Greece--a Jewish History

Greece--a Jewish History
Author: K. E. Fleming
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2010-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691146128

K. E. Fleming's Greece--a Jewish History is the first comprehensive English-language history of Greek Jews, and the only history that includes material on their diaspora in Israel and the United States. The book tells the story of a people who for the most part no longer exist and whose identity is a paradox in that it wasn't fully formed until after most Greek Jews had emigrated or been deported and killed by the Nazis. For centuries, Jews lived in areas that are now part of Greece. But Greek Jews as a nationalized group existed in substantial number only for a few short decades--from the Balkan Wars (1912-13) until the Holocaust, in which more than 80 percent were killed. Greece--a Jewish History describes their diverse histories and the processes that worked to make them emerge as a Greek collective. It also follows Jews as they left Greece--as deportees to Auschwitz or émigrés to Palestine/Israel and New York's Lower East Side. In such foreign settings their Greekness was emphasized as it never was in Greece, where Orthodox Christianity traditionally defines national identity and anti-Semitism remains common.

Greece--a Jewish History

Greece--a Jewish History
Author: K. E. Fleming
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400834015

K. E. Fleming's Greece--a Jewish History is the first comprehensive English-language history of Greek Jews, and the only history that includes material on their diaspora in Israel and the United States. The book tells the story of a people who for the most part no longer exist and whose identity is a paradox in that it wasn't fully formed until after most Greek Jews had emigrated or been deported and killed by the Nazis. For centuries, Jews lived in areas that are now part of Greece. But Greek Jews as a nationalized group existed in substantial number only for a few short decades--from the Balkan Wars (1912-13) until the Holocaust, in which more than 80 percent were killed. Greece--a Jewish History describes their diverse histories and the processes that worked to make them emerge as a Greek collective. It also follows Jews as they left Greece--as deportees to Auschwitz or émigrés to Palestine/Israel and New York's Lower East Side. In such foreign settings their Greekness was emphasized as it never was in Greece, where Orthodox Christianity traditionally defines national identity and anti-Semitism remains common.

Jewish Salonica

Jewish Salonica
Author: Devin Naar
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781503600089

Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society. Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

The Holocaust in Greece

The Holocaust in Greece
Author: Giorgos Antoniou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108679951

For the sizeable Jewish community living in Greece during the 1940s, German occupation of Greece posed a distinct threat. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered around ninety percent of the Jewish population through the course of the war. This new account presents cutting edge research on four elements of the Holocaust in Greece: the level of antisemitism and question of collaboration; the fate of Jewish property before, during, and after their deportation; how the few surviving Jews were treated following their return to Greece, especially in terms of justice and restitution; and the ways in which Jewish communities rebuilt themselves both in Greece and abroad. Taken together, these elements point to who was to blame for the disaster that befell Jewish communities in Greece, and show that the occupation authorities alone could not have carried out these actions to such magnitude without the active participation of Greek Christians.

The Jews in the Greek Age

The Jews in the Greek Age
Author: Elias Joseph Bickerman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1988
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674474901

A history of the Jews in the Greek age, charting issues of stability and change in Jewish society during a period that ranges from the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great in the fourth century, until approximately 175 B.C.E. and the revolt of the Maccabees.

The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945

The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945
Author: Steven B. Bowman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2009-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804772495

The Agony of Greek Jews tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. Bowman focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. His book contains new archival material and interviews with survivors. It supersedes much of the general literature on the subject of Greek Jewry.

The Jewish Community of Salonika

The Jewish Community of Salonika
Author: Bea Lewkowicz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

This book is a pioneering study of the often forgotten Sephardi voices of the Holocaust. It is an account of the Sephardi Jewish community of the Greek city of Salonika, which at one point numbered 80,000 members, but which was almost completely annihilated during the German occupation of Greece in the Second World War. Through her systematic series of interviews with the remnants of this once-flourishing community, the author reawakens the communal memory and is able to show how individual identities and memories can be seen to have been shaped by historical experience. She traces the radical demographic and political changes Salonika itself has undergone, in particular the ethnic and religious composition of the city's population, and she interprets the narratives of the Salonikan Jewish survivors in the context of this changing landscape of memory and as part of contemporary Greece. With the vivid power of oral history and ethnography, this book highlights a significant aspect of the Jewish experience.

The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome

The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome
Author: Tessa Rajak
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 599
Release: 2018-12-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9047400194

Twenty-seven interdisciplinary essays on aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world, exemplifying a wide range of techniques, by a well-known scholar. Three are previously unpublished, including a reappraisal of the Judaism and Hellenism debate and a study of the Sardis synagogue. The book's overall coherence derives from the author's long-standing interests in the analysis of texts as documents of cultural and religious interaction, and in how Jewish communities were woven into the social fabric of Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman East. The four sections are: Greeks and Jews, Josephus, The Jewish Diaspora and Epigraphy, and finally Beyond the Greeks and Romans, essays which extend into Christian literature and on to the nineteenth century reception of the Judaism/Hellenism dichotomy. Scholars and students from a wide variety of backgrounds will benefit. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece

Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece
Author: Steven B. Bowman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

This is the first systematic study of the Jews in the Greek resistance based on archival research and personal interviews. It covers Jews in various aspects of resistance in Greece and other concentration camps. The book is a contribution to the overall story of Greek resistance against the Nazi occupiers and provides hitherto unknown stories of their contributions to that fight. Based on interviews and archival research Bowman has assembled a preliminary list of over 650 individuals who fought or served with the Greek Resistance forces. These include andartes and andartissas, interpreters, recruiters, doctors, spies, nurses, organizers, and a number of non Greek Jews who volunteered or were trapped in Greece during the war years. While the murder of nearly 90% of Greek Jews by the Nazis has begun to enter the holocaust story, the participation of Greek Jews in the war against the Nazis is virtually unknown. Greek Jews actively fought in the war against the Italian and German invaders. Veterans and young Jewish males and females went to the mountains to fight or serve in various ways in the andartiko among the several Greek Resistance movements. Other Jews remained in urban areas where they joined different Resistance cells whether as active saboteurs or in leadership roles. A number of Jews appear on the payrolls of Force 133. Additionally Greek Jews participated in the Sonderkommando revolt in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in October 1944 while others fought in the Warsaw revolt from August to October 1944.

The Jewish Metropolis

The Jewish Metropolis
Author: Daniel Soyer
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1644694913

The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th to the 21st Century covers the entire sweep of the history of the largest Jewish community of all time. It provides an introduction to many facets of that history, including the ways in which waves of immigration shaped New York’s Jewish community; Jewish cultural production in English, Yiddish, Ladino, and German; New York’s contribution to the development of American Judaism; Jewish interaction with other ethnic and religious groups; and Jewish participation in the politics and culture of the city as a whole. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, and includes a bibliography for further reading. The Jewish Metropolis captures the diversity of the Jewish experience in New York.