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Paris Papamichos Chronakis, "The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule" (Stanford UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
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Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Roberto Maza
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Roberto Maza and today my guest is award winning author Paris Papamikos Kronakis. Paris is the author of the Business of Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonika From Ottoman to Greek Rule, published by Stanford University Press in 2024 and the recipients of the 2024 National Jewish Book Awards JDC Herbert Katzky Award Writing based on archival material and sponsored by the Jewish Book Council, the Business of Transition examines how the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigated the transition from empire to nation state in the early 20th century. In this social and cultural history, the author Paris shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonika, present day Thessaloniki, skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst revolution and war, rising ethnic tensions and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, the author traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members and civic leaders to illustrate how the self reinvention of a Jewish led bourgeoisie made a sea Greek. But before we delve into all of this, first things first. Paris. Welcome.
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
Thank you, Roberto. It's great to be with you. A great honor and a great pleasure.
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Roberto Maza
Okay, the first question I want to ask is, can you tell us something about yourself and the origins of the book?
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
So I am currently lecturer in Modern Greek History at Royal Holloway University of London. I did my undergraduate studies in my hometown, Thessaloniki. I was the first in my family to be born there. And we will talk more about the movement of people in and out of Thessaloniki later in the course of the interview. I then did my MA in Comparative History at the University of Essex in the uk. And it was then that I first became fascinated with the history of the middle classes in Europe. I combined this interest with awareness late in the day, relatively in the not so tender age of 21, of the Jewish as well as Muslim presence in my hometown in Thessaloniki. It came as a shock to me to realize that my hometown at the turn of the century was a multi ethnic city with a predominantly Jewish population. And so I combined these two interests. The interest in the history of the middle classes in Europe and an interest in the history of multi ethnic societies, questions of multi ethnic coexistence, tolerance. And in the book I try to understand how classes change in times of transition from empire to nation state. And this is a project that started a very long time ago when global history was just emerging and the interest in the late Ottoman Empire was reignited and passed through various changes in historiographical trends, from an interest in the history of capitalism to an interest in the history of post Ottoman legacies, to more recently, an interest in processes of deglobalization. And I think the book in some ways continues to speak to these kind of questions and sensitivities. I carried it with me to the US where I stayed for seven years, first teaching at Brown University and then at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And so, very much like its merchants, the book and its author traveled as well.
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Roberto Maza
I have a question about the book itself. Now, obviously the focus is on the late 19th century and the early 20th century, but I wonder if you can give us a sense of the organization, the structure of the book, and also if you can speak about the periodization, because obviously the book follows a specific periodization. And, you know, I'm just wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about why you chose that particular periodization and sort of a division of the book in both periods.
- [06:35]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
When I started researching the book, the periodization I followed was mostly determined by political changes. The end of the Ottoman Empire due to the Balkan wars in 1912, 1913, the First World War, and the arrival of refugees in the city of Thessaloniki in 1922, 1923, following the Greco Turkish exchange of populations at that time. But as I focused on the merchants, a very specific, powerful, but long neglected group, my sense of the changes they experienced and the changes that were meaningful to them, and therefore the periodization, the way their lives were temporarily broken, changed as well. So the book begins with the establishment of the most important commercial institution in the city, the late Ottoman Chamber of Commerce in 1876, and actually ends with its dissolution and refoundation according to the new Greek law in 1919. I also, in the course of my research, came to realize that the period of the Young turks, so the four years between 1908 and 1912 that were characterized by the reinstatement of the Ottoman Constitution, the dethronement of Sultan Abdul Hamid and the advent of mass politics in the Ottoman Empire were actually much more closely tightly connected to developments that followed the Balkan wars of 1912, 1913. So when it came to the organization of the book and the periodization, I found I was more comfortable with. Therefore I dared to suggest the period of the Young Turks from 1908 to 1912, the Balkan wars of 1912, 1913, and then the First World War from 1914 up to 1918, or essentially when it comes to Greece, because of the Greco Turkish War of 1919, 1922, form a whole. They merge, they coalesce. And so the book is organized actually in three parts. In the first part, I deal with the late Ottoman realities up to 1908. Then the second and more extensive part deals with the so called war decade, or the years of revolution and war, beginning with the Young tabik Revolution of 1908 and going up to the end of the Second World War, 1918, 1919. And then the third part traces this kind of post war period from 1919 relatively up to 1922, in order to understand how a transition, a first transition of the city into the Greek rule was affected. And so the book, when it comes to the periodization also, I think, makes an intervention in suggesting that rather than treating the 1910s a war decade as a decade of a city in limbo in between the Ottoman Empire and the Greek state. We can actually better understand it if we approach it as a decade of tremendous changes that were pointing towards Hellenization.
