To my parents, Athanassios Kravvas and Eleni Lioudi-Kravva To my children, Bigina and Thanassis Without them I feel that my accomplishments would be somehow incomplete… Acknowledgements There are some people who have contributed –one way or another– to this final product. I would like to thank my Ph.D. supervisors Pat Caplan and Victoria Goddard for their continuous support, guidance and trust in my project and myself. I am grateful to Rena Molho for her help and support through all these years. Stella Salem constantly enhanced my critical understanding and problematised many of my arguments. Of course, I should not forget to mention all my informants for sharing with me their ideas, their fears and who made me feel “at home” whenever they invited me to their homes. I would also like to thank Eleonora Skouteri–Didaskalou a gifted academic who tried to teach me more than ten years ago what anthropology is and why studying it entails a kind of magic. Last but not least I would like to express my gratitude to Ariadni Antonopoulou for helping me with the final version of the text. CONTENTS Introduction: What is to be “cooked” in this book? 1 1. Introducing the Jews of Thessaloniki: Views from within 9 About the present of the Community 9 Conceptualising Jewishness 13 “We are Sephardic Jews” 17 “We don‟t keep kosher but” 20 2. Conceptual “ingredients”: We are what we eat or we eat because we 24 want to belong Part A. Theories: Food as an indicator of social relationships 25 Food and the local-global interplay 29 Ethnicity and boundaries 32 Boundaries and communities 35 Eating food, constructing boundaries and making communities 42 Greece “through the looking glass” and the study of Macedonia 44 Part B. Methodological and ethical issues: The advantages and limitations of being “a 51 native” Field strategies and ethical considerations 54 3.The Past in the Present and vice versa: Histories uncovered 63 The Jews of Thessaloniki: from domination to dissolution 64 “How can you call Ferdinando a wise king when he made his country poor and he enriched 65 mine?” The sixteenth century: a “golden age” for Thessalonikian Sepharadism 67 Venga el Maschiah, ma sea en nuestros dias: May the Messiah come, but in our lifetime 69 The nineteenth century: Economic and cultural revival for Thessalonikian Jewry 70 At the dawn of the twentieth century 72 Thessaloniki during and after the Balkan Wars 74 The Great Fire 75 The Asia Minor “disaster” 79 The Second World War 81 After their return 85 4. Food and Jewish families 90 Making families 91 Major Feasts and Fasts of Judaism : “If the food is missing there is no celebration” 96 “Proper” motherhood means “proper” food 106 Food exchanges 108 Everyday cooking 109 When ritual food enters everyday cooking 111 Conflicts and Tensions around food. Women and Men: Worlds apart? 112 “We think that there is nothing left but…” 114 5. Eating food and making the Community 118 People talking about the Community 119 Changes within the Community and people‟s responses 121 The primary school 125 Being at school 127 The Old People‟s Home 129 Being at the Old People‟s Home 131 The synagogues 133 Being in the synagogue 135 6. Food is good to talk about and remember with: Narrativising the 138 Present and the Past Part A. Food is good to talk about : The search for authenticity 139 “Keeping the traditions alive” 142 “We cook differently” 144 “When our cuisine meets yours” 149 Part B. Food is good to remember with 150 Remembering childhood and family life 152 Remembering the city 155 Remembering life before and after the War 157 The Past and the Present met in a life-history 159 7. The multiplicity of the Self and Other 164 “There is no anti-semitism but…” 165 The issue of education: “Did you learn anything about us at school?” 169 The multiplicity of belonging: Feeling Jewish, being Greek and vice versa 171 The issue of mixed marriages: “I would like to marry you but…” 175 Two cases of mixed marriages: 177 The story of Betie and Alexandros The story of Maria and Abraham 179 The issue of language: from Ladino to Greek 180 Conclusion: Food, Eating and the social dynamics involved 184 References cited 191 Recipes 217 Preface to the book by Pat Caplan Dr. Kravva‟s book makes an important contribution to several fields of anthropology. First of all, it is an ethnography of the remaining small Sephardic Jewish community in the city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece. Although Dr. Kravva is herself a native of this city, she notes that until she began to look for a research topic for her Ph.D., she knew almost nothing of the existence of this community and its long history. This brings me to the second area which is covered in this book – the turbulent history of the city of Thessaloniki during the twentieth century. The author shows how the ethnic composition of the cosmopolitan city changed dramatically, firstly with the coming of the Greek-speaking refugees from Asia Minor, which rendered the large Jewish population a minority, and secondly with the Second World War and the deportation of the city‟s Jews, only a few of whom were to return. Thessaloniki became a Greek-speaking city, with its inhabitants mainly practitioners of Greek orthodox Christianity. The Jewish population abandoned its original language of Ladino, which they had brought with them from Spain, and adopted Greek as their language. History is not, however, just about „what happened‟ but also about how people continuously interpret it and try to make sense of it. Kravva demonstrates that while the official version of history, which she herself learned in school, makes little reference to the Jewish contribution to the city or to what happened during the second world war, members of that community who returned to live in the city did retain such memories, and an important way in which they continue to do so is through food practices. While the Jews of Thessaloniki continue to think of themselves as such, they also consider themselves to be fully Greek and citizens of the Greek state. The generation below middle age is ambivalent about its Jewishness, not wishing to appear too different, while the Greek orthodox majority sometimes questions the „Greekness‟ of the Jews. Yet paradoxically, Jews outside Greece question the way in which those in Thessaloniki practice Judaism, particularly criticising them for their lack of a kosher diet. In fact ethnic and religious identity is complex and shifting, and a sense of being Jewish manifests to a greater or lesser extent in particular contexts, being particularly marked in terms of religious rituals. Food – its preparation, cooking, and eating - is the focus of this book, and is the way in which identity is remembered and enacted. The author shows the central importance of food not only in the construction of the Jewish family but also in that of the community, particularly through three main institutions: the Jewish primary school, the old people‟s home, and the synagogues. Food is about taste, smell and the evocation of memory, it is about nostalgia and belonging and Jews in Thessaloniki, like the rest of humanity, are indeed what they eat. Yet ideas about food and identity are far from static. Even as Kravva shows that there are debates within the community about whether or not Jews in Thessaloniki should adopt kosher practices, she also reports the discussions in the wider society about the place of ethnic minorities in Greece and how their history should be represented. Such debates are by no means resolved, and the issue of the relationship between religious and ethnic identity, on the one hand, and citizenship of the Greek nation-state on the other, remains highly contested. In short, then, Kravva‟s work reveals the way in which the study of food can lead in so many different directions. It covers gender relations, households and families, it involves the construction of communities through rituals and the commensality practiced in their institutions. Yