From the Ottoman Empire to Auschwitz

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From the Ottoman Empire to Auschwitz: Sephardic Jews and the Holocaust

 

Although usually understood as a "European" event, the Holocaust also resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews born in the Ottoman Empire. Grappling with the distinctiveness of the experiences of Sephardic Jews, including the center of the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish world in Salonica (Thessaloniki, in today's Greece), compels us to expand the scope of the Holocaust into the Mediterranean basin, to link it to other acts of mass violence in the region such as the Armenian genocide, and to better grasp the full reach and destruction of the Final Solution.

 

Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and associate professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. The great-grandson of a rabbi from Salonica and former Fulbright scholar to Greece, Naar received his PhD in history from Stanford University. He is the author of Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, winner of a 2016 National Jewish Book Award and the 2017 book prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association. He also serves on the advisory board of the Historical Jewish Press, which is hosted by the National Library of Israel.

 

With thanks to the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington

 

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