May. 20, 2004 11:24 Flooded by history By SHIRA DICKER
A visit to Greece reminded this comfortable American Jew that Jews were once comfortable here, too
The view from my second-floor hotel room at the Electra Palace in Thessaloniki is thrilling, affording me access to the caf -studded plaza beneath, which leads into Aristotelous Square, the white-paved waterfront, and the Aegean Sea itself.
Sunlight spills in through the curtains and Greek-tinged conversation drifts through my open window. The immediacy with my surroundings is fortunate because I am spending the majority of my time in Thessaloniki working in my hotel room, chained to my laptop computer.
We have come to Thessaloniki during this last week in April as guests of the American Embassy. My professor husband was invited to lecture first for the Embassy in Athens and we spent the past three days in that ancient city. Flying out of Athens earlier this morning, we arrived dazed with exhaustion yet dazzled by the beauty of the seaside city, known variously as Thessaloniki, Thess, Salonika, Salonique, Selanik, or Saloniki.
This Greek adventure is part of a larger European journey that began for our family this past January. Based in Yarnton, a rural village just outside of Oxford, England, we have lived as temporary Brits for the past three months, owing to my husband's academic fellowship at the center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the university. Though I have traveled abroad extensively during this time (two trips apiece to New York and Israel, a week in France and now Greece), Yarnton has served as home.
The sparkling sunshine of Thessaloniki is a welcome respite from the damp and dreary vistas of Yarnton and I gaze out of the window, planning my late afternoon break when I will explore the city. Perhaps it is the Mediterranean climate, or the heady blend of cappuccino, wine, and buttery pastry smells drifting up to my window, but I feel a deep affinity for Thess.
IT IS different in England. Eternally overcast and chilly, the British climate seems to me a prison sentence. Venturing outside in Yarnton is a muddy, misty, melancholy affair. Compounding the oppressiveness of my surroundings is another feeling, impossible to ignore.
It is neither the dislocation of the expatriate nor the homesickness of the long-term traveler, but the disquiet of the unwelcome outsider.
Whether in bustling London or the bucolic Cotswolds, I declare my outsider status every time I open my mouth. If the listener is particularly adept, he will identify me not only as an American but as a New Yorker as well. This dual identity is a funny thing in Europe, nearly an oxymoron. As a Manhattanite, I am mythic - fashionable, cultivated, well-connected, highly literate, but as an American, I am a close relation of George W. Bush and therefore a philistine war monger, given to a swaggering global posture.
Yet there is another component to my outsider status, this one with deeper roots: I am a Jew in Europe and that means something quite complex at the start of the 21st century.
For a late 20th century New York Jew to arrive in Europe at this point in history is a shocking, unnerving experience. There is even a science fiction element to it, hinting of time travel into the horrible recent past.
Here, I am amazed to hear people state their opinion that Jews have too much power, that they inspire anti-Semitism by insisting upon being different, that they are behind the war in Iraq, that they had foreknowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
In America, one's Jewishness is a pedigree, envied and respected. In Europe, it is a liability, a defensive posture. Here, "looking Jewish" makes one an instant target for assault. Here, Jewish institutions are as heavily-guarded as Buckingham Palace. Here, there is a widespread belief that the ongoing murder of Israeli civilians at the hands of Palestinian terrorists is morally and politically justified.
So here, too, is another artifact from the recent past, collected in the course of my recent travels: a lethal strain of anti-Semitism still running through Europe's veins.
BUT ALLOW me to return to my sun-drenched room at the Electra Palace in Thessaloniki, where anti-Semitism is hardly on my mind.
At 5:30 in the afternoon, I awake my husband from a nap, snap closed the top of my laptop, and pull on a pair of sandals. We set out for the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, located about 10 minutes from our hotel on Agiou Mina Street, in the building which once housed the Jewish newspaper, L'independent, eager to learn the local history of our people.
