Istanbul
was critical of Jews’ apparent lack of assimilation, saying that their Otto-
man mentality was manifested in the desire to retain a separate corporate
identity. Asserting that Jews could never be Greeks, it whipped up anti-
Jewish animosity and played a prominent role in the 1931 Campbell riot,
in which members of the extreme nationalist National Union of Greece,
founded by refugee merchants, attacked an area of the city populated by
Jews who had settled there following the 1917 fire. The editor in chief
of Makedonia was put on trial following the riot.^27 Claiming that Jews
despised Hellenism, his paper imagined that they were conspiring to take
over the city and undermine Greece, just as Dönme were beginning to be
depicted as playing a sinister role behind the scenes in Turkey.
Aristotle University, originally housed in the Allatini villa, where Abdül-
hamid II had lived under house arrest, was granted the land of the Jewish
cemetery in 1937. Disinterments were carried out. As Nicholas Stavrou-
lakis graphically relates, “The great necropolis resembled a pockmarked
valley on the moon. Across its ravaged surface could be seen shattered
fragments of marble, piles of earth and bricks intermingled with remains
of the dead.”^28 In 1941 , the Nazis seized the city, and the fate of the cem-
etery reflected that of Thessaloníki’s Jews. The following year, Nazis and
Greek municipal officials expropriated two large sections of the Jewish
cemetery, demolished graves, disinterred bodies, and then destroyed the
rest of the cemetery. Many gravestones were incorporated into the recon-
struction of St. Demetrius, the church of the city’s saint, his tomb recently
tended by Mevlevi Sufis. Gravestones were even used in the dance floor
in a taverna located in the former cemetery.^29 In 1943 , the deportations
of Jews began. Among all of the Jews of Europe deported to Auschwitz,
those of Thessaloníki faced one of the highest death rates. By the end of
summer, Thessaloníki “was a city rid of its Jews and all that was left of its
rich Sephardi history was to be found in empty graves, shops, and homes.
The last vestige of pluralism had vanished almost without a trace.”^30
A Karakaş interviewee related the story told in his family about their
factory or workshop in Sultanahmet, Istanbul which received most of its
raw material from Germany. In the early 1940 s, the material stopped ar-
riving. The factory manager wrote to the supplier in Germany. Months
passed. Finally, he received a curt response stating; “We can no longer do
business with you because you have Jewish origins.”^31 In 1942 – 43 , the busi-
nessman Mümtaz Taylan Fazlı, whose firm Orak was on the fashionable
Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and was a member of the executive committee