";s:4:"text";s:3121:" Jewish Salonica is a cornerstone of Sephardi legacy, without which it is impossible to describe the history of Sephardi Jews after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. He is most notable for evacuating Sephardi Jews from Spain after the proclamation of the Alhambra Decree, and resettling them throughout Ottoman lands, especially in Salonica … The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-sta A wonderful book by Mark Mazower, titled “Salonica, City of Ghosts,” covers the city’s Ottoman centuries.
The city was occupied by the Saracens in 904 and by the Normans of Sicily in 1185. These laws damaged their communal, religious, commercial and everyday conduct. Alongside Istanbul, Salonica stands at the center of the study on Ottoman Jewry and the Jewish Sephardi Diaspora. As the pressure on the community to deliver the cemetery land to the municipality and the university increased, the Jewish front against it disseminated. To him, Salonican Jews are not only passive victims of Greek anti-Semites or the Nazis, but “historical actors in their own right” (11). Shortly beforehand, the municipality eradicated the Muslim cemetery of the Sabbatean Naar’s discussion of the cemetery is instructive and important, among else since the debate over the cemetery’s fate reflects the intrigues in the community and its relations with the Greek state. The community was aided by various forces within the city and in Athens, and also recruited international Jewish and non-Jewish forces, managing to prevent the expropriation of the land until a law in this respect was enacted in 1936. Many Spanish Jews came to Thessaloniki, which was then part of the Ottoman empire, following their expulsion by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. Reviewed by Stephen Schwartz Schools contributed both to the preservation and transformation of Jewish identity. Naar both explains and analyzes various subjects while giving the political background within the community and in its surroundings, and demonstrates how the mythic image of Salonica was constructed, even reinforced as the real community got further away from its glorious past and ‘post mortem’.Naar erected a fabulous tombstone for Salonican Jewry described different aspects of communal life during the last decades of its existence.