The Jewish Community of Salonica under Siege: The Antisemitic Violence of the Summer of 1931.

Kallis, A. A. (2006) The Jewish Community of Salonica under Siege: The Antisemitic Violence of the Summer of 1931. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 20 (1). pp. 34-56. ISSN 1476-7937

Abstract

The antisemitic violence that took place in Salonica during the summer of 1931 constituted a defining moment not just for the city’s Jewish community and relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Greeks, but also for the development of Greek nationalism. After the Greek military defeat of 1922 and the conclusion of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, Salonica had become a battleground for the reconfiguration of Greek national identity. It was there that the problems of territorial insecurities, the influx of refugees from Anatolia, struggles between various ethnic, religious, and cultural groups, and the wider battle between Venizelism and its opponents played out. Antisemitism proved successful when it could be effectively aligned with these primary causes of social, political, and economic anxiety. Moreover, antisemitic movements in other European countries (primarily Hungary and Romania) set a precedent for the hyper-nationalist, anti-communist, and intensely xenophobic discourse of the period. But Greece was out of step with much of the rest of Europe in that 1931 represented the peak of antisemitic momentum in that country and not a step on the path to further escalation.