Invisible Revisited 6

Read this post first

[Part Six of Twelve]

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

LAQUEUR and HESSE

Cemeteries have never been permanent resting places of the dead; over the millennia they, like everything, fall prey to the “lone and level sands” of time. But even in historical time they come and go as the livings’ imaginaire of their ancestors change, new sensibilities arise, and new demands on space make their imperatives felt. Les Halles, the main wholesale market in Paris, sat on the ground of the Cemetery of the Innocents that at the time of its destruction in 1764 contained upwards of two million bodies. It, in turn, has been replaced by a mall. St. Pancras Train Station in London and the railway lines that enter it from the north replaced the churchyard of the local parish; hundreds of churchyards lie beneath the financial hub that is the City of London with only a patch here and there as a reminder of a lost world. Time and progress triumph in the end; the last remains of England’s first Jewish cemetery, dating from 1290, survived until the building the Barbican Center in the 1950’s. In fact, the Salonika Jewish cemetery itself sits on at least some of the ground that had been a Byzantine burial place before the fall of the city to the Turks in 1453. Recycled gravestones from the sixteenth century with Greek lettering near the ground and Ladino inscriptions in Hebrew letters nearer eye level remained still in our era. In other words, the dead survive in place at the sufferance of the living who they serve.

More specifically in the modern period, both the creation of new cemeteries and the destruction of old ones grew out of a central tenant of western urban planning beginning in the Enlightenment: move the dead away from the living. Ernest Hébrard was firmly in this tradition. Around the years of his birth the man who remade Paris, Baron Hausmann, was advocating—unsuccessfully it turned out—the creation of gigantic new burials grounds even further from the city than those that had been built earlier in the century. They were to be accessible to the dead and to mourners only by new, special purpose, railways. It is totally in keeping with this history that Hébrard, when he started thinking about how to build a modern city out of the ruins of the old, oriental one destroyed in 1917, would take aim at the Jewish cemetery that abutted the old walls and stood in the way of progress and expansion. He was equally keen to be rid of other burial grounds. (In 1923, after his stint in Salonika, Hébrard went to Indochina where he designed a new administrative center for Hanoi and planned even grander projects that were never put in effect.) Salonika, in short, was on the map of international urban renewal.

But even before Hébrard, it might have seemed clear to the farsighted that something about the place of the dead would have to change. Thessaloniki by the end of the nineteenth century was the last outpost of European orientalism, appreciated by western travelers for its picturesque eastern ambiance at a time when Athens and Belgrade had become western. Its days of exoticism were numbered. Already it had a tram and was connected to the rest of Europe and Greece by rail; its sea wall had been taken down; modern boulevards had been cut through crooked streets; grand hospitals, schools, and consulates in the latest European historical styles had been built in the last decades of Ottoman rule. Later on, soccer fields and a children’s asylum were also on the list of properties to be appropriated or at least so thought the Chamber of Commerce when it debated the matter in the 1930’s.

Technorati Tags: greece, jewish history, jews, religion