JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES最新文献

Reviewed by:

• The Fourth of August Regime and Greek Jewry, 1936–1941 by Katerina Lagos
• Mogens Pelt (bio)

Although this book's title might suggest a focus solely on Greek Jewry under the Metaxas regime, its scope is much broader. It traces the history of Greek Jews from the Greek Revolution to the death of Ioannis Metaxas in January 1941, while at the same time presenting a comprehensive historical analysis of the relationship between Greek Jewry and the Greek state and society during the Metaxas regime. It may seem counterintuitive to end the book with the death of Metaxas since, only a few years later, most members of the Jewish communities in Greece were killed during the Axis occupation: 85% of Greece's local Jewish population were exterminated during the Holocaust, one of the highest percentages in Europe. The role of the Greek population ranged from assisting the Nazis in the deportation to hiding Jews and protecting them from persecution.

Lagos's main argument for zeroing in on the Metaxas period is twofold. First, the historiography concerning Greek Jews has focused mainly on the Holocaust, and we need to go beyond that period to establish an analytical context and explain the prior development of relations between Christian and Jewish Greeks. Second, Lagos argues that that the treatment of Jews by Greek Christians during the deportations should not be seen as a culmination of their treatment under Metaxas. On the contrary: the Metaxas dictatorship was the last period of peaceful Christian-Jewish relations before the Holocaust, something for which Metaxas himself was credited: in November 1937, he was inducted into the Golden Book by the Zionists of Greece, and the rabbi of Thessaloniki congratulated Metaxas on reestablishing an atmosphere of peace and calm for the Jewish community since taking power the year before. At first glance, when seen in a European context where most authoritarian regimes enacted [End Page 127] anti-Jewish legislation, this may appear as a conundrum; even more so because the Metaxas dictatorship resembled the regimes in Germany and Italy in its way of presenting itself to the public. Yet the regime's stance toward Jews was in fact much more favorable than that of previous governments, including those of Eleftherios Venizelos, the leader of the Liberal Party who had previously governed Greece in long stints since 1910. This raises two questions: How should we understand the Metaxas regime, and why did it follow such a different policy compared to contemporary Europe and to previous Greek governments?

Lagos's thesis is that prejudice toward

Abstract:

World's fairs organized at the turn of the twentieth century offered glimpses into humanity's aspirations for the future. Since they were primarily a place to promote progress and industrialization, one would expect Greek participation in these exhibitions to follow a similar approach. But the country's presence in the international exhibitions in Chicago (1893), Paris (1900), Brussels (1910), and San Francisco (1915) proves that the groups of prominent academics, technocrats, and business leaders who undertook the organization of Greek participation viewed world's fairs less as platforms to demonstrate industrial advancements and more as sites to promote and reinforce their nationalistic ideals. By exhibiting ancient Greek and Byzantine artifacts, Greece's pavilions sought to connect the modern state with its glorious past and reaffirm its European identity. The organizers' alternative viewpoint on what can represent modernity challenges our understanding of the Greek interpretation of modernization. Contrary to the prevailing notions in Greek historiography that linked modernity exclusively with industrialization, the exhibits displayed by the country abroad prompt a reconsideration of our interpretation of Greek progress, highlighting the influence of the irredentist concept of the Great Idea.

• Contributor

Alexandros Balasis is a PhD candidate in History at York University, Toronto. He is interested in modern Greek history, having studied issues of modernity and nationalism. His current research centers around transoceanic migration, focusing on migrants' agency and their interactions with migration policies.

Dušan I. Bjelić is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern Maine. His research interests include Balkan studies with an emphasis on the Balkans' relation to Europe in light of the Balkans' history of racial capitalism. He is the co-editor, with Obrad Savić, of Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (MIT Press, 2003); the author of Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (Routledge, 2011) and Intoxication, Modernity, and Colonialism: Freud's Industrial Unconscious, Benjamin's Hashish Mimesis (Palgrave, 2017); and the editor of Balkan Transnationalism at the Time of Neoliberal Catastrophe (Routledge, 2019).

Karen Emmerich is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she currently directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. She is also a translator of Greek poetry, prose, and drama. She is the author of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (2017) and has translated books by Miltos Sachtouris, Eleni Vakalo, Yannis Ritsos, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Christos Ikonomou, Amanda Michalopoulou, and others.

Sofia Fragoulopoulou holds two postgraduate degrees, one in the domain of cultural management (Department of Communication, Media, and Culture, Panteion University) and one in the domain of cultural anthropology (Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University). She also holds a PhD in the History of Museums and Collections from the Department of History and Archaeology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is working as an archaeologist in the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. Her research interests include the interconnections between material culture and cultural memory and the history of women in the field of archaeology.

Thomas W. Gallant is Distinguished Professor and holder of the Nicholas Family Endowed Chair in Modern Greek History at the University of California San Diego. He has published extensively on modern Greek social and economic history and historical archaeology.

Theodoros Kouros is Lecturer at the Department of Communication and Internet Studies, Cyprus University of Technology. His primary research interests include state and statecraft, bureaucracy, and resistance tactics and strategies.

Tomasz Lidzbarski is a PhD cand

Reviewed by:

• The Cypriot collection of Petrarchist and other Renaissance poems ed. by Paschalis M. Kitromilides, and: Studies on the Cypriot Collection of Renaissance poems ed. by Marina Rodosthenous-Balafa
• Simos Zenios (bio)

The two publications under review are the latest to appear in the National Hellenic Research Foundation's Sources of Cypriot Learning and History series, which, under the general editorship of Paschalis M. Kitromilides, has made difficult-to-find and valuable texts from early modern Cyprus accessible to scholars and students. Both these publications depart, in different ways, from the established character of the series. The earlier volume, The Cypriot Collection of Petrarchist and Other Renaissance Poems (henceforth, The Cypriot Collection), edited by Kitromilides, publishes the well-known anonymous collection of 156 poems in codex Marc. gr. IX 32, created between circa 1550 and 1570/71, together with a number of introductory studies, both new and previously published. The collection is well known even to non-specialist scholars and the broader public. It is the crowning achievement of early modern Cypriot literature and it represents the most direct and innovative engagement with Petrarchism that is attested in early modern Greek literature. The collection has been published before: first, accompanied by a French translation, in Siapkara-Pitsillidès 1952 (second edition in 1975; also, Siapkaras-Pitsillidès 1976, with translation into modern Greek and intended for a non-specialist audience) and, more recently, in [End Page 108] Carbonaro 2012, an edition that relies upon and proposes corrections to the text established by Siapkaras-Pitsillidès and which is accompanied by a translation into Italian. The poems of the collection have also been the object of numerous studies by successive generations of scholars. The second volume under review, Studies on the Cypriot Collection of Renaissance Poems (henceforth, Studies on