Greece--a Jewish History (ebook)

Argumento de Greece--a Jewish History (ebook)

"This fascinating book examines the concepts of identity and nationality as experienced by Jews, while paying tribute to those who were lost in World War II and to the righteous gentiles who saved the remnants of the community. Professor Fleming has written an important work on a little-known subject. It belongs in all academic Judaic collections."--Barbara M. Bibel, Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter

"This book is an excellent effort to explain the quandary of the Jews of Greece during the country's turbulent 200-year history."--Jay Levinson, Jewish Tribune

"This volume, which displays solid scholarly standards, is also highly interesting as it follows the multiple destinies of these Jewish groups and demonstrates how complex Jewish history is--how diverse and how difficult to categorize. Fleming has succeeded in escaping preconceived attitudes and in treating the object of her investigation with detachment but also with the empathy required for all genuinely good research projects."--Esther Benbassa, Journal of Modern History

Winner of the 2010 Prix Alberto Benveniste
Winner of the 2009 Runciman Award, Anglo-Hellenic League
Winner of the 2008 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture, Jewish Book Council
Honorable Mention for the 2009 Edmund Keeley Book Prize, Modern Greek Studies Association

"Greece--a Jewish History is a superb book, one in whose company I would include very few that I've read over the past five, maybe even ten, years. The story Fleming tells is an incredible--and moving--reading experience. The best comprehensive account in English of the 'Greek' Jewish experience, it is written in an easy and fluid style that allows for the drama of the story to come through gradually until, in the Auschwitz years, it becomes almost overwhelming. It is a masterful piece of research and historical craftsmanship. The story of Greek Jewry has found its historian. This wonderful book also announces Fleming as, among other things, a Jewish historian of the first order."--David Myers, UCLA Center for Jewish Studies

"What is a Greek Jew? Fleming pursues this question through various Jewish experiences (Romaniot and Sephardi) during the stages of the emerging modern Greek national identity. Her well-written, gripping story argues that 'Greek Jew' is actually a phantom term that emerged formally only in 1920 with governmental recognition of the Salonika community, and developed among young Jews during the 1930s, later concretizing in the Nazi concentration camps and the Jewish Diasporas to Palestine and the U.S."--S. Bowman, Choice

"This is not a 'religious book' meant to inspire. It is the very well told story of a once flourish Jewish community whose history must never be forgotten."--Jay Levinson, Jewish Magazine

"[A]n absorbing story, well told and referenced, and a worthy winner of [the] Runciman Award."--Michael Llewellyn Smith, Hellenic Review

"With this innovative, soundly researched work Professor K. E. Fleming has filled a long-standing need for the story of Greek Jewry to be told fully."--Jewish Book World

"K. E. Fleming has produced an insightful historical overview of the Jewish presence in Greece from the establishment of the Greek state in the early nineteenth century to the post-Holocaust era. . . . [U]ntil the appearance of Fleming's work there was no overarching account of the Jewish experience in modern Greece, and this book fills that lacuna extremely well."--Alexander Kitroeff, American Historical Review0List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi

CHAPTER 1: Introduction 1

PART I: Independence and Expansion 13

CHAPTER 2: After Independence: "Old Greece" 15
CHAPTER 3: "New Greece": Greek Territorial Expansion 32

PART II: The "Sephardic Republic": Salonika to 1923 49

CHAPTER 4: Salonika to 1912 51
CHAPTER 5: Becoming Greek: Salonika, 1912-23 67

PART III: Normalization to Destruction 89

CHAPTER 6: Interwar Greece: Jews under Venize?los and Metaxas 91
CHAPTER 7: Occupation and Deportation: 1941-44 110

PART IV "The Greeks": Greek Jews beyond Greece 145

CHAPTER 8: Auschwitz-Birkenau 147
CHAPTER 9: Trying to Find Home: Jews in Postwar Greece 166
CHAPTER 10: Hellenized at Last: Greek Jews in Palestine/Israel 190
CHAPTER 11: Conclusion: Greek Jewish History--Greek or Jewish? 205

Notes 215
Index 265