Introduction Excerpt for The Business of Transition
Introduction
Salonica’s Merchants between Empire and Nation-State
“SALONICA IS NOT A CITY of letters, nor an industrial city. It is a city of commerce, not primarily commercial, but solely commercial. Every blow against commerce is a blow against the whole of Salonica,” declared the Greek newspaper To Phos in 1915.1 By then, the city had been Greek for just about three years, after nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule. It had been Byzantine for even longer, second only to Constantinople, and, before that, Roman and Hellenistic. Established in 315 BCE, Salonica had seen many empires come and just as many go. It had also seen its population change time and again, eventually becoming one of the world’s most diverse cities by the early twentieth century. When the Greek troops entered on October 26, 1912, Salonica was home to circa 150,000 people whose origins spanned the Mediterranean and traversed the Balkans. Approximately 70,000 were Sephardi Jews, a near majority ever since they had settled in the city following their expulsion from Spain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Muslim Turks and Dönme (Jewish converts to Islam) barely reached 30,000, whereas Greek Orthodox Christians trailed far behind at no more than 10,000. Additionally, there were some 6,000 Bulgarians, alongside Romanians, Albanians, and a few Armenians and Kurds. Small European “colonies” of French, Italians, Germans, and Austro-Hungarians added to the mix. There was a reason Salonica was commonly known as the “Babel of the Mediterranean.”2
Commerce was the common thread binding it all together. In 1933, Georgios Christodoulou, a local Greek journalist, titled his history of the city, Salonica, City of Commerce.3 The work, possibly the first local economic history, traced Salonica’s long past through the lens of trade. Christodoulou dedicated his work to the local chamber of commerce and, by weaving together factual documents and “objective” statistics, memorialized merchants as the city’s main—indeed only—historical actors. Starting from the city’s founding, Christodoulou crafted a coherent, triumphant narrative of unbroken progress. The book spanned an array of diverse epochs, empires, and conquests, yet aligned with the dominant Greek national narrative to foreground the continuity between Salonica’s ancient Greek past and its modern Greek present.4 Still, while emphasizing the role of the Greeks, Christodoulou did not fail to acknowledge the significant contributions of the Jews. In fact, his work was as much a response to local anxieties as it was an expression of national pride. Published four years into the global financial crisis that had finally reached Salonica, in a time marked by economic distress, political instability, intensifying working-class agitation, rising antisemitism, and unprecedented Christian-Jewish friction, his book offered Salonica a usable past fit for all. Christodoulou was looking back in search of a brighter future.
Commerce, it seemed, held the key to understanding the city’s changing fortunes. In 1914, right after the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and just before the outbreak of World War I, another Salonican intellectual, Joseph Nehama, a leading figure of the local Jewish community, published in Paris The Coveted City, Salonica, the first—and for a long time the only—truly integrated history of the city.5 Writing under the pen name P. Risal, an acronym for P[a]ris-Sal[onique], Nehama presented a comprehensive history of his hometown that celebrated Salonica’s grandeur by seeking to explain its persistent yet ever-changing significance. Nehama identified a tension between the city’s enduring importance and its perennially contested territorial status: How was it that Salonica thrived amid oftentimes brutal, debilitating conquests? Nehama argued that Salonica’s appeal to both past empires and modern nationalisms stemmed from its role as a crucial commercial hub, strategically located at the crossroads of major trade routes connecting the Mediterranean with the Balkans and the Adriatic with the Aegean Sea. While Salonica may never have been an empire’s capital, it made empires great. It was the symvasileuousa, the co-reigning city of the Byzantine empire, the most important European port for the Ottomans, and even the Austro-Hungarians’ prospective gateway to the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Commerce was not just a part of Salonica’s story; it was the city’s destiny.
