by Mark Mazower
Mazlum’s café was burned down in the fire, and the upper-class Hotel Méditerranée was built in its place, but some of Kyor Ahmet’s Jewish students continued to develop and adapt his Ottoman legacy. “Maestro Sadik”—the blind Jewish oud player Sadik Nehama Gershon—collaborated with the song-writer Moshé Cazés who paid tribute to his partner as “truly an ‘international musician’ who plays many instruments and sings in Turkish, Greek, Judezmo and Arabic. The excellent traditional musicians who reached Salonica from Istanbul during the period of the population exchange categorize Master Sadik as a ‘gramophone’; it suffices for him to hear any piece of music just once in order to learn it; and if it contains mistakes, he will correct them.” In the cafés, players clustered round as Sadik taught them new songs “freshly arrived from Istanbul. Since all the musicians take the lesson together, you can easily imagine how the café turns into a veritable dervish centre, Sadik with his oud and everyone else beating rhythm, some on their clothes, others with their feet.” And it was not only the musicians and their songs which still came from Turkey, but record producers and devotees, like another student of Kyor Ahmet’s, the Turkish poetess Madame Aziz, who frequented the café where Sadik played.22
On the street, too, the old-established musical styles could be heard—the gypsy drummers, klarino players from the mountains inland, the mandolin bands and the love songs or kantades with which musicians and lovers still serenaded girls outside their homes. Christians like the Vlach violinist Mikos Salonikios played alongside Jewish bands, and hung out in the musicians’ cafés—the Dolma Batché, and the Nuevo Mundo (New World) where cantors, tobacco workers and professional players adapted the old Ottoman modes—hijaz, segah and shetaraba—for a new clientele. This was also the last generation of the uninhibited, sharp-tongued Jewish entertainers, men of local renown like Moshiko el Mentirozo (the Liar), the Fratelli Nar, Los Ratones (the Mice), Nataniko, Daviko el Chiko (Little Dave) and Baruh el Dondurmadji (Baruch the Icecream Man)—whose scabrous rhymes and songs were the highlights of any wedding.23
These performers were nothing if not adaptable. Just as the café chantant gave way to the café variété, so the violin and the kanun were slowly being replaced by the bouzouki and guitar. Old-time musicians occasionally deplored the headlong rush into “European” fashions. “Everything goes out of style, even the traditional Turkish music ensemble. The piano, bass and violin have defeated the Eastern violin, oud and tambourine. The fox-trot has beaten the Eastern-style love song,” wrote Sadik and Gazoz. But they were, after all, businessmen too, and they managed to adapt tangos and other European dances in their repertoire with little fuss and much humour. “ ‘Having a good time’ today means dancing, and dancing without end. The old people say, ‘The good ones go, the bad ones stay.’ But we say, ‘The old routine has gone; the new ways are here to stay.’ ” Sadik himself was said to be able to handle songs “en turko, en grego, en ewspanyol i franko/mezmo los tangos ed Edwardo Byanko [in Turkish, Greek, Spanish and French/Even the tangos of Eduardo Bianco].”24 And there was still an insatiable demand for music in “the Oriental style,” with all the memories this conjured up. A journalist described the evening bedlam of one street in the Upper Town which was lined with tavernas, all loudly competing to attract customers: “One tries to present the best singer who can hold the wail of the amané highest and play the tambourine, another the best players who can charm up, with the oud and the santouri, nostalgia for the much-mourned East.” In the city’s tavernas, at least, the Ottoman world remained alive.25
BACKLASH