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Roberto Maza
I have a couple more questions about the book itself before we go into the chapters. And one is about the historical context now, Salonika or the Saloniki. And I guess I'm going to use both terms and I hope this is fine, is discussed in the context of the late 19th century, early 20th century. So can you describe briefly how the city looked like in that period of time?
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
It's interesting that you use both terms because the city is a city with a long history with inhabitants of very many different ethno religious backgrounds and therefore a city of many names. It is known today as the Saloniki, but its Jews called it Saloniki, its local Greeks Saloniki as well, the Ottoman Turks, the Bulgarian Solon and so on. And this matters because the city in the late 19th and early 20th century was a city, one might argue, of many interesting paradoxes, and it actually offers the historian only paradoxes. To begin with, it was a city both old and new. It was a city founded in antiquity, in the Hellenistic period, but it was a city that swelled, tripled its population over the course of the second half of the 19th century. It was the gateway of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, the most important port city of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, and the second competing with Izmir port of the Ottoman Empire after Istanbul. It was a city where its oldest population were the Jews, but it was also a city of many emigrants, primarily Christians from the Ottoman Macedonian hinterland. It was a city for that reason that was both Jewish and multi ethnic. Being a Salonican was a constitutive element of Jewish identity. Jews prided themselves of being the native population of the city, but it was also multi ethnic. It housed not only like every other multi ethnic port of the Eastern Mediterranean, a motley of all sorts, of all the new populations, but it stood apart for its big sizable group of Islamicized Jews, the Donme. So Thessaloniki or Salonika was both, one might argue, the Babel of the Mediterranean, but also the Jerusalem of the Balkans. It was also a city that like many other cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, lived out of commerce. It was a great emporium, interestingly enough, and I think you'll appreciate this as an Italian or be shocked to hear it, it didn't have an opera house. So in many ways it was a city of commerce. And commerce defined the identity of the city and gave it quite a unique character. But it was also a city, a coveted city, as Joseph Nehama called it. A city that is coveted by many competing nationalisms, the Greek, the Bulgarian, the Serbian, as well as a laboratory of politics, radical revolutionary politics. When it came to the Ottoman Turks, it was the birthplace of. Of the Young Turks and the Young Turk revolution. So Thessaloniki, in many ways offers a very interesting example in order to examine how commerce, coexistence and politics functioned in the Eastern Mediterranean of the first period of globalization. But it also, in many ways, stands apart in being Jewish, but also Balkan. A city that looks outward to the sea, but also inward to the Macedonian hinterland.
- [15:20]
Roberto Maza
Now, speaking about commerce, the book focuses on Jewish and Greek merchants. So can you briefly talk about merchants? Who are they? What's their role in the city? And perhaps also about the two communities under scrutiny, the Jewish one and the Greek one.
