The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  This was the beginning of a disaster that seared itself into the Greek memory. Although the first Turkish troops to enter Smyrna were well-disciplined cavalry, they were accompanied by chettes, Turkish irregulars who had already tasted a great amount of Greek blood during rampages in western Anatolia. As the refugees crowded into the city, massacres, rape and looting, mainly but not exclusively by the irregulars, became the unspoken order of the day, starting with the favourite enemy – not the Greeks but the Armenians. Neither the new Turkish governor nor, when he arrived, Mustafa Kemal, appeared worried by something they seemed to regard as a fact of war; there was apparently no longer any room for Greeks and Armenians in the new Turkey that was coming into existence. The thorough sacking of the Armenian quarter was followed by violence across the city, though the Turkish quarter was respected. The suburban villas of the Levantine merchants were pillaged; most Levantines (if they survived) lost everything they owned, and their trading companies went out of business. Finally, the streets and houses of Smyrna were soaked in petrol (beginning, again, with the Armenian quarter), and on 13 September the city was set alight. This swelled the refugee population to 700,000, for now the Greeks and Armenians of Smyrna itself were forced to flee to the quayside. There, a tantalizing spectacle awaited them: British, French, Italian and American warships were in harbour, all nervously protecting the interests of their own mother-country. The fire spread closer to the quayside, wrecking the warehouses and offices of the great trading firms, and the centre of the city was reduced to ashes, while a desperate mass of people, many of whom were dying of wounds, thirst and exhaustion, prayed for deliverance.

  The attitude of the Great Powers was chillingly unsympathetic. Admiral Bristol had already instructed two American journalists that they were not to write of Turkish atrocities, and the French and Italians insisted that their ‘neutrality’ prevented them from taking on board refugees – so much so that people who swam out to the warships were left to drown in the sea. When a boy and a girl were found in the water off an American ship, the sailors told Asa Jennings, an employee of the Young Men’s Christian Association who was trying to organize large-scale evacuation, that, much as they wished to help, this was against orders, as it would compromise American neutrality. He refused to accept this – the children were recovered and turned out to be brother and sister.11 On board the British warships, bands were ordered to play rousing sea shanties while the officers dined in the mess, to drown out the terrified screams that were coming from the quayside a few hundred yards away. Eventually the British admiral gave way to the impassioned pleas, and the admirably persistent Jennings was able to secure the help of the Greek navy based nearby in Lesbos as well. Twenty thousand were saved on allied ships, and very many more on Jennings’s Greek flotilla. Even so, something like 100,000 people were killed in Smyrna and its hinterland, and at least as many were deported into the Anatolian interior, where most vanished.

  The callousness of the commanders in Smyrna Bay, and the sheer hostility of Admiral Bristol in Constantinople, reflected a different way of thinking about humanitarian catastrophes from that of the early twenty-first century. ‘Neutrality’ was understood to mean that one should stand aside, rather than that neutral powers were best placed to offer aid to the dispossessed and dying victims of ethnic violence. This unwillingness to intervene was compounded by awareness that Lloyd George’s support for Venizelos had set off a train of events over which neither Greece nor Great Britain had any control. Most of the people of Smyrna had gone; Smyrna too had ceased to exist, wrecked by fire, and the new Turkish city of Izmir never recovered its long-standing commercial primacy. The gap left by the Greeks and Armenians was filled as Turks expelled from Crete and northern Greece flooded into Turkey. Eventually, under the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, a massive exchange of population between Greece and Turkey took place – 30,000 Muslims left Crete alone. The flight from Istanbul of the last sultan, in November 1922, removed the final, very feeble, barrier to the creation of a new, westward-inclined Turkey, with a new capital, a new alphabet and a secular constitution. In Greece, the Megalé Idea was dead, but the multinational character of the Turkish empire was also discarded. Despite the tensions and even hatreds that erupted between peoples and religions, and despite frequent attempts to humiliate Christians and Jews by imposing on them a variety of financial and social disabilities, the Ottoman system had managed to hold together disparate peoples for several centuries. It was replaced by a group of nations whose leaders proclaimed strident nationalism, and found it difficult to accommodate those they now deemed outsiders – Greeks and Armenians in Turkey, Jews and Muslims in Greece.

