E314 | Salonica was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world until its liquidation by the Nazis in 1943. Historians often mark the beginning of the end of the Jewish community in 1913 when the city was annexed by Greece. Devin Naar challenges this presumption in this podcast by looking at how the Jewish community continued to flourish and adapt as part of the new Greek nation-state. Ultimately, the community was both sustained and limited by its continued use of the millet structure from the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and its strong attachment to the city as a political space. As such, the interwar history of the Salonican Jews becomes an important study of the legacies of the Ottoman Empire and the types of politics it continued to create well into the twentieth century.
More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/05/jewish-salonica.html
Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies and Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he directs the Sephardic Studies Program. Naar received his PhD in History from Stanford University, served as a Fulbright Scholar in Greece, and sits on the Academic Advisory Council of Center for Jewish History in New York.
Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world. He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is an assistant professor of history at UCSD.
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano is a PhD candidate in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington. His dissertation explores how Ottoman intellectuals and bureaucrats in the 14th and 15th centuries provided models for social and political behavior through the creation of a new literary and poetic language.
CREDITS
Episode No. 314
Release Date: 19 May 2017
Recording Location: University of Washington
Audio editing by Chris Gratien
Music: Katibim (Uskudar'a Gider iken) - Safiye Ayla
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for permission to use the composition "Istanbul"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Devin Naar at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/05/jewish-salonica.html
