Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913-1983: Patterns of Jewish Survival in the Greek Provinces before and after the Holocaust (review)

162 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 from festschrifts and Dutch journals, which are not well known. Among Fuks' most important revelations was his 1954 discovery in Cambridge's university library of the oldest known (1382) Yiddish language manuscript. "Jewish Libraries in Amsterdam in 1640" includes a listing ofthe 167 books owned by Amsterdam's three important Sephardic congregations. The Fukses are well known for their extensive research on Judaica printing in the Netherlands, which was the capital ofHebraica publishing for many years. More information will appear on this in their forthcoming History ofHebrew Typography in the Netherlands. A related essay is on "Menasseh ben Israel as a Bookseller," which takes the reader through the bibliographic detective work, from purchasing books in Lublin to selling Hebraica to the Swedish crown. Fuks' informative footnotes provide documentation and much interesting information amassed from a lifetime of study. Another essay examines the role of Eastern European Jews in Holland, from the seventeenth century until 1940. His history of their political and cultural organizations is fascinating and sensitively crafted. His portrait ofthe interwar years is most palpable has he was a participant in many of these activities. Other essays deal with a Swedish proselyte and his flight to Holland, seventeenth-century litigation among Amsterdam's Sephardic Jews, and other treasures pulled together from Dutch archives. This book makes excellent academic or leisure reading and is an excellent tribute to such an important scholar of Jewish print culture. Andrew B. Wertheimer Woodman Astronomical Library University of Wisconsin-Madison Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913-1983: Patterns of Jewish Survival in the Greek Provinces before and after the Holocaust, by Joshua Eli Plaut. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. 220 pp. $38.50. Greek Jewry has traditionally been a stepchild of Jewish Studies. A glimpse at the author's restricted bibliography will note the continuity of this neglect among modem scholars. While there has been a spate ofbooks and articles about Ottoman and Turkish Jewry, a corresponding interest in Greek Jewry has not yet developed, even though a small Society for the Promotion of Greek Jewish Studies has appeared and is quite active in Thessaloniki. Greek Jewry, for a number ofreasons among which one should emphasize its polyglot nature and its non-Ashkenazi traditions, has long remained the province of specialists. (The Bulletin of Judaeo-Greek Studies has been carefully chronicling bibliography for the past decade.) Therefore it is a pleasure to welcome the Book Reviews 163 contribution of a folklorist who has. surveyed the tran~iti~n.apd destruction and survival of Greek Jewry in the twentieth century. The Balkans in general and Greece in particular are difficult for westerners to understand, let alone keep straight. Aside from the internal division between Romaniote (Greek-speaking citizens of the Roman Empire) and Sephardim (scions of the postExpulsion Iberian immigrants), Greek Jewry was a congeries of congregations sharing several cultures in common as well as possessing ala Balcan numerous passport identities. In addition, borders change, and as quickly nationalities, followed by languages. A Jew born in Didymotihon (now on the Turkish border near Edirne) in 1900 would learn Judeo-Spanish, some Hebrew, maybe some Turkish, be educated in French at the Alliance school, learn Bulgarian during World War I, and, if he were lucky enough to be among the two dozen (of the more than 700 deported) who returned from Birkenau, Greek. The Jews ofThrace and Macedonia, who were joined to Greece after the First Balkan War and became loyal nationalist Greeks during the interwar years so that they fought heroically in the Greek army against the Italian invaders of 1940, were nearly totally wiped out by the Germans in Treblinka and Birkenau. What the handful of survivors in Greece remember is but a shadow of the four and a half centuries ofthe Sephardi experience in the Balkans, of a symbiosis with the Ottomans that produced a unique kind ofcosmopolitanism that is looked back upon nostalgically by some survivors who deplore the nationalist rhetoric and violence of recent years. Plaut's chapters guide the reader through the vicissitudes of the Balkan Wars which added the centuries-old Sephardi centers of Thrace and Macedonia to...