  II

  Alexandria was another port city in which cultures met and mixed. The city began to take its modern shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when an elegant Corniche road along a new waterfront was created, and wide streets with apartment blocks and offices came into being. These buildings included the pseudo-Coptic Anglican cathedral, built as early as the 1850s, as well as the extraordinary group of buildings designed by the architect Alessandro Loria, who was born in Egypt, trained in Italy and then lionized in Alexandria in the 1920s. His National Bank of Egypt looks like a Venetian palazzo; he also built the Jewish and Italian hospitals, appropriately since he was both a Jew and an Italian; his most visited building is the famous Cecil Hotel, a favourite of Winston Churchill and Lawrence Durrell, and indeed of Durrell’s own creation, Justine.12 The Greek, Jewish, Italian, Coptic and Turkish inhabitants of the city were immensely proud of Alexandria, interpreting the classical phrase Alexandria ad Aegyptum to mean that it was a European city beside, not in, Egypt.13 Jasper Brinton, an American who served as appeal judge of the Mixed Courts of Egypt in the early twentieth century, enthused about Alexandria, which, he said, was ‘brilliant and sophisticated, far beyond any city in the Mediterranean’; music-lovers were entertained in the city’s great theatres by Toscanini, Pavlova and the best voices from La Scala.14 It was said that the streets were so clean you could eat food off them, something definitely not to be tried nowadays.

  Of course, cosmopolitan Alexandria was not all Alexandria, and the life of the elite, which will be discussed shortly, was not the life of the majority of the Greeks, Italians, Jews and Copts who lived along the northern shore of the city. On late nineteenth-century maps, the southern flank of the long, narrow city was labelled Ville arabe, but it did not greatly intrude on the life of the Alexandrian middle classes, except to provide cooks, maids and tram-drivers. The Europeans accounted for only 15 per cent of the population, even if it was they who exercised most of the economic power; in 1927 there were about 49,000 Greeks in the city, 37,000 of whom had Greek citizenship, 24,000 Italians and 4,700 Maltese. Overlapping with various nationalities there were 25,000 Jews (nearly 5,000 with Italian passports, though many remained stateless); a good many Greeks also held non-Greek passports, whether as Cypriots (making them British) or as Rhodians (making them Italian) or, even after 1923, as Turkish subjects.15 The majority of influential Muslim families, including the royal family, hailed from Turkey, Albania, Syria or Lebanon. As in Salonika and Smyrna, French made great inroads, even though Egypt was a British protectorate. One Alexandrian exile confessed that his reading knowledge of Arabic was limited to menus and newspaper headlines: ‘I have always considered English and French as my mother tongues.’ His wife told a different story: ‘My mother was entirely Francophone, and my father spoke only Italian. I don’t know how they understood one another, but they did.’16 A smattering of Arabic was mainly thought useful for communicating with servants. In an age of rising nationalism, this rejection of any ‘Eastern’ identity would eventually prove fatal to the survival of these communities.

  A fictionalized memoir of life in Alexandria by André Aciman shows the direction of thinking of many Alexandrians. Aciman’s family arrived from Constantinople in 1905, but his uncle Vili attached himself both to Alexandria and to Europe:

  Li
ke most men born in Turkey towards the end of the century, Vili disparaged anything that had to do with Ottoman culture and thirsted for the West, finally becoming ‘Italian’ the way most Jews in Turkey did: by claiming ancestral ties to Livorno, a port city near Pisa where escaped Jews from Spain had settled in the sixteenth century.17

  The architect Loria liked to dress himself and his family in the black shirts of the Fascists; he was also a benefactor of the Alexandria synagogue. The most influential Jewish family was that of Baron Félix de Menasce, who held an Austrian imperial title, although his grandfather, who was born in Cairo, had acquired his wealth after becoming the banker to Khedive Ismail; by Félix’s time not just banking but commerce with Trieste sustained the fortunes of this glittering family. He founded schools and hospitals, and even established his own synagogue and cemetery, for he fell out with the leaders of the imposing new synagogue on Nebi Daniel Street. Even though he led a secular life in which Jewish observance counted for little, he was deeply upset when he learned that his son Jean, who was studying in Paris, had been baptized a Catholic. Worse still, in his eyes, his son joined the Dominican Order and came to Alexandria to preach. Félix de Menasce was a close friend of the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who visited the city in March 1918, staying at the imposing Menasce residence. Interestingly, Baron Félix used his contacts with the Arabs in Palestine to attempt to negotiate a bilateral agreement between Jews and Arabs over the future of Palestine, but the British, now in charge of Palestine, were uninterested.18

