Minna Rozen (born October 1947) is a professor emeritus at the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Rozen served as head of the Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University, and specializes in the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan states. [1]
Minna Rozen was born in Tiberias and grew up in Afula, Israel. She studied law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1966, after her marriage, she returned to Afula and studied history at the University of Haifa. Later she completed her PhD in history at Tel Aviv University.
Between 1973 and 1999 she taught at Tel Aviv University, specializing in the study of Jews during the Ottoman period. Between 1992 and 1997, she was the director of the Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University. Since 1999, she has been teaching at the University of Haifa. She has taught as a guest professor at Princeton University. Rozen's historiographical approach is an interdisciplinary one combining historical research with several disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, such as sociology, literature, art history, gender studies, and diaspora theories.
Over the years, Rozen's writing has focused on grassroots history, manifesting in a large documentation projects she conducted about the Jews of Turkey and Greece, and the Franco communities around the Mediterranean. [2] Her first documentation project was at the archives of the French Levant Company in Marseilles, the archives of the French Foreign Ministry, and the archives of the British Levant Company. These sources constituted the basis for a series of studies about the trade routes of "new Christians" who returned to Judaism at the end of the 16th century in Livorno in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and from there dispersed to the trade centers of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant and North Africa. This research, among the first to be based on the combination of Rabbinical sources and European sources, unearthed the existence of a Jewish-Portuguese trading diaspora in the Mediterranean, which competed with the national trading companies of Britain and France as though they were supported by their own nation state. Her studies dealing with later periods showed how these trade communities, which were numerically small, influenced the processes of secularization and modernization in Istanbul and Thessaloniki.
Between 1987 and 1990, Rozen documented and photographed 61,000 Jewish gravestones dated 1583–1900 in Turkey, over 40,000 of them in Istanbul. [3] This digital collection uploaded to the website of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University. [4] Because the collection documents a societal group that maintained continuity for 450 years, it allows to follow the community's multifaceted history and its relations with the surrounding Ottoman culture. [5] Upon the completion of this documentation project, Rozen incorporated it into an in-depth study of the history of Muslim Ottoman burial culture and art. In a book published in 1994 she showed how from the 17th century, the Jewish community in Istanbul accepted the social, aesthetic, and spiritual values of the surrounding Muslim society. [6]
Rozen also conducted a survey of the protocol books documenting the decisions of the Rabbinical Courts of the Jewish community in Istanbul in the years 1701–1931. [7] used these materials, along with the results of the survey of the "complaint books" (Şikayet defterleri) of the Ottoman Empire's subjects against institutions and officials of the Empire, and collections of printed Ottoman sources, to examine the historical processes experienced by the Jewish community in Istanbul. Her studies showed how the Romaniote Greek Jews integrated into the Sephardic Jewish majority, how a society formed that was highly polarized in terms of social class, where most of the capital was concentrated in the hands of the few people who were close to the Sultan's court in various ways, and how the values of the dominating Muslim society were gradually accepted by the Jewish Istanbul community.
In 1991, Rozen traveled to Moscow on a mission to locate the archives of the Thessaloniki Jewish community, which had been stolen by Nazi Germany and had reached Moscow with the victorious Red Army. [8] The Russian State Archive permitted Rozen to photocopy the part of the archive that was preserved in the KGB archives, about 250,000 documents, and so far about one quarter of them have been coded into a custom-made computer program. During the work on the documents of this archive, it became apparent that other parts of the community's archives had been scattered over the world, and the part preserved in the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem turned out to be particularly large. This archival research uncovered previously unknown aspects of the Thessaloniki Jewish community in the twentieth century. The Thessaloniki Jewish community, known as "Jerusalem of the Balkans", which was remembered as a city of scholars, international traders, and large industrialists, was revealed as a society whose core during the 19th and 20th centuries were impoverished workers and small artisans living from hand to mouth. Prof. Rozen's students, Dr. Gila Hadar and Dr. Shai Srougo, placed the lives and struggles of the simple Thessaloniki Jews, the female tobacco workers, the port stevedores, and their families on the historiographical agenda.
