The paper analyzes the process of the Jewish community of Salonika's passage from the Ottoman into the Greek period through its organizational patterns and its internal and external politics. Using a variety of primary sources, many of them newly unearthed, are revealed here the continuity and changes in the community's political culture as it was forced to leave the Imperial - multinational framework and adjust to the world of a Nation-State. The community's political and economic decline that followed its integration in the Greek state and the influence these developments had on the social fabric is portrayed through the communal organization.

The present essay explores the education of Jewish children and youth in Salonika from the transitional period of the Young Turk Revolution (1908) and the amalgamation of Ottoman Salonika into the Greek State until the German invasion of Greece (1941. Based on a variety of primary sources, archival material mostly unused hitherto, in Hebrew, Ladino, Greek, and French gathered in Greece, Russia, Israel, the U.S., and France as well as periodicals and memoirs, the essay makes use of the Jewish-Salonikan experience to consider a broader question: the ramifications of such a transition from the multinational empire to the nation-state, for the educational politics of minorities: How much will a minority be willing to invest in order to entrench its identity through education? What motivates its leadership to invest in such education? To what degree does such education serve the minority’s political standing? Finally, the essay addresses the universal question of how much a society is ready to invest in egalitarian education.

Scholars have relied upon diverse methodologies and sources to produce a new corpus of studies about Salonica’s Jews that explores the impact of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of the Greek nation-state. Much of the newer scholarship, however, reinforces the perception that Salonica’s Jews experienced a period of “decline” after the city’s incorporation into the Greek state (1912 – 1913) that culminated in their deportation to Auschwitz (1943). This study investigates why such a lachrymose and teleological interpretation of Salonican Jewish history persists today. By reference to new sources and a different interpretive lens, this article also challenges conventional wisdom concerning key turning points in the narrative of the city’s Jews: a major fire (1917), a compulsory Sunday closing law (1924), and the first major act of anti-Jewish violence (1931). The article thus offers a new approach to assessing the encounters between the multiplicities of Jews in Salonica and the Greek state.

[Attention: The attachments contain correct download links to the accompanying presentation in both pptx and ppsx (presentation & show)] in English and Greek [Ελληνικά] ___________________________________ Jewish Thessaloniki is unique because the most cataclysmic and momentous event in its 2,000 year history is its (near total) obliteration. Unfathomable events of human annihilation took place within a space of a few months in 1943 CE. These events have been only superficially researched as to the interplay of circumstances and powers that allowed them to take place, to the degree and speed they occurred. Documentary evidence shows the bureaucratic efficiency of the perpetrators. The events of the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki should be correlated with the history of the Community before AND after the destruction. The question is twofold: if more human beings could have been saved and, irrespective of the outcome, what was the moral standing of the surroundings of the Community? The latter, for objective purposes, can only be surmised and deduced by the behavior, attitude, actions, reactions and / or omissions of the non–Jewish community, as a whole and as individuals, BEFORE and AFTER the Holocaust. Unfortunately the general Holocaust mathematical equation has two parts: The first equality states that it only takes a few evil persons to assassinate [too] many. The second equality states that many righteous humans may save, at most, a finite number of fellow beings. Darfur waits our actions. . .