NOISE, SEX, BRASH MATERIALISM and immorality—it is perhaps not surprising that the disappearance of the old ways produced a backlash of nostalgia and condemnation. “We went to bed mules and woke up Franks,” complains Auntie Benuta in a popular satirical series in the Jewish press. Its elderly protagonists railed against the “snot-noses,” “little Franks,” the “messieurs” as they were ironically called, who used fancy words like “progress,” “coiffeur” and “hypertension.” Yet of course even in the old days, “when fruit stones were sweet,” according to the saying, the entertainments and pleasures of city life had come under attack. In the nineteenth century, the rabbis had denounced “frivolous gatherings,” and warned parents not to let their boys become musicians or dancers “for these professions expose one to meetings between unmarried men and maidens at weddings and dinner parties and in coffee-houses or hideaways and such, and this can cause one to engage in forbidden behaviour such as profanation and frivolity, jesting and lightheadedness.” Both rabbis and hodjas inveighed against the evils of the coffee-house in particular, though the incessant stream of prohibitions is probably a clue to their lack of effectiveness. The city was known for its cafés, and most men went to pass the time in dominoes and backgammon, if nothing worse.26
Between the wars, antipathy to the city’s pursuit of modernity was as strong as it had been in the mid-nineteenth century. The refugee crisis and the near-disintegration of the state prompted a mood of something close to panic at the nation’s collective moral health. General Pangalos banned short skirts, while churchmen and police authorities closed down the city’s first open-air gymnastics society, founded by an Italian devotee of sunlight and naturalism. And at the beach by the Beshchinar gardens, guards in boats tried to patrol the space between the male and female bathing cabins to prevent any mixing of the sexes, something which bewildered many of the refugees from the Asia Minor coast, for whom mixed bathing had been customary.
What was new in the 1920s was not the fact of protest but its source: religious authorities could still make their presence felt—especially the church—but it was the organs of state who now assumed the primary responsibility for the enforcement of social norms. The police adjudicated on propriety, checked dress and even reported on civil servants spotted in gambling dens. As we have seen, however, the police’s ability and even willingness to perform this task was often in doubt. Sure enough, before long mixed bathing was commonplace and as for sex outside marriage that, so far as some commentators were concerned, appeared to be taking place in every nook and cranny of the city, churches not excepted. The boundaries of respectability were constantly being redrawn, in no small part because of the needs of commercial profit and the media. Society was policing itself as much as it allowed itself to be policed, and groups defined their own terms of acceptability. The shoemaker’s guild, for instance, had no difficulty accepting “Simonetta,” a gay man much prized by his fellow-guild members for his designs as well as his wit during their weekly parties; he in turn kept out of their interminable political rows—they were Archive Marxists and used to have regular brawls with members of the Communist Party—insisting that “these matters are not for women.” In the cinemas, the dance-halls, the streets and the tavernas, a new topography of pleasure was emerging: through the experiences it generated, and the memories and places it claimed, it was establishing the city in the affections of a new generation of inhabitants. The taverna, claimed one journalist, was drug-store in daytime, refuelling stop in the evening, and theatre of political and personal passions at night, when it became a “parliament, a session of the League of Nations, a conference to solve all outstanding social problems.” “The Beshchinar is your life, your lungs, your joy,” proclaimed an advertisement for the city’s oldest public park in 1934. It was no longer strictly true: the oil refineries which surrounded the once elegant Garden of the Princes where Sultan Abdul Mecid held court in 1859, the rail tracks, slums, tanneries and meat yards whose refuse polluted its beach, all pointed to its imminent and sad demise. But in a wider sense it was so: Salonica’s pleasure gardens, parks, suburban and seaside centres of entertainment and distraction were, in times of exile, unemployment, poverty and political unrest, the places that people would remember, that made the city itself not only bearable but, to an ever-larger proportion of its inhabitants, home.27
21
Greeks and Jews
AUNTIE DJAMIL
A: You don’t want to hear anything that has to do with modernism.
UNCLE BOHOR: Doesn’t “modernism” mean … “anti-Semitism”?1
LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY
BEHIND THE GRECO-TURKISH population exchange of 1923 lay an apparently simple logic: Muslims should be made to settle in Turkey and Orthodox Christians in Greece. But where were Salonica’s Jews to go? No one in Madrid or Lisbon (or Salonica for that matter) suggested they return to Iberia. Only a minority considered Palestine. Some did emigrate to France and the USA. But for the vast majority, their home was the city, and if asked they would have naturally described their nationality—as one emigrant did to the French authorities in 1916—as “Salonican.”2
As a result of its conquests in the First Balkan War, Greece’s total Jewish population had shot up from ten thousand to well over eighty thousand, of whom around seventy thousand lived in Salonica. The tiny communities of Old Greece spoke Greek and were highly assimilated whereas the Sefardic Jews of the north, who played a highly influential role in what was now the country’s second-largest city, were quite distinct from the Greeks in both language and culture. Lucien Wolf, a British Jew who helped draw up the post-WWI minorities treaties of Eastern Europe, wanted Greece to guarantee many of the traditional rights which the city’s Jews had enjoyed under the Ottomans. But when he discussed the idea with the Greek ambassador in London, the latter saw such concessions as preserving all the humiliations of an Ottoman system of capitulations, and retorted that “to ask us to make special distinctions or grant special privileges would be to upset the very principle of equality which is on the other hand demanded of us.” It was a fair point; Ottoman diplomats had been making it for decades before him.3
At the Paris Peace Conference, however, the idea of guaranteeing minority rights in law won the day and most states in eastern Europe were forced to accept the principle. In 1920, the Venizelos government passed legislation defining the constitutional position of Greek Jewry and this came into effect two years later. The rights and duties of the rabbinate were spelled out for the first time, the old property qualifications for voting in communal elections were scrapped, and all adult males over twenty-one were granted the vote. Jewish traders were allowed to make Saturday not Sunday their day of rest, and to keep their accounts in Judeo-Spanish.4
From the Greek point of view, the key to turning Jews into full citizens of their new country was language. Before 1912, few Jews in Salonica had bothered to learn Greek. From 1915, however, all Jewish (and Muslim) community schools in receipt of public funds were obliged to teach it. Jewish children were not forced to attend what Greek civil servants called “our schools”—whose instruction was described as “rather classical” and “incompatible with Jewish customs and nature”—and instead Athens invested in the Jewish schools themselves, providing language teachers, and later actual buildings. In this way, the younger generation learned Greek quickly and by the Second World War, many Jewish children were fluent, having taken part in school productions of such Greek classics as “Golfo the Shepherdess,” or the stirring story of Leonidas and the three hundred. After one school play, a Judeo-Spanish paper proudly reported in 1932: “Many Christian friends who followed the performance assured us that they could not tell that the actors were Jews, so beautiful and correct was their Greek. We single out Miss Emilia Nachmia, who played with naturalness the role of Syrmo, Miss Esther Habib, daughter of our chief rabbi, who played Froso, Miss Matilda Almosnino, who moved us in the role of Krinio …”5
For the older generation it was harder, of course. According to the satirists, Uncle Ezra would take the wrong bus because he didn’t know how to read the name of the destination, while Auntie Benuta’s Greek was so poor that when the postman arrived with a registered letter, she had to seek help from her niece, Sunhula. But even Judeo-Spanish changed with the times, and Greek phrases rushed in. Albert Molho, a leading Jewish journalist, wrote in 1939: “Our assimilation to Hellenism is to be noted not only in the thousand and one manifestations of our public and private life. One sees it in our language as well: even when we speak Judesmo, one still sees we are Hellenes. Judeo-Spanish, which once overflowed with Turkish words … today shows clear signs of Greek influence.” By the late 1930s readers of some Judesmo publications wanted a page in Greek: “in my opinion,” wrote one, “the idea is not bad because as things are going, in time readers of Judeo-Spanish will be rare, since the younger people are reading Greek newspapers more, and in the schools [Judeo-]Spanish is no longer studied.”6
The language question reflected the spectrum of attitudes to assimilation more generally among the city’s Jews. French remained the language of the cultured elite, especially among those wealthy enough to send their children to the foreign schools. Local communists stood up for the continued use of Judeo-Spanish, the vernacular of the workers. But a middle-class minority stressed the need for fluency in Greek in order to “give Greece good Greek citizens who will, at the same time, be no less good Jews.” In the view of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, religion was a matter of private conscience, Judeo-Spanish a backward dialect holding up intellectual progress, and cultural assimilation a necessity. “If I speak about assimilation,” wrote one,
I do so not out of Greek patriotism but for the sake of Jewish interests. I believe that in order for the Jews to be able to live here, they need to assimilate to the environment in which they live. The fewer barriers there are between Greeks and Jews, the easier it will be for us to live here. Our purpose is not to be ostentatiously patriotic, but to safeguard the existence of the Jewish population. If assimilation is not the correct means of doing this, let us suggest another way.