- [15:39]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
We tend to understand, research and write about commerce as a practice. We focus on networks, we focus on businesses, we focus on the way the trade was conducted. And this is fine. But commerce in the late Ottoman Empire, and not only is also quite a few other things. To begin with, commerce identified the urban elite of the city most, the predominant majority of the Thessalonikis. Salonica's urban elite, were merchants of the likes of a Latini, Modiano, Fernandez, and so on and so forth. So commerce was very closely linked to an urban identity. The notables of a community were also primarily merchants. And so commerce in the late 19th century, particularly when it comes to the Jewish community, also denoted the most or was associated with the most prominent Jews. It signaled that is a certain noble, acceptable way that should be and was emulated to be a good Jew. But commerce also in the late Ottoman Empire, as I came to find out, also denoted progress, civilization, the progress of civilization in the land. Modernization, being a good Ottoman citizen, and therefore it was linked also with Ottomaness. So when it comes to commerce and its practitioners, the merchants, that is, we have to think more holistically in order to understand the very many different ways that commerce mattered and shaped a city, an empire, and of course, a local and regional economy. Now, commerce had very different, nonetheless, connotations for the Jews and the Greeks. And now I'm coming back to the question of communities. The Jewish community in the city was the predominant community. Jews were almost half of the population, around 50,000 people. It was a highly stratified community, unlike many in Eastern Europe or elsewhere in Europe. And merchants, prominent Jewish merchants, were at the top of it. They were also native to the city and with a very strong attachment to it, to the point that their strong feelings for Thessaloniki, for Salonika, also generated some sort of anti Constantinopolitan or anti Istanbulot emotions. The Greeks, on the other hand, the Greek Orthodox Christians, that is rather than Greeks, were a much, much smaller community, a community that never numbered more than 10,000. They were mostly newcomers in the city. Most of the prominent Greek merchants can come from present day Greek central Macedonia. And most of their businesses were for that reason actually outside the city in present day Naousa and Ver. And they were therefore quite marginal in the city life and quite introspect. And so what we notice in Thessaloniki, and this is one feature that makes it stand apart, is that Jews in the late Ottoman Empire not only had adopted a majority mentality, but they were the Salonican community par excellence. They set the pace of urban life at the level of economy, society and culture. Whereas Greeks, Greek Orthodox Christians, that is, had a much more introvert, inward looking identity, which made them, given also the fact that most of them were recent migrants, a kind of a community of being in the city but not being off the city.
- [20:28]
Roberto Maza
And I want to go back to the question of identity in a second, but first I would like you to summarize reading a few words because you already mentioned a lot about your work. So if you can summarize briefly your argument and give the listeners a sense of sources that you have used throughout.
- [20:46]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
The book, so very briefly, almost epigraphically, I would say that the argument focuses on a couple of themes. A that commerce matters when it comes to understanding late Ottoman realities and in particular transitions from Ottoman to post Ottoman states. Ethnicity might or should not be the only lens to look at it. Commerce and its practitioners, the merchants were extremely powerful, but hitherto neglected or even silenced voices that deserve to be brought back to life. Second point is that for that reason transitions impact both minorities, of course, like the Jews, but also majorities like the Greek Orthodox Christians. Transitioning from an Ottoman to a Greek nation state context was a difficult if not traumatic process for the Greek Orthodox Christian inhabitants of Thessalonica as well. And so for that reason, I think transitions should be understood less as a process of minoritization and nationalization of a city and a class becoming Greek, and more as a transformation of identity. The impact that is on all the constitutive elements of those merchants, their class, that is their ethnic, but also, one could argue, their local, as I do, or even their gender identity. In short, it meant a Very different thing to be a bourgeois merchant in Greek Thessaloniki than it was in late Ottoman Salonica. And you can sense this if you broaden your scope and look for primarily local sources. So one of the things that this book does is bring forward the rich local archives. Now, these are not necessarily mostly Jewish, but as women's and gender history has told us, if you start looking, you will find women else everywhere. And this is also true with the Jews and to a lesser extent with the Muslim merchants of Thessaloniki as well. So the book gives credit to the local sources, the archives of the local commercial and industrial associations, the archives of the local chamber of commerce, of local banks and newspapers. And also because the Saloniki and its inhabitants were so deeply inscribed into global networks, it also uses archives dispersed all around Europe, from London to Paris to Italy, and of course Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. So when it comes to the sources, these are global, meaning both global and local. And hopefully this is the story the book also aspires to tell.
- [24:18]
Roberto Maza
I appreciated the fact that you mentioned how global RV cities, I mean, as someone working on Jerusalem, people think that everything is about Jerusalem, is in the city. The reality is that is everywhere in the world. So Salonik is the same. Now I want to go back to identity, which is really a central feature of your book. So in, in the first part of the book, where you look at the late Ottoman era, you talk about the social structure of a city. And I'm curious about the relationship between commerce and bourgeoisie as an identity marker, because again, I had the feeling that, at least in my eyes, in my knowledge, they were already together. But actually you say something different. And I'm very curious about how you identify them as two different markers, but also coming together at some point.