The discovery of these archives led to research in contemporary Greek archives, [9] and to shining a new light upon the annihilation of the Jews of Thessaloniki in 1943 by the Nazis. The few remnants of the community and some of its descendants shifted the blame from Nazi Germany to the community's last Rabbi, Rabbi Zvi Koretz, who died of typhoid fever two weeks after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he was imprisoned with his family. The new sources in Rozen's study show how Thessaloniki's transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state in 1912 led to a drop in the community's political status, and a severe decline in the condition of the lower classes. The heads of the community, who were unable to handle the Greek state, took a decision that was unanimous among all the political factions in the city to bring in a Chief Rabbi from outside, after the community had been without such an office-holder for ten years. The chosen Rabbi was Dr. Zvi Koretz, a young man with a PhD in Oriental Studies from Vienna University, who was also a graduate of the Rabbinical Seminar in Berlin. The community's heads hoped that he would know how to deal with the Greeks, which he did, but at the same time he tried to introduce order into the community's convoluted affairs, and acquired many opponents who saw him as an outsider trying to displace them. After the war, when the community's tragedy was revealed in full, Rabbi Koretz became the scapegoat in two ways. The Germans lacked faces and identities, and it was impossible to avenge them, while the memory of the Rabbi and his family was within reach. He was a classic scapegoat: a foreigner, not a Sephardi Jew, and unable to respond. Greek society, too, found him very convenient to condemn. Greek society and the Greek state have trouble to this day in recognizing that during the war the Greek government collaborated with the Germans, and despite the heroic struggle of the communist partisans against the Nazi occupiers, the fate of Thessaloniki's Jews was to them, and particularly to the Christian residents of Thessaloniki, the concern of others rather than part of Greek society. The blaming of Rabbi Koretz clears their conscience to this day, and the minuscule Jewish community remaining in Thessaloniki has had to fall in line with this approach.
Deepening the research dealing with Greece's modern history led to a study comparing the Greek diaspora with the Jewish diaspora over the generations, whose results led Rozen to study theories of diaspora and migration, which have interested Rozen during the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Rozen rejects the view that there was an Armenian genocide. Israeli historian Yair Auron criticizes her for "practically blam[ing] the Armenians for what happened to them". [10]
The Romaniote Jews or the Romaniotes are a Greek-speaking ethnic Jewish community native to the Eastern Mediterranean. They are one of the oldest Jewish communities in existence and the oldest Jewish community in Europe. The Romaniotes have been, and remain, historically distinct from the Sephardim, some of whom settled in Ottoman Greece after the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal after 1492.
Sephardic music is an umbrella term used to refer to the music of the Sephardic Jewish community. Sephardic Jews have a diverse repertoire the origins of which center primarily around the Mediterranean basin. In the secular tradition, material is usually sung in dialects of Judeo-Spanish, though other languages including Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, and other local languages of the Sephardic diaspora are widely used. Sephardim maintain geographically unique liturgical and para-liturgical traditions.
Obadiah ben Abraham of Bertinoro, commonly known as "The Bartenura", was a 15th-century Italian rabbi best known for his popular commentary on the Mishnah. In his later years, he rejuvenated the Jewish community of Jerusalem and became recognised as the spiritual leader of the Jews of his generation.
The history of the Jews in Greece can be traced back to at least the fourth century BCE. The oldest and the most characteristic Jewish group that has inhabited Greece are the Romaniotes, also known as "Greek Jews." The term "Greek Jew" is predominantly used for any Jew that lives in or originates from the modern region of Greece.
The history of the Jews in Turkey covers the 2400 years that Jews have lived in what is now Turkey. There have been Jewish communities in Anatolia since at least the fifth century BCE and many Spanish and Portuguese Jews expelled from Spain by the Alhambra Decree were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire in the late 15th century, including regions now part of Turkey, centuries later, forming the bulk of the Ottoman Jews.
In Judaism, Nusach, plural nuschaot or Modern Hebrew nusachim, refers to the exact text of a prayer service; sometimes the English word "rite" is used to refer to the same thing. Texts used by different communities include Nosach Teiman, Nusach Ashkenaz, Nusach Sefard, Nusach Edot Hamizrach, and Nusach Ari. In English, the word nusach means formulate, wording.
The rise of the Western notion of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire eventually caused the breakdown of the Ottoman millet system. The concept of nationhood, which was different from the preceding religious community concept of the millet system, was a key factor in the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Abulafia or Abolafia is a Sephardi Jewish surname whose etymological origin is in the Arabic language. The family name, like many other Hispanic-origin Sephardic Jewish surnames, originated in Spain among Spanish Jews (Sephardim), during the time when it was ruled as Al-Andalus by Arabic-speaking Moors.
The history of the Jews in North Macedonia stretches back two thousand years, beginning during Roman antiquity, when Jews first arrived in the region. Today, following the Holocaust and emigration, especially to Israel, around 200 Jews remain in North Macedonia, mostly in the capital, Skopje and a few in Štip and Bitola.
Sardis Synagogue is a synagogue located in Manisa Province, Turkey, and it is the biggest known synagogue that belongs to ancient world. Sardis was under numerous foreign rulers until its incorporation into the Roman Empire in 133 BCE. The city served then as the administrative center of the Roman province of Lydia. Sardis was reconstructed after the catastrophic AD 17 Lydia earthquake, and it enjoyed a long period of prosperity under the Roman rule.
The history of the Jews of Thessaloniki reaches back two thousand years. The city of Thessaloniki housed a major Jewish community, mostly Eastern Sephardim, until the middle of the Second World War. Sephardic Jews immigrated to the city following the expulsion of Jews from Spain by Catholic rulers under the Alhambra Decree of 1492. It is the only known example of a city of this size in the Jewish diaspora that retained a Jewish majority for centuries. This community influenced the Sephardic world both culturally and economically, and the city was nicknamed la madre de Israel.
Judaeo-Spanish or Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. Originally spoken in Spain, and then after the Edict of Expulsion spreading through the Ottoman Empire as well as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco, and England, it is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, France, and Turkey. In 2017, it was formally recognised by the Royal Spanish Academy.
Rena Molho is a Greek historian who focuses on the different aspects of Ottoman and Greek Jewish history and culture and more specifically that of the Jews of Salonika.
By the time the Ottoman Empire rose to power in the 14th and 15th centuries, there had been Jewish communities established throughout the region. The Ottoman Empire lasted from the early 14th century until the end of World War I and covered parts of Southeastern Europe, Anatolia, and much of the Middle East. The experience of Jews in the Ottoman Empire is particularly significant because the region "provided a principal place of refuge for Jews driven out of Western Europe by massacres and persecution."
Steven B. Bowman is an American scholar and academic particularly known for his research of Greek and Jewish relations throughout the past three millennia, with emphasis on Byzantine and Holocaust periods. He is a professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches a wide range of courses in ancient and medieval Judaic Studies and modern Israel.
Jacob Meyer Levy was an Israeli educator, historian, translator and writer.
Eleftherias Square is a central square in downtown Thessaloniki, Greece. It takes its name from the Young Turk Revolution, which began in the square in 1908. The square is currently a car park, but a public competition was launched by the Municipality of Thessaloniki in 2013 to select a design for its redevelopment into a park. Construction was initially expected to start in 2018 at a cost of €5.1 million.
Avraham Al-Naddaf (1866–1940), the son of Ḥayim b. Salem Al-Naddaf, was a Yemenite rabbi and scholar who immigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1891, eventually becoming one of the members of the Yemenite rabbinical court (Beit-Din) established in Jerusalem in 1908, and active in public affairs. His maternal grandfather was Rabbi Yiḥya Badiḥi (1803–1887), the renowned sage and author of the Questions & Responsa, Ḥen Ṭov, and a commentary on the laws of ritual slaughter of livestock, Leḥem Todah, who served as the head of Sanaa's largest seat of learning (yeshiva), held in the synagogue, Bayt Saleḥ, before he was forced to flee from Sana'a in 1846 on account of the tyrant, Abū-Zayid b. Ḥasan al-Miṣrī, who persecuted the Jews under the Imam Al-Mutawakkil Muhammad.
Jacob M. Landau was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Zvi Hirsch Koretz, also written as Tzevi or SeviKoretz, was an Ashkenazi Jew who served as the Chief Rabbi of Saloniki's Jewish community from 1933 to 1945. His role as president of the Judenrat during World War II has been called into controversy, with many accusing him of being a Nazi collaborator.
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