Pub Date : 2019-06-19DOI: 10.12681/HISTOREIN.14321
D. Michman
This article provides a survey of the main characteristics of the return process of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to their home countries in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with the goal to contextualise and compare the return to the Netherlands and Greece.
{"title":"Commonalities and Peculiarities of the Return to Life of Holocaust Survivors in their Home Countries: The Dutch and Greek Cases in Context","authors":"D. Michman","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.14321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.14321","url":null,"abstract":"This article provides a survey of the main characteristics of the return process of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to their home countries in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with the goal to contextualise and compare the return to the Netherlands and Greece.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45751480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-19DOI: 10.12681/HISTOREIN.14601
Eleni Beze
After the end of the Second World War, and as a result of the ensuing Greek Civil War (1946–1949), former resistance members went through a period of generalised, severe persecution. In this context, Jews who had survived the Shoah by taking part in the resistance in some way or by going into hiding under the protection of the resistance forces had to denounce their former comrades or communist rescuers. How did Greek Jews who had been influenced by leftist ideology respond to the politics of the civil war and its aftermath? How were their responses affected by the attitudes of the Greek state, Jewish community and State of Israel towards them? Following the traces left mainly in a) the archives of the Jewish Museum of Greece, the Jewish communities of Athens and Salonica, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; b) the Greek Jewish press of the period; c) personal accounts, essays and literature, I will attempt to explore the multiplicity of responses of leftist Greek Jews to the political and personal dilemmas of the post-Shoah period. I argue that despite different postwar (and prewar) political attitudes and experiences, leftist Greek Jews expressed two main tendencies: a tight relationship with the country’s Jewish communities and, at the same time, a strong tendency to leave for other countries, mainly Israel.
{"title":"Being Leftist and Jewish in Greece during the Civil War and its Aftermath: Constraints and Choices","authors":"Eleni Beze","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.14601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.14601","url":null,"abstract":"After the end of the Second World War, and as a result of the ensuing Greek Civil War (1946–1949), former resistance members went through a period of generalised, severe persecution. In this context, Jews who had survived the Shoah by taking part in the resistance in some way or by going into hiding under the protection of the resistance forces had to denounce their former comrades or communist rescuers. How did Greek Jews who had been influenced by leftist ideology respond to the politics of the civil war and its aftermath? How were their responses affected by the attitudes of the Greek state, Jewish community and State of Israel towards them? Following the traces left mainly in a) the archives of the Jewish Museum of Greece, the Jewish communities of Athens and Salonica, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; b) the Greek Jewish press of the period; c) personal accounts, essays and literature, I will attempt to explore the multiplicity of responses of leftist Greek Jews to the political and personal dilemmas of the post-Shoah period. I argue that despite different postwar (and prewar) political attitudes and experiences, leftist Greek Jews expressed two main tendencies: a tight relationship with the country’s Jewish communities and, at the same time, a strong tendency to leave for other countries, mainly Israel.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46182486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-19DOI: 10.12681/HISTOREIN.14360
Henriette-Rika Benveniste
The Jews who lived in Salonika in 1945 and who survived the extermination will of the Nazis form an exception. The article explores the life of camp survivors returning to their home city. Practical relief was mainly organised by the Jewish community. Besides mourning for the loss of entire families, economic hardship, scarcity of material resources and political insecurity were the main characteristics of those years. The article focuses on the life in a building belonging to the Jewish community, the former Allatini Orphanage, which became a “dormitory” to shelter about 60 homeless Jews, mostly camp survivors. It examines the extreme poverty, the demands, the sociability and the migration choices of men and women who depended on the community’s care. Their voices, their mourning and their thirst for a new life can be heard piercing the paperwork of the bureaucracy of a welfare system and will help us reconstruct a difficult return to “normality”.
{"title":"Allatini Dormitory, 3 Paraskevopoulou Street: Despair and Hope in Salonika after the Shoah","authors":"Henriette-Rika Benveniste","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.14360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.14360","url":null,"abstract":"The Jews who lived in Salonika in 1945 and who survived the extermination will of the Nazis form an exception. The article explores the life of camp survivors returning to their home city. Practical relief was mainly organised by the Jewish community. Besides mourning for the loss of entire families, economic hardship, scarcity of material resources and political insecurity were the main characteristics of those years. The article focuses on the life in a building belonging to the Jewish community, the former Allatini Orphanage, which became a “dormitory” to shelter about 60 homeless Jews, mostly camp survivors. It examines the extreme poverty, the demands, the sociability and the migration choices of men and women who depended on the community’s care. Their voices, their mourning and their thirst for a new life can be heard piercing the paperwork of the bureaucracy of a welfare system and will help us reconstruct a difficult return to “normality”.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46258850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-19DOI: 10.12681/HISTOREIN.14399
Odette Varon-Vassard
The genocide of the Greek Jews was almost total, with the extermination rate of more than 80 percent much higher than in most Western European countries. Nonetheless, the decades that followed the end of the war, the liberation of the camps and the difficult return of the survivors were ones of silence. Greece was no exception to the oblivion that shrouded the event for decades internationally. On the contrary, compared to other Western countries, there was a longer delay in recognising this memory at the level of both the state and of society. If it was established internationally in the 1980s, this memory (and the associated historical studies and publication of testimonies) in Greece began in the early 1990s. Since 2004, the interest of the state began to manifest itself in practice. Even so, the question remains whether this memory has been recorded in the collective memory of Greek society. This article attempts to outline the long and painful course from oblivion and silence to the emergence and reconstruction of the cultural memory of the Shoah in Greece, noting the most significant events that it comprises.