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
As I, as I said earlier, commerce was linked to being a bourgeois experiencing and performing a bourgeois identity in Thessaloniki of the late Ottoman Empire. But I would also dare say in every other major port city of the eastern Mediterranean. In many different ways, merchants were, when it came to professional, to professions, the majority of the nascent ascending upper middle class, the bourgeoisie of Salonica. They also manned and run the upcoming bourgeois public sphere, made primarily of associations, voluntary associations, but also restaurants, cafes and the like. All the signs that is of bourgeois modernity. Commerce was also highly valued. It was linked with progress and as I suggested, it was associated with Ottomanism and hence the idea of being a good citizen. But it was also linked with communal duty and even with an emerging sense of being a national subject, being a good Greek and conversely to be a bourgeois to be an upper middle class person also meant because of these positive connotations of commerce, to be interested in things commercial, to get an education that might involve, for example, accounting, to be involved in commercial clubs, clubs that primarily. That also that were primarily run by merchants. And in this way, these two notions merged, but also made the merchants the most prominent and obvious model to follow for someone to become a model bourgeois person.
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Roberto Maza
Let me now start talking about some individuals so we can actually add an identity to these merchants, these bourgeois of the city. So in Salonica today, Jewish presence is nominal, right? If you visit the city, you can see the traces of Jewish presence, but the Jewish community is virtually down to zero. Can you give us some more details about Jewish individuals that you mention in the book, so that we can bring them back to life, like Abram and David Herrera, the Modianos and others.
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
So the book has an interesting kind of structure. Each of the three parts I mentioned opens with a long vignette, a portrait of a key merchant and a neglected one. The first part opens with a long vignette of Jacob Cazz, a prominent merchant community, notable and major personality in both communal and local politics throughout the late Ottoman and post Ottoman period. Khazaiz is now forgotten, but one can actually see how powerful these people were simply by following a year in his life. And it is possible, because of the wealth of the surviving material, surprisingly to do so. Kazes was or became president of the Jewish community, was an almost permanent member of the communal council. He was also deeply involved into the local chamber of commerce, becoming also its president. He flirted with the Zionists in order to serve his community. At some point he was also a highly successful businessman that managed to survive the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation state. And he was also someone whose trajectory also helps us understand how the practice of commerce changed from the mid 19th to the late 19th century and then the 20th century. Kazess started as an apprentice in a Greek commercial house, Greek Orthodox, that is. He then formed his own business, became a Dorian of the Jewish community, but somehow later in the day, in the course of the 1910s, was also instrumental in in guiding the community through the process of transitioning and integrating into the new state. So Kazesh is also a very interesting figure in understanding or attempting to understand Greek Jewish relations and their changes over time from a commercial and business perspective. The Herreras are different in this case because, as the name suggests, they have an Italian origin. But the eras were also were Jewish very successful businessmen. They owned one of the most important department stores in the city. They became deeply involved in philanthropic and later political endeavors. But they were also very active members of the local, as it was called Italian colony, La Colonia Italiana. And so the Herreras also point financing, for example, the construction of the Italian hospital in Thessaloniki, playing hosts to Italian dignitaries visiting the city and so on and so forth. So the Herreras also make evident in, I think, very tangible ways, the multifaceted elements of Jewishness and how outward and outward looking Salonic and Jewishness was. And for that reason also how important a sense of Italianness or Italianita was for a bourgeois identity.
- [32:38]
Roberto Maza
I'd love to unpack the Italianness and the question of, you know, being Italian there, but obviously we have to talk about other things. It's a fascinating topic. Now let me move further up the periodization. So in July 1908, the Ottoman Empire underwent what we normally call as autominist, the Constitutional Revolution, which was truly celebrated across the empire by people of every religious and ethnic background. Again, I found it fascinating that, you know, people celebrated in Saloniki. And I, as someone working on Jerusalem in the same period, I had same sources. People were celebrating regardless of their identity. But I found your discussion of the Jews and Greeks in relation to the revolution fascinating, particularly because. Because you say that the Jews were a house in disorder and the Greeks won in order.
