Tracing People From 1863: The Jewish Community on Rhodes

One of the engrossing aspects of Rhodes Town is its palimpest of cultures, literally layered on top of each other, but with numerous changes across centuries and sometimes even decades. There are various highlights of changes to monuments and much more work has been made since I was last here, gulp, 25 years ago.

There are so many layers - Ancient / Ionian Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian / Genoese, Knights of St John, Ottoman, Italian, modern Greek - it can be hard to disenangle them. But you can see the changes if you know how to look and the different styles of architecture or art that the different communities used. What then about these communities - the people in this Island on the edges of East / West?

Under Ottoman rule from 1522, the Turks took control of the main city and the Greeks lived outside the walls - mainly on the west where the new town is now. The Jewish population lived in a quarter of the Old Town on the East that was nearest to the harbour. There had been Jewish people in Rhodes since at least the Roman period, though many of the Greek speaking people (the ancient community) left after 1502 due to the Spanish Inquisition enforcing its anti-Semitic rules on the Knights. This inquisition led to many Spanish and Portugese Jews (Sephardic Jews) leaving for the Ottoman Empire and the relative freedom and autonomy they had there. They were encouraged to settle in Rhodes after 1522 and became a vital part of the community. This map below - Plate 4 in Charles Thomas Newton's Travels and Discoveries in the Levant (1865) - shows the map of Rhodes Town with the 'Jew's Quarter' marked. The Castello area and part in the middle and to the west in the Old Town were mainly occupised by Turks It was also where the Newtons and Gertrude stayed in 1863. The Frankish area was outside the Old Town, beyond the Greek Area, towards the sea - the Vice- Consul houses / offices are marked.

When Charles Thomas and Mary Severn Newton visited the island with Gertrude Jekyll in 1863 there were roughly 4,000 Jewish people living in the town and one of these became a much trusted servant called Mordecai. He and his family were Sephardic and so spoke Spanish/Hebrew - Ladino - and Gertrude records the family as having red or fair hair. As well as helping Mary and Gertrude with dinner - pictured in their album below - Mordecai and his family sat for both artists. One of which - Mordecai and his family - is recorded in being in Charles’ front drawing room in his will in 1889 and left to his sister in law Eleanor Furneaux.

Mary wrote to her sister Claudia that 'We had an old Greek woman to cook for us and a Jew man servant belonging to Senior Panini who waited on us. This good Jew Mordecai was perfect'. Gertrude records the petty feuds between Maria, their Greek servant, and Mordecai, who was as much a fixer as a servant and that Maria called him 'that Hebrew'. There was tension between Greek and Jewish people, in part as the Jewish community got enhanced priviledges, or had done before reforms of the Tanzimat, in which the Ottomans gave minority community equal rights under civil law. In part due to Anti-Semitism, which was common across Europe and a glimpse of this can be seen in a comment about a Jewish man in Smyrna that Mary makes. Generally the tensions were minor, but a 'Blood libel' in 1840 led to a severe risk of violence against the Jewish community as a Greek boy went missing on the island. There were rumours that his blood had been drunk in a ceremony - the so-called 'Blood Libel'. A serious uprising in Damascus had occurred over the same Anti-Semitic rumours but in the case of Rhodes both the Ottoman Government and Chief Rabbi intervened before the violence took hold (Borovaya, 2021).

There is only one remaining synagogue in the town now - the Kahal Shalom Synagogue. Italian occupation of the island in 1912 was not a problem for the community until the 1930s, even after Mussolini became fascist dictator of Italy. In 1936 the fascist goverment brought in racial laws based on those in germany The arrival of Cesare Mariade de Vecchi, who was a hardline fascist and friend of Mussolini, meant changes on the island, including the removal of Jewish gravestones from mixed cemeteries (McGilchrist, 2010).

Unfortunately, Mordecai’s surname is not recorded by either Gertrude or Mary in their letters and diary and so I could not trace them in the lists of those people deported by the SS in 1944 that are part of a memorial in the synagogue. I hope later generations of his family emigrated - as many Jewish people did due to poor economic conditions in the 1920s and then the racial laws of 1936 - before the German Nazi deportation of this ancient population to Auschwitz on 23 July 1944. Of the 1,604 people rounded up from Rhodes, only 150 people survived. 90 % of all Jewish people from Greece were murdered with the vast majority sent to the Gas Chambers on arrival at Auschwitz (Mazower, 1993). Seeing the lists of names - entire families - and another plaque to the children of just one family, who were murdered brings home the loss and inhumanity of the Shoah. The memorial to Jewish matyrs is on the edge of the former 'Jewish Quarter' and in the shade of gnarled trees srrounded by cafes, but strikingly sombre.

The ancient Jewish legacy lives on in the remaining Synagogue and a small community, which has put together an engrossing museum and memorial to all the souls murdered. The museum captures the lives, more than the deaths, of these people. The photograph below shows what Mordecai and his fmaily may have worn and their life in the mid to late nineteenth century. It has helped me think about how I capture how the population of Rhodes has changed since 1863 for Holiday Sketches exhibition at The Portico Library next month. More importantly, it made me put the tasteless fascist renovation of the Grand Master Palace - rebuilt for Mussolini, though he never came - into context. History and things from the past are always claimed and controlled by power and particularly by authoritarian rulers.

Bibliography

Borovaya, O. (2021) ‘The Rhodes Blood Libel of 1840: Episode in the History of Ottoman Reforms’, Jewish social studies, 26(3), pp. 35–63. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2979/JEWISOCISTUD.26.3.02.

Mazower, M. (1993) Inside Hitler’s Greece : the experience of occupation, 1941-44 / Mark Mazower. New Haven: Yale University Press.

McGilchrist, Nigel (2010), Rhodes. McGilchrist's Greek Islands, London