Greece: A Jewish History

“This innovative, soundly researched work . . . has filled a long-standing need for the story of Greek Jewry to be told fully.” —Jewish Book World

K. E. Fleming’s Greece—a Jewish History is the first comprehensive English-language history of Greek Jews, and the only history that includes material on their diaspora in Israel and the United States. The book tells the story of a people who for the most part no longer exist and whose identity is a paradox in that it wasn’t fully formed until after most Greek Jews had emigrated or been deported and killed by the Nazis.

For centuries, Jews lived in areas that are now part of Greece. But Greek Jews as a nationalized group existed in substantial number only for a few short decades—from the Balkan Wars (1912–13) until the Holocaust, in which more than eighty percent were killed. Greece—a Jewish History describes their diverse histories and the processes that worked to make them emerge as a Greek collective. It also follows Jews as they left Greece—as deportees to Auschwitz or émigrés to Palestine/Israel and New York’s Lower East Side. In such foreign settings their Greekness was emphasized as it never was in Greece, where Orthodox Christianity traditionally defines national identity and anti-Semitism remains common.

“An excellent effort to explain the quandary of the Jews of Greece during the country’s turbulent 200-year history.” —Jay Levinson, Jewish Tribune

“Until the appearance of Fleming’s work there was no overarching account of the Jewish experience in modern Greece, and this book fills that lacuna extremely well.” —Alexander Kitroeff, American Historical Review

© 2010 Princeton University Press (E-bog): 9781400834013

Release date

E-bog: 15. marts 2010