FIGURE 1. Letterhead (in five languages) of Jacob Elie Fransès, merchant of “cashmeres and clothing,” 1901. Source: Archive of the Banque d’Orient, File 184, General State Archives—Historical Archive of Macedonia, Greece
The Coveted City appeared at a time of heightened nationalism, wars, and massive population displacements, which were beginning to tear Salonica’s multiethnic fabric apart. Between 1913 and 1918, the city was spared no conflict. The Second Balkan War in the summer of 1913 saw the Greeks expelling most of the Bulgarian population. Concurrently, thousands of Balkan Muslim refugees, escaping the devastation in Ottoman Macedonia, camped in and around Salonica awaiting transfer across the Aegean. By the summer of 1914 their paths would intersect with Greek Orthodox refugees who were in turn disembarking at the port having fled the escalating Ottoman persecution in the coastal towns of Asia Minor. The outbreak of World War I further complicated the situation. In late 1915, as the Central Powers of Bulgaria, Germany, and Austria-Hungary advanced toward Serbia, their French and British opponents, known as the “Entente,” responded by disembarking the “Army of the Orient,” a 200,000-strong military force, in the city. Meanwhile, Jews and Greeks, the city’s two major communities, were both torn between supporters of the Entente and the Central Powers, while the European residents were split by their own national allegiances. Salonica was drifting apart.6 In these turbulent times, Nehama sought to create a unifying narrative that all could identify with, by introducing a character of broad appeal: the “Salonican merchant.” In a memorable passage, he portrayed this figure as pivotal in reversing the city’s economic fortunes in the second half of the nineteenth century and as a driving force behind its unprecedented development ever since. “The Salonican becomes bolder. He develops a taste for risk. [He] hardly need[s] any initial capital. A directory and a ream of letterhead paper are more than sufficient for [him],” he wrote. Nehama extolled the merchant’s business savvy, ingenuity, curiosity, and integrity, and made of him a model for all to celebrate and emulate. The merchant was both an emblem of modernity and the epitome of the true Salonican, embodying a spirit of unity amid the city’s diverse and challenging landscape.7
Commerce was the sole positive, inclusive identity that Salonica could embrace. Once this identity was compromised, the city and its inhabitants would face a profound identity crisis, one that has been difficult to resolve even up to the present. A few days into the Greek occupation, a Greek merchant confided to Nehama that as a Greek he was happy, but as a merchant he despaired and considered moving his business to Beirut.8 This sentiment reflected a broader anxiety: the transformation of Salonica from a thriving port city into a fortified border town was a worrying prospect, not just for the Jews but for many others, including its Greeks. Nehama himself starkly declared, “Salonica without its trade will cease to be Salonica,” a statement underscoring the deep connection between commerce and the city. Thus, when in the late 1910s Piraeus, the port of Athens, gained trading advantages and Salonica faced economic regression, resentment grew against the Greek capital.9 Commerce could simultaneously bolster and question national allegiances. While the Greek authorities were striving to make Salonica Greek, local commercial anxieties were challenging state prerogatives generating a broader configuration of contentious local identities. Salonicans felt they were in Greece but not altogether of Greece, an uncomfortable position they still inhabit today.
In Ottoman and post-Ottoman Salonica, then, commerce was more than just a trade; merchants were integral to the city’s psyche and were mythologized accordingly. Despite this, their legacy was only faintly preserved thereafter, mainly in the names of those imposing villas they built in the upscale Kampanyas quarter east of the walled city—names like Villa Modiano, Morpurgo, Hadjilazarou, and Allatini. After 1991, with the collapse of socialism in the Balkans and the opening of regional borders, Salonica’s elite fostered high hopes of a commercial revival by reconnecting with the city’s natural hinterland. Concomitantly, a nostalgic progressive discourse quickly emerged, celebrating the city’s lost cosmopolitan past by reminiscing on its multiethnic commercial bourgeoisie, thereby mythologizing it anew.10 This discourse, critical of the dominant Greek nationalist narrative, contrasted the openness, mobility, and prosperity of the late Ottoman era with the closure, introspection, provincialism, and conservatism brought about by the Greek nation-state and the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, from the Balkan Wars through the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange and up to the Holocaust. The commercial bourgeoisie was revered as a symbol of the last prosperous era in Salonica’s history, with its disappearance marking the onset of stagnation, if not regression, under Greek rule. Yannis Boutaris, the former mayor of Salonica, best captured this sentiment in 2010 when he lamented that the city’s current predicament stemmed from the absence of a vibrant, dynamic, and entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, true to the city’s history.11 The loss of multiethnic Salonica, in his view, was also the loss of bourgeois Salonica.
RETHINKING TRANSITION: MAJORITIES AND MINORITIES
The Business of Transition wrestles with such narratives of decline and fall by turning emphatic statements into historical questions. It asks: What became of Salonica’s multiethnic commercial bourgeoisie as it transitioned from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state? How did merchants experience the passage from imperial to national rule, react to it, engage with it, even shape it? Integration presented a formidable challenge to Salonica’s merchants. The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and the subsequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Europe dramatically altered Salonica’s business landscape. As the Serbian and Bulgarian borders moved almost to its outskirts, the city lost its extensive hinterland. Additionally, these formerly landlocked states now had access to their own ports in the Adriatic and Aegean Seas. To make matters worse, Salonica had become part of a country with numerous vibrant ports and no pressing need for yet another. Its merchants feared that much of the city’s trade would be redirected to Piraeus, Greece’s major port, and their city would at worse become a heavily fortified, militarized border town, or at best just “another Volos,” a second-rate port servicing local needs.12 Higher tariffs and more protectionist trade policies would further hinder import trade, Salonica’s lifeline. To top it all, the increased presence of the centralizing Greek state in the city posed a threat to the relative autonomy Salonica had previously enjoyed, further complicating the merchants’ integration into Greece.
Much as integration presented an enormous challenge to merchants, commerce was equally prominent in the minds of all those crafting a future for post-Ottoman Salonica. At this juncture, different models of sovereignty were being advanced, with the integrated, centralized nation-state just one among several options. In 1914, for instance, there was a striking proposal to encircle the city with barbed wire and transform it into a massive, tax-free warehouse. Even as late as 1919, a French plan proposing the internationalization of Salonica was still under consideration.13 All these schemes had one thing in common: they fundamentally centered on commerce. As such, they also underscore the diverse responses, multiple perspectives, and different subject positions that the question of Salonica’s commerce elicited at a time of transition. Transition was not a given merely causing local despair and resignation, although it very much did so; it was also a process fluid enough to incite action from a variety of actors, including Salonica’s merchants.
