From a Mediterranean perspective, the First World War was only part of a sequence of crises that marked the death throes of the Ottoman Empire: the loss of Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, the Dodecanese, then the war itself with the loss of Palestine to British control, soon followed by a French mandate in Syria. All these changes had consequences, sometimes drastic, in the port cities where different ethnic and religious groups had coexisted over the centuries, notably Salonika, Smyrna, Alexandria and Jaffa. At the end of the war, the Ottoman heartlands were carved up between the victorious powers, and even Constantinople swarmed with British soldiers.1 The sultan was immobilized politically, providing plenty of opportunities for the Turkish radicals, in particular Mustafa Kemal, who had acquitted himself with great distinction fighting at Gallipoli. Allied mistrust of the Turks was compounded by public feeling: the mass deportation of the Armenians in spring and summer 1915 aroused horror among American diplomats based in Constantinople and Smyrna. Marched across the Anatolian highlands in searing heat, with harsh taskmasters forcing them on, men, women and children collapsed and died, or were killed for fun, while the Ottoman government made noises about the treasonable plots that were said to be festering among the Armenians. The intention was to ‘exterminate all males under fifty’.2 The worry among Greeks, Jews and foreign merchants was that the ‘purification’ of Anatolia would not be confined to persecution of the Armenians. In its last days, the Ottoman government had turned its back on the old ideal of coexistence. In Turkey too, as the radical Young Turks often revealed, powerful nationalist sentiment was overwhelming the tolerance of past times.
Smyrna survived the war physically intact, with most of its population protected from persecution, partly because its vali, or governor, Rahmi Bey, was sceptical about the Turkish alliance with Germany and Austria, and understood that the prosperity of his city depended on its mixed population of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, European merchants and Turks.3 When he was ordered to deliver the Armenians to the Ottoman authorities, he temporized, though he had to despatch about a hundred ‘disreputables’ to an uncertain fate.4 The Greeks formed the majority in Smyrna; indeed, there were more Greeks there than in Athens, and they remained very attached to Orthodoxy, which played an important role in the Greek school system and in public festivals, while nationalist ideas from Greece had also begun to filter into the community. The Greeks were very active in the trade in dried fruits, and the arrival of the fig harvest from the interior was a great event on the quayside of Smyrna. The Ladino-speaking Jewish community was less prominent than in Salonika, but in Smyrna as in Salonika western fashions were gaining hold. The governor once visited the school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and commented that he wanted the Jews to wear fezzes, not the western-style hats they were now adopting: ‘You are not in France or Germany, you are in Turkey, you are subjects of His Majesty the sultan.’5
Smyrna possessed an excellent harbour and had continued to flourish from the late eighteenth century onwards, when other Ottoman ports found business was contracting. France dominated Ottoman trade with Europe around 1800, and supplied the city not just with European cloths but with colonial products such as sugar, coffee, cochineal and indigo. The Turks of Smyrna actually bought fezzes made in France.6 Among the Europeans, there was a lively community of business families of British, French and Italian origin, who helped keep Smyrna’s business alive throughout the nineteenth century, when families such as the Whittalls, major fruit exporters, and the Girauds, whose carpet factories employed 150,000 people, dominated economic life. Among newer arrivals were the Americans, who used Smyrna as a staging-post for the traffic of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.7 Spacious suburbs containing the grand houses of the Levantine families, such as the aptly named Paradise, were laid out a few miles from the city, connected by railway line or boat services to the heart of Smyrna.8 Even during the war, these ‘Levantines’, as they were known, managed to continue their life of ease, since Rahmi Bey saw no reason to treat the foreign merchants as enemy aliens – most had been born in Smyrna and had never visited the country whose passport they carried.
