Thessaloníkē, Saloniki, Saloniko, Selânik, Salonicco, Salonique, Salonika, Solun, Sãrunã, and Salonica—these are just a few names by which Thessaloniki (as it became known in 1912), now the second-largest city in Greece, was called over millennia. The names reflect both its political history and the diversity of its inhabitants and sojourners, whose languages could be seen in their different alphabets or heard on the polyglot city’s streets: Albanian, Bulgarian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Judeo-Spanish, Romanian, and Ottoman Turkish.
Founded in 315 BCE, Thessaloníkē was for much of its history part of multiethnic empires: Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman. Cicero spent over a year in exile there. In the 50s CE the apostle Paul preached his gospel of nascent Christianity, planting its seeds on the European continent. In the fourth century Emperor Galerius made the metropolis his home. Archaeological remnants of his reign—the Arch of Galerius and the Rotunda—flaunt the city’s antiquity. But the Rotunda also captures Salonica’s later vicissitudes: as the building passed from one empire to the next, it was converted from a pagan site to a Christian church, then to a mosque, then back to a church after the Kingdom of Greece took over the city in 1912.
Situated at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa on the shores of the Thermaic Gulf, surrounded by mountains—including the magnificent Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods—Salonica (as it was called by non-Greeks during Ottoman rule) enchanted both its visitors and its residents. “The approach…from the sea is very imposing,” wrote Henry Holland, a British physician and traveler who visited in 1812 and 1813. Visible then were domes of churches, and minarets of the numerous mosques “worthy of notice from their size and antiquity” arose “from among the other buildings, environed, as usual, by cypresses.” The muezzins’ calls to prayer could be heard across town. From offshore one could grasp the city’s importance as a trading hub. Already in the sixteenth century the port could dock three hundred vessels. In 1935 a local novelist wrote in Judeo-Spanish that Salonica was a “perpetual gateway” through which “all peoples passed”—“a hotel open to the nations. Since Babel, one can say, God never created anything better.”
During the Ottoman period, from 1430 to 1912, Salonica, though controlled by the Ottoman Turks, did not have a Muslim majority. Scholars estimate that at the turn of the twentieth century the Jewish population was about 90,000 out of around 158,000, the largest ethnoreligious group. Most were Sephardim, tracing their roots to those exiled from Spain in 1492. By the time of the first census, taken a year after the Greek army arrived, ending nearly five hundred years of Ottoman rule, the Jewish population had declined to just over 61,000, but Jews remained a plurality (swelling back to about 75,000 in 1917). Around 46,000 inhabitants were classified as “Ottoman,” the term for Muslims, and just under 40,000 were Greek Orthodox. According to the historian Devin E. Naar, about 15 percent of what had been the Ottoman Empire’s half a million Jews lived in Salonica. It was considered, he says, “the most Jewish city in the world,” the “Jerusalem of Turkey,” or the “New Jerusalem.” Wrote one journalist, “Salonica is neither Greek, nor Bulgarian, nor Turkish; she is Jewish”—indeed for him “the Queen of ‘Jewishness’ in the Orient.” This demographic predominance was felt in the city’s weekly rhythms, as everything quieted down on the Jewish Sabbath. But by 1923 Salonica would be 75 to 80 percent Greek.
This dramatic transformation is the subject of Paris Papamichos Chronakis’s The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule, which focuses on a slim slice of a complex Salonican society. The book comes on the heels of two previous studies, Mark Mazower’s broad Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (2004)1 and Naar’s Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (2016), about the Jewish community during those transformative years.