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
Why so when. When approaching the. The 1908 Constitutional Revolution and the entire second constitutional period, which, in the case of Thessaloniki, lasted from 1908 to 1912. So it was a very short but extremely compact period. My intention was to focus less on questions of ethnicity, which have been, well, I think, researched, argued and documented the passage that is from a period of fraternization and harmonious, tolerant relations between the different ethno religious communities of the Ottoman Empire to one of heightened nationalism, partisanship and increasing violence. So move from that focus of ethnicity to questions of class and actually ask what does a revolution do to class relationships? Now, in the course of my research, I understood that the two are actually intertwined. That one cannot talk of class relations without taking ethnicity into account. And on the other hand, one cannot really understand ethnic tensions without attending to questions of class. To be more specific, what the 1908 Constitutional Revolution did to the Jewish community in Thessaloniki, but also, I think elsewhere, was that it shook bourgeois hegemony. The hegemony, that is, and I use very consciously the Gramscian term here, of the commercial bourgeoisie over the entire Jewish population of the city for two reasons. A, because of the very rapid growth of Zionism which to my view at least was a lower middle class movement or middle class movement, and the emergence of Jewish socialism, I.e. the Jewish socialist, the predominantly Jewish socialist federation. So there were these two communal developments. But because of growing ethnic tensions, primarily in the marketplace, between Greek Orthodox Christians and Jews, the ability of the Jewish, of Jewish, of the Jewish bourgeois, communal elite to safeguard and secure Jewish interests, economic interests, particularly of the lower ranks stevedores, port workers in the city was very severely challenged. And so their own position as Immaculate Jews models to emulate rightful leaders of the community was challenged. On the other hand, when it comes to the Greek Orthodox Christians, I think that the integrative power of Greek nationalism managed to also solidify class relations within the community in a way that secured the hegemony or the dominance or the control that the up and coming Greek merchants exercised over it. So one can actually see how the 1908 Constitutional Revolution impacted the two communities in very different ways. And how the advent of mass politics, of people taking the streets, of people demonstrating, of people boycotting other communities or nations, actually rendered the Jewish community a laboratory of politics, for sure, demonstrating its internal dynamism, but shaking at the same time Jewish hegemony as well as the merchants hegemony in the city. Why so? Because in the public discourse, the most prominent, I argue, the most menacing, the most hostile figure for each community was the other community's merchants.
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Roberto Maza
Now, the constitutional period was short lived, as you mentioned, because in 1912 the outbreak of the Balkan wars changed everything for the city of Salonika. The city change ends. And I was wondering if you can talk about the changes that occurred in the city following the war.
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
So one of the points I make is that actually provocatively so, is that the war themselves didn't actually change much. Not because I want to emphasize continuities, but actually because I want to stress how much, as we've already mentioned, was already changing during the second constitutional period, already, that is, from 1908. So almost counterintuitively, the war to begin with, when it came to the Jews, intensified internal divisions. Rather than solidifying the community and unifying the community in the face of an external enemy. The Greeks were up and coming already before 1912. The wars gave them the opportunity to further consolidate their position in the city, although at the same time they were extremely concerned and worried about the impact of integrating into a nation state, that is Greece having numerous and major ports, primarily the port of Piraeus. The Balkan wars didn't also initially change the way the merchants of the city did Politics and I spent a long time in, in one of the chapters describing how the Jews, Christian Orthodox as well as Muslim merchants of the city came together in order to defend their interests against the new drawing of the borders. So the Balkan wars were definitely a watershed when it came to the change of borders, to the way commerce was or was about to be conducted, to the breaking of the Ottoman ikumin of the Ottoman Balkans as a unified business space which Salonican merchants predominated. But in doing so they generated a panic across all communities and therefore precipitated or accelerated changes that were already happening. So one can think of the Balkan wars therefore as both a new beginning, but also as a kind of an ending.
- [41:49]
Roberto Maza
Now, two years later, obviously we have the outbreak of World War I. And in that case Greece remained neutral for a period of time. And yet the city obviously had to face this calamity, not only because the border was just a few kilometers away, but because then Salonika as a port city was involved in different ways in the war. So can you talk about trade and business in this period of time and also how communities faced the war and the calamity that was brought by the war.
