Spanish of Cervantes with heavy accretions of Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Bulgarian. The city’s horizon was spiked with minarets and in its center lay a sprawling Jewish cemetery that reached up to the walls of the old city. On Friday afternoons almost all of the city’s commercial life ceased for most of the stevedores and porters were Jews. Over 32 synagogues, with names like Aragon, Castille, Toledo, and Magrebi, reminiscent of a time long past in a land abandoned in desperation and sadness, provided religious centers for the Sepharadim. The population included Karaites as well as Donmeh, followers of the 17th century pseudo-Messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Hellenization sought to absorb this incredibly medieval city into contemporary Greek life.

For the Sepharadim, their Spanish culture was a means of preserving their Jewish identity when religious observance began to slip. If a Sephardic Jew were to lose his religious commitment to Judaism, he had a strong secular Judaeo-Spanish culture to fall back on. By the late 1930’s, however, several factors had disrupted much of this culture. Hellenization required the official imposition of the Greek language; of the establishment of Sunday, not Saturday as the day of rest; and the considerable re-organization of the traditional religious life of the Jews according to the laws of the Greek state. In August 1917, fire swept through the Jewish quarter, causing great loss of life and property, from which it did not recover. Confiscations, which continued until the late 1930’s, began of of vast sections of the ancient cemetery. In the 1920’s the enormous influx of Greek refugees from Asia Minor resulting from the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey fundamentally altered the city’s ethnic structure. National and economic life increasingly came to be centered in Athens, and many Jews from Thessaloniki moved south to the capital. As these factors weakened the Thessaloniki Jewish community, more and more of its members left Greece altogether, for Palestine, Europe, South Africa, and the United States. By 1939 the Thessaloniki Jewish community had fallen from approximately 90,000 at the turn of the century to 56,000.

If the Thessaloniki Jewish community was unique in its identification with its Spanish past, the Athens Jewish community was equally unique for its heterogeneity. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the 17th century when Sabbatai Zevi visited the city there are periodic references to a Jewish presence in Athens. The absence of Jews in Athens immediately following the Greek War of Independence is ominous, indicating that they either fled or were massacred as were the Turks. We hear of the first ‘new’ Jews in the city when the Bavarian King Otto I of Greece settled in Athens in 1834, for with him came a man named Max Rothschild, perhaps the first Jew to arrive in the new capital. He was soon followed by a number of other Jews, most of them Bavarian and therefore Ashkenazi in background. Within a short period of time Jews from Turkey, many of them from Smyrna if one can judge by family names, began to settle in the city. By the middle of the 19th century a small Jewish community, but one with no determining tradition, had been established in Athens

For a time this community was the object of attention for the Duchess of Plaisance, Sophie Berbe Marboise. A highly eccentric French-American lady who had married the Duke of Plaisance, a member of the Napoleonic aristocracy, Sophie fancied herself an adherent of what she called ‘the faith of Moses.’ She dressed heavily in veils, ate no pork, befriended Jews, and would seem to have lived in her own world of fancy and romance. On her death in 1854 Sophie left much of the considerable property she had bought in Athens to the Athens Jewish community, which at that time had no official charter of incorporation. The land she donated stretched from the Zappeion southwest around the acropolis and north to Omonia Square. The Jews of Athens never claimed their gift. Even if the community’s legal position had been defined, the time was not such for it to press claims in Athens.

During the 1840’s a regular part of the Easter celebrations in Athens included the ritual burning of a ‘Judas’ in effigy. In 1847 Max Rothschild persuaded the Greek prime minister, John Kolettis, to stop this practice. Lacking a Judas, public feeling focussed on a Jew of questionable business integrity named Don Pacifico, who had been born on Gibraltar and was therefore a British citizen. Rioters sacked Don Pacifico’s house and burned his warehouse. Don Pacifico’s exorbitant claims for restitution were supported by the British prime minister, Viscount Palmerston, who sent the British fleet to blockade Piraeus. Whatever the justification for Don Pacifico’s unsavory reputation, the strength of public feeling against him does not suggest a secure position for the Jewish community in Athens at the time.

Secure or not, the community was well established by the late 19th century. It was legally organized in 1885 and its official charter was granted in 1889. A synagogue was built in 1904 and dedicated in 1906 as Etz Hayyim (indicating a strong Romaniot element). Heterogeneous as it was, the Athens Jewish community had several advantages in its favor against the coming Nazi storm.