{"title":"The Emergence and Construction of the Memory of the Shoah in Greece (1945–2015): From Oblivion to Memory","authors":"Odette Varon-Vassard","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.14399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.14399","url":null,"abstract":"The genocide of the Greek Jews was almost total, with the extermination rate of more than 80 percent much higher than in most Western European countries. Nonetheless, the decades that followed the end of the war, the liberation of the camps and the difficult return of the survivors were ones of silence. Greece was no exception to the oblivion that shrouded the event for decades internationally. On the contrary, compared to other Western countries, there was a longer delay in recognising this memory at the level of both the state and of society. If it was established internationally in the 1980s, this memory (and the associated historical studies and publication of testimonies) in Greece began in the early 1990s. Since 2004, the interest of the state began to manifest itself in practice. Even so, the question remains whether this memory has been recorded in the collective memory of Greek society. This article attempts to outline the long and painful course from oblivion and silence to the emergence and reconstruction of the cultural memory of the Shoah in Greece, noting the most significant events that it comprises.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42200612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-19DOI: 10.12681/HISTOREIN.14627
Pothiti Hantzaroula
The high percentage of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Volos, compared to the devastating death rate in the rest of Greece, makes the city a case of its own. Scholars have analysed the factors that contributed to the survival rate of 74 percent of Volos’ Jewish population and dealt with survivors’ struggles to rebuild their lives after the Shoah. Yet, less attention has been paid to the construction of the memory of survivors, its complex reworking and its importance in shaping the lives and identities of communities. The study of the “exceptional” case of Volos through a microhistorical approach offers an opportunity to understand the variety, as well as the commonalities, of experiences of survivors among various communities in postwar Greece. Thus, questions such as postwar reintegration in the city, relations with the Christian population, the role of antisemitism in shaping postwar identities, and mixed marriages can be better understood when situated in a comparative perspective. The persistence of antisemitism in Volos against a highly assimilated community shows that there are no easy equations, either between survival and assimilation or between help by non-Jewish locals and a lack of antisemitism. By focusing on child survivors that went into hiding during the Shoah and by exploring the mutual relations and perceptions between the non-Jewish and Jewish population, the article aims to understand the ways in which such relationships and perceptions shaped postwar Jewish identities.
{"title":"Postwar Identity in the Making: Hidden Children in Volos (Greece)","authors":"Pothiti Hantzaroula","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.14627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.14627","url":null,"abstract":"The high percentage of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Volos, compared to the devastating death rate in the rest of Greece, makes the city a case of its own. Scholars have analysed the factors that contributed to the survival rate of 74 percent of Volos’ Jewish population and dealt with survivors’ struggles to rebuild their lives after the Shoah. Yet, less attention has been paid to the construction of the memory of survivors, its complex reworking and its importance in shaping the lives and identities of communities. The study of the “exceptional” case of Volos through a microhistorical approach offers an opportunity to understand the variety, as well as the commonalities, of experiences of survivors among various communities in postwar Greece. Thus, questions such as postwar reintegration in the city, relations with the Christian population, the role of antisemitism in shaping postwar identities, and mixed marriages can be better understood when situated in a comparative perspective. The persistence of antisemitism in Volos against a highly assimilated community shows that there are no easy equations, either between survival and assimilation or between help by non-Jewish locals and a lack of antisemitism. By focusing on child survivors that went into hiding during the Shoah and by exploring the mutual relations and perceptions between the non-Jewish and Jewish population, the article aims to understand the ways in which such relationships and perceptions shaped postwar Jewish identities.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44401230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Konstantinos Raptis, Die Grafen Harrach und ihre Welt 1884–1945","authors":"Ikaros Mantouvalos","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.17388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.17388","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Konstantinos Raptis. Die Grafen Harrach und ihre Welt 1884–1945. Vienna: Boehlau, 2017. 373 pp.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43970407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-19DOI: 10.12681/HISTOREIN.16773
Anthony Derisiotis
Review of Leonidas Karakatsanis, Turkish-Greek Relations: Rapprochement, Civil Society and the Politics of Friendship. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. xxi + 283 pp.
