Thessaloniki’s Jewish cemetery is believed to have been Europe’s largest, covering an area of eighty-six acres, with almost 500,000 graves, the oldest of which dated from the 1400s. The city’s Greek politicians had been wanting to move the burial ground for a long time, as there was a feeling that it impeded Thessaloniki’s expansion. There had been resistance from the Jewish community. When the German army occupied Thessaloniki in 1941, the Greek authorities and the Nazis took joint action. After a few weeks of systematic destruction, the “vast necropolis, scattered with fragments of stone and rubble, resembled a city that had been bombed, or destroyed by a volcanic eruption,” wrote one contemporary witness.2
The American consul in Istanbul, Burton Berry, reported that “the work of destroying the cemetery was done in such haste that very few Jews succeeded in finding the remains of their families and relatives. Recently buried dead were thrown to the dogs.”3 According to another witness, the “sight of it was devastating. People were running between the tombs begging the destroyers to spare those of their relatives; with tears they collected the remains.”4
The hundreds of thousands of broken headstones and sepulchral monuments were used as a marble quarry, from which building materials were sourced for years to come. The Nazis were the first to make use of this morbid exchange. They had a swimming pool built from the headstones. But mostly the stones were used by the Greeks themselves, for the repair of houses, building of lavatories, paving of school yards, and even the construction of a sailing club in the harbor. The square in front of the city’s theater was paved with Jewish headstones. Even the Greek Orthodox Church made use of the devastation: seventeen churches in and around Thessaloniki put in a request to the authorities for marble from the Jewish cemetery.5
A piece of a headstone from the destroyed Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki. The burial ground was leveled during the war and the stones used as construction material, one of the few remaining traces of the city’s erased Jewish community.
Today, broken stones from the destroyed burial ground can be found all over Thessaloniki. In most cases their history has been weathered off, polished, or hacked away, but sometimes—as in the case of this slate wall, in an alley that stinks of urine behind a run-down moped garage—there has been no effort to remove their origins. The slate wall was not built during the war but in the 1960s, when there was still a supply of stone from the Jewish burial ground.
These scattered fragments are the remains of Sephardic Saloníki, the largest and richest Jewish community in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. Saloníki, as the city was known for a long time, was a Jewish center of knowledge, famous for its rabbis, schools, newspapers, and printers. But the city was much more than that; it was, in fact, the only substantial urban settlement in the world where the Jewish population was not in the minority.
For the first time on this journey I do not visit a library, because there isn’t one to visit. Thessaloniki is a place where plunder, destruction, and the Holocaust left very little for posterity. Of the fifty thousand or so Jews living here in 1942, only a few thousand would survive.6
Today, Thessaloniki is a wholly Greek city, but there is still a small Jewish congregation in existence, with its roots in Sephardic Saloníki. Only in later years has it tried to reclaim the city’s largely forgotten Jewish history. In the early 2000s the Jewish Museum was founded in Thessaloniki to honor the memory of this lost culture. It is a rather small museum, situated in a beautiful turn-of-the-century house in one of the few restored streets in the old Jewish quarter. On the first floor, in a room whose windows face onto the orange trees in the street, sits the museum’s curator, Erika Perahia Zemour. When I find her, she is agitated. She has just found out that the monument recently erected in memory of the Jewish cemetery bears an inaccurate inscription.
“I’m so furious! It took us over seventy years to get this monument put up, so people would know what was here before. And then it’s not even accurate. It’s incredible! On the plaque it says it was the Germans who destroyed the cemetery and used the stone as building material. That’s completely wrong. It was the Greeks who smashed up the cemetery and used most of the stone. That’s very typical of how people reason here,” says Zemour, drilling me with her eyes and taking a puff on her bright red e-cigarette.
In the museum, there has been an attempt to collect some of what has been lost; there are some undamaged gravestones, photographs, ritual artifacts, and a number of books that survived the Holocaust. But it is not a large collection. Most of what was plundered in Saloníki would never come back.
“Saloníki was a center of Jewish learning and dissemination in the eastern Mediterranean. Some of the first printers in the Ottoman Empire were set up here, in Saloníki, by Sephardic Jews. Even the first newspaper printed in the Ottoman Empire was a newspaper from Saloníki,” Zemour tells me. What set Saloníki apart from other large Jewish settlements was the unique level of freedom the Jews had in the management of their own affairs. “This was the only place in Europe where Sephardic Jews were really welcomed after they had fled Spain. Jews from other parts of Europe also came here, fleeing persecution. They were in the majority here, so they could feel safe. There was no ghetto and there were no restrictions. Saloníki’s Jews could devote themselves to any profession they chose. This made the city unique,” Zemour tells me.
Saloníki became known as la madre de Israel (Israel’s mother). The expression was coined by the Marrano Jew Samuel Usque, who in the 1500s described Saloníki as a paradise for Jews, while the rest of Europe was “my Hell on earth.”7
There was already a Jewish settlement here in antiquity; there is even a reference to it in Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians in the New Testament, in which Paul tries to persuade the city’s Jewish population to convert, thereby triggering a riot.
