Jewish Imperial Allegiance and the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897 · 37on novel, urgent, and political layers of meaning in the context of war-
time for all involved. This added dangerous undertones to such tensions,
which could no longer be dismissed simply as the work of uneducated
youths. Each time an urban conflict arose in the midst of the war, it be-
came more clearly cast as a symbolically charged political act.
Also striking was the total sense of confidence and ownership of the
public space that Salonican Jews had exhibited during the incident, as
they goaded the Greek prisoners passing through the town. With the ad-
ditional police surveillance of wartime, and the new presence of Ottoman
soldiers in the city, the Jews—already the single largest religious group
in Ottoman Salonica—appear to have felt a bolstered sense of security in
- Their great success in performing patriotic acts, and the applause
with which these had been met by local Ottoman officials and journals,
may have contributed even further to such spontaneous manifestations.
One contemporary observer, a representative of the Alliance Israélite
Universelle (AIU) in Salonica, expressed his concern about the excessive
“zeal and noise” that had accompanied the Jews’ public demonstrations
of loyalty to the Ottoman Empire during the war. He worried that the
Jews had abandoned their usual reserve and thus turned local Greeks
against them.^35 Indeed, though contemporary Jewish observers do not
seem to have been inclined to mention this fact, there were plenty of
historical precedents of Greek-Jewish tensions created during earlier
conflicts that might have given reason to be wary.^36 Moreover, the Alli-
ance representative’s discomfort with the Jewish community’s excesses
further exposes the undercurrent of intercommunal tensions in late Ot-
toman Salonica, tensions that appear to have deepened during the war.
Disorganized and unplanned acts such as these greatly disturbed Jew-
ish elites in Salonica, who hoped to erase either their practice or their
memory, or both. Despite the claims of Jewish journalists to the contrary,
the war raging off in the distance had, in fact, also found its way home to
the streets of Salonica.
The Case of Izmir
The Jewish papers of Izmir also spoke of harmony among the different
groups living together in their city.^37 At the start of the year, a recently
founded Ladino journal, El Meseret, published an article describing the
cooperation and openness that abounded in Izmir. It told the story of a