The Occupation and the Final Solution

Greece became involved in the Second World War on October 28, 1940, when the Italians simultaneously invaded Albania and presented an ultimatum to the Greeks. The Greek dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, who had been in power since 1936, responded with an adamant ‘ochi’, no, and moved the army north to meet the attack. What Mussolini had seen as a war of a few weeks became a grinding stalemate. The Italian war machinery bogged down in the exceptionally heavy snows of that winter, and by the spring of 1941 the Italians were forced to withdraw. From this embarassing situation the Italians were saved by the Germans, who invaded Greece in 6 April. The exhausted Greek army no longer had the arms to repel the new attack, which overran Athens on 21 April and defeated the last resistance on Crete by the end of May. Germany and her allies, Bulgaria and Italy, were jubilant at the success.

Greece was divided into three occupation zones. The Italians were affirmed in their hold over the Dodecanese Islands, the Ionian Islands, a large section of mainland Greece, and the Peloponnesos. The Bulgarians were given eastern Macedonia and Thrace, with its accompanying access to the Aegean, the goal of their 900 year old expansionist dreams. The Germans laid claim to western Macedonia, Thessaloniki, a strip of land lying along the Turkish border in eastern Thrace, the major Aegean islands, and Crete. They also, of course, maintained rights of intervention in the areas under Bulgarian and Italian occupation.


Conclusion

The entire story of the almost total destruction of Greek Jewry can not be written here. It can only be said that in 1939 there were over seventy thousand Jews in Greece living in communities that had histories stretching back over two thousand years or whose family memories took them back into the rich brocade of medieval Islamic Spain. In 1945 the total Jewish population of Greece was given as ten thousand. Those who had not returned had died in Poland. In some towns a few Jews either survived the deportations, emerged from hiding or even survived the camps, but returned to find emptyness. Of the Jews from Crete none survived and Chania has only an empty synagogue, abandoned by Jews and Christians alike and not even a monument to commemorate the tragedy. In Zakynthos all the Jews were saved through the efforts of its archbishop and mayor while in Corfu the mayor and chief of police declared a public holiday on the day the Jews were deported. From Salonika 15 train loads over a period of eighteen months emptied the city of its Jews. The Bulgarians in the manner of Pilate handed the five thousand Jews of Thrace to the Germans on the Danube. Their fates were sealed at Treblinka.

It is said that the few remaining Jews of Greece are now vanishing and it has been predicted that within twenty years there will be no Jews, only individuals living isolated and secularized lives. This remains to be seen. Unlike the Jewries of Europe, the Jewish presence in Greece is old, more than two thousand years and with the exception of the Second World War there has never been a moment of unrelenting persecution. There have been times when they all but vanished only to suddenly witness the rebirth of communities or the arrival of Jews from elsewhere, for the Jews of Greece have more than once offered haven to those fleeing from far-off lands.

more information in:The Official Web Site of KIS, the Central Jewish Council of Greece
A Short History of the Jews of Greece by Nikos Stavrolakis

[akritas]

abstract from the chapter Greek Jewry and the Final Solution

Anti-Semitism as the Germans understood it had no place in Greece. Most Greek Jews had no doubts that whatever the familiar petty prejudices and hostilities they might sometimes encounter, Greece was their home. Jewish men had fought in the Greek army in Albania, and many older ones had fought during the First World War as well. One of the most moving affirmations of their identi*fication with their Orthodox compatriots comes in a note in Greek which was discovered in 1980 at the site of one of the crematoria in Birkenau. Written by an unnamed Jewish man, anxious to record his experiences for the world outside the camp, the scrap of paper was addressed 'to my beloved friends, Dimitrios Athanasios Stefanides, Ilias Cohere Georgios Gounaris and all my parea [gang], Smaru Eframidou of Athens and other friends I will always remember, and finally to my beloved fatherland GREECE whose faithful citizen I have always been.

By and large, Orthodox Greeks reciprocated such sentiments. As the commander of the Sonderkommando Rosenberg had already found in 1941, 'for the average Greek there is no Jewish question. He doesn't see the political danger of world Jewry.' Only in Salonika did an anti-Semitic movement exist, stimulated by economic rivalries dating back generations and by the linguistic gulf which separated the Ladino-speaking Jews from the Greeks; even there, however, local anti-Semitism did not play a large part in the process of deportation. The vulnerability of the Jews in the Macedonian capital owed less to the indifference or hostility of fellow-Greeks than to the fact that they were the first to be persecuted. Flight was difficult from Salonika because the mountains were far away, and resistance was still in its early stages. While some Orthodox Greeks enriched themselves at the expense of the Jewish community, many others hid Jewish children, or helped young men join the resistance.