Ari is an Ashkenazic Jew, Polish on his mother's side, Russian on his father's. Fair-haired with a light complexion and scholarly gaze, his Russian roots predominate. Visiting Kiev two years ago, Ari reported meeting strangers who looked like family. My own heritage is more mixed and mysterious, resulting in a look that might be summed up as Mediterranean. Adopted at birth, I have traced both German Jewish and Sephardic roots, among other traces of European Jewish wanderings. I am often thought to be variously Italian, Spanish, French, Israeli, or Arab. In Athens, several people asked whether I was Greek.
En route to the museum we pass upscale clothing shops and stalls selling plastic baubles and Byzantine artifacts alike. Old men with wizened faces stand on the sidewalk selling soft, sesame-encrusted pretzels. Young Adonises in Armani stride by, speaking in sensual Greek on their flip-top cellphones. Teenage girls, dark hair bleached and dyed impossible colors, stagger by on tottering heels, smoking cigarettes and affecting a disaffected look.
A left turn at Goody's, the local version of McDonald's, and we have arrived. A guard waves, buzzes us in, checks our bags. The place is elegant, cool, completely silent but for water burbling though a stone fountain in the middle of the ground floor. We are the sole visitors.
The literature for the museum, which opened only three years ago, explains that it is not a memorial but a repository for the vibrant Jewish life that thrived in Thessaloniki for more than 2,000 years, deemed the center of the Sephardic world up until World War II. Consulting a guide book, I discover that only one century earlier, the 80,000 Jews of the city accounted for one half of its population, prompting the closure of the port every Shabbat because most of the workers were Jewish. As we make our way through the modest museum, I am struck with shame at my own ignorance and throw myself into the task of learning the Jewish history of this beautiful Aegean city.
THESSALONIKI WAS known as Ir va'em b'Yisrael, City and Mother of Israel, an appellation coined by Samuel Usque, 16th-century Jewish poet of Marrano descent. Dating back to the era of the prophets, several centuries before the Common Era, there is evidence of rich Jewish life in Greece, though Jewish life in Thessaloniki itself might be traced back to 140 BCE, when Jews from Alexandria arrived at the port city. The Roman rulers of the time granted Salonika's Jews - later known as Romaniot - the right of self-rule and life proceeded in relative harmony until the end of the fourth century and the beginning of Byzantine rule.
The emperors imposed laws prohibiting public observance of Jewish ritual and other anti-Jewish legislation, but somehow, Jewish life in Byzantine Greece continued to flourish. When Benjamin of Tudela visited the city in the year 1169, he encountered a functional and cohesive Jewish community. Persecution against Salonika's Jews continued during the Latin Empire right up to the year 1430, when Thessaloniki was occupied by the Turks. Throughout this time, however, the local Jewish community remained intact, even as many chose to emigrate.
With the arrival of the Turks, the immigration of Jews from Bavaria in 1470, and the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese Jews following the expulsion of 1492, Jewish life in Salonika took a dramatic and positive turn. For the next several centuries, Jews were able to prosper, tolerated and even celebrated by the Ottoman rulers and their Muslim and Christian neighbors. Building institutions, spawning venerable leaders and scholars, centers of learning, publications, poetry, and commerce, Thess became a model Diaspora community.
Bearing the blended customs and traditions of innumerable Jewish communities, most notably Spanish, Turkish, French, Italian, Palestinian, and North African, Salonika boasted a Jewish population of 20,000 by the year 1553 and 30,000 by the middle of the 17th century. One century earlier Thessaloniki hosted Shlomo Alkabez, author of the Shabbat hymn "Lecha Dodi." Around the same time, Salonika's reputation as a center for Torah learning became widely known, drawing avid students from other countries.
The city also became the second world center of Kabbala after Safed.
During this time, the Jews of Thessaloniki were involved in the exportation of grains, cotton, textiles, wool, and silk. Granted rare license by the local authorities, Salonika also boasted Jewish fishermen and farmers as well as gold and silver miners - tradesmen not commonly found in other Jewish communities. The major trauma for the Jewish community during this blissful era was the arrival of the false messiah Shabtai Zvi in 1657. His expulsion from the community and consequent conversion to Islam caused a small number of Jews to likewise convert, but historians note that this event rather served to draw the Jewish community together in the face of peril.
