“The Bulgarians Were the Worst!” Reconsidering the Holocaust in Salonika within a Regional History of Mass Violence

Levene, Mark (2018) “The Bulgarians Were the Worst!” Reconsidering the Holocaust in Salonika within a Regional History of Mass Violence. In, Antoniou, Giorgos and Moses, A. Dirk (eds.) The Holocaust in Greece. Cambridge University Press, pp. 36-57. (doi:10.1017/9781108565776.004).

Abstract

In the conclusion of Salonica, City of Ghosts, his profoundly penetrating study of multiethnic, Ottoman Salonika, Mark Mazower writes: “the history of the nationalists is all about false continuities and convenient silences.” Juxtapose that with a comment from Steven Bowman, a leading authority on the Holocaust in Greece: “To date no researcher has integrated the Jewish story into any aspect of the general Greek experience during the [Second World] war,” and we have a provocative question. Is this one of the “convenient silences”? Or perhaps speaking of “false continuities,” does the “Jewish story” radically undermine what Mazower describes as “the fictions necessary to tell the rendezvous of a chosen people with a land marked out to them by destiny”?

We could, of course, be more charitable to the purveyors of national history, Greek or otherwise. “Professional specialisation sequesters scholars in specific corners of the past,” writes the Israeli historian, Shlomo Sand. The fact that the Holocaust in Greece has been pursued as a discrete field of study often itself without reference to the wider Greek scene might simply confirm that the contemporary writing of history tout ensemble is less about agendas per se and more about a general academic tendency toward the specialization of which Sand speaks...

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics