Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950

[Inland]

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Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950

A history of the period when this city (located in northern Greece) was the largest, richest and most vibrant Jewish city in the world, ruled in a Muslim empire, with a history of Roman emperors and Greek saints.

Okay, not for everybody.

But this city showed a pattern of living that existed prior to the world being carved up by nations, that is, before there was an effort to erase the fact that a population was not homogenous for all time and to forcibly remove the history—or presence—of religious or ethnic minorities.

As it ended up, the Muslim population was removed by the 1920s by the first government sponsored ethnic cleansing, whereby the Greek population in Asia Minor was expelled by the new Turkish nation and the Muslim population was expelled by the newly independent Greek nation. The Germans managed to compress the entire process of stars, ghettoization, expropriation and deportation to death camps into a March to September, killing all but a few thousand of the fifty thousand Salonican Jews.

The traces of these past cultures have all but vanished from modern Thessaloniki, a thourougly Greek city, with the Jewish past at least acknowledged while the Muslim Turkish history ignored except for a plaque outside Ataturk’s birthplace.

But the history is not, as the author is careful to point out, that there was this place and then everybody died or was exiled. It was that there was a crossroads of the world, a cosmopolitan place, where the relentless homogenization of nationality did not exist, and that today Thessalonica is once again at a crossroads of the west and east, Slav and Greek and Turk, Christian and Muslim, industrialized and not so much, and that once again the cosmopolitan ideal may flourish.