Jewish Imperial Allegiance and the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897 · 45stationed, he had seen overly enthusiastic acts of patriotic identification
spill over into violence. Tensions between the city’s Jews and Greeks, if
already present in certain forms, gained a clearly political charge in the
wake of the war.
Negative forms of patriotism also exposed the rift that existed be-
tween the ideal visions of Jewish community leaders, invested in shaping
the public face of their community, and the ways in which many among
the popular classes chose to express and enact their attachment to the
empire. In the case of Izmir, the strong identification with local Mus-
lims, trumpeted time and time again in the pages of the Ottoman Jewish
press throughout the war, may have even inadvertently contributed to
the mass conversions to Islam, which left a perplexing and unsettling
legacy for the community’s leadership. La Buena Esperansa, the only Jew-
ish newspaper of the city which had not remained silent in the face of the
conversions, did not return to the issue after voicing its timid protest. The
pages of Salonica’s Jewish journals similarly registered their own com-
munal scandal—the taunting of the Greek prisoners of war at the city’s
train station—only in the most limited and indirect manner.
On 31 May, a small notice, without a headline, appeared in Le Journal
de Salonique. It read: “A convoy of fifty-seven Greek prisoners arrived
in our city yesterday. At the [train] station, the honorable English consul
... presented each soldier a package of various sweets and cigarettes.
From the station all the way to the White Tower, where they were to
be held, the prisoners were the object of [the population’s] sincere curios-
ity.” This clearly served as proof, the article pressed on, that “we are far
from the calumnies being hurled at our population by the Greek press
of Athens!”^56 Despite this fleeting reference to the troubling accusations
then being leveled against Salonican Jews, neither the author of this
notice nor any other Jewish journalist in the city provided further hints
as to the content of these “calumnies.” Consciously inserting only the
positive version of events into the pages of their papers, the city’s Jewish
journalists were evidently keen to rewrite the history of their own com-
munity. They did not entirely succeed in erasing the unsettling events
they had witnessed from the historical record, however. Through alter-
nate sources and even through careful readings of the press itself, we can
begin to put the story of Ottoman Jewish patriotism back together in its
entirety.