JEWISH LIFE kept improving in Thessaloniki right up to the year 1900, when the local Jewish population numbered 80,000, according to Iakov Benmayor, who now serves as vice president of the Community Council and wrote the Encyclopedia Judaica's entry on Salonika some 35 years ago. The chief reason Jews left for the United States in the early 20th century was to avoid serving in the Turkish army and Zionism took swift hold in the city, spawning 20 such organizations right up until the eve of World War II.
In 1912, Greek armies overtook Thessaloniki and King George declared Jews and all minorities full citizens of the state. This moment seems to be the apex of modern Jewish history in Thessaloniki. During this era, which seemed a contemporary version of the Jewish community's original 16th-century Golden Age, 35 of the 73 newspapers printed in Salonika were in Judeo-Spanish and there were as many as 28 Jewish schools. Jews formed the infrastructure of Thessaloniki, providing the city's most renowned physicians, astronomers, lawyers, teachers, and stevedores.
Then, in 1917, a terrible fire overtook the city, destroying key buildings of the Jewish community and rendering 50,000 Jews homeless. Following this devastation, new and restrictive Hellenic laws prevented Jews from returning to certain parts of the city where their families had lived for centuries. Other laws appeared, banning commerce on Sunday. Active anti-Semitism surfaced for the first time in centuries, resulting in vandalism and hate speech. Jews began leaving for Palestine, the US, England, France, Italy, and Alexandria - a virtual unwinding of history.
History began to unravel ever faster. In the spring of 1941, Nazi soldiers invaded the city. Immediately, the only surviving Judeo-Spanish newspaper was shut down, Jewish buildings requisitioned, the community structure dismantled. The following summer, Jewish men and boys were rounded up, humiliated, and beaten in the ironically-named Liberty Square, then sent off to forced labor, where many died.
Deportations began. The remaining Jewish property was seized. Eighteen of the 19 synagogues of Salonika were destroyed, as well as 30 smaller houses of prayer. The Jewish cemetery - dating back to the 15th century - was turned into a quarry after historic tombstones were smashed and family monuments turned into rubble.
Greek Jews were mandated to wear the yellow star and herded into ghettos for the first time in 2,000 years. In all these actions, the Greek authorities were complicit and Nazi documents record their request to rid the city of its Jews. Trains deported 43,850 Jews, over 95 percent of Salonika's Jewish population, within a matter of months. Fewer than 2,000 survived.
By August 7, 1943, the Jewish community of Salonika - Promised Land for European Jewry for most of its history - was erased, leaving only a ghostly outline.
I STAND silently alongside my husband in the small room which documents the destruction of Thessaloniki's Jewish presence, fighting the urge to scream. I have stood in other such rooms in other cities and felt overwhelmed by grief but here, a bottomless sorrow engulfs me. All the encounters of the past three months well up inside me and I see my previous existence as a New York Jew akin to a fairy tale, ephemeral, unreal.
While I lived my secure American Jewish life - attending Jewish day schools and Hebrew-speaking summer camps, munching matza sandwiches on Pessah at the Bronx Zoo, dancing joyously with Torah scrolls on West End Avenue during Simhat Torah, snacking on kosher pizza with my children in a sidewalk succa on West 72nd Street, traveling with my family to Israel on vacation, taking part in Israeli dancing in Central Park, joining hundreds of thousands of vocal Jews at demonstrations in front of the UN, in front of the Israeli consulate, in front of the White House - Thessaloniki was busy burying its Jewish past.
I learn from Erika Perahia Zemour, the director of the museum and daughter of Shoah survivors, that there is now a small Jewish community in Thess, numbering between 1,000 and 1,300. There is a daily minyan, a small primary school, a Jewish community center, a summer youth program, community programs and publications, and three synagogues, though only one is in regular use. There is a choir today in Thessaloniki, whose members sing in Judeo-Spanish.
I cannot remain in the room of Salonika's final chapter and so I walk backwards through the exhibition, returning to the pictures of the community in its flowering. Gazing at the faces frozen in time, I understand why this city speaks to me. The women in the photographs could be my sisters. I look just like a Thessaloniki Jew, traces of Sepharad and exile in my blood.