When Constantinople fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, Saloníki’s population was reduced significantly when Sultan Mehmet II had thousands of people forcibly moved to Istanbul, the new capital built on the ruins of Constantinople. According to Ottoman registers, in 1478 there was not a single Jew remaining in Saloníki.8 But when the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, they were welcomed by the sultan, who regarded these well-educated Sephardic Jews as an asset to the rapidly developing Ottoman Empire. Many Jewish translators, doctors, and bankers were offered employment at the court. The benefits of the Ottomans’ tolerance were well recognized at the time. The French geographer Nicolas de Nicolay visited Istanbul in the 1550s and wrote:
To the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, [the Jews] have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in light divers bookes in divers languages as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and the Hebrew tongue, being to them naturell.9
The first Sephardic Jews came to Saloníki from Majorca in 1492. They were soon followed by others, from the mainland, and thereafter also from Provence, Italy, and Portugal. By 1519 tens of thousands had arrived, and the Jewish population was already in a majority. By the early 1500s there were twenty-five synagogues in Saloníki.10 The Sephardic influence was so pronounced that Saloníki could really only be regarded as a Spanish-Jewish colony on the Greek coast, in which both their language and culture had remained intact.
Yet even if the Jews were to enjoy greater freedoms in the Ottoman Empire than in Christian Europe, they were never on an equal footing with Muslims. The Ottoman state rarely involved itself in religious questions involving the empire’s many minorities; like other religious groups, the Jews were allowed their own law courts. In Saloníki, a prominent and influential class of rabbis was in charge of the running of civil society. The rabbis, who passed sentence on everything from ownership of property to adultery, sought answers to legal and m
oral disputes on the basis of complex and extensive Judaic legal writings. Entire libraries were imported from Spain, and Saloníki’s rabbis collected writings, manuscripts, and books from Jewish educational centers in Europe such as Amsterdam, Venice, Kraków, and Vilnius. The first printing press in Saloníki, established in 1513, produced texts in Ladino and Hebrew.11 In the early 1500s an official school for Talmudic studies was established, the Talmud Torah Hagadol, which was soon well known all over the Jewish world. The school grew rapidly into an enormous educational institution, with two hundred teachers, thousands of pupils, an extensive library, and its own printing press.
In the intellectual hothouse into which Saloníki had developed, there was a meeting between Jewish philosophy, classical literature, Arabic science, and the humanism of the Italian Renaissance. Their high level of education made the rabbis of Saloníki sought-after all over Europe.
The prerequisite for this cultural flowering was the economic prosperity of the city, one of the most important harbors in the eastern Mediterranean. The city’s golden age was in the 1500s, and then, in the following centuries, it went through a decline as a consequence of new trading routes, religious splits in the community, and the gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Yet the city remained a cultural melting pot, with Sephardic culture at its heart. For several centuries, Saloníki was the largest Jewish city in the world. In the 1800s it enjoyed a revival and was at the forefront of industrial development in the Ottoman Empire. However, at that time it was not so much its religious or cultural identity as its political identity that occupied the central ground. The strong sense of freedom, identity, and self-rule that had set Saloníki’s Jewish community apart resulted in a dynamic political development at the turn of the last century, with strong trade unions and a proliferation of daily newspapers, political organizations, and associations. Many Jewish workers involved themselves in Socialist and syndicalist movements. Zionism also attracted many followers in Saloníki, and before the outbreak of the Second World War there were some twenty Zionist organizations in the city.
The young David Ben-Gurion, who went on to be a founding father of Israel, was one of the many who came to study in Saloníki. As an East European Jew, Ben-Gurion was stunned by what he saw in Saloníki: an entirely different kind of culture to the one in which he had been raised. In Saloníki there was no need for Jews to decide between assimilation or isolation; they were free to do whatever they pleased. In Saloníki, “Jews are capable of all sorts of professions,” he wrote in a letter, and went on, “[It is] a Jewish city unlike any other in the world, not even in Eretz, Israel.”12 This was a decisive insight for Ben-Gurion. In Saloníki he saw what a free Jewish people was capable of. For him, Saloníki’s Jews were the very emblematic image of “the new Jew” to which the Zionist movement wanted to give shape.
Erika Perahia Zemour spreads a trio of yellowed newspapers over her desk. One is in Hebrew, one in French, and a third in Ladino. All three are newspapers from Saloníki, testifying to the simmering political life of the city at the turn of the last century. Thessaloniki had more newspapers than any other city in the Ottoman Empire. The house that now encompasses the museum was once the head office of one of the newspapers on the desk, the French-language L’Independent.
“This newspaper,” says Zemour, pointing at another of the newspapers, “is written in Spanish but in the Hebraic alphabet. Ladino was the language spoken here by most Jews right up to the Second World War.” Zemour herself is part of the small minority of about two hundred people with Sephardic roots still living in Thessaloniki.