  These connections provided the inspiration for Lawrence Durrell’s description of the enormously rich Alexandrian banker Nessim, whom he cast as a Copt rather than a Jew. Durrell wrote the first volume of his Alexandria Quartet in Bellapais, in Cyprus, in the early 1950s, but he had close links with the Alexandrian Jews through his second wife, Eve Cohen, and even more through his third wife, Claude Vincendon, who was the granddaughter of Félix de Menasce.19 The Menasces mixed socially with another eminent family, the Zoghebs, who were Melkite Christians from Syria, members of a community that included many prosperous traders in silk, timber, fruit and tobacco.20 There was no comparison between the haut bourgeois life of the Smyrna Levantines and the truly grand style of the Menasces and their peers, especially since the Alexandrian elite had the ear of the king and, in particular, of Omar Toussoun, a much admired member of the royal family who understood the importance of associating himself with the different communities of Alexandria. He might be found giving out the prizes at a Jewish school, or to children of the Alexandrian elite at Victoria College, which was modelled on an English public (i.e. private) school. He was honorary president of the Coptic Archaeological Society and donated handsomely towards the building of the Coptic hospital. At the same time he took a great interest in the local economy, working hard to stabilize cotton prices.21

  The daily life of the foreign communities revolved around commerce and coffee houses, among which the most famous were those of the Greeks, notably the Café Pastroudis. And within these cafés might be found members of the Greek intelligentsia, of whom the most accomplished was the poet Cavafy.22 The English novelist E. M. Forster, who spent most of the First World War in the city (falling in love with an Arab tram-conductor), spread awareness of Cavafy’s poetry beyond Alexandria, while the poet himself returned again and again to the theme of his home city. The problem was that it was ancient Alexandria to which his mind kept returning, rather than the modern city, which had no great appeal for him.23 Alexandria, of all the port cities in the eastern Mediterranean, was damaged least by the political changes that followed the fall of the Ottomans, for it owed its revival to foreign settlers attracted by the initiatives of the khedives, not the sultans.

  III

  Alexandria was a newly rebuilt city; not far away there emerged a brand new one, in Palestine. There, the British found themselves in a very different political environment from Egypt. The Arab revolt during the First World War, in part fostered by T. E. Lawrence, had brought Britain valuable allies against the Turks; simultaneously, Zionist demands for a Jewish homeland led to increasing tension between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, particularly after the British government indicated its sympathy for the idea of a Jewish National Home in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Jewish aspirations were expressed in the idea of a return to the land, as idealistic settlers from central and eastern Europe created agricultural settlements – the kibbutz movement aimed to take Jews out of cities and into the fresh air of the countryside – but there was another strand to Zionism, according to which the creation of a westernized city in Palestine, inhabited by Jews, was a fundamental task. In 1909 a group of Jews, mainly European Ashkenazim, acquired the title to some sandy dunes a mile north of the ancient port of Jaffa, and divided the land into sixty-six plots, which were assigned by lot – a sign of their idealism, since a lottery ensured that no one could bid for a better position and rich and poor would have to live side by side.24 Their intention was to create a well-spaced garden city, or rather a garden suburb, since initially they refused to include any shops in their plans. They assumed that the residents would travel down to Jaffa for whatever supplies they needed. Looking for a name, the settlers argued about any number of alternatives, including the staunchly Zionist Herzliya and the delightfully mellifluous Yefefia (‘most beautiful’). In the end Theodor Herzl won, because the name Tel Aviv was the Hebrew title of his novel about re-establishing Zion, Altneuland, ‘old-new land’: tel signified the ancient remains which reminded visitors of the Jewish presence in past millennia, and aviv, the first green shoots of the wheat harvest, and, by extension, springtime.25