The transition took place during a period marred by wars—the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), World War I (1914–1918), and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). These resulted in the gradual dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of new independent states, as well as what Naar calls “mass carnage,” millions of refugees, and forced population transfers. In 1917 an enormous fire burned the center of the city and destroyed three quarters of the old town, inhabited mostly by Jews and Muslims. Seventy thousand Salonicans became “refugees in their own home,” 50,000 of them Jews. Two months after the fire, a British soldier described Salonica as “a city of the dead,” “a waste land of ghostly ruins.” Thousands of buildings were destroyed, among them thirty-seven synagogues. Only “the slender but solidly built minarets” remained. But gradually, as Mazower writes, “out of the ashes, an entirely new town began to emerge, one moulded in the image of the Greek state and its society.” And then in 1923, under the Treaty of Lausanne, the Greeks and the Turks agreed to a population exchange, which pushed approximately half a million Muslims out of the territories controlled by Greece and over a million Orthodox Christians out of Turkey, where they had lived for centuries if not millennia. Of these last, according to Chronakis, 100,000 ended up in Salonica, now called Thessaloniki, paradoxically “re-Ottomaniz[ing]” the city, which was now predominantly Greek Orthodox. The Jews, writes Naar, “largely remained in situ. Rather than transporting themselves to a different country, a different country had come to them.”
The nineteenth-century Salonican economy, in which several wealthy Jewish merchant families were prominent, had been organized around the institution of apprenticeship, which was conducive to fostering what Chronakis says were “intimate” bonds and which depended on reputation and trust; it “could cut across ethnic lines.” By the turn of the century a “new employee-based system” had developed, leading to a greater sense of class distinction and, later, interclass hostility. With time that friction also turned into interethnic animosity, and anti-Jewish attacks, which had taken place since at least the Greek War of Independence in 1821, intensified. The Greek press began to rail against “Shylockian usurers”—The Merchant of Venice had been translated into Greek in 1884. By the 1920s, under the influence of a translation of TheProtocols of the Elders of Zion that was widely published in local Greek newspapers, the city’s public discourse was permeated with explicit antisemitism.
The transformation of Salonica after 1912 was not just a political transition from a multiethnic empire to a nation-state. It became a new city altogether, in which the newcomers began to redefine its character and marginalize its deeply implanted Jewish and Muslim residents. The minarets, except for one, were destroyed, erased along with other architectural reminders of the Ottoman past. Jews, whose presence in the city is documented before the Common Era and who had become, according to Mazower, “an integral part of the fabric of the Ottoman city,” were pushed away from the city’s historic center through gradual repossession of Jewish properties, sometimes for civic use or under the guise of modernization. The fire in 1917 did that more effectively. The destruction allowed for the reconstruction of Salonica as a modern city. “One could not Westernize Salonica,” says Mazower, “without uprooting the Jews” who had lived in its center, a vestige of the Ottoman past. Finally, during the Nazi occupation, after the Salonican Jews were deported to Auschwitz, even their memory was almost obliterated.
In 2023 about four thousand Jews lived in Greece, fewer than a thousand in Thessaloniki. “The destruction wrought by the Holocaust,” writes Naar, “solidified the pre-war images of Salonica as a grand Jewish metropolis through the processes of mourning and nostalgia.” But just as the city’s Jewish past “became ever more enshrined” in Sephardic Jews’ collective memory, it was “increasingly excised from local consciousness and marginalized within the broader framework of Jewish history.”
Chronakis criticizes that historiography, which has tended to prioritize “aggressive policies of the nationalizing Greek state” and painted the Jewish community as “under siege,” “depriving Jews of their agency and depicting them either as helpless victims of state policies, or as engaged in futile rearguard battles.” He largely elides the question of marginalization, perhaps because he stops before 1923 and focuses on the upper-class traders, a small fraction of the Jewish population. Instead, he asserts that “the transformation of Jews from a semi-autonomous, self-governing religious community…to a minority” was not “an externally imposed process” but “one in which Jews were actively and creatively involved.” So although
they ended up playing second fiddle, for Jewish merchants, becoming a minority was not about experiencing exclusion and marginalization; rather it was about negotiating a new relationship with the new majority—a relationship that was admittedly unequal, yet inclusive enough. Provocatively put, Jews became a minority of their own making.
A minority, for Chronakis, is not “a mere demographic fact” or “a quasi-static legal and political category externally imposed on a given collective” but rather “a cultural construct, a dynamic process, and the outcome of on-the-ground negotiations.” “To be a majority,” he argues,
is to act and speak like one. It involves not enforcing one’s will, but exhibiting and performing a hegemonic mentality, being capable of organizing and regulating interethnic relations, and legitimately speaking and standing for the broader interests of the city.