This study then unpacks transitions by zooming in on merchants and placing commerce back in the forefront of the passage from empire to nation-state. To do so, it departs from the popular identification of commerce with Jews, an identification deeply rooted in history, historiography, and public memory. Indeed, among the various plans circulating in the 1910s, many envisioned a viable future for Salonica’s Jews by advancing, to varying degrees, the twin proposals of a free port and an autonomous “Jewish” republic. Commerce and Jewishness were often seen as overlapping, leading many—both Jews and non-Jews—to believe that Jewish Salonica could only survive if Salonica remained a city of commerce.14 Such identifications underscore the strong and enduring connections between Jews, commerce, and the city. However, they have also tended to subsume commerce into a narrower discussion of Salonica’s Jews treating it as a dependent rather than an independent variable. In fact, much of the historiography makes the same presumptions in focusing exclusively on Jews and framing Salonica’s transition predominantly as a Jewish question.15 Public memory has also tended to equate the city’s fin-de-siècle bourgeoisie with affluent Jews, memorializing the entrepreneurial feats of such figures as Allatini, Fernandez, Morpurgo, Torres, and Misrahi. Astonishingly, some commentators have even contended that had Salonica’s Jewish merchants survived the upheavals of the twentieth century, then contemporary Salonica would have been a brighter, more open, and outward-looking city.16 The nostalgic and celebratory discourse on Salonica’s “lost bourgeoisie” has done much to revive the city’s Jewish past, integrating it into local memory; ironically, however, it has also produced silences of its own.
Surprisingly, the greatest among these silences concerns neither the Bulgarians nor the Muslims, as one might expect, but the Greek Orthodox community in general, and Greek merchants in particular. Despite numerous “Greek” histories of Salonica, there are scarcely any that focus specifically on its Greeks, especially during the crucial late Ottoman and immediate post-Ottoman periods.17 Today, the histories of the city’s Greeks have largely faded into oblivion, more so even than those of the Jews. This is not a local particularity: virtually no urban histories of the passage from the Ottoman (and Habsburg) Empires to their successor states consider the experiences of national majorities. In the case of Salonica, this paradox can be attributed to several, at times contradictory factors. One might speculate that the enduring image of a Jewish and multiethnic Ottoman Salonica cast a shadow over its Greek Orthodox population, making the city and its Greeks a “dangerous” subject for a historiography preoccupied with national purity, clear-cut ethnic divides, and a deliberate neglect of Greece’s Ottoman past.18 Indeed, Greek nationalists early on even questioned the Greekness of Salonica’s Greek Orthodox residents: “Its Greeks do not possess the strong features that one encounters in other Greek places,” Philippos Dragoumis noted in his diary shortly after the Greek takeover in November 1912. “Generally speaking, there reigns in Salonica a certain European cosmopolitanism mixed with oriental elements, which gives birth to dissonances intolerable and repellent.”19 Throughout the twentieth century, it was the surrounding region of Macedonia, rather than Salonica, that captivated scholars and dominated efforts to affirm its Greekness. By 1939, a Society for Macedonian Studies was established in Salonica and its scholarly journal, fittingly called Makedonika (Macedonian Issues), published article after article on “Greek” Macedonia but seldom anything on the city’s past. This trend continued well into the late 1990s, with history students at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki focusing their postgraduate theses and doctoral dissertations on subjects relating to Macedonia, while Salonica itself garnered little academic interest.20 Perhaps most significantly, by casting the annexation of Salonica as “liberation,” Greek national discourse effectively denied the city’s Greeks their own history. Their Greekness was assumed to be straightforward, and their identification with the Greek state and its authorities was taken for granted. As a result, the passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state was perceived as a return to the national body: not as a protracted, complex process but as an instant change of sovereignty, a mere moment in (national) time.