  Thus was born what was to become the first major city to emerge on the shores of the Mediterranean since the early Middle Ages, when Tunis had been founded to replace Carthage and Venice had emerged from its lagoons. The emergence of Tel Aviv offers a different, Mediterranean perspective to the tortuous history of the foundation of Israel, and the new city aroused intense passions among its Arab neighbours – it still does not feature on many maps of the Middle East produced in Arab countries.26 The founders of Tel Aviv were clear in their minds that they wished to create a Jewish settlement, and that it would possess a European character distinct from Jaffa, which they saw as distressingly ‘oriental’. This wish for European modernity was not new to Jaffa. With a strong sense of German propriety, a Protestant sect known as the Templars had created two orderly settlements outside Jaffa in the 1880s: ‘with its broad streets and elegant buildings, a person might forget he was walking in a desolate land and imagine himself in one of the civilised cities of Europe’.27 The wealthier Arabs of Jaffa also built comfortable villas in its suburbs. Nor was Tel Aviv the first Jewish suburb of Jaffa. In the 1880s a prosperous Algerian Jew, Aharon Chelouche, who had lived in Palestine since 1838, bought land on which there arose the Jaffa suburb of Neve Tzedek. What impressed those who saw Neve Tzedek was its clean and relatively spacious layout, and its homes were thought to be among the most beautiful in Jaffa.28 Neve Tzedek attracted settlers from a variety of origins – as well as the North African Chelouches, there were Ashkenazim arriving from central Europe, while Solomon Abulafia, who became its mayor, came from no further away than Tiberias – he and his Ashkenazi wife, Rebecca Freimann, decamped in 1909 to join the founders of Tel Aviv. Not surprisingly he is portrayed in photographs in a morning coat, cravat and striped trousers, emblems of modernization that were also worn by his Turkish and Arab peers in Jaffa.29 The writer Agnon lived for a time in the Abulafia house in Neve Tzedek, and, before Tel Aviv became a centre of Hebrew culture, a writers’ and artists’ colony gathered here.

  Jaffa too was on the ascendant. It was the major port in Palestine and Jerusalem’s main outlet to the sea, even though ships of any respectable size could not come close in to shore, and travellers had to disembark on to lighters, or were carried ashore piggy-back by Jaffan porters. The Ottoman sultan bestowed an eloquent symbol of modernization on Jaffa by building the clock towe
r that still stands. By the eve of the First World War, Jaffa was host to over 40,000 inhabitants, Muslim, Christian and Jewish (the last group roughly a quarter of the whole). Then, during the war, the city was evacuated of Arabs and Jews, under orders from the Turks, who suspected collusion between the Jaffans and the advancing British army; but Jaffa and its Jewish suburbs were not pillaged by the Turks (more damage was done by Australian troops who squatted for a while in the empty city), and Jaffa bounced back thereafter.30 From its railway station one could travel northwards to Beirut and south and west to Cairo – even to Khartoum. Jaffa drew its income not just from trade passing from the Mediterranean into the interior but from its excellent oranges, which were distributed around the Ottoman lands and to western Europe. Jaffa, rather than Jerusalem, was also the prime cultural centre of Palestine, and a growing sense of identity among the Arab population was reflected in the title and contents of a Christian-owned newspaper, Falastin, ‘Palestine’.31 This is not to suggest that its cultural life rivalled that of Alexandria. Setting aside the dour German Protestants, it was an Arabic-speaking city, and the Chelouches mixed on easy terms with their Arab friends and neighbours.32 But the emergence of Tel Aviv set off new tensions. In the 1920s, Jaffan Christians and Muslims often enjoyed visiting the new settlement – there were attractions such as the Eden Cinema, not to mention the gambling dens and brothels that began to sprout there. However, outbreaks of violence between Jews and Arabs soured relations from 1921 onwards; the first riot began when the Jaffa Arabs, already tense, mistakenly assumed that a Communist demonstration in Tel Aviv was a rabble about to descend on Jaffa; forty-nine Jews were killed, including the inhabitants of a writers’ colony on the outskirts.33