Description
Book SynopsisDescribes the diverse histories and the processes of Greek Jews that worked to make them emerge as a Greek collective. This book follows the Jews as they left Greece - as deportees to Auschwitz or emigres to Palestine/Israel and New York's Lower East Side.
Trade ReviewWinner 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 "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 "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 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 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 "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 Review "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 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 "[A]n absorbing story, well told and referenced, and a worthy winner of [the] Runciman Award."--Michael Llewellyn Smith, Hellenic Review
Table of ContentsList 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
