From the Ottoman Empire to Auschwitz: Sephardic Jews and the Holocaust. Prof. Devin E. Naar.

Although usually understood as a "European" event, the Holocaust also resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews born in the Muslim world of 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 world, 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.

[@user-yz8pw9dv2n]

Sadly for years in my younger life here in London,England people seemed to have no idea that Sephardim also were mudered in the Shoa.As a sephardi jew born in Salonika my self that hurt deeply.Things now seem to have inproved here about this.

[@katerinasikinou7560]

Not even the Israeli people of Israel are aware of that! As a Thessalonian linguist myself, it was a bitter discovery for me some time ago at a conference in Tel Aviv.

[@OhrMag]

Wonderful lecture, thank you Prof. Naar

[@silvierousso3995]

Thank you / Muchas Grasias ! I did ( a very modest ) research about Salonica and the Jews there . I live in Italy and purchased a DVD about the Jews of Kastoria .

[@katerinasikinou7560]

This is fascinating!

[@Geva555]

I've read a zionist traveler's diary after visiting tsaloniki, such a loss. my heart tears for my lost brothers and sisters

[@tyxeri48]

What about the responsibility of the community themselves? Did the leadership bear some responsibility or not? Members of the community believe that they do. Especially rabbi Koretz.

[@annafrankmusicofficial]

Very nice

[@Turkic-X]

I know many Jews who were expelled first from Germany in the 1450s, and then from Spain and Portugal, and who still live in many cities in Turkey. There are many families who settled in Izmir after Thessaloniki. In addition to Istanbul, there are many Sephardic Jews who speak Ladino in the cities of Antalya and Mersin. Our ancestors were Fatih Sultan Mehmed and II. Bayezid entrusted them to us..

[@tyxeri48]

Many? Entrusted? What and illusion, my friend!