Back in London, the victorious British government was blind to the interests of the Levantine merchants of Smyrna. There was bitter hostility to the Turks: Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, described the Ottomans as one of Earth’s ‘most pestilent roots of evil’, and Lloyd George, the prime minister, had for several years been enthusing about the noble achievements of ancient Greek civilization, in contrast to the miserable failings of the Turks – in the wildest of misjudgements, he dismissed Kemal as ‘a carpet seller in a bazaar’. This led him to embrace Venizelos’ dream of a restored Greek dominion that would stretch across the Aegean to include the coast of Asia Minor. For Venizelos this was the very heartland of Greek civilization: ancient Ionia, whose Greek inhabitants, he insisted, ‘constitute the purest part of the Hellenic race’, optimistically numbered at 800,000 souls.9 Great Britain valued Greek military support during 1919 in the struggle against the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia. These Greek freedom-fighters surely needed to be rewarded. The British were happy to offer the Greeks Smyrna and its hinterland, though the Americans and the continental powers, gathered for their Peace Conference in Paris in 1919, were less sure, and the Whittalls of Smyrna submitted evidence that the inhabitants of the city did not want to be ruled by the Greek government, for all of them, Greek, Turk, Jew, Armenian, valued the harmony that existed within the city and wanted no more than local self-government. Lloyd George convinced most of his allies that Smyrna and its hinterland should be granted forthwith to Venizelos, who should be urged to send Greek ships there and occupy the Ionian coast without delay. Among those who bitterly opposed these developments was the American High Commissioner in Constantinople, Admiral Bristol, a man whose prejudices hardly suited him for the tasks ahead: he asserted that ‘the Armenians are a race like the Jews; they have little or no national spirit and have poor moral character’, but he reserved his greatest anger for the British, for he did not believe that Lloyd George was motivated by high moral concerns – it was all about competition for oil.10
In May 1919 13,000 Greek troops arrived. After a quiet start, incidents began to multiply: Turkish villages were ransacked and about 400 Turks and 100 Greeks were killed within Smyrna alone. The new Greek governor, Aristides Sterghiades, was a remote figure who preferred to stand above the social life of the Smyrna elite. He tried to be fair and would often favour Turks over Greeks in disputes; the price he paid was the contempt of the Greeks, whose triumphalism threatened all that was special about the city. On the other hand, his policies brought trade back to Smyrna. It was in the hinterland that problems became ever more serious; the Red Cross collected evidence of the ethnic cleansing of Turkish-inhabited areas by Greeks. One Greek officer was asked by the Red Cross why he let his men kill Turks, to which he replied, ‘because it gave me pleasure’. In fact, violence was the trademark of both sides. But Mustafa Kemal was gathering his forces, and, when, in 1921, the Greeks attempted to penetrate into the highlands to the east, in the hope of drawing a frontier between Greece and Turkey in the western plateau, early successes were met with a dramatic Turkish counter-attack – the Greeks had allowed themselves to be drawn far too deeply into Anatolia. The rout of the Greeks brought Turkish armies cascading westwards towards Smyrna, which they entered on 9 September 1922, but not before about 50,000 defeated Greek soldiers and 150,000 Greeks from the interior began to converge on the city.
This was the beginning of a disaster that seared itself into the Greek memory. Although the first Turkish troops to enter Smyrna were well-disciplined cavalry, they were accompanied by chettes, Turkish irregulars who had already tasted a great amount of Greek blood during rampages in western Anatolia. As the refugees crowded into the city, massacres, rape and looting, mainly but not exclusively by the irregulars, became the unspoken order of the day, starting with the favourite enemy – not the Greeks but the Armenians. Neither the new Turkish governor nor, when he arrived, Mustafa Kemal, appeared worried by something they seemed to regard as a fact of war; there was apparently no longer any room for Greeks and Armenians in the new Turkey that was coming into existence. The thorough sacking of the Armenian quarter was followed by violence across the city, though the Turkish quarter was respected. The suburban villas of the Levantine merchants were pillaged; most Levantines (if they survived) lost everything they owned, and their trading companies went out of business. Finally, the streets and houses of Smyrna were soaked in petrol (beginning, again, with the Armenian quarter), and on 13 September the city was set alight. This swelled the refugee population to 700,000, for now the Greeks and Armenians of Smyrna itself were forced to flee to the quayside. There, a tantalizing spectacle awaited them: British, French, Italian and American warships were in harbour, all nervously protecting the interests of their own mother-country. The fire spread closer to the quayside, wrecking the warehouses and offices of the great trading firms, and the centre of the city was reduced to ashes, while a desperate mass of people, many of whom were dying of wounds, thirst and exhaustion, prayed for deliverance.
