Peer-reviewed Publications by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Basil C. Gounaris, Michael Llewellyn-Smith and Ioannis D. Stefanidis (eds.), The Macedonian Front, 1915–1918: Politics, Society and Culture in Time of War (Routledge), 2022
This chapter repositions the politics of contraband trade in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterr... more This chapter repositions the politics of contraband trade in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean during World War One at the interstices of state policies and individual merchant action. It examines how the British and French military authorities imaginatively adopted a variety of non-economic criteria to define as ‘contraband’ the business activities of numerous prominent Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Dönme merchants in the port-cities of Salonica and Kavala, and how in turn these merchants challenged their blacklisting by employing a multi-faceted social, cultural and political capital to prove their loyalty to the Entente Powers.
Mainstream historiography on the political economy of illicit trade during the Great War has so far adopted a largely nation-bound approach focusing on the processes of state-building and the establishment of national economies sustained by increasingly tighter control over international trade. This chapter by contrast draws from Greek and Entente government records, archives of international Jewish organizations, and the local press, to prioritize the functioning of formal and informal cross-ethnic networks and argue that the multiethnic, post-Ottoman commercial elites of Macedonia actively shaped the convoluted politics of contraband trade as their region transitioned from empire to nation-state.
Jewish Social Studies, 2019
In scholarly and lay circles today, anti-Zionism is commonly perceived as the most recent variant... more In scholarly and lay circles today, anti-Zionism is commonly perceived as the most recent variant of a resurgent, bipartisan antisemitism. Such a presentist view, however, obscures anti-Zionism’s much longer and variegated history. This article unearths the widespread Christian hostility to Zionism in interwar Salonica, Greece, and links it to liberal politics, Slavophobia, minority policies, and authoritarian state (re)building. Anti-Zionism was the prevalent form of anti-Jewish hatred in Greece, but its popularity was less a clear sign of time-honored traditional Judeophobia or resurgent racist antisemitism than it was an indication of a broader, state-endorsed anxiety about the place and handling of ethnic, religious, and political difference in a modernizing Greece.
Journal of Levantine Studies, 2018
Derided by Jewish assimilationists, Greek Christian nationalists, and subsequent historians as un... more Derided by Jewish assimilationists, Greek Christian nationalists, and subsequent historians as un-patriotic, Zionism in interwar Salonica in fact followed a broader pan-European trend and developed a symbiotic relationship with Greek nationalism. This article refines the emerging historiographical orthodoxy on European Zionism as a complementary nationality by approaching Salonican Zionism as a modern urban identity that renewed the local Jews’ ties to their hometown. The article focuses on the multifaceted relation Salonica’s Zionist youth associations developed with the public space of a rapidly Hellenizing city during the interwar years. Drawing on the local Christian and Jewish daily press, as well as numerous Ladino Zionist publications, it shows that Zionist associational practices and discourses produced a local identity that was at once Salonican and Greco-Jewish. The multifaceted sociability of the Maccabi Sports Club rendered Jewish youth visible in the public sphere and turned the young Maccabeans into the main symbol of Jewish presence in Salonica. Concurrently, the key role of the club in the local sports scene facilitated Jewish integration into a Hellenizing Salonica. Zionism was a primarily urban phenomenon, a diasporic but not deterritorialized national movement with multiple spatial references, as much to the land of “exile” as to the imagined homeland of Eretz Yisrael.
Dirk A. Moses & Giorgos Antoniou (eds.), The Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2018
Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, 2018
Although concentration camps constituted a densely populated social world, historians still large... more Although concentration camps constituted a densely populated social world, historians still largely approach them as being composed of isolated individuals. This interpretative premise is sustained by the inherent linear organization of most audiovisual archives and the prominence of the individual survivor testimony as their organizing unit. However, taking the social relation rather than the individual and his/her testimony as the organizing principle of a rethought digital Holocaust archive leads to a more historically faithful understanding of the Holocaust survivor as a networked self. A pilot digital reconstruction of social networks of Jewish Holocaust survivors from the Greek city of Salonica/Thessaloniki demonstrates how the linear digital audiovisual archive can support the digital documentation of the multiple forms and structures of relatedness, thus helping historians better understand how Holocaust survivors managed to reconstruct a social universe in the camps and navigate within it under extremely adverse circumstances.