In 1900, Saloníki was a cultural and ethnic melting pot with an explosively growing population, thanks to the quick industrialization of the city. Eighty thousand Jews living in Saloníki made up around half of the city’s population at the time, with the rest consisting of Turks, Bulgars, Armenians, and Serbs. The city was the most modern and industrialized area in the Balkans, but at the same time it was part of a politically unstable Ottoman Empire. When the Nazis marched into Thessaloniki in 1941, it marked the nadir of a long series of catastrophes that had devastated the city’s Sephardic community and, for the first time in hundreds of years, made them a minority. Alfred Rosenberg’s commando groups also discovered that many of the city’s famous libraries had been destroyed.
• • •
On the afternoon of August 18, 1917, a black plume of smoke rose over Saloníki’s Turkish quarter. The fire had started with a spark from an open kitchen fire, which caught in a pile of straw.13 In the densely populated districts of central Saloníki, the flames jumped from house to house. A British journalist, Harry Collinson Owen, described how the sea was dyed red by barrels of wine exploding in the heat, while the city’s minarets rose out of the flames like “white needles.” What he saw was “a fantastical and sorrowful scene, the wailing families, the crashing of disintegrating houses wherever the flames passed through, swept along by the wind; and, in the narrow lanes, a slow, moving mass of carts and mules carrying enormous loads.”14
The old, dense streets of housing by the port were hit worst of all, and on them were Jewish newspaper offices, schools, and sixteen synagogues, several of which dated back to the early 1500s. Fifty thousand of Saloníki’s Jews saw their homes, properties, and businesses disappear in the flames. Even the renowned Kadima library on Jewish history was destroyed.15
The political consequences of the fire were yet another catastrophe for the Sephardic community. In 1913, after the Balkan Wars, Saloníki had been ceded to Greece. According to the Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos, the fire in 1917 came as “a gift of divine intervention.” Greek politicians now took the opportunity to build a modern Greek city on the foundations of one that had been principally Ottoman and Jewish.16 Torched blocks of houses were expropriated and the Jewish families that had lived there for hundreds of years were forbidden from coming back. Instead, tens of thousands of people were moved into the suburbs and shantytowns outside the city. Many of the city’s Jews regarded their Thessaloniki as lost. Between 1912 and 1940 tens of thousands of Jews left the city and emigrated to France, the United States, and Palestine.17
Although much of the old Saloníki had been lost, the Nazis were particularly fascinated by this “Jewish city.” Alfred Rosenberg still regarded Thessaloniki as “one of the most important Jewish centers” and a city of more “racial chaos, formed by cosmopolitanism and Jewish finance.”18 Something that particularly surprised the Nazi researchers was that they could find no documentation to suggest that there had ever been a Jewish ghetto in the city.
As soon as Greece had surrendered to the German army in 1941, Rosenberg sent a group from the ERR to Thessaloniki, led by the “Jewish expert” Johannes Pohl. By the middle of June 1941 the organization had established an office in the city, in what had previously been the American consulate. But the ERR’s operation would not be restricted to Thessaloniki alone—it would cover the entire Balkan area, because there had been smaller Jewish settlements in this part of the Mediterranean for hundreds of years.19
Between May and November 1941, thirty or so academics and researchers from the ERR, supported by the SD and troops from the Wehrmacht, made a sweep of Greece’s Jewish communities. In all, raids were carried out on about fifty synagogues, Jewish schools, newspapers, book dealers, banks, and other organizations where material was confiscated. The ERR had further identified about sixty “prominent Jews” whose homes were searched for books, manuscripts, and archive material.20
The plundering in Thessaloniki was more thorough in order to collect material for research on the Sephardic Jews. Above all, there was an interest in their economic networks and commercial prowess. The researcher Hermann Kellenbenz wrote a study on the economy of the Sephardic Jews, commissioned by Walter Frank’s Institute for the Jewish Question, part of his National Institute for the History of New Germany, and a competitor of Rosenberg’s Frankfurt institute.
> It had been a status symbol since the 1500s among the city’s most eminent Jewish families to own a library. Many libraries and private collections had been created over the centuries. The first library confiscated by the ERR belonged to Joseph Nehama—the historian and principal of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s school in the city—who owned a large collection of works on Jewish history. Nehama was one of the leaders of the congregation who had argued, before the war, that Jews ought to remain in Thessaloniki. Other plundered libraries included those of the chief rabbi, Zvi Kortezs, which contained a thousand valuable books on Arabic and Jewish philosophy, and the collection of the historian Michael Mohlo, which contained many rare Jewish books. One of Mohlo’s most significant contributions was that during the 1930s he had begun to document epitaphs in the Jewish cemetery—a tremendously valuable project, considering the later destruction of the cemetery. Luckily, the fruits of his labor managed to avoid being plundered.
The Book Thieves Page 20