The attitude of the Great Powers was chillingly unsympathetic. Admiral Bristol had already instructed two American journalists that they were not to write of Turkish atrocities, and the French and Italians insisted that their ‘neutrality’ prevented them from taking on board refugees – so much so that people who swam out to the warships were left to drown in the sea. When a boy and a girl were found in the water off an American ship, the sailors told Asa Jennings, an employee of the Young Men’s Christian Association who was trying to organize large-scale evacuation, that, much as they wished to help, this was against orders, as it would compromise American neutrality. He refused to accept this – the children were recovered and turned out to be brother and sister.11 On board the British warships, bands were ordered to play rousing sea shanties while the officers dined in the mess, to drown out the terrified screams that were coming from the quayside a few hundred yards away. Eventually the British admiral gave way to the impassioned pleas, and the admirably persistent Jennings was able to secure the help of the Greek navy based nearby in Lesbos as well. Twenty thousand were saved on allied ships, and very many more on Jennings’s Greek flotilla. Even so, something like 100,000 people were killed in Smyrna and its hinterland, and at least as many were deported into the Anatolian interior, where most vanished.
The callousness of the commanders in Smyrna Bay, and the sheer hostility of Admiral Bristol in Constantinople, reflected a different way of thinking about humanitarian catastrophes from that of the early twenty-first century. ‘Neutrality’ was understood to mean that one should stand aside, rather than that neutral powers were best placed to offer aid to the dispossessed and dying victims of ethnic violence. This unwillingness to intervene was compounded by awareness that Lloyd George’s support for Venizelos had set off a train of events over which neither Greece nor Great Britain had any control. Most of the people of Smyrna had gone; Smyrna too had ceased to exist, wrecked by fire, and the new Turkish city of Izmir never recovered its long-standing commercial primacy. The gap left by the Greeks and Armenians was filled as Turks expelled from Crete and northern Greece flooded into Turkey. Eventually, under the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, a massive exchange of population between Greece and Turkey took place – 30,000 Muslims left Crete alone. The flight from Istanbul of the last sultan, in November 1922, removed the final, very feeble, barrier to the creation of a new, westward-inclined Turkey, with a new capital, a new alphabet and a secular constitution. In Greece, the Megalé Idea was dead, but the multinational character of the Turkish empire was also discarded. Despite the tensions and even hatreds that erupted between peoples and religions, and despite frequent attempts to humiliate Christians and Jews by imposing on them a variety of financial and social disabilities, the Ottoman system had managed to hold together disparate peoples for several centuries. It was replaced by a group of nations whose leaders proclaimed strident nationalism, and found it difficult to accommodate those they now deemed outsiders – Greeks and Armenians in Turkey, Jews and Muslims in Greece.
Alexandria was another port city in which cultures met and mixed. The city began to take its modern shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when an elegant Corniche road along a new waterfront was created, and wide streets with apartment blocks and offices came into being. These buildings included the pseudo-Coptic Anglican cathedral, built as early as the 1850s, as well as the extraordinary group of buildings designed by the architect Alessandro Loria, who was born in Egypt, trained in Italy and then lionized in Alexandria in the 1920s. His National Bank of Egypt looks like a Venetian palazzo; he also built the Jewish and Italian hospitals, appropriately since he was both a Jew and an Italian; his most visited building is the famous Cecil Hotel, a favourite of Winston Churchill and Lawrence Durrell, and indeed of Durrell’s own creation, Justine.12 The Greek, Jewish, Italian, Coptic and Turkish inhabitants of the city were immensely proud of Alexandria, interpreting the classical phrase Alexandria ad Aegyptum to mean that it was a European city beside, not in, Egypt.13 Jasper Brinton, an American who served as appeal judge of the Mixed Courts of Egypt in the early twentieth century, enthused about Alexandria, which, he said, was ‘brilliant and sophisticated, far beyond any city in the Mediterranean’; music-lovers were entertained in the city’s great theatres by Toscanini, Pavlova and the best voices from La Scala.14 It was said that the streets were so clean you could eat food off them, something definitely not to be tried nowadays.
Of course, cosmopolitan Alexandria was not all Alexandria, and the life of the elite, which will be discussed shortly, was not the life of the majority of the Greeks, Italians, Jews and Copts who lived along the northern shore of the city. On late nineteenth-century maps, the southern flank of the long, narrow city was labelled Ville arabe, but it did not greatly intrude on the life of the Alexandrian middle classes, except to provide cooks, maids and tram-drivers. The Europeans accounted for only 15 per cent of the population, even if it was they who exercised most of the economic power; in 1927 there were about 49,000 Greeks in the city, 37,000 of whom had Greek citizenship, 24,000 Italians and 4,700 Maltese. Overlapping with various nationalities there were 25,000 Jews (nearly 5,000 with Italian passports, though many remained stateless); a good many Greeks also held non-Greek passports, whether as Cypriots (making them British) or as Rhodians (making them Italian) or, even after 1923, as Turkish subjects.15 The majority of influential Muslim families, including the royal family, hailed from Turkey, Albania, Syria or Lebanon. As in Salonika and Smyrna, French made great inroads, even though Egypt was a British protectorate. One Alexandrian exile confessed that his reading knowledge of Arabic was limited to menus and newspaper headlines: ‘I have always considered English and French as my mother tongues.’ His wife told a different story: ‘My mother was entirely Francophone, and my father spoke only Italian. I don’t know how they understood one another, but they did.’16 A smattering of Arabic was mainly thought useful for communicating with servants. In an age of rising nationalism, this rejection of any ‘Eastern’ identity would eventually prove fatal to the survival of these communities.
A fictionalized memoir of life in Alexandria by André Aciman shows the direction of thinking of many Alexandrians. Aciman’s family arrived from Constantinople in 1905, but his uncle Vili attached himself both to Alexandria and to Europe:
Like most men born in Turkey towards the end of the century, Vili disparaged anything that had to do with Ottoman culture and thirsted for the West, finally becoming ‘Italian’ the way most Jews in Turkey did: by claiming ancestral ties to Livorno, a port city near Pisa where escaped Jews from Spain had settled in the sixteenth century.17
The architect Loria liked to dress himself and his family in the black shirts of the Fascists; he was also a benefactor of the Alexandria synagogue. The most influential Jewish family was that of Baron Félix de Menasce, who held an Austrian imperial title, although his grandfather, who was born in Cairo, had acquired his wealth after becoming the banker to Khedive Ismail; by Félix’s time not just banking but commerce with Trieste sustained the fortunes of this glittering family. He founded schools and hospitals, and even established his own synagogue and cemetery, for he fell out with the leaders of the imposing new synagogue on Nebi Daniel Street. Even though he led a secular life in which Jewish observance counted for little, he was deeply upset when he learned that his son Jean, who was studying in Paris, had been baptized a Catholic. Worse still, in his eyes, his son joined the Dominican Order and came to Alexandria to preach. Félix de Menasce was a close friend of the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who visited the city in March 1918, staying at the imposing Menasce residence. Interestingly, Baron Félix used his contacts with the Arabs in Palestine to attempt to negotiate a bilateral agreement between Jews and Arabs over the future of Palestine, but the British, now in charge of Palestine, were uninterested.18
These connections provided the inspiration for Lawrence Durrell’s description of the enormously rich Alexandrian banker Nessim, whom he cast as a Copt rather than a Jew. Durrell wrote the first volume of his Alexandria Quartet in Bellapais, in Cyprus, in the early 1950s, but he had close links with the Alexandrian Jews through his second wife, Eve Cohen, and even more through his third wife, Claude Vincendon, who was the granddaughter of Félix de Menasce.19 The Menasces mixed socially with another eminent family, the Zoghebs, who were Melkite Christians from Syria, members of a community that included many prosperous traders in silk, timber, fruit and tobacco.20 There was no comparison between the haut bourgeois life of the Smyrna Levantines and the truly grand style of the Menasces and their peers, especially since the Alexandrian elite had the ear of the king and, in particular, of Omar Toussoun, a much admired member of the royal family who understood the importance of associating himself with the different communities of Alexandria. He might be found giving out the prizes at a Jewish school, or to children of the Alexandrian elite at Victoria College, which was modelled on an English public (i.e. private) school. He was honorary president of the Coptic Archaeological Society and donated handsomely towards the building of the Coptic hospital. At the same time he took a great interest in the local economy, working hard to stabilize cotton prices.21
The daily life of the foreign communities revolved around commerce and coffee houses, among which the most famous were those of the Greeks, notably the Café Pastroudis. And within these cafés might be found members of the Greek intelligentsia, of whom the most accomplished was the poet Cavafy.22 The English novelist E. M. Forster, who spent most of the First World War in the city (falling in love with an Arab tram-conductor), spread awareness of Cavafy’s poetry beyond Alexandria, while the poet himself returned again and again to the theme of his home city. The problem was that it was ancient Alexandria to which his mind kept returning, rather than the modern city, which had no great appeal for him.23 Alexandria, of all the port cities in the eastern Mediterranean, was damaged least by the political changes that followed the fall of the Ottomans, for it owed its revival to foreign settlers attracted by the initiatives of the khedives, not the sultans.