In this period of transition, Jews stopped performing hegemony; they were becoming “a minority by choice” and “internalizing a minority mentality,” even though they “remained numerically superior.”
But how are the concepts of majority and minority different within a multiethnic empire versus within a nation-state? In the Ottoman Empire, both Jews and Greek Orthodox Christians were minorities. Until the Tanzimat reforms, enacted between 1839 and 1876 and embedded in the Ottoman constitution of 1876, non-Muslims had been legally inferior dhimmi, subordinate to Muslims, required to be marked through clothing or colors and subjected to various prohibitions that reminded them of their second-class status. According to the historian Bruce Masters, “Who constituted the majority and the minority was thus transparent within the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period”; even where Muslims were demographically a minority, “they were, in effect, the legal majority.”2 In Salonica, for example, and in Izmir, an Anatolian port city on the Aegean coast, Muslims were a numerical minority but held political power. In Salonica, Jews predominated numerically and economically; in Izmir, Greek Christians did.
These two groups reacted to their status in different ways. As historical sources that Mazower quotes show, Greek Orthodox, aware of the onetime preeminence of the Byzantine Empire, longed to be “freed from the heavy Ottoman yoke” and saw their position as “enslavement,” a feeling that was exacerbated when Greece broke off from the Ottoman Empire and in 1832 established itself for the first time as an independent kingdom. Salonica and Izmir were not included in it, but the prospect of a return to political dominance by the Greek Orthodox raised irredentist sentiments. In contrast, Jews in the Ottoman Empire (and everywhere) accepted their subjugated legal position and recognized that as a numeric and religious ethnic minority they were dependent on the goodwill of rulers. They knew that even Jews’ communal authority, including the appointment of their rabbis, was subject to the approval of the state. The 1865 Organic Statutes of the Jewish Community specified that the chief rabbi was responsible for putting “into practice the orders of the imperial state” and thus had to “enjoy the confidence and the credit of the state and of the nation.” This remained in place until the end of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1869 the situation of both Jews and Christians began to change with a law that for the first time created the idea of an Ottoman nationality. And in 1876 the Ottoman constitution affirmed nominal equality of all “Ottomans no matter what religion they profess” and guaranteed “individual liberty,” conditional only on “not attacking the liberty of other people.” Islam remained the state religion, but the state committed itself to protecting “the free exercise of all the religions recognized in the Empire” and accorded “the religious privileges granted to the different communities on condition that no offence is committed against public order or good morals.” The constitution also guaranteed freedom of the press.
The Tanzimat reforms also changed local administrative structures, creating municipal self-government with elected city councils and formalizing autonomous religious communities, thus presenting new outlets for political expression. It was during this period that the number of private clubs and professional associations that increased civic and communal participation rose—while also, because of the new political stakes, sowing division.
These reforms played out differently for Greeks and Jews. Jews embraced the new layers of citizenship in relation to the state, the city, and the community and began to identify themselves as sivdadinos otomanos, a Judeo-Spanish phrase meaning “Ottoman citizens.” And locally, as Naar shows, they “developed a new vocabulary” to describe themselves as Salonicans. Many institutions and businesses founded or supported by Jews contained either the name of the city—for example, Banque de Salonique, Cercle de Salonique, Journal de Salonique—or used neutral professional terms, such as Club Commercial. They also tended to be multiethnic. Similarly, Jewish philanthropic activity, an important marker of an emerging bourgeois identity, “transcended the narrow bounds” of the Jewish community, according to Chronakis.
But how, he asks,
could Salonica be multiethnic and Jewish at the same time? Was this a mere question of demographics? Or were Jews important in fostering multiethnic sociability? And to what extent was multiethnicity a precondition for establishing Jewish hegemony, for creating the image of a Jewish Salonica?