- [42:23]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
So the story of Salonika in the First World War is extremely fascinating. Salonika does indeed become even more acutely a border town. The front is essentially at some point at the outskirts of the city, but it is also the beginning of the war. A neutral city or a port city of a neutral state. And that means incredibly lucrative trade opportunities, business opportunities for its merchants. All the routes, business routes are kind of reawaken and so Jewish in particular as well as Muslim and to a lesser extent Greek Orthodox Christian merchants make enormous profits by trading in board liminally legal ways with, with the Central Powers, that is with Austria, Hungary and, and Germany. Then in late 1915, early 1916, the so called army of the Orient, the combined French, British and later Italian and Russian force of almost 200 soldiers arrives in the city. And so a new city is established. And this means, particularly for Jews, because they were still in control of the most important areas of commercial activity, this meant enormous and enormously profitable business opportunities. Feeding, dressing, entertaining, inebriating, even the. The. This multi ethnic army was a lifeline for the major Jewish businesses and allowed them not only to survive the war, but actually to thrive. And so the war meant many things for the merchants. And we can also talk a little bit more later about what it meant for their city too.
- [44:56]
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
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Paris Papamikos Kronakis
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- [46:21]
Roberto Maza
To bring a character here, the, you know, a figure, a key figure in Salonika Joseph or you know, with Italian name Giuseppe Misrahi. You know, he's a key figure. He's certainly a very important character in the city. And yet after the war he left. You know, I didn't know this character, but as you were describing, I was surprised to understand that he just left. And so I was wondering if you can talk about the consequences of the war for the Jewish and Greek communities. Also from a demographic perspective.
- [47:01]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
Is an emblematic figure. In many ways it encapsulates the history of the community, its growth and development, even transformation during the second half of the 19th century and its attempt to navigate the very tumultuous waters of the Balkan wars and the First World War and eventually the integration into the new state. He tried to he spearheaded the modernization of communal education in the late 19th century. He was the first president of the industrialist association in 1914. He was a member of both the late Ottoman and then the Greek Chamber of Commerce. He collaborated with Greek entrepreneurs trying to solidify his position in the new and Greek economy of the city. And yet at the end of the day, once the First World War was over in 1919, he left for France. The war meant different things for the two communities. For The Jewish community. It meant a period of relative security because of the presence of the British and particularly the French. But the end of it also brought the realization that the future of the city was going to be national. The city itself was going to be a Greek city. The Greek state had grown during the war. It had now a greater and stronger grasp over the economy, both of the city and of the country. And so the possibilities of Jews to continue to exercise their dominance were very rapidly diminishing. For the Greeks, the war might not have been as lucrative an affair as they expected, but the end of it meant that. And the changes it brought because of state intervention in the economy, because of the closer, due to language and affinity and loyalty, one might even argue, to the Greek state meant a renewed sense of security. It also meant that in the broader Greek economy, they would be now the ones representing the city, either with or mostly against Athens. So they were now emerging as the true Salonicans in the place of the Jews.
- [50:31]
Roberto Maza
And I want to keep talking about it, discussing the question of Hellenization, which, in your words, seems to have been slow but a relentless process. So how did identities change in the city? And also I'm curious about your assessment of this process, particularly in terms of its immediate results. So what did happen to the communities? 1. It was clear, as you said earlier, that the city was to become Greek, and that became apparent to everybody.