Alexandria was a newly rebuilt city; not far away there emerged a brand new one, in Palestine. There, the British found themselves in a very different political environment from Egypt. The Arab revolt during the First World War, in part fostered by T. E. Lawrence, had brought Britain valuable allies against the Turks; simultaneously, Zionist demands for a Jewish homeland led to increasing tension between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, particularly after the British government indicated its sympathy for the idea of a Jewish National Home in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Jewish aspirations were expressed in the idea of a return to the land, as idealistic settlers from central and eastern Europe created agricultural settlements – the kibbutz movement aimed to take Jews out of cities and into the fresh air of the countryside – but there was another strand to Zionism, according to which the creation of a westernized city in Palestine, inhabited by Jews, was a fundamental task. In 1909 a group of Jews, mainly European Ashkenazim, acquired the title to some sandy dunes a mile north of the ancient port of Jaffa, and divided the land into sixty-six plots, which were assigned by lot – a sign of their idealism, since a lottery ensured that no one could bid for a better position and rich and poor would have to live side by side.24 Their intention was to create a well-spaced garden city, or rather a garden suburb, since initially they refused to include any shops in their plans. They assumed that the residents would travel down to Jaffa for whatever supplies they needed. Looking for a name, the settlers argued about any number of alternatives, including the staunchly Zionist Herzliya and the delightfully mellifluous Yefefia (‘most beautiful’). In the end Theodor Herzl won, because the name Tel Aviv was the Hebrew title of his novel about re-establishing Zion, Altneuland, ‘old-new land’: tel signified the ancient remains which reminded visitors of the Jewish presence in past millennia, and aviv, the first green shoots of the wheat harvest, and, by extension, springtime.25
Thus was born what was to become the first major city to emerge on the shores of the Mediterranean since the early Middle Ages, when Tunis had been founded to replace Carthage and Venice had emerged from its lagoons. The emergence of Tel Aviv offers a different, Mediterranean perspective to the tortuous history of the foundation of Israel, and the new city aroused intense passions among its Arab neighbours – it still does not feature on many maps of the Middle East produced in Arab countries.26 The founders of Tel Aviv were clear in their minds that they wished to create a Jewish settlement, and that it would possess a European character distinct from Jaffa, which they saw as distressingly ‘oriental’. This wish for European modernity was not new to Jaffa. With a strong sense of German propriety, a Protestant sect known as the Templars had created two orderly settlements outside Jaffa in the 1880s: ‘with its broad streets and elegant buildings, a person might forget he was walking in a desolate land and imagine himself in one of the civilised cities of Europe’.27 The wealthier Arabs of Jaffa also built comfortable villas in its suburbs. Nor was Tel Aviv the first Jewish suburb of Jaffa. In the 1880s a prosperous Algerian Jew, Aharon Chelouche, who had lived in Palestine since 1838, bought land on which there arose the Jaffa suburb of Neve Tzedek. What impressed those who saw Neve Tzedek was its clean and relatively spacious layout, and its homes were thought to be among the most beautiful in Jaffa.28 Neve Tzedek attracted settlers from a variety of origins – as well as the North African Chelouches, there were Ashkenazim arriving from central Europe, while Solomon Abulafia, who became its mayor, came from no further away than Tiberias – he and his Ashkenazi wife, Rebecca Freimann, decamped in 1909 to join the founders of Tel Aviv. Not surprisingly he is portrayed in photographs in a morning coat, cravat and striped trousers, emblems of modernization that were also worn by his Turkish and Arab peers in Jaffa.29 The writer Agnon lived for a time in the Abulafia house in Neve Tzedek, and, before Tel Aviv became a centre of Hebrew culture, a writers’ and artists’ colony gathered here.
Jaffa too was on the ascendant. It was the major port in Palestine and Jerusalem’s main outlet to the sea, even though ships of any respectable size could not come close in to shore, and travellers had to disembark on to lighters, or were carried ashore piggy-back by Jaffan porters. The Ottoman sultan bestowed an eloquent symbol of modernization on Jaffa by building the clock tower that still stands. By the eve of the First World War, Jaffa was host to over 40,000 inhabitants, Muslim, Christian and Jewish (the last group roughly a quarter of the whole). Then, during the war, the city was evacuated of Arabs and Jews, under orders from the Turks, who suspected collusion between the Jaffans and the advancing British army; but Jaffa and its Jewish suburbs were not pillaged by the Turks (more damage was done by Australian troops who squatted for a while in the empty city), and Jaffa bounced back thereafter.30 From its railway station one could travel northwards to Beirut and south and west to Cairo – even to Khartoum. Jaffa drew its income not just from trade passing from the Mediterranean into the interior but from its excellent oranges, which were distributed around the Ottoman lands and to western Europe. Jaffa, rather than Jerusalem, was also the prime cultural centre of Palestine, and a growing sense of identity among the Arab population was reflected in the title and contents of a Christian-owned newspaper, Falastin, ‘Palestine’.31 This is not to suggest that its cultural life rivalled that of Alexandria. Setting aside the dour German Protestants, it was an Arabic-speaking city, and the Chelouches mixed on easy terms with their Arab friends and neighbours.32 But the emergence of Tel Aviv set off new tensions. In the 1920s, Jaffan Christians and Muslims often enjoyed visiting the new settlement – there were attractions such as the Eden Cinema, not to mention the gambling dens and brothels that began to sprout there. However, outbreaks of violence between Jews and Arabs soured relations from 1921 onwards; the first riot began when the Jaffa Arabs, already tense, mistakenly assumed that a Communist demonstration in Tel Aviv was a rabble about to descend on Jaffa; forty-nine Jews were killed, including the inhabitants of a writers’ colony on the outskirts.33
The underlying cause of tension was the arrival from across the Mediterranean of shiploads of Jewish immigrants. Towards the end of 1919 the Russian ship Ruslan arrived in Jaffa from Odessa with 670 passengers. Even if these Ashkenazi migrants were not changing the inner character of old Jaffa, because they went to live in Tel Aviv or the Palestinian hinterland, the balance between Jaffa and Tel Aviv was shifting perceptibly and rapidly. In 1923 Tel Aviv already contained 20,000 inhabitants, almost all Jews. After that, it began to overtake Jaffa proper: a year later, Tel Aviv contained 46,000 inhabitants, 150,000 in 1930, and in 1948, the year of Israel’s creation, 244,000. Gradually it became emancipated from the municipality of Jaffa, enjoying internal autonomy from 1921, absorbing the other Jewish quarters on the edge of Jaffa, such as Neve Tzedek, and becoming a separate municipality in 1934.34 One early development within Tel Aviv was the foundation of a school, the Herzliya Gymnasium, whose imposing modern building (now, unbelievably, swept away and replaced by a hideous tower block) functioned as an important cultural centre.35 On the other hand, this drew Jewish children away from the mixed schools in Jaffa, often operated by nuns, where Jews, Christians and Muslims had been educated side by side.