Marsha Rozeblit & Jonathan Karp (eds.), World War One and the Jews, 2017
Jewish History, 2014
Current historiography approaches the passage of Salonican Jewry from the Ottoman Empire to the G... more Current historiography approaches the passage of Salonican Jewry from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state from a macroscopic perspective. Concentrating on state-minority relations, it focuses exclusively on external forces, treating Salonican Jews as a homogenized community and ignoring the role of the city’s non-Jews. To reassess the importance of the local dynamic, this article examines processes within Salonica itself. Through a close reading of a debate over the city’s commercial future, it considers the shifts in Greco-Jewish relations and the swift reversal of ethnic hierarchies within the city’s entrepreneurial elite that took place at a time when Greek government circles still included the Jews in their vision of a commercially prosperous Greek Salonica. In 1913–14, the Salonican Chamber of Commerce’s proposal to establish a free port generated a heated discussion that transcended the boundaries of professional deliberations and entered the local public sphere. The Greek New Club, an organization whose members were drawn from Salonica’s still small and economically weak Greek entrepreneurial class, became heavily involved in the debate, broadening the field of entrepreneurial politics, marginalizing the existing multiethnic Ottoman commercial institutions, and ultimately elevating itself as the rightful representative of a class and a city’s broader interests. At the same time, the Greek press identified the proposal’s advocates as Jewish businessmen and discursively constructed them as un-Greek. Before the aggressive policies of a nationalizing state led to the complete marginalization of Salonica’s Jews during the interwar period, this historically particular local interplay of class and ethnicity was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the de-Judaization of the city.
Edited Books by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Special issue on the Jews of Salonica in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman period. Co-edited by Anthon... more Special issue on the Jews of Salonica in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman period. Co-edited by Anthony Molho, Eyal Ginio and Paris Papamichos Chronakis.
Publications by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Umanistica Digitale, 2019
Digital audiovisual archives of Holocaust survivor testimonies follow a common classifying practi... more Digital audiovisual archives of Holocaust survivor testimonies follow a common classifying practice organizing the material at the unit of the individual. They thus prioritize the uniqueness of each survivor’s story and approach survival as a personal ordeal. The online meta-database of Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors’ testimonies (http://gjst.ha.uth.gr/en/) exemplifies this logic of archiving the historical experience and its mnemonic narrativization. The current project Bonds of Survival critically rethinks these methodological premises of the digital Holocaust archive. It complements current emphasis on the Holocaust survivor and her experience by shifting attention from the individual to her social relations. Taking the relationship as the organizing unit of the archiving order, it uses social network visualization tools to collect, categorize, and display the social interactions of survivors. Researchers can thus more accurately determine the weight and ontology of social relations in the camps and systematically explore the linkages between survival strategies, identity formation, and modes of social interaction.
Arheiotaksio, 2017
In scholarly and lay circles today, anti-Zionism is commonly perceived as the most recent variant... more In scholarly and lay circles today, anti-Zionism is commonly perceived as the most recent variant of a resurgent, bi-partisan antisemitism. Such a presentist view, however, obscures its much longer and variegated history. This article unearths the widespread Christian hostility to Zionism in interwar Greece and links it to Liberal politics, anti-Slavic anxieties, minority policies, and authoritarian state-building. Anti-Zionism was the prevalent form of anti-Jewish hatred in Greece, but its popularity was less a clear sign of time-honored traditional Judeophobia or resurgent racist antisemitism and more an indication of a broader, state-endorsed anxiety about the place and management of ethnic difference in a modernizing Greece.
Book Chapters by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
With the Zionist athletic association Maccabee as its point of departure, this chapter explores t... more With the Zionist athletic association Maccabee as its point of departure, this chapter explores the local dimensions of diasporic nationalism, focusing on the relations between the Zionist youth associations within the gradually Hellenised city of Salonica/Thessaloniki in the interwar period. Drawing on the Christian and Jewish daily press, as well as on various publications by the associations, the chapter examines how Zionist associational practices and discourses produced a local identity that was simultaneously Salonican and Greco-Jewish. The manifold sociality of the Maccabee athletic association rendered youth visible in the public sphere and elevated it to a significant symbol of the Jewish presence in the city. At the same time, the association’s leading part in the local sports scene facilitated the assimilation of Jews to Greek Thessaloniki, a ‘city in the making’ during this period. Zionism, the chapter argues, was a diasporic but not delocalized national movement: it referred as much to an imagined homeland as to the land of ‘exile’.