Perhaps one could put it differently: these professional organizations were multiethnic because they were Jewish led. As “a permanent minority,” to use Salo W. Baron’s term,3 Jews understood their precarity and knew well that to protect their own interests they needed to create multiethnic spaces for business and sociability. As Chronakis says, unlike “their Greek peers,” Jewish merchants “could not count on economic nationalism or any other kind of state protection in the future.” Even during the Ottoman period, since 1832 there had been a Greek state to protect Greek interests, with its consul residing in Salonica. But to talk about Jewish “hegemony” and “dominance,” as Chronakis does repeatedly, seems to misunderstand the larger situation that Jews recognized and lived in.
By showing that the city’s various institutions were Jewish and multiethnic, The Business of Transition,perhaps unwittingly, undermines the stereotype of Jewish insularity. The Greek Orthodox, more exclusive and inward looking, lacked “the interethnic connections of the Jews,” Chronakis writes. Few of their merchants “participated in any of the city’s multiethnic associations.” Greek organizations and businesses were also more likely to restrict membership to Greek Orthodox Christians and to choose nationalist or territorial names—Ethnikos Syndesmos (National Club), Pharos tes Makedonias (Beacon of Macedonia), or the Kleisoura Association, named after a town in the Macedonian hinterland by Greek Orthodox immigrants who settled in Salonica. The Nea Lesche (New Club) espoused a “militant sense of Greekness,” served as “a mediator between ‘Greek’ Salonica and the national center,” and “favored those merchants who actively espoused Greek irredentism.” Greek Orthodox philanthropic activity also focused on their hometowns rather than Salonica.
With rising Greek nationalism, even before the annexation of Salonica to Greece in 1912, Jews came to be seen as foreigners. Already in 1886 a Greek newspaper had cast Jewish merchants as a national threat. In 1903, somewhat more cryptically, an article in the Greek Orthodox newspaper Aletheia expressed the community’s concerns about “how to reclaim its bread, which had lately slipped from its hands and was now feeding foreign stomachs.” Aletheia also warned that cosmopolitanism “should not be part of the modern Greek character considering the damages it has brought to us so far” (perhaps meaning cross-ethnic contact, or perhaps alluding both to the understanding of cosmopolitanism as the antithesis of nationalism and to the association of cosmopolitanism with Jews).4
Three years later a Greek journalist visiting Salonica from Athens was more direct:
Jews!… Jews in front, Jews behind, Jews to my right, Jews to my left, Jews here, Jews there! Everywhere Jews! So much my imagination was Judaicized that even the sea appeared to my eyes as a Jewish siren. The floating boats became Jewish, the sun Jewish, and the sky Jewish. Not even the distant Olympus, standing at the end of the Thermaic Gulf like an immeasurable Titan, could escape this transformation. In that moment, it appeared to me as the sacred Jewish mountain of Chorev.
The Greek Orthodox community, a small minority at the time amounting to about 12 to 13 percent of the population, decided to launch a campaign—also targeting Bulgarians—to display Greek-language signs on stores and businesses so that “Salonica would appear to foreigners, and to us, more Greek than before.” Jews were alarmed by this “exclusivist spirit.” The multiethnic character of the city was beginning to unravel.
Chronakis pegs these manifestations of Greek nationalism to a “minority mentality” that “placed multiple symbolic barriers in the way of cross-ethnic socializing, propelling a shift toward ethnic entrenchment”; for him “a majority mentality” is “hegemonic and therefore open.” Arguably these definitions are off the mark. Majorities are rarely inclusive. They exude entitlement, dominance, exclusion, and disdain for alliances, whereas minorities understand their vulnerability and seek allies and cross-communal connections. That is why Jews made concerted efforts to form “broader multiethnic collectives.”
Perhaps, then, after Greece annexed Salonica in 1912 and Jews were still a near majority, they were not becoming “a minority by choice.” Rather Greeks, while still a local minority, began to act as a nationalmajority, performing their newly gained supremacy. The first week after the Greek capture of Salonica, Greek troops, with local help, attacked Jewish and Muslim civilians; they targeted mosques and synagogues, stores and warehouses, as well as homes. They beat, raped, and plundered. When Jewish shop owners closed their stores out of fear of violence, “the jubilant Greek civilian population,” says Chronakis, found it an “unacceptable act of silent yet defiant protest” and organized “an impromptu boycott of Jewish businesses.” A year later the Greek press labeled the multiethnic chamber of commerce “illegal” and urged a “commercial conquest of Salonica” and the creation of a “purely national industry.” Jewish withdrawal from leadership in Salonica’s professional institutions, and the decision by some of its prominent Jewish merchants to emigrate before the demographic shift in 1923, may have reflected the sense that Jews had no bright future in the Hellenized and exclusory new Greek nation-state.
But as Mazower and Naar show, the signs were there even before 1912, not only in writings but also in occasional violence. Salonican Jews were likely aware of the slogan “Fight for faith and fatherland!,” the massacres of Jews and Muslims during the Greek War of Independence, and more recent blood libel accusations. They probably knew as well about the exclusionary Megali Idea of greater Greece, defining as Greeks only “those indigenous inhabitants of the state of Greece who believe in Christ.” They would also have witnessed violence against Muslims during the Balkan Wars. While for Jews Salonica was a “homeland,” a “mother of Israel,” Greeks strove for the erasure, as Naar says, of “the centuries-long Ottoman imprint on the city,” both in space and landscape and through the gradual elimination of populations that did not fit the nationalist idea of “Greekness.”
Salonican burial grounds epitomize this process, though Chronakis does not discuss them. During the Ottoman period four cemeteries—Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Dönmeh (Jewish Muslim)—were located just outside the historic old city. Of the four, only the Orthodox Christian remains. The Muslim and Dönmeh cemeteries were destroyed following the final exodus of Muslims from Salonica after the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923. The Muslim cemetery, Mazower writes, “was desecrated, its walls were torn down, the tombstones and urns sold off for building materials”; “the bones of distinguished former sheykhs,…threatened with being disinterred,” were saved only through the intervention of a Greek priest who helped facilitate their transfer to Istanbul.
The obliteration of the ancient Jewish cemetery—the largest in Europe and, at around eighty-six acres, thirty-five times bigger than the storied one in Prague—was more protracted. Part of the property was expropriated by the Ottoman authorities in 1890 to build a new school and transform the area into a boulevard. After the Great Fire of 1917 the plans for the reconstruction of the city ominously “envisioned the complete removal of the Jewish cemetery from Salonica’s urban fabric,” says Naar. Jewish community leaders successfully thwarted these efforts several times, but by 1929, with the expansion of the newly established Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, whose buildings abutted the cemetery, many realized that the burial ground might not survive and that its ancient tombstones might be discarded “like trash”—and with them, the only physical evidence of Jews’ age-old continuous existence in the city would disappear. Something similar had already happened in Izmir, the Anatolian port. When the Greeks occupied it during the Greco-Turkish War, the authorities ordered the Jewish cemetery destroyed and used the land and the stones in the construction of the new Ionian University of Izmir. In Salonica the 1937 Obligatory Law 890 formalized the “disposition of the land” used for the Jewish cemetery, ceding part of it to Aristotle University; the final destruction began in December 1942, under the Nazi occupation of Salonica. (The Greek press reported “relief” and “gratitude” that the battle over the burial ground was over.)
Salonican Jews tried to adapt to the Greek state, embracing the Greek language and citizenship. They even changed the Hanukkah liturgy, turning the Greek enemies into Syrians, writes Naar, “to avoid presenting the holiday as one about Greek-Jewish antagonism.” But Jews, now a minority in a nation-state, were continually reminded of their putative “foreignness.” In 1924 the Greek state passed—in violation of the Minority Treaties of 1920—the Compulsory Sunday Closing Law, mandating the closure of businesses on the Christian holy day. In the 1930s Jewish schools came under the authority of a government education agency that required them to submit curricula and personnel for approval. In June 1931 Greek nationalists attacked several Jewish neighborhoods. In one, the rioters displaced more than two hundred Jewish families, burning shops and houses. (This is largely missing from Chronakis’s book—much of it goes beyond the chronological scope of his study.)