- [51:05]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
Hellenization was relentless, but its base and its agents changed over time. In the 1910s, I argue Hellenization was mostly a local affair. It was driven from the city. It meant, for example, the establishment of Greek civil society institutions, such as, for example, the Red Cross, or the Hellenization of local Ottoman institutions, such as, for example, the Chamber of Commerce. The role of the state, that is, as a vehicle of social and demographic engineering was not yet apparent. The state did not intervene in the process of Hellenization, for example, through education. That would only happen in the 1920s and early 1930s. So Hellenization involved the locals more than actually the central state. The second thing to keep in mind is that Hellenization meant a change of both ethnic identities, what it meant to be a Jew. Jews now also had to become Greek citizens to somehow link or rethink their joyousness in relation to Greekness, and in the process, rethink Greekness as well. But it also meant a new understanding of class, what it meant to be a bourgeois. And so I argue that in the 1910s, particularly towards the end, to be a bourgeois was much more closely now tied to Greekness to be a good merchant was also more closely tied to Greekness, because most of the commercial institutions were now Hellenized and Greeks, Greek Orthodox Christians, that is, were leading and managing them, rather than, as was the case in the Ottoman, the late Ottoman Empire, linked to Jewishness. So Hellenization, at least in the 1910s, contrary to what happened after 1922, when more than 150,000 refugees arrived from Asia Minor in Thessaloniki, reversing the demographic order, hellenization in the 1910s were more about the local Greeks securing positions of power in the local civil society at the expense of the Jews, but also through negotiation with the Jews, rather than a drastic watershed like demographic change that made Greeks the demographically predominant element in the city at the expense of the Jews. So a more, one might argue, subtle but nonetheless powerful process.
- [54:39]
Roberto Maza
I have a couple of more questions and I want to go back to something that you discussed at the beginning of the book, but also then you tracing back at the end of a book itself. So you talk about clubs and associations, which are obviously very important in the structure of a city. And your last chapter is called From Clubs to Associations. Can you tell us about the difference and how did this process of moving from clubs to association change the city intercommunal relations and also the commercial structure of the city itself?
- [55:17]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
So one of the arguments I make, and one of the interventions I think this book makes in the historiography of urban life in the late Ottoman Empire, is that what we conventionally call modernization, Europeanization, urban modernity, was intimately associated with the establishment of clubs in the late 19th century, from the 1870s onwards, and most importantly, commercial clubs, this was, that is one of the ways that that the European middle class bourgeois practice of associationism and the ensuing formation of an urban or public bourgeois sphere came into being in the late Ottoman Empire. Clubs were instrumental, and these were specific spaces in between the family space, the home and the communal or religious space, the synagogue or the church. There were, for that reason, neutral. There were spaces of leisure where ideally one would not discuss business questions. And there were also spaces where one would cultivate a certain idea of the self. One would have to behave a certain way, one would have to demonstrate good manners, read, engage with each other as equals. Clubs were also important in the late Ottoman Salonica, as well as elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, in bringing communities together. But because clubs were primarily, even multi ethnic, clubs were primarily manned by Jews. They blended multiethnical existence with Jewish visibility in the emerging public spaces of the city. And so clubs were instrumental in Making Salonica bourgeois, but also Jewish. Fast forward to the 1910s, the late 1910s. What Ann notices is that clubs, both numerically as well as in terms of their importance, recede. They almost vanish. No new clubs are established. Most of the old ones decay their presence in the press or in public discourse in general. Waynes in the stead come the associations. Associations were professional organizations and they flourished right after the Greek law and associations was introduced in the so called new lands. The annexed the Ottoman territory, the former Ottoman territories annexed by Greece in 1914. And so associations now did a very interesting thing. A they separated merchants as such from other parts of the bourgeois or upper middle class. Associations also, such as, for example, the association of the Industrialists of Greek Macedonia, the Commercial association of Thessaloniki, but also other professional associations were also structured not around the notion of commerce or middle classness as some sort of an ideal, but around the notion of professional interest. They existed in order to promote and support the interests of a specific professional body. And those associations were established not just by the upper middle class, but also by the lower middle class, even the working classes. The phenomenon of associationism ceased to be so exclusively associated with being a middle class person. This, I argue, signaled a new way of being bourgeois and middle class. And also signaled a new way of being a merchant, hence Hellenization. To go back to your previous question, also meant a change in the way of being an upper middle class, either Jew or Greek.
- [60:17]
Roberto Maza
As the last question I want to ask you about the Jewish community, Can you comment on how Zionism was experienced amongst the Jews of Salonica?
