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Reviewed by:
  • The Jewish Communities of Southeastern Europe: From the Fifteenth Century to the End of World War II, and: Documents on the History of the Greek Jews: Records from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and: Italian Diplomatic Documents on the History of the Holocaust in Greece (1941–1943)
  • Mark Mazower
I. K. Hassiotis, editor, The Jewish Communities of Southeastern Europe: From the Fifteenth Century to the End of World War II. Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies. Pp. 680. ISBN 960-7387-03-1.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Documents on the History of the Greek Jews: Records from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Athens: Kastaniotis. 1998. Pp. 472. ISBN 960-2330-5.
D. Carpi, editor, Italian Diplomatic Documents on the History of the Holocaust in Greece (1941–1943). Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University. 1999. Pp. 318. ISBN 965-338-037-0.

Since the fall of the Junta, the steady renaissance of the study of modern history in Greece has proceeded apace, and the center of scholarly activity has shifted back from its earlier loci abroad to universities and research centers in Greece itself. In the same period, Greek historians, like their colleagues elsewhere, have moved from an emphasis on class, society, and economy to a new preoccupation with culture, ethnicity, and nationalism. The emergence of a pioneering body of work on Greek Jewry over the last decade obviously forms part of this process. This subject, which lay virtually untouched by scholars previously, is now attracting serious research. To mention some of the highlights, there have been several collections of essays sponsored by the Society for the Study of Greek Jewry, the numerous testimonies of Holocaust survivors published by Ets Haim in Thessaloniki. In addition, Bernard Pierron has published a valuable history of Greek-Jewish relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Rena Molho has written a dissertation on the Jewish community of late Ottoman Salonica, and in general the quantity of articles and books has reached the point where the Jews can now be properly incorporated into the history of Greece.

The three volumes under review all in different ways testify to this growing professional and public interest in a subject that not so long ago was regarded with indifference if not distaste. There are two collections of diplomatic docu-ments and a collection of essays that represents the fruits of a conference held in Thessaloniki in 1992. Since the essays range most widely in time and theme, let us begin with these.

As the editor, Professor I. K. Hassiotis, explains in his foreword, the title of the volume is slightly misleading. True, there are contributions on Jewish life in Albania and Yugoslavia, but the weight of the scholarship on display here tilts toward Greek Jewry and Thessaloniki’s community in particular. Of the 42 papers [End Page 413] included here, 35 refer entirely or in part to Greece, and nineteen focus upon the Macedonian capital. The range of subjects treated is vast—from literary and musicological analyses to history, urban planning, and family law. But a few generalizations are possible.

In the first place, the varied origins of the contributors should be noted: historians and other scholars are represented from Israel, Spain, and many other countries in addition to Greece. More pertinent is the fact that they come from quite different, if adjacent, fields of study and use very different sources; thus we find that scholars of Jewish reactions to the expulsions from the Iberian penin-sula use quite other materials from the Israeli Ottomanists, who rely heavily upon rabbinical responsa. For the early twentieth century, the French-language records of the Alliance Israelite come into play, while Greek architectural historians rely on the morphological analysis of building styles or draw on Greek municipal records and the local press. Overall, I came away from a reading of this volume with an overwhelming sense of the need for researchers to enter this field willing to unite quite disparate kinds of material and to overcome the arbitrary boundaries that simply obstruct the most efficient use of what is an extraordinarily abundant range of sources. We need to shake up certain histori...

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