Yet, much as Greek Orthodox merchants initially rejoiced at the onset of Greek rule, they also viewed it, as we saw, with skepticism. The Business of Transition unearths the lost history of Salonica’s Greek Orthodox merchants during the late Ottoman period, charting the crooked line of their passage to the Greek nation-state. Their path, I argue, was not isolated but deeply intertwined with that of their Jewish peers. The relationship between the two groups was far more complex than just a story of mounting animosity, as current historiography often insists. Conflicts certainly existed. Yet, while the local Greek press vociferously pushed for the “economic conquest” of Salonica, Greek merchants agonized about Jewish migration, fearing its devastating impact on the local economy. Greeks and Jews often found common ground and some Greek merchants went as far as to propose plans akin to Jewish internationalization schemes. Politics further complicated these interactions. Political polarization divided Greek and Jewish merchants, not only between the two groups but also within them, sometimes empowering certain Greeks and Jews over others. In 1915, for example, prominent Jewish merchant Pepo Mallah managed to evade all accusations of speculation an enraged Greek press threw against him as he was a deputy with the governing party of Dimitrios Gounaris.21 The Greek and Jewish experiences of transition were both different and similar, diverging but oftentimes converging, too. In many ways, their stories were mutually constitutive. Consequently, The Business of Transition is more than a comparative history of ethnoreligious communities; it is a relational history of encounters, exchanges, and shifting positions within and between these two groups.22
This is, then, a study firmly placed in the “field of in between,” as Sarah Stein has eloquently defined the space of multiethnic contacts in imperial and post-imperial settings.23 However, my methodological focus on relations is not intended to offer a comprehensive history of Salonica’s commercial bourgeoisie in all its ethnoreligious diversity. Rather, it serves a distinct, double analytical imperative: first, to construe transitions anew as a shared journey, rather than a linear, predetermined shift from empire to nation-state; and second, to account for the radical realignment in power relations between Greek and Jewish merchants. For these reasons, the emphasis is squarely on Jews and Greeks, with minimum attention paid to Bulgarians, Muslims, and Dönme. Despite the fact that these groups—especially the Dönme—included wealthy individuals deeply involved in Ottoman Salonica’s business and public life, they all quickly faded away. After 1913, Bulgarian, Muslim, and Dönme merchants were absent from local commercial institutions, initiatives, and shared public spaces, having either left Salonica or turned inward, focusing on their own business matters or communal affairs at best. Transition happened without them, even if it happened at their own expense. Their impact on the changing Greco-Jewish power hierarchies was for that reason neither long nor extensive enough to merit further analysis and their occasional presence in Jewish and Greek discourses was mostly polemical, as will be seen.
During the late Ottoman period, Jews formed the backbone of Salonica’s commercial bourgeoisie. They held a numerical majority, dominated all lucrative sectors of commerce, and set the tone of its public culture. The Greek Orthodox population, in contrast, lagged far behind, lacking the economic, social, and cultural capital that their Jewish counterparts possessed. However, by the final decade of Ottoman rule, they had made remarkable strides forward. Consequently, the late Ottoman Greco-Jewish balance of power was uneven yet fragile, with the Orthodox Greeks increasingly challenging the dominant position of the Jews. It was dynamic rather than fixed, and as local actors readily acknowledged, conducive to change.24 The advent of Greek rule alarmed the Jewish entrepreneurs convinced as they were that a commercial nation like the Greeks would render them redundant. These concerns were compounded by the belief that their Greek peers would soon predominate thanks to the staunch backing of the Greek state. Indeed, Greece’s annexation of Salonica set off a gradual but decisive shift, eventually reversing the ethnic hierarchy in the local economy. By the time World War II erupted, the landscape of commerce in Salonica had transformed beyond recognition. Although Jewish presence remained robust, it had noticeably receded. Greeks, on the other hand, had ascended to prominence, leading nearly all major trade sectors.25 The once-anticipated “commercial conquest of Salonica” was complete, with the city’s commercial bourgeoisie now indisputably Greek. But how exactly had this shift happened?
Existing historiography has often echoed the initial fears of Jewish merchants. It typically emphasizes the dwindling business opportunities in Greek Salonica and points to the Greek state’s policies of ethnic preference as key factors in promoting Greek entrepreneurship over Jewish.26 However, such accounts, by prioritizing the aggressive policies of the nationalizing Greek state, tend to paint a picture of gradual ghettoization, of a community “under siege.” They risk depriving Jews of their agency and depicting them either as helpless victims of state policies, or as engaged in futile rearguard battles.27 Moreover, these narratives often overlook or oversimplify the interactions between Jewish merchants and their Greek counterparts, sometimes interpreting them merely as indicators of rising antisemitism. In so doing, they follow a familiar pattern in Central and Eastern European historiography that similarly emphasizes ethnic conflict and gradual marginalization in major urban Jewish centers.28 As a result, the making of a Greek Salonica is presented as a violent process occurring at the expense of the city and without its involvement.
