Salonica Stories

Please review the use of the word “decimate” in this piece. Unfortunately, a much higher proportion than 10% of the Jewish community of Salonika was murdered by the Nazis. Most were deported and very survived the death camps. I hope you will edit the article to correct this error in the wording.

The statement “2,000-year-old, largely Sephardi Jewish community” is inaccurate. The Jewish community of Salonica is indeed 2,000 years old. However, the Sephardim did not arrive until the 15-16th centuries to dominate its character. Prior to that, the Jews of Salonica were Romaniote initially, and then Eshkenazi.

Mathilde B., thank you for the correction. The text has been amended accordingly. Marian, we use the term “decimated” as it is commonly understood, to convey that the size of the community was drastically reduced.

Thanks for your interest.

-Julie Subrin

Julie,
Just as for so many Jewish communities destroyed in the Shoah, one can not speak about the Jewish community of Salonica without also accurately remembering its fate. Certainly, the intent was to say that the community was “drastically reduced,” but even that belittles the annihilation — how about that better chosen word? — that more accurately describes what happened.

The USHMM estimated that that Jewish community went from around 50,000 to less than 2,000. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005422

I would like to read this, but why on earth is it $50?! A professor is already paid to research and produce content. The printing costs shouldn’t be THAT high, even anticipating limited sales–much longer hardbound books sell for $30 or
so, and they could come out with a trade paper version, or sell the ebook for much, much less, rather than a mere $10 discount. It’s true I can probably eventually get this from a library, but even libraries have limited budgets, not everybody lives in a big city with broad libraries, and even school libraries probably won’t have enough copies for all the students of teachers who want to assign this book. I also can’t annotate or keep a library book as a reference.

A publisher associated with an ostensibly not-for-profit institution dedicated to the creation and propogation of knowledge ought to make that knowledge available as cheaply and as widely as possible, and not artificially inflate costs.

(This is obviously a broader problem with academic literature and not limited to this work).

Usually I use the word Ladino to refer to word-by-word grammatically artificial translations of the Hebrew-bible into Judeo-Spanish. Such texts were used as teaching materials in Judeo-Spanish speaking communities.

A-Levi (probably al-Levi) appears not to have spent much time in discussion of the Zionist-alleged Ottoman-Islamic anti-Jewish oppression that is a mainstay of modern Jewish (ethnic Ashkenazi) anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia incitement.