{"title":"Leonidas Karakatsanis, Turkish-Greek Relations: Rapprochement, Civil Society and the Politics of Friendship","authors":"Anthony Derisiotis","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.16773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.16773","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Leonidas Karakatsanis, Turkish-Greek Relations: Rapprochement, Civil Society and the Politics of Friendship. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. xxi + 283 pp.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46214879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-19DOI: 10.12681/HISTOREIN.18635
Eleni Gara
Review of Ali Yaycioglu. Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 347 pp.
Ali Yaycioglu的评论。帝国的伙伴:革命时代奥斯曼秩序的危机。斯坦福:斯坦福大学出版社,2016。347页。
{"title":"Ali Yaycioglu, Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions","authors":"Eleni Gara","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.18635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.18635","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Ali Yaycioglu. Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 347 pp.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48280879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-08-21DOI: 10.12681/HISTOREIN.10833
K. Papari
The interwar crisis as perceived by conservative German and Greek intellectuals focused particularly on national identity, which they thought to be decisively challenged and threatened by radical transformation. In Greece the intellectual elites undertook the task to interpret the crisis in order to frame a cultural programme concerning the meaning of Hellenism that incorporated their ideological and partisan assumptions. This article explores the notion of Greekness, and the ways it embraced and encapsulated the problems that bedevilled both state and society, during the period of the interwar crisis. It aims, first, to examine the intellectuals' narrative and production of the ideology of Greekness as a signifier that launched, implicitly and explicitly, the elements that constituted a new imaginary institution of the nation. To this end, it will examine theoretical schemes and cultural transfers from German academic currents and theorists of the time and the appeal of their proclamations. The ideology of Greekness offered a means for the government to resolve the issues of the interwar state and, in particular, the challenge of its political survival and continuity. My second aim is to trace the convergences and divergences of the concervative intellectuals' schema of Greekness with the equivalent aspirations of the Thirties Generation. By capturing the meaning of Greekness, the conservative intelligentsia expanded the criterion for Greekness beyond an aesthetic perception of Hellenism and its related conversation with European modernism, as the issue was employed by the writers and poets of the Thirties Generation. Conservative's examination of Greekness disclosed the way that the politics of culture both served and promoted a hegemonic discourse. In conclusion my paper holds that the intellectuals' main concern was to utilize the cultural capital of Hellenism in order to propose a technique of governance, numbering the Greek case among the counterpart nationalist project in Germany at the time. Greekness demonstrated anew an imaginary conceptualization and institutionalization of the nation, that was articulated in accordance with the ideological assertions of conservatives circles and became synonym with a pedagogy of national conformity.
{"title":"The Plurality of Greeknesses in Interwar Greece: A Matter of Culture or Politics?","authors":"K. Papari","doi":"10.12681/HISTOREIN.10833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12681/HISTOREIN.10833","url":null,"abstract":"The interwar crisis as perceived by conservative German and Greek intellectuals focused particularly on national identity, which they thought to be decisively challenged and threatened by radical transformation. In Greece the intellectual elites undertook the task to interpret the crisis in order to frame a cultural programme concerning the meaning of Hellenism that incorporated their ideological and partisan assumptions. This article explores the notion of Greekness, and the ways it embraced and encapsulated the problems that bedevilled both state and society, during the period of the interwar crisis. It aims, first, to examine the intellectuals' narrative and production of the ideology of Greekness as a signifier that launched, implicitly and explicitly, the elements that constituted a new imaginary institution of the nation. To this end, it will examine theoretical schemes and cultural transfers from German academic currents and theorists of the time and the appeal of their proclamations. The ideology of Greekness offered a means for the government to resolve the issues of the interwar state and, in particular, the challenge of its political survival and continuity. My second aim is to trace the convergences and divergences of the concervative intellectuals' schema of Greekness with the equivalent aspirations of the Thirties Generation. By capturing the meaning of Greekness, the conservative intelligentsia expanded the criterion for Greekness beyond an aesthetic perception of Hellenism and its related conversation with European modernism, as the issue was employed by the writers and poets of the Thirties Generation. Conservative's examination of Greekness disclosed the way that the politics of culture both served and promoted a hegemonic discourse. In conclusion my paper holds that the intellectuals' main concern was to utilize the cultural capital of Hellenism in order to propose a technique of governance, numbering the Greek case among the counterpart nationalist project in Germany at the time. Greekness demonstrated anew an imaginary conceptualization and institutionalization of the nation, that was articulated in accordance with the ideological assertions of conservatives circles and became synonym with a pedagogy of national conformity.","PeriodicalId":38128,"journal":{"name":"Historein","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46375587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}