The Business of Transition moves away from Athens and the central state, opting instead to take a closer look at local developments. It charts the changing power dynamics between Greek and Jewish merchants within the city’s urban terrain. The narrative follows these merchants as they adjust their business strategies, come together in professional associations, engage in joint initiatives, interact with other social strata, and seek a new modus vivendi. In doing so, I view the transformation of Jews from a semi-autonomous, self-governing religious community (an Ottoman millet) to a minority not merely as an externally imposed process, but as one in which Jews were actively and creatively involved. Jews, to a significant extent, sought to adapt to the new economic and social environment. Even though 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.29 Thus, I move beyond viewing minority status as a mere demographic fact, or as a quasi-static legal and political category externally imposed on a given collective, an approach many works in minority studies have for long advanced. Instead, I treat minority status as a cultural construct, a dynamic process, and the outcome of on-the-ground negotiations. In short, I move from minority to the more nuanced concept of minorization.30
The Business of Transition further reevaluates the concept of “majority” by attending to Greek merchants and by considering the changing contours of Greco-Jewish relations at a time of transition. What makes a majority and how did Greeks become one? Many works on post-imperial successor states in the Eastern Mediterranean and East Central Europe either leave the question untouched or treat ethnic majorities as numerical givens thereby focusing on the pro-majoritarian policies of the new, nationalizing states.31 Similarly, in the case of Salonica, some studies have approached this question from a political standpoint, emphasizing 1912 as the pivotal moment when Salonica’s Greek Orthodox residents, previously a minor urban community, joined the majority population of a nation-state and were accordingly disproportionately empowered. Others adopt a demographic lens, highlighting the dramatic change after the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange, which brought 100,000 Greek Orthodox refugees from Asia Minor to Salonica making the Greeks a staggering 80 percent of the local population.32 Recent works view majority status as a public performance, a carefully choreographed spectacle of state authority reordering the city’s multiethnic public space and assigning new subject positions through public rituals, ceremonies, and pageants.33 However, all these analyses essentially rely on external factors, like political authority or forced population movements, to explain shifts in local power relations. This study, by contrast, delves into the nuances of individual and collective agency, scrutinizing changes in business practices, political initiatives, social interventions, and, eventually, urban leadership among both Greek and Jewish merchants. The onset of Greek rule and the war-ridden 1910s reshaped Salonica’s commercial landscape, impacting swiftly and heavily on the local economy, society, and politics. Numerous state policies, hastily introduced, sparked widespread reactions, protests, and even demonstrations, thereby opening up new spaces for social action, creating unprecedented political opportunities, and eventually introducing new positions of power. The Greek merchants, though numerically small and initially economically modest, found themselves in a position to capitalize on these shifts. They transcended communal boundaries, took the lead in the city’s public sphere and fostered a new urban identity which was to be embraced by a much broader and diverse range of social strata and ethnic groups, from blue- and white-collar workers to Jews. Ultimately, this study contends, to be a majority is to act and speak like one. It involves not just 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. It is to occupy the invisible, “neutral” position of the universal.34 Salonica’s transition from Ottoman to Greek rule is the story of its Greek merchants moving away from their marginal, particular place in the Ottoman city to becoming a majority by embodying the universal.
RETHINKING TRANSITION: BEFORE AND AFTER, CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
As has become clear, a main focus of this study is to show how making Salonica and its merchants “Greek” involved a reconfiguration rather than a severance of interethnic, particularly Greco-Jewish, relations. Such an approach necessitates taking a step back and rethinking what it was exactly that came before and eventually vanished. It invites, that is, a revisiting of multiethnic coexistence in the late Ottoman period and an inquiry into the cultures and hierarchies of conviviality in the great port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. As the first part of this study argues, what preceded the transformation of the 1910s was a distinctly multiethnic and Jewish late Ottoman Salonica. Not either of the two, but both. This dual character of the city was widely acknowledged by contemporaries and is similarly recognized in modern studies that note Salonica’s dizzying ethnic diversity alongside an unmissable Jewish prominence.35 However, what still eludes scholars is the intricate relationship between these two aspects in the context of a modernizing city. How 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? Historiography has acknowledged Salonican Jews’ strong sense of locality and their deep attachment to the city, a sentiment that persisted well into the interwar period.36 Yet, it is less clear whether and how Jews also figured as model citizens and exemplary Salonicans in the final Ottoman decades, at a time when new discourses about the city, its problems and its remedies, emerged alongside modern public spaces, fostering a transethnic civic consciousness and a sense of local citizenship.37 Such questions are not unique to Salonica. Across the turn-of-the-century Eastern Mediterranean and probably East Central Europe, too, specific ethnoreligious groups often distinguished themselves taking center stage in the life and legend of their multiethnic cities and shaping conviviality accordingly. Greeks in Izmir made the city “infidel,” Italians in Habsburg Trieste fashioned a supra-ethnic Triestine discourse, and Jews in Lodz gave birth to the figure of the “Lodzermensch.”38 Yet, accounts of multiethnic coexistence among the urban bourgeoisies of these and other places often swing between idealizing conviviality as a cosmopolitan utopia of tolerance and equality and criticism for its lack of depth. Either way, they overshadow the complex interplay between ethnoreligious identities and modes of coexistence, including the power dynamics and exclusions multiethnicity could nurture.39
The Business of Transition examines how (and how far) late Ottoman Jews and Greek Orthodox participated outside their communal premises—in multiethnic clubs, masonic lodges, public events, and shared spaces—to understand how Jewish participation translated into Jewish hegemony. How did service to the city, not just the community, become a core part of Jewish bourgeois identity, thereby rendering Salonica a Jewish and multiethnic city in equal measure? Like the Greeks who succeeded them, the late Ottoman Jewish commercial bourgeoisie displayed a majority mentality, claiming to represent the entire city and speaking in its name. While the notions of majority and minority are typically (and correctly) associated with homogenizing nation-states and are rightly juxtaposed with the principle of difference that characterizes plural empires, multiethnic relations in imperial settings, I argue, could nevertheless both foster and obscure ethnic power hierarchies, elevating one group as a spokesman for all.40
By examining the processes of becoming a majority and a minority in tandem, understanding them as situated developments unfolding in the fields of local economy, society, and politics, and by foregrounding the active roles of Greek and Jewish merchants in reshaping their power relations, I also suggest a new periodization of Salonica’s transition. Previous studies have largely centered on the role of the central and centralizing state in advancing the Hellenization of the city. Consequently, they emphasize policies such as the reordering of urban space after a devastating fire consumed the entire downtown area in 1917; the 1923 resettlement of refugees from Asia Minor on the city’s outskirts to alter demographic balances on the ground; legal measures in the early 1920s targeting the Jewish community’s “disproportionate” political and economic weight such as the establishment of a separate Jewish electoral college and the introduction of mandatory Sunday rest; and, finally, the nationalization of Jewish communal education.41 As a result, these studies have concentrated on the 1920s and 1930s, a period marked by significant shifts in Greek state formation. In so doing, they also followed the conventional periodization dominating the broader historiography on national integration in East Central Europe, which views nationalization as a distinct feature of state-building in the new states established after World War I.