Still, Jews insisted that they belonged, and their historians properly wrote them into the city’s past. As Naar records, Mercado Covo, writing in 1930, proclaimed that “Jews have been in Salonica since the most ancient times. They are as ancient as the Greeks. With the Greeks they were present at the dawn of the flourishing of the city.” In a history of its Jews, written in French in 1940 and cited by Naar, the local businessman, historian, and cofounder of the Union Bank of Salonica Joseph Nehama emphasized both “Athens and Jerusalem” as foundations of modern civilization and, quoting Paul’s letter to the Galatians, asserted that “there is neither Jew nor Greek”—both belonged to Salonica. By the time Nehama was writing, only around 50,000 Jews remained there, about 20 percent of the city’s population. Three years later virtually all were sent to Auschwitz. Fewer than two thousand survived the war, among them Nehama.
The Salonica that emerged as Thessaloniki was a new city, no longer the multiethnic and multireligious Babel of the previous centuries. The change was not just political and demographic. It was also conceptual: no longer part of an “Oriental” empire, it now belonged to a “European” state. The city had never left the European continent, but as a cultural concept Europe is deeply enmeshed with Christianity and denies Islam—and Judaism—the right to belong. Salonica illustrates that; the city “entered” Europe only when Ottoman rule ended. The transition was manifest in Salonica’s culture and politics—and in how its history was told. The part played by merchants and commerce shows that the city’s Hellenization was complex. As Chronakis persuasively demonstrates, that process did not always align with what went on in Athens. Thessaloniki not only had become a city of newcomers but also now existed within a new political geography. It became a provincial port, cut off from its northern hinterlands and markets elsewhere in Europe and no longer connected to other parts of what used to be the Mediterranean Ottoman realm.
Chronakis’s book, read against Mazower’s and Naar’s studies, illustrates how the history of the same place can be interpreted and plotted differently. Mazower offers a bird’s-eye view of more than five hundred years. It is inclusive and broad, integrating the experiences of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. As the title, Salonica, City of Ghosts, suggests, it confronts Salonica’s harrowing transition from a multiethnic past to a monoethnic present. It challenges Greek historiography that erased the Ottoman centuries and created “the myth of eternal Hellenism,” which “flattened out the past of the Greeks themselves and made it less interesting.” Naar dives into the workings of the Jewish community and the impact of the period “between the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece,” allowing us to understand how a predominant minority group—both its elites and its less fortunate—managed political, demographic, and economic transformations. But as he seeks to avoid the “lachrymose” story of Salonica’s Jews,Naar, too, struggles with accounting for the ultimate destruction of the Jewish community and does not deal with what happened to Muslims.
Chronakis puts the experience of Jews and Greeks side by side as, within a short span of time, the Greeks turned into a numerical and political majority. By charting the actions of the merchants he reveals their economic and class dynamics, pushing back against historians who have focused on “the demise of multiethnic coexistence and the triumph of the nation-state in the region” and on “nationalism and patterns of ethnic violence,” as well as showing areas of common concern. But this kind of granular analysis necessarily ignores other classes and perhaps overstates the position of Jews in Salonica as “Jewish dominance.” This portrait is distorted: there are hardly any Jewish poor, craftspeople, dockworkers, or women. Chronakis also stops in 1922, before the triumph of the nation-state becomes palpable.
“Dominance” implies power and control, and a prevailing position in social and political hierarchy. Jews never had that. Such economic predominance as they had was not disproportionate, it seems, to their population. The strategies Jews deployed during the Ottoman era and in response to subsequent changes show that they always understood themselves as a minority with a tenuous social and legal status. Greeks, in contrast, asserted a territorial prerogative in Salonica, attaining political control after 1912 and demographic ascendancy in 1923.
It is impossible to tell the story of how Salonica turned into a Greek city without discussing the consequences that followed. Its modern history painfully reminds us of the imperfections and weaknesses of a liberal democratic system, whose freedoms of religion and the press give voice to a myriad of views but also help create divisions, and whose promise of equality threatens social and religious hierarchies. It shows, too, what happens when liberalism, imperfect as it will always be, fails and ethnonationalism triumphs.