- [60:30]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
This is. This is a fascinating but also very tricky question. Zionism meant many things. To begin with, it was not a singular uniform movement. There were many trends. It. If I were to summarize, I would say that Zionism was, for Salonic and Jews, less of a strategy of exit immigrating to the land of Israel, and more a way of being in the city. It offered a new understanding of what it meant to be Jewish. A new understanding, therefore, of living and integrating in a society where ethnicity and nationality mattered more than anything else. It made that is Jews compatible, if one might argue, if one might say so to the Greeks. And you can sense that in the press of the period where actually true Zionism was loaded precisely because it meant negating what was understood as Franco Levantinism or being a rootless cosmopolitan. It made that is Jews legible to the Greeks, understandable. So for the Jews, it was a way of surviving in a national setting in a productive and positive manner. And it was also a way of claiming to be both Greeks and Jews, claiming that is a supplementary or dual identity, arguing that Jews in the new Greek state could be both good Greek citizens as well as good Jews. So for Jews, and this is kind of a paradox, Zionism and its history is. Is a story of integration and in the process changing what it meant to be Greek to because it pushed for a more expansive understanding of Greekness. But for the Greek Orthodox Christians, Zionism, or as I have argued elsewhere, anti Zionism meant negating the Greekness of the Jews. And so we see, as I have argued elsewhere in the interwar period, anti Zionism being the first and foremost version or manifestation or form of anti Semitism. Zionists were demonized, were vilified, were treated by the local Greek press and the local Greek state authorities as the most un Greek or anti Greek form of. Of Jewishness. So anti Zionism has a much longer history than we tend to think today. It is not born with the State of Israel and it also has a much more diverse history as well.
- [64:22]
Roberto Maza
Last question. Can you draw some conclusions for the listeners about your book, what you wanted to achieve from the beginning and what you, you know, think you have achieved in telling the story of Salonika in this particular period of time?
- [64:38]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
I think, as I said in the beginning, and it dawned on me very late in the day, I understand I might have been a little bit too theoretical, abstract and conceptual in this conversation of ours, but when I was actually revisiting and revising the book manuscript and preparing the blurb and doing putting the final touches, I suddenly realized that the. The key takeaway, at least for me, is that commerce matters in very many different ways. And this might seem as a to be a truism, but commerce actually allowed me to rethink quite a few major issues in the historiography of the late modern Eastern Mediterranean and of the Jewish world of Central East Central and Southeastern Europe. And this is that transitions are not linear processes. One should better think of them as crooked lines. They start and end and they start again. And in my case, 1919 or 1922 with the arrival of the refugees is both an end of one way to transition and the beginning of another. The transitions are not just about minorities, majority populations, the Greeks in my case, but for example, the Hungarians in the case of the Austro Hungarian Empire, Hungarian Christians, the Polish Catholic Christians in the case of interwar Poland, Muslim Egyptians in the case of postcolonial Egypt, also experience in sometimes quite traumatic ways the transition from an imperial to a national setting. It doesn't happen automatically. And it's not just a moment of jubilation, as national narratives would have us think. And the case might also be true, and this is actually true for, say, Trieste in Italy, where its Italian populations encountered quite a few difficulties in the process of integration. Looking at commerce, I think, also allows us to rethink class in the 20th century. We usually tend to associate class with the 19th century and the big cosmopolitan bourgeoisies as part of it, dying or waning, with the cataclysmic changes the First World War brought. I would like to take this question of class and the question of the Eastern Mediterranean bourgeoisie in particular, to the 20th century. And rather than talk of a decline of a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and lament it, think a little bit about what happened to it in real historical terms. And finally, think about how people understand and make sense and feel what might be to them or appear to them as a period of decline. Decline is a term historians, and public historians in particular in our part of the world, use a lot. But historians seldom write histories of decline use, that is, decline less as a easy explanation and more as a lens and a phenomenon that merits its own analysis. And so my story is the story of people trying to come into grips with monumental changes, experiencing them in very many different ways as Jews, as Greeks, as Salonicans, as merchants, as men and as women, and also actively shaping them rather than merely and passively experiencing their consequences. They might have failed, but these failures also point to the different futures that were imagined back then, futures that went beyond the nation state, and perhaps to futures that it is worthwhile attending to nowadays when our future seems quite gloomy.
- [70:24]
Roberto Maza
This was Paris Papa Mijos Chronakis, author of the Business of Transition Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonika from Ottoman to Greek Rule. The book was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. Paris, thank you so much.
- [70:42]
Paris Papamikos Kronakis
Thank you so much, Roberto, for hosting me. Sa.