One of the most important developments was the creation of a harbour. The port of Jaffa serviced Tel Aviv until the outbreak of a new and even more serious round of violence in 1936. Then, amid Arab boycotts of Jewish shops and Jewish boycotts of Arab ones, the town council petitioned the British authorities for permission to establish a port in the north of their growing city. The Jewish leader David Ben Gurion stated: ‘I want a Jewish sea. The sea is a continuation of Palestine.’ The impact of the rival port was quickly felt in Jaffa: in 1935 Jaffa imported goods worth £7.7 million, which fell the following year to £3.2 million, with Tel Aviv catering for £602,000; but by 1939 Jaffa was importing goods worth only £1.3 million, and Tel Aviv had expanded to £4.1 million. Since Arab labour was not available during the crisis of 1936, the port was staffed from Salonika, the city that was famous for its Jewish stevedores.36 A series of Levant Fairs also brought wealth to Tel Aviv, beginning modestly in 1924, but expanding to a point where, in 1932, 831 foreign companies exhibited their products. The vision that was being promoted was one of Tel Aviv as the new crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and (proving that this might yet be possible) the fairs attracted displays from Syria, Egypt and the newly created kingdom of Transjordan.37
This growth was accompanied by the emergence of Tel Aviv as a real city, even while its boundaries with Jaffa remained indistinct and the subject of bickering. The building of the city was a mixture of uncoordinated private enterprise and a certain amount of central planning – enough to create a broad tree-lined avenue named after the Rothschilds (in the hope of greater financial support than was received). In the 1930s, a master-plan was devised by the Scottish architect Geddes, who sought to tie the city more firmly to its long seafront. In the core of the city striking Bauhaus buildings expressed the wish of its wealthier inhabitants to be seen as the carriers of modern western culture; the ‘White City’ they built was considered remarkable enough to earn UNESCO World Heritage status in 2003. Other expressions of the search for a western, European identity could be found in the Habima Theatre and in the literary, artistic and musical culture of the city. Similar trends were taking place in Alexandria, Salonika and Beirut, as well as in Jaffa; what was different here, as observers often remarked, was that Tel Aviv seemed at times to have more in common with eastern European cities such as Odessa and Vienna than with Mediterranean ones such as Naples and Marseilles.
The puzzlement of the Jaffans at the behaviour of their Jewish neighbours, even in less tense times, can be seen in a cartoon from the Arabic newspaper Falastin, of 1936 (opposite). An Anglican archbishop stands in a pulpit admonishing a corpulent John Bull, who has ended up with two wives, the first a demure Palestinian Arab whose face and hair are exposed, but who wears traditional Palestinian dress and carries a cage containing a dove; the second is a long-legged Jewish pioneer in very short shorts and a tight blouse, smoking a cigarette. John Bull explains that the pressure of the Great War led him to marry twice, and the archbishop insists he must divorce his Jewish wife. The political message is clear, but so is the mixture of fascination and unease at the manners of the new Jewish settlers.38 The casual familiarity between Jew and Arab in the days when the Chelouches had established Neve Tzedek had vanished. Those who built Tel Aviv had come to insist too hard on the difference between what they proposed to create and what they left behind in Jaffa. The mere modernizers who founded Neve Tzedek had been swamped by immigrants for whom the ways of the East were entirely alien. Such changes grew naturally out of the pressures placed on Tel Aviv by the thousands of newcomers who were escaping from persecution in central and eastern Europe. At the same time, several Zionist leaders vaunted the advantages of creating a Jewish city – the first all-Jewish city, they averred, for 1,900 years. Ironically, just as this happened, the waves of persecution within Europe reached a new and unprecedented intensity, devastating the eastern European cities where Jews constituted a near or real majority. One of those cities was Salonika.
It has already been seen how Salonika found itself caught up in the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire; it even found itself on the front line from 1915 onwards, when British and French troops arrived, in the hope (soon abandoned) of supporting Serbian armies fighting against Austria; the allies bedded down in Salonika and its surroundings, an area the British called ‘the Birdcage’. The allied presence had unsettling political results: Britain and France deepened an existing schism in Greek politics when they gave their support to Venizelos against the king of Greece – Venizelos came to Salonika in 1916, and fighting broke out between royalists and Venizelists, while the allies seized some of the ships of the Royal Hellenic Navy.39 Then, after the fire of 1917 and the end of the war, Salonika attracted the attention of the Greek and Turkish governments because it retained such a large Muslim population: in July 1923 there were about 18,000 Muslims still in Salonika. A million Christians arrived in Greece from Turkey, refugees from the warfare that destroyed Smyrna, followed by those who were expelled under the terms of the population exchange agreed at Lausanne; 92,000 of these would settle in Salonika. The city and the surrounding countryside were denuded of Muslims, while the Christians from Asia Minor were settled in the vacant houses and lands of the Turks, or in areas rebuilt after the fire. Ironically, the Salonikans found that many Anatolian refugees spoke Turkish; their badge of identity was the Greek Church, not the Greek language, and their customs were almost indistinguishable from those of the Turkish Muslims among whom they had lived for as much as 900 years.40
There were still 70,000 Jews in Salonika. The Greek government encouraged their Hellenization, notably through the teaching of Greek in schools. Sometimes this led to tensions, as when the government, challenging what were seen as ‘narrow religious conceptions’, removed the provision that Jewish shops could close on Saturdays but open on Sundays.41 And yet the Day of Atonement was made a general public holiday in Salonika, and everyone understood that the economic stability of the city depended on Greeks and Jews working together. There was some Jewish emigration to France, Italy and the United States; in Haifa and Tel Aviv, Jewish dockworkers were valued. But the overall sense was that, despite massive political changes, there was no threat. If anything, threats had receded now that the borders between Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia had been defined.