This view was opposed chiefly by the Zionists. They accused the Alliance of betraying Judaism and demanded a prominent place in the school curriculum for Hebrew. Relatively unimportant before the First World War, Zionism became far more popular in the 1920s. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had been hailed with enthusiasm in the city, and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s visit in 1926—unlike his earlier, pre-war one—elicited exuberant demonstrations outside his hotel.7 But while many sympathized with the Zionists’ desire for an assertion of Jewish ethnic identity, they felt there was little point wasting “hour after hour learning a language such as Hebrew, which is of no use to anyone here.” As a Greek analyst of these language battles remarked:
Even now, when no restrictions are placed on the teaching of Hebrew … Hebrew is neither learned properly nor is there any need for it in the everyday lives of the Jews.8
The truth was that behind these struggles over language lay new attitudes to politics. By eliminating the old property qualification from community elections, the Greek authorities had unwittingly undermined the old Ottoman Jewish notable class and reduced the power of its assimilationist message. Both the communists and the Zionists profited from this and were able to draw upon the votes of the thousands of the poor, including those who had suffered most from the fire and its aftermath. In addition, for much of the interwar period the post of chief rabbi was vacant and this meant that there was no one to play the kind of unifying role which Saul Modiano or Ascher Covo had done half a century earlier.
The first communal elections in 1926 were a two-way fight between the communists and everyone else—Zionists and assimilationists alike—who banded together into a so-called Jewish Union to stop the left. They elected fifty-eight candidates as opposed to twelve communists. But deep ideological divisions existed among the opponents of the latter—chiefly over how far to accommodate Greek demands for assimilation. In 1930, while the communist vote stayed constant, the Zionists split into different factions. At this point, Zionism, though internally divided, was undoubtedly the leading political force within the community. Yet four years later, in the last communal elections of the interwar period, both the communist and the assimilationist votes held steady, while the vote of the pro-Jabotinsky radical Zionists collapsed. The truth was that Salonica’s Jews were so deeply divided along
ideological lines that they were more or less incapable of unified action. Communal democracy and the collapse in the power of the old Ottoman-Jewish bourgeois elite made administering community affairs harder rather than easier. Many voters evidently felt alienated from politics, and in 1930 there was an abstention rate of perhaps 50 per cent. But the accusation that the city’s Jews were a hot-bed of socialism was misplaced: the extreme left was always a minority cause, though it was a larger minority—typically between 15 and 20 per cent—than among non-Jews. The main trend was that a large part of the community first embraced and then lost faith in Zionism.9
The idea of founding a Jewish national home in Palestine gained currency in the city only from the start of the twentieth century. After Chief Rabbi Jacob Meir arrived from Jerusalem in 1907 the movement acquired a network of clubs, schools, newspapers. The 1917 fire, by destroying the old neighbourhood synagogues around which local networks of power and authority had formerly been based, also helped to foster the new kind of ethnic (rather than strictly religious) definition of community which the Zionists espoused.10