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Devin Naar (University of Washington): "'Stones that speak': The Life and Death of the Jewish Cemetery of Salonica."

Devin Naar (University of Washington):

"'Stones that speak': The Life and Death of the Jewish Cemetery of Salonica"

Thursday, January 30, 2014 at 4pm
Humanities Gateway 1002

This presentation explores the fate of the largest Jewish burial ground in Europe on the eve of World War II. Once spanning the equivalent of eighty football fields, the Jewish cemetery in the Greek port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) came under threat as a new university sought to expand its campus. Local Jewish leaders resisted and argued that the tombstones “spoke,” that the inscriptions narrated the history of the city and ought to be preserved. The competing interests came to a head in the 1930s and especially once Nazi Germany occupied the city during the war. Even if the stones “spoke,” who was prepared to listen?

Drawing on previously unstudied archives of the Jewish community, records from the local Chamber of Commerce, and newspapers in Judeo-Spanish, Greek, and French, this talk presents a window into the confrontation and negotiation between the Jewish community of Salonica and the Greek state over urban space and the national narrative. Controversy over the place of the Jewish dead ultimately served as a metaphor for the uncertain place of the living.

Devin E. Naar is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies, assistant professor of History, and chair of the new Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington. He completed his PhD in history at Stanford University where his dissertation, “Jewish Salonica and the Making of the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans,’ 1890-1943,” received the department’s award for “best dissertation.” His presentation draws on a chapter of his book manuscript based on this dissertation. A former Fulbright scholar to Greece, Naar is currently a fellow in the Society of Scholars at the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, and also sits on the academic advisory councils of the Center for Jewish History and the American Sephardi Federation, both in New York.