It became clear how mistaken this view was during the Second World War, after the Germans occupied the city in April 1941. There were occasional outrages such as the seizure of valuable Jewish manuscripts and artefacts, but for nearly two years restrictions on the Jews were less stringent than elsewhere in Hitler’s empire. This was partly because the economy of the city was near collapse, with severe food shortages, and the Germans were unwilling to disrupt what commercial activity there was.42 The Nazis treated the Spanish-speaking Sephardim no differently from the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe. Once the Nazis had decided to act, they did so quickly and efficiently – behind these acts lay the malign hand of Adolf Eichmann. In February 1943 the Jews were confined in ghettoes. Tales that they would be deported to Cracow to work in rubber factories were disseminated; and on 15 March the first train packed with victims departed for Poland. By August the city was almost entirely Judenrein, to cite contemporary German usage. Within a matter of weeks 43,850 Salonikan Jews were put to death, most gassed immediately on arrival in Auschwitz and elsewhere.43 The Italian consul saved some, and individual Greeks, including clerics, often did what they could; the Spanish authorities were sometimes willing to help those they saw as fellow-Spaniards of very long standing. Even so, in Greece the Nazis succeeded in wiping out 85 per cent of the Jewish community.
So, after three and a half centuries, old Salonika ceased to exist. Smyrna was the first of the great port cities to succumb. The fall of Smyrna had led to perhaps 100,000 deaths. Salonika experienced the added horror of an industrialized killing machine. The destruction of the port cities of the eastern Mediterranean would continue after the Second World War, though without such staggering loss of life. Each acquired an exclusive identity as a Greek, Turkish, Jewish or Egyptian city. Further west, too, port cities that brought together people of different cultures and religions were in decline. Livorno had entered united Italy long before these events and, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, its elite, identifying (whatever a person’s ancestry) with Italia, looked increasingly towards the professions and non-commercial careers, as the city lost its special privileges and ceded primacy to Genoa and other rivals.44 After the First World War, Trieste was detached from Austria-Hungary and a geographical position that had once been its advantage now became an embarrassment, as the city was boxed in by the new kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, with Austria a small and inconsequential state across the Alps, uncertain of its cultural and political identity. Then, after the Second World War, it became a bone of contention between Italy and Yugoslavia, acquiring the ambiguous status of ‘Free City’ until 1954. Its distinctive cultural identity, or rather plurality of identities, proved unable to survive these political and economic changes.
Jaffa changed more suddenly, even though it had already lost its plural identity as Tel Aviv developed into a separate, non-Arab, city. Over a number of weeks in spring 1948, on the eve of the birth of Israel, tens of thousands of Jaffan Arabs fled by ship or overland, seeking refuge in Gaza, Beirut and elsewhere. The United Nations had designated Jaffa as an exclave of the proposed Arab state that would coexist with a Jewish state in Palestine. Following bombardment by Jewish forces in late April, the population of Jaffa dwindled. The leaders of the Arab community, which had now contracted to only about 5,000, surrendered the city on 13 May, the day before the state of Israel was proclaimed down the road on Rothschild Avenue, Tel Aviv.45 Thereafter, Jaffa became a suburb of Tel Aviv with an Arab minority, in what was almost a reversal of the situation forty years earlier, while those who had left found themselves unable to return. In Alexandria, the final act was delayed until 1956, when the nationalization of the Suez Canal was followed by the expropriation and expulsion of Italians, Jews and others at the orders of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The city reconstituted itself as a massive Muslim Arab city, but its economy nose-dived. Something remains of the old Alexandria, but mainly in the form of cemeteries – of Greeks, Catholics, Jews and Copts. As for the cemeteries of Salonika, the massive Jewish one had already been despoiled, graves and all, by the Nazis. It is now covered by the vast campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: ‘and some there be, which have no memorial’.46