Historical
Background
Claiming 5,000
persons in all, Greek Jewry today might be considered an insignificant
fragment of the total world population. Two thousand years ago, however,
one-tenth of the vast Roman Empire's inhabitants were Jews—the great
majority of whom lived in cities that had been founded by Alexander the
Great or his successors, or that had been built by the Romans in accordance
with Greek urban planning thoughts. From that ancient world in the area
that is now called Greece, modern post-Exilic and Rabbinic Judaism developed
through the fall of Rome, the Germanic and Islamic invasions, and the
rise and fall of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. As recently as the
turn of the 20th century, the Jewish population of the port city known
as Thessaloniki was so large and influential that commerce in the city
came to a standstill on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays.
Although the Jewish
population of Greece began to decline at the time of the First World War,
the Nazi deportation and systematic killing of Greek Jews during World
War II was an unprecedented catastrophe that very nearly eliminated Jewish
life in Greece. Thanks in part to the safety extended by the Greek resistance
movement, the ability of some Greek Jews to survive the death camps, and
the courage of non-Jewish Greek citizens who sheltered Jews fleeing from
Nazi persecution, some Greek Jewry survives to this day.
The Jewish presence
in ancient Greece dates at least to the beginning of the fourth century
B.C.E. By the first century B.C.E., there were few cities in the Roman-dominated
Hellenic world in which Jewish communities could not be found.
With the 11th century
came the first three European Crusades to liberate Jerusalem from Moslem
control. The Fourth Crusade attacked Constantinople in 1204, but with
the recapture of Constantinople, the Eastern Byzantine Empire recovered.
The emperor extended an invitation to the Jewish communities of the empire
to come to Constantinople and Salonika to help revitalize the economies
of these cities. A new atmosphere of toleration towards Jews evolved and,
when anti-Jewish violence erupted in Spain and Portugal over a century
later, Jews from those countries found safety in the East.
By 1389, the Ottomans
had subjugated almost all of the Balkans, and their empire extended to
the Danube River. In 1453, they took Constantinople, and Ottoman rule
was to have a profound and, in many ways, beneficial influence on Jewish
life in the lands under their control, which later became modern Greece.
In 1492, the brutal Inquisition conducted by the Catholic Church in Spain
resulted in the expulsion of Spain's entire Jewish population. The reigning
Turkish sultan welcomed the exiled Jewish refugees as a skilled and well-educated
workforce that could repopulate the territories conquered by his Moslem
armies. Jews were given the freedom to govern themselves and to pursue
their commercial ambitions. Salonika became the hub of religious learning
for the Jews of the Balkans. It was renowned for its rabbis and printing
presses, and soon developed as a center for the study of Torah and Kabbalah.
The new Greek State,
recognized in 1823, consisted only of part of mainland Greece and some
islands. Greece pressed for more—seeking to incorporate all lands
inhabited by Greek-speaking peoples. Greece liberated Macedonia and Thrace.
Along with Macedonia came its principal city, Salonika, which, as of 1915,
boasted between 80,000 and 100,000 Jewish inhabitants—over half the
city's population.
Life began to change
for the Jews of Salonika as Greece sought to exert control over the newly
incorporated lands of Macedonia and Thrace. King George I of Greece assured
the city's Jews that their civil rights would be protected by law under
Greek rule—thereby making "monarchists" out of most members
of Greece's Jewish population—but violent anti-Jewish riots did erupt
periodically in Salonika.
The conclusion
of the First World War in 1918 did not bring an end to border clashes
between Greece and Turkey. By 1925, over 2 million people had been transferred
as refugees among Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. New laws were implanted
for Salonika that favored the new Greek arrivals, thus exacerbating the
social tensions and economic difficulties that the city's Jews were then
experiencing.
Greece was dragged
into the Second World War in October 1940, when Mussolini's forces invaded
Greek territory through Albania. The government conscripted every able-bodied
male, and close to 13,000 Jews entered the Greek army. The first Greek
officer to fall in battle was Mordecai Frizis, a Jew from Chalkis who
became a hero to both Greek Jews and non-Jews alike. Even the Greek dictator
Metexas praised the Jewish soldiers for their courage in combat. By the
time Greek troops had forced the Italian army back into Albania, six months
after their invasion, the percentage of Jewish casualties in the Greek
army was nearly three times that of non-Jewish soldiers.
German forces came
to Italy's aid in April 1941, and the Greek army was no match for Hitler's
mechanized forces. The Nazis attacked on April 6, 1941 and finally took
Crete by May 28, 1941 (7 weeks). Germany then maintained control of the
area surrounding Salonika, where it is estimated that 50,000 Jews remained.
The Germans placed Thrace and its 6,000 Jews under the control of Bulgarian
troops and Italy had an estimated 13,000 Jews in its zone of occupation.
The German occupation touched off a wave of theft and vindictive destruction
of Jewish property by Greek collaborators, generally orchestrated by the
Nazi invaders. Jews were soon deprived of their wealth, confined to ghettos,
and often forced into labor battalions. Under these conditions, starvation,
typhus, and exhaustion cost many their lives.
The worst was yet
to come. On March 15, 1943, the Germans began to deport the Jews of Salonika
to the German-run death camps in Poland. Within six months, virtually
all of the city's Jews had been killed in Auschwitz and Birkenau. Jews
living in the central and southern regions of Greece had the best chance
of survival. During the period in which the Italians controlled these
areas, they extended Jews limited protection that allowed them to live
more or less normal lives. With the surrender of the Italians to the Allies
in September 1943, the Germans moved swiftly to capture and deport to
their deaths all the Jews that they could find in formerly Italian-controlled
territory. Two important factors hindered this ruthless operation: the
Greek resistance movement, which helped those Jews who had the ability
to escape to the mountains of what it called "Free Greece";
and ordinary citizens—including members of the police and the Orthodox
Church—who risked their own lives to shelter Jews.
While close to
87 percent of Greece's Jews died during the Holocaust, 10,000 to 12,000
survived, including approximately 2,000 who were liberated from German
killing centers at the end of the war. Between 3,000 to 4,000 Jews, including
the chief rabbis of Athens, Volos, Larisa, and Zakinthos, found safety
with the Greek partisan movements. As many as 5,000 Jews survived in hiding,
protected by friends or generous strangers. These included Greek police
who forged identification papers and bishops who registered false baptisms,
which resulted in some Jews being able to pass as Greek Orthodox. At the
conclusion of the war, many of the surviving Jews returned to their places
of origin to begin the process of restoring their communities, an activity
that received the dedicated assistance of the Greek government at the
time and that continues to this time.
top
|