In Athens German efforts to whip up an anti-Semitic movement were entirely unsuccessful. The largely Greek-speaking Jewish community there was small and highly integrated into Greek life. After the registration decree, the Jews found support from all quarters of the population, from EAM/ELAS to the official authorities. Rallis's philosemitic Education Minister, Nikolaos Louvaris, addressed an appeal to the Germans to cease their persecution of'the Jews of Old Greece'. Archbishop Damaskinos ordered priests to tell their con*gregations that the Jews were to be helped. The Greek police often ignored instructions to turn Jews in hiding over to the Germans.

Despite the threat of imprisonment, many non-Jews hid Jewish friends in their apartments, or helped them to escape. Alfredos Cohen, a lawyer from Athens, recorded the spontaneous support of neighbours and friends:

I will never forget the terror which seized us one night while I was hiding my large family in one of the houses, when it was announced that the Germans had published an order declaring that all the Jews who were caught in hiding would be shot, and the people who were hiding them would be sent to the concentration camp.Then one of us said that it was not right for us to stay in that house and endanger the lives and peace of aged people and even women. The answer was: 'No, you must stay. Indeed my son, why should our lives be more precious than yours?'

A similar attitude led people to offer hospitality to Jewish children, a phenomenon which reached such proportions that the Germans were forced to issue public warnings against it. The registry book of the 'Esther' orphanage in Athens for 1945-46 shows that these warnings were ineffective. Many Jewish children survived after their parents were deported. One Jewish six-year-old was cared for by an Orthodox family in Salonika in 1943, remaining with them even after they too were arrested and sent to Germany. When they all returned at the end of the war, he could no longer remember his real Jewish parents.

Overall, Orthodox Greeks showed a remarkable generosity of spirit towards the Jews which bears comparison with that of any other group in Europe. In central Greece, in particular, non-Jews helped hundreds of Jews to hide or escape. Following Barzilai's flight to the mountains, the rabbis of Volos and Larissa also went underground. Largely as a result, less than half the Jews in Athens, Volos, Trikkala and Larissa were seized. On the island of Zante, the mayor, Loukas Carrer, and Metropolitan Chrysostomos refused to hand over Zante's 257 Jews to the Gestapo, and hid them instead in the villages.

Though the fugitives received support from many quarters, the outstanding role was played by EAM/ELAS, whose underground organisation was the most extensive in the country. Thanks to EAM, hundreds of Jews survived the war. About 650 of them served in the resistance, in combat units or as interpreters. They were 260 highly valued on account of their training and high level of literacy. Many had served as officers in the Greek army in Albania.

While some Jews headed for the hills, others managed to escape from Greece altogether by travelling to the coast at Evvia, from where caiques took them to Turkey. Help did not always come without a price. One Jewish family from Athens was searched by andartes fifteen minutes before their boat was due to sail, and asked to hand over three-quarters of their gold coins and most of their luggage. Other Jews in hiding had to pay their landlords a deposit in case they were suddenly discovered and deported. In general, however, they were rarely denounced, despite the rewards offered by the SS. And although some thieving by ELAS members took place, more noteworthy was the remarkably sympathetic attitude their organisation showed towards the refugees.

The Greeks' overwhelming disapproval of German policy towards the Jews meant that the Greek state and its forces could not be relied upon to support Eichmann's men. As a result, the 'Jewish experts' in Blume's SD headquarters were obliged to seek the help of the German army. Only in Athens was an operation carried out by the SS alone: elsewhere the deportations could not have been successful without the assistance of the Wehrmacht. Colonel Jaeger on Corfu offered an example of stubborn resistance to Eichmann's men, but he was exceptional. The Final Solution in Greece provides a powerful argument against drawing too sharp a distinction so far as the attitudes of the occupation bureaucracy are concerned between the SS, the regular army and, for that matter, the Foreign Office. Despite their differences, they worked together to maintain the authority of the Reich over its enemies - real and imagined.

for fair use only

Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44, pages 256-261

[pankration]

Great articles. Should shut a lot of people up.