Indeed, following Greece’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, and the consequent end of its irredentist dream of territorial expansion, the Greek state turned its focus inward. As elsewhere in the “New Europe” of post-imperial successor states, Greek governments tightened their control over citizens and embarked on an extensive program of reconstruction and modernization while also seeking to integrate ethnic minorities, refugees, and other religiously diverse groups within the nation.42 In contrast, the 1910s have received scant attention in these narratives, though not without reason. The consolidation of state power in newly annexed territories was significantly delayed due to Greece’s near continuous military engagements. Moreover, factors like Salonica’s contested status, the uncertainty of Greek rule, efforts to win over a diverse population, and, above all, the presence of the Anglo-French Army of the Orient during most of World War I are also held accountable for stalling Hellenization.43 Yet, by the early 1920s, just before the population exchange would signal the end of Ottoman Salonica, there were already noticeable shifts in the city’s economic, social, and political landscape, transforming its commercial bourgeoisie. Greek merchants had made substantial economic and institutional advances, and, most importantly, had succeeded in legitimizing their urban authority, too. By contrast, emigration, shifting business strategies, and loss of communal control were pointing toward a waning of Jewish power. As this study argues, even before the influx of refugees from Asia Minor and the Greek state’s full-scale Hellenization efforts, Salonica’s most influential social stratum had largely completed its passage from empire to nation-state.
This alternative chronology of transition invites a reevaluation of the continuities and ruptures between Ottoman and Greek rule. Historiography has long interpreted Salonica’s passage as a violent and abrupt break from its imperial past, epitomized by cataclysmic events such as the Great Fire of 1917, the utter destruction of the old Ottoman city, and its subsequent rebuilding according to Western principles of urbanism; or the aggressive minorization of its Jews, reversing the tolerant policies of the Ottoman state.44 This view rendered the relatively calm 1910s as inconsequential, merely the tail end of Ottoman Salonica. Recently, however, there has been a shift in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and its successor states from ruptures to continuities, an emphasis on the persistence of empire in the time and space of the nation.45 As part of this trend, the organizational autonomy of Salonica’s Jewish community in the interwar period has been likened to that of an Ottoman millet defying the nationalizing and homogenizing logic of the nation-state.46 Even the name Salonica persisted as the city’s popular English designation well into the twentieth century, only being replaced by the Greek Thessaloniki in the 1950s.47 The population exchange, often viewed as the deepest rupture, might also be reconsidered as a form of continuity, given the Anatolian refugees’ sounds, tastes, and smells that “re-Ottomanized” the city, much to the chagrin of its native Greek observers.48
However, focusing on Salonica’s merchants reveals latent but important ruptures, albeit beyond the sphere of politics where these are usually traced. By 1919, the last significant Ottoman commercial institution, the city’s chamber of commerce, was reconstituted under Greek law, sealing a broader transformation in the merchants’ associational world.49 Merchants themselves were markedly different from their Ottoman predecessors: not only were they now Greek-led, but they were also significantly renewed, since many prominent “Ottoman” Greek and Jewish figures were gone, and newcomers and lesser-known locals had risen to power. Effectively, the commercial bourgeoisie of Greek Salonica was a new group, with losses among both Jews and Greeks. Challenging the emerging new orthodoxy in post-Ottoman historiography, I therefore point to the importance of a new set of subterranean ruptures. Unlike the tectonic shifts the older historiography had identified, these are subtler, yet consequential enough. Continuities and ruptures are, in my view, not mutually exclusive but can coexist. The passage from empire to nation-state is best understood not as a single, linear trajectory of “change” or “inertia,” but as a complex process, composed of different layers, each possessing its own distinct temporality and tempo of mutation.
Notes
1. To Phos, June 15, 1915, 1.
2. On the early history of the city, see Apostolos E. Vakalopoulos, Istoria tes Thessalonikes (Thessaloniki: Stamoulis, 1983). On Ottoman and Greek Salonica, see Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (London: Harper, 2004). On its Dönme, see Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
3. Georgios K. Christodoulou, E Thessalonike, polis tou emporiou (Thessaloniki: Nikolaidou, 1933).
4. On the Greek national narrative of continuity from antiquity to the present, see Antonis Liakos, “The Construction of National Time: The Making of the Modern Greek Historical Imagination,” in Political Uses of the Past: The Recent Mediterranean Experience, eds. Jacques Revel and Giovanni Levi (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 27–42.
5. P. Risal, La ville convoitée, Salonique (Paris: Perrin, 1914). On Nehama as a Jewish historian, see Devin Naar, Jewish Salonica Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 209–219.
6. Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1996); Muslim Community of Salonica, May 22, 1914, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (MAE CADN), Salonique, Série B, Box 22; Morgan, July 20, 1914, FO 286/580; Paris Papamichos Chronakis, “Global Conflict, Local Politics: The Jews of Salonica and World War I,” in World War I and the Jews, eds. Jonathan Karp and Marsha Rozenblit (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 175–200.
7. Risal, La ville convoitée, 263–265.
8. Nehama, December 10, 1912, Archives of Alliance Israélite Universelle (AAIU) Grèce Ι C 51.
9. Nehama, December 22, 1912, AAIU Grèce I C 51; Smart, March 25, 1920, FO 286/744.
10. Georgios Agelopoulos, “Political Practices and Multi-Culturalism: The Case of Salonica,” in Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference, ed. Jane Cowan (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 139–155.
11. “Mpoutaris sto LSE. E Thessalonike ypo te demarchia mou vreke ton eauto tes,” To Proto Thema, December 11, 2014, 15.
12. Nehama, December 10, 1912, AAIU Grèce Ι C 51.
13. Paris Papamichos Chronakis, “De-Judaicizing a Class, Hellenizing a City: Jewish Merchants and the Future of Salonica in Greek Public Discourse, 1913–1914,” Jewish History 28, no. 3/4 (2014): 373–403; Consul, December 7, 1915, MAE CADN, Athènes, Série A, Box 357.
14. G. N. Cofinas, Salonique, son avenir (Athens: Pyrsos, 1913).
15. Mazower, Salonica; Bernard Pierron, Juifs et chrétiens de la Grèce moderne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, “Becoming Greek: The Jews of Salonica, 1912–1917,” paper presented at the international conference “Religion, Identity, and Empire,” New Haven, March 24, 2005; Naar, Jewish Salonica.
16. Antonis Kamaras, “E Thessalonike choris Evraious,” Kathimerini, January 29, 2015, 7.
17. The singular exception is a handful of short articles by Evangelos A. Hekimoglou, “Enthymion Hadjilazarou: to ergo enos lesmonemenou prokritou tes Thessalonikes,” Makedonike Zoe 293–295 (1990): 23–25, 44–46, 42–43.
18. For a broader look at the silencing of the Ottoman past, see Şuhnaz Yilmaz and İpek K. Yosmaoglu, “Fighting the Spectres of the Past: Dilemmas of Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans and the Middle East,” Middle Eastern Studies 44, no. 5 (2008): 677–693.
19. Philippos Stefanou Dragoumis, Emerologio, Valkanikoi Polemoi 1912–1913 (Athens: Dodoni, 1988), 200.
20. Peter Mackridge and Eleni Yannakakis (eds.), Ourselves and Others: The Development of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity since 1912 (Oxford: Berg, 1997). A quick survey on the university’s online repository of MA and PhD dissertations generated only a handful of historical works on Salonica.
21. Commercial Association of Thessaloniki, February 17, 1919, Archive of the Commercial Association of Thessaloniki (ACAT), File “1916–1919”; Papamichos Chronakis, “De-Judaicizing a Class, Hellenizing a City”; Makedonia, July 22, 1915, 3.
22. On relational Jewish histories, see Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans. Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).
23. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “The Field of In Between,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 3 (2014): 581–584.
24. Ekthesis ton gegonoton kai tes katastaseos en te perifereia Thessalonikes kata to etos 1908, Diplomatic and Historical Archive of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DHAGMFA), File ΑΑΚ/Γ; Benghiat, December 1, 1909, AAIU Grèce I C 48.
25. Orly Meron, Jewish Entrepreneurship in Salonica, 1912–1940: An Ethnic Economy in Transition (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2011).
26. Mazower, Salonica; Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, Greece: A Jewish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Pierron, Juifs et chrétiens; Minna Rozen, The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond: The Jews in Turkey and the Balkans, 1808–1945 (Tel Aviv: The Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, 2005); Rena Molho, Oi Evraioi tes Thessalonikes, 1856–1919: mia idiaιtere koinoteta (Athens: Themelio, 2001).
27. Devin Naar makes a similar point: Naar, Jewish Salonica, 1–36.
28. Van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans; Marsha Rozenblit, “Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation-State: The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic,” in In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933, eds. Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 134–153; Sean Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918–1939 (London: Valentine-Mitchell, 2004).
29. I am echoing the famous statement by E. P. Thompson whose argument that the English working class was present in its own making signaled the shift of social history to questions of agency and experience: Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), vi.
30. The bibliography on minorities is vast. On Greece, see Richard Clogg, ed., Minorities in Greece: Aspects of a Plural Society (London: Hurst, 2002); Harry Mylonas, The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Konstantinos Tsitselikis, Old and New Islam in Greece: From Historical Minorities to Immigrant Newcomers (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Dia Anagnostou, “Minorities and the Making of the Nation-State in 20th century Greece,” Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 5, no. 3 (2003): 381–386; Kevin Featherstone, Dimitris Papadimitriou, Argyris Mamarelis and Georgios Niarchos, The Last Ottomans. The Muslim Minority of Greece, 1940–1949 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). For a different reading of the post-Ottoman trajectory of Ottoman Jewry than the one proposed here, see Aron Rodrigue, “From Millet to Minority: Turkish Jewry,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, eds. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 238–261.
31. Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building. The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (London: Routledge, 1997); Rogers Brubaker, “National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe,” Daedalus 124, no. 2 (1995): 107–132; Rogers Brubaker, “Nationalizing States in the Old ‘New Europe’—and the New,” in Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79–106.
32. Gilles Veinstein, ed., Salonique, 1850–1918: la “ville des Juifs” et le réveil des Balkans (Paris: Autrement, 1992); Mazower, Salonica; Naar, Jewish Salonica; Régis Darques, Salonique au XXe siècle: de la cité ottomane à la métropole grecque (Paris: CNRS, 2000); Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 158–179.
33. Eleni Kallimopoulou, “Under One Dome? Rituals of Transition in Ottoman/Greek Thessaloniki.” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique Moderne et Contemporain 4 (2021): 55–86.
34. On hegemony, see Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). My thinking on the “particular” and the “universal” has been enriched by similar analyses in feminist history: Gianna Pomata, “History, Particular and Universal: On Reading Some Recent Women’s History Textbooks,” Feminist Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 7–50; Joan Wallach Scott, “Women in ‘The Making of the English Working Class,’” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 68–90.
35. On contemporary observations, see Mark Mazower, “Travellers and the Oriental City, c. 1840–1920,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002): 59–111.
36. Devin Naar, “Fashioning the ‘Mother of Israel’: The Ottoman Jewish Historical Narrative and the Image of Jewish Salonica,” Jewish History 28, no. 3/4 (2014): 337–372; Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
37. Alexandra Yerolympos, “Conscience citadine et intérêt municipal à Salonique à la fin du XIXe siècle,” in Vivre dans L’Empire ottoman: sociabilités et relations intercommunautaires (XVIIIe–XXe siècles), eds. Paul Dumont and François Georgeon (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 123–144.
38. Pamela Ballinger, “Imperial Nostalgia: Mythologizing Habsburg Trieste,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 1 (2003): 84–101; Reşat Kasaba, “İzmir 1922: A Port City Unravels,” in Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, eds. Leila Fawaz, C. A. Bayly, and Robert Ilbert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 204–229; Winson Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 118–120.
39. On critiques of cosmopolitanism, Will Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies,” History Compass 6, no. 5 (2008): 1346–1367. On the limits of coexistence, Basil C. Gounaris, “Salonica,” Review 16, no. 4 (1993): 499–518; Meropi Anastassiadou, Salonique, 1830–1912: une ville ottomane à l’âge des Réformes (Leiden: Brill, 1997).
40. Aron Rodrigue, “Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire,” interview with Nancy Reynolds, Stanford Humanities Review 5, no. 1 (1996): 81–92; Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
41. Naar, Jewish Salonica; Pierron, Juifs et chrétiens; Rozen, The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond; Mazower, Salonica; Alexandra Yerolympos, Urban Transformations in the Balkans (1820–1920): Aspects of Balkan Town Planning and the Remaking of Thessaloniki (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 1996); Minna Rozen, “On Nationalizing Minorities: The Education of Salonikan Jewry, 1912–1941,” Archeion Analekta 3 (2018): 127–232.
42. Antonis Liakos and Nicholas Doumanis, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 20th and Early 21st Centuries: Global Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
43. Rena Molho, “Thessalonique après 1912: propagandes étrangères et communauté juive,” in La France et la Grèce dans la Grande Guerre, ed. Yannis Mourelos (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1992), 47–60.
44. Among others, Aleka Karadimou Gerolympou, E anoikodomese tes Thessalonikes (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 1985); Rena Molho, “E antievraike nomothesia tou Venizelou ston Mesopolemo kai pos e demokratia mporei na ginei arogos tou antisemitismou,” Syghrona Themata 82 (2003): 53–59.
45. The most innovative works include Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Michael Provence, The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Adam Mestyan, Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).
46. Naar, Jewish Salonica.
47. As a cursory search on English-language texts using Google NGram indicates.
48. See the complaints of a local passerby in Makedonia, May 14, 1925, 3.
49. Evangelia A. Varella, “To Emporiko kai Viomechaniko Epimeleterio Thessalonikes kata ta chronia tou Mesopolemou,” Thessaloniki 4 (1994): 251–285.