A Historical Puzzle: Why Did So Few Jews in Greece Evade Deportation and Survive the Holocaust?

One of the unresolved questions in the study of the history of the Jews of Greece relates to the devastating impact of the Holocaust. How to explain why Jews in Greece suffered the second highest mortality rate (87 percent) – second to Poland (91 percent)--of all countries occupied by the Nazis? The relatively small Jewish population in Greece and the country’s geographic remoteness might have suggested that Jews in Greece would have had a better chance of survival than elsewhere. But the opposite is true–proportionally more Jews from the distant land of Greece were rounded up and deported than those in the heart of Nazi Europe itself. 

Conventional explanations are not satisfactory. Several point to the “exception” of Salonica. Home to the largest Jewish community in all of Greece–where about 70 percent of the country’s prewar population resided–Salonica suffered a devastating fate, with its Jewish population reduced by around 95 percent. Commentators point to the density and visibility of the city’s Jews; the sense of Jewish family solidarity; and the fact that the city’s Jews, predominantly of Sephardic and thus Ladino-speaking heritage, allegedly did not speak Greek. These factors, some argue, explain why Jews in Salonica were more distant from their Greek Christian neighbors than elsewhere in Greece, and that if Salonica’s Jews had not clung together so tightly, if they had learned better Greek, if they were more integrated into the general society, then more would have survived.

But there is a problem with this line of argumentation. The insinuation that the high losses among Salonica’s Jews are somehow their own “fault” –due to their non-assimilation or clannishness–is insidious and perhaps antisemitic; it blames the victims for their own demise. 

An explanation for the high mortality rates among Greece’s Jews must be found elsewhere. First, it is a misnomer that Jews in Salonica did not speak Greek. It is true that the older generations born and raised in Ottoman Salonica were much less likely to speak Greek, or to speak it with a “Jewish” accent. But younger generations, those born or at least raised once Salonica became part of Greece, were much more conversant in the language. The majority of the city’s Jewish children attended either Greek state schools of Jewish communal schools where Greek was the primary language of instruction. When Germany, Poland, and Italy (including Rhodes) were expelling Jews from state schools, the Greek state was integrating them. 

Secondly, even in places where Jews spoke fluent Greek (indeed, exclusively Greek), where they seemed to have good relations with their Orthodox Christian neighbors, where they were well-integrated, and where they did not constitute such a large and conspicuous portion of the population, they still suffered very high mortality rates. This was the case in Ioannina (Janina), home to a community of Romaniote Jews whose presence dated back 1,800 years. The fact that they spoke Greek fluently did not compel their Orthodox Christian neighbors to intervene on their behalf during either the Italian or Nazi occupations of the region. Few Jews in Salonica were saved in hiding with their Orthodox Christian neighbors, and the same can be said for Janina. Speaking Greek or the sense that Romaniotes were “closer” to their Orthodox Christian neighbors did not make them more likely to survive. The numbers make this reality clear: in both Janina and Salonica, more than ninety percent of the Jews in each locale were deported and murdered.

An answer to the puzzle lies elsewhere. In my book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, I suggested that the distance between Jews and Orthodox Christians across Greece was determined not so much by what Jews themselves did or wanted, or even the primary language they spoke, but rather by Greek state law. Greece was the only European country that, in continuity with Ottoman imperial law, had no civil marriage and prohibited intermarriage across faiths, except via rare cases of conversion (Greece introduced civil marriage in 1982; a few other post-Ottoman countries still today preserve prohibitions against intermarriage across faiths, like Israel and Saudi Arabia.) The fact that it was possible for Jews to have friendships, business partnerships, and attend school together with Orthodox Christians, but could not form family bonds, perpetuated a sense of separation. 

The non-existence of civil marriage in Greece attracted the attention of the German foreign office even before the war, in 1937:

No racial mingling between Jews and the Greek host nation takes place in Salonika because of its special position. The Greek state is de facto, if not in the legal sense, inclined toward anti-Semitism. The Orthodox Church plays a major role in this true anti-Semitic inclination by forbidding intermarriage with Jews...conversions to the Orthodox Church are rare. A feeling of foreignness exists between the Jews and the Greeks that [is similar to that which] National Socialist Germany aims to achieve through its Jewish policy.

Nazi officials viewed the prohibition against intermarriage–not Jews’ alleged desire to remain separate nor their preference for speaking one language or another–as a marker of Greece’s anti-Jewish laws and as perpetuating that “feeling of foreignness" between Jews and Orthodox Christians. 

In contrast to Greece, Germany had introduced civil marriage with the country’s unification in 1871. The infamous Nuremberg Laws, imposed in 1935, overturned civil marriage and prohibited relationships between Jews and Aryans. No such law had to be put into place in Greece once the Nazis occupied the country in 1941 because, practically speaking, intermarriage was already illegal: Greece operated with the Nuremberg Laws avant la lettre. The only difference was that Greece permitted Jews to be baptized. This infuriated Nazi officials who saw the willingness of Greeks to accept Jewish baptism as a sign that Greek was an “uncivilized” country that had not accepted the modern concept “race hygiene” that would have outlawed conversion. While the United States’ anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited whites and Blacks from marrying each other, served as direct inspiration for the Nuremberg Laws, Greece’s prohibition against interfaith marriages was the closest corollary in Europe. 

In Germany, most Jews who survived did so because of the efforts of non-Jewish relatives. The famous Rosenstrasse protest in Berlin in 1943 involved a group of non-Jewish women demanding the release of their relatives from captivity. Ultimately, 1,800 Jewish spouses and some “mixed” children were released. Such a protest would have been unthinkable in Greece, whether in Salonica or Janina, because no such unions existed. There were a few Jews who had converted to Orthodox Christianity to marry, but not many. 

In Germany, a considerable portion of Jews was married to non-Jews: about 30,000 –or 14 percent–of Jewish marriages involved non-Jewish spouses; many of them survived. For Greece, so far I have been able to identify just 110 cases of Jewish-born individuals married to non-Jews (.015 percent of marriages involving Jews). The rate of intermarriage in Germany appears to have been 93 times greater than in Greece. I know of only three cases where Jewish converts to Orthodox Christianity were deported by the Nazis; all others were spared.

The problem that Jews faced in Greece was not that they did not “assimilate” or “become Greek,” but that the Greek state insisted on legally separating its citizenry by religious community. Moreover, even as Jews and Orthodox Christians could not readily form family bonds, Jews began to propose a different meaning of what it meant to “be Greek.” Jewish leaders redefined “Greek” identity from one rooted in Orthodox Christianity to a civic identity, based on participation in the political system, an embrace of the Greek language, and patriotism. Jews argued that it was indeed possible for non-Orthodox Christians to become Greek and that it was possible to be both Jewish and Greek. Whatever sense of family solidarity Jews experienced, or distance from their Orthodox Christian neighbors, was not only due to their preferences, but also because the laws of the land required that Jews constituted families only with other Jews.