Conference Presentations by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Course Syllabi by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Το μάθημα αυτό εξετάζει τη θέση των Εβραίων στην νεοελληνική κοινωνία και ιδεολογία από την Επανά... more Το μάθημα αυτό εξετάζει τη θέση των Εβραίων στην νεοελληνική κοινωνία και ιδεολογία από την Επανάσταση του 1821 μέχρι την επαύριο του Δευτέρου Παγκοσμίου Πολέμου. Θα αναλυθούν κομβικά γεγονότα της ιστορίας των Εβραίων της Ελλάδας –οι σφαγές κατά την περίοδο της Επανάστασης, το επεισόδιο του Δον Πατσίφικο, οι Βαλκανικοί Πόλεμοι, η ενσωμάτωση των Εβραίων της Θεσσαλονίκης και τέλος το Ολοκαύτωμα και η μεταπολεμική ανασυγκρότηση. Ερμηνευτικά, η έμφαση θα δοθεί στην ανάδειξη της εσωτερικής ποικιλομορφίας που διακρίνει την ιστορική διαδρομή των Εβραίων της Ελλάδας και στην παράλληλη, αργή και ατελή, ανάδυση της συλλογικής ταυτότητας του «Έλληνα Εβραίου». Θα διερευνηθούν: οι σχέσεις των εβραϊκών πληθυσμών με το ελληνικό κράτος και τους όμορους χριστιανικούς πληθυσμούς· οι ποικίλες όψεις της συμβίωσης· το μεταβαλλόμενο περιεχόμενο του ελληνικού αντισημιτισμού και οι πολλαπλές εκδοχές της αφομοίωσης· και, τέλος, η θέση του Ολοκαυτώματος στην ελληνική συλλογική μνήμη. Το μάθημα αυτό αποτελεί μια έκκεντρη ματιά στην ιστορία του ελληνικού εθνικού κράτους και αποσκοπεί να αναδείξει τις δυνατότητες και τις δυσκολίες μιας σύνδεσης της «εβραϊκής» με την «ελληνική» ιστορία.
This course offers a comprehensive understanding of fascism by tackling a key historical question... more This course offers a comprehensive understanding of fascism by tackling a key historical question. Why did some of the first European countries to introduce liberal democratic institutions end up with authoritarian dictatorships in the twentieth century? Focusing on Italy, Greece and Spain, the course adopts a comparative perspective and deals with the most important aspects of fascist rule: the origins of fascist ideology; political violence, torture and repression; propaganda and censorship; the role of charismatic personalities and the cult of the leader; treatment of women; culture and fascism's relation to the classical past. Finally, the course considers the afterlives of fascism in popular memory and culture. Working through various textual and visual sources and exploring questions of memory and legacy, the course offers a historically informed perspective on the current crisis of democracy in Mediterranean Europe and the rise of populism and political extremism.
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Peer-reviewed Publications by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Mainstream historiography on the political economy of illicit trade during the Great War has so far adopted a largely nation-bound approach focusing on the processes of state-building and the establishment of national economies sustained by increasingly tighter control over international trade. This chapter by contrast draws from Greek and Entente government records, archives of international Jewish organizations, and the local press, to prioritize the functioning of formal and informal cross-ethnic networks and argue that the multiethnic, post-Ottoman commercial elites of Macedonia actively shaped the convoluted politics of contraband trade as their region transitioned from empire to nation-state.
Edited Books by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Publications by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Book Chapters by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Conference Presentations by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Course Syllabi by Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Mainstream historiography on the political economy of illicit trade during the Great War has so far adopted a largely nation-bound approach focusing on the processes of state-building and the establishment of national economies sustained by increasingly tighter control over international trade. This chapter by contrast draws from Greek and Entente government records, archives of international Jewish organizations, and the local press, to prioritize the functioning of formal and informal cross-ethnic networks and argue that the multiethnic, post-Ottoman commercial elites of Macedonia actively shaped the convoluted politics of contraband trade as their region transitioned from empire to nation-state.