Invisible Revisited 2

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[Part Two of Twelve]


Bodies Visible and Invisible: The Erasure of the Jewish Cemetery in the Life of Modern Thessaloniki

LAQUEUR and HESSE

They are not just gone; they are forgotten. There is no historical signage on campus that tells the story of the invisible world just below the surface of the visible one, nor is there any mention of our topic in the rather extensive history of the university that readers can find on its website. Nothing alerts the visitor to the fact of the extraordinary transformation of a city of the dead into a world of the living; a cemetery into a university; a sacred site into a world of secular learning, where students, scholars and scientists unwittingly walk every day upon an immense accretion of ancient and hidden bones.

The world of the dead does not mirror precisely the world of the living. It exists everywhere in a tenuous balance between the actual social world and an imagined social world that is sustained by history and memory. There are very few descendants of pre- Holocaust German Jews left in Berlin; but, monuments to hundreds of thousands of the Jewish dead in the city’s cemeteries represent an interest on the part of the living to keep these dead alive, to keep a vanished world somehow present. The story of the dead among the living is, in this sense, a story of how a social world understands itself. We begin with the observation that the story of the erasure of the old Jewish cemetery—not only its literal erasure from modern-day Thessaloniki, but, even more strikingly, its almost complete symbolic erasure from the memory and history of the city—is a unique phenomenon in modern European history, unique even within the history and memory of the destruction of the European Jews. Our essay asks how this came to be.

We should be more precise. The history of the Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki and its destruction has, at some level, been known and remembered within the Jewish community— even since its near complete destruction— because of the determined efforts of Rabbi Michael Molho who witnessed and documented its past and its present at the moment of its destruction. As the notes to this essay suggest, various Greek scholars have also told parts of its story in a number local histories. But still there is a great void.

By the twentieth century the cemetery had existed in some form for over two millennia. It grew exponentially over the centuries as the burial place of the descendants of Iberian Jews who fled eastward into the Mediterranean after the Christian re-conquest of Spain in 1492—the Sephardim– and then of Askenazi Jews who fled the pogroms of the Russian empire. By the late nineteenth century it covered more than three hundred and fifty-five thousand square meters and was, for most if its history, the largest Jewish cemetery anywhere in Europe. Only one or two Jewish cemeteries anywhere rivaled it in size. None were its equal in numbers of dead or in millennia of continuous use. The old Jewish cemetery of Thessaloniki ran eastward for over five hundred meters from the old city wall that once defined its western boundary; it abutted the Greek Christian cemeteries that grew upwards into the rocky hills along its north western edge. (The Evagelistrias Cemetery, a few hundred meters from where the University is now located, was founded in 1875.) To the south east, spreading toward the sea, lay one of Thessaloniki’s many Turkish cemeteries. Between the Jews and the Turks was the small cemetery of the Donme or Ma’min, devoted to the followers of the 17th century Jewish mystic Sabbatai Tsvi, who converted in his last years to the Muslim faith

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