36 · Julia Phillips Cohen
embassy in Athens that the crowds, consisting of Salonican Jews and
Muslims, had exceeded 15,000 souls.^32 While this number may easily be
an exaggeration, it nonetheless gives us an impression of the significant
figures involved and, at the very least, the enormity with which the event
came to be painted by some. Apparently, the threats the Jews and Mus-
lims hurled at the Greek prisoners did not stop for over an hour, as they
followed the railcars that made their way across Salonica’s streets until
ending at its famous White Tower, where the prisoners were to be held.^33
Although various accounts indicate that the Jews and Muslims of Sa-
lonica had come out together to confront the Greeks who represented
their “enemy,” certain consular and foreign reports suggested that Jews
had been at the center of this outburst. In fact, one Athenian paper ac-
cused the entire Salonican Jewish community of having participated in
the disturbance.^34 The clear hyperbole of this last claim aside, the fact
that Jews had been especially visible during the troubles posed a great
problem for the leaders of the Jewish community and for its journalists,
who responded to this event only with silence. In fact, throughout the
following weeks, they did not mention the disturbance even once. The inter-
communal brawls and fighting that had previously occurred offstage, so
to speak, in peacetime, and away from their cities’ centers, had been dis-
turbing but manageable enough. Once war broke out, and tensions were
suddenly cast in such clear political molds, their former methods—calls
to the chief rabbi for sermons and to the police for action—no longer
sufficed.
The total silence of the Jewish press offers a reminder of the more com-
plex and sometimes uncomfortable aspects of the very patriotism these
journalists espoused and attempted to foster among their readership. The
silence of the local papers on the subject seems indicative, also, of the
limitations of their influence over their own communities. In the case of
the stone-throwing boys, local journalists had interceded and, at least for
a time, succeeded in bringing the issue to the attention of the larger com-
munity and the authorities, halting much of the violence as a result. This
time, the story of the harassment of Greek prisoners in Salonica had been
picked up abroad and by the Athenian press in particular, which blamed
Salonica’s Jews for the incident.
While some of the more overtly political tensions of the April train
depot incident may have superimposed themselves onto previous pat-
terns of ritualized violence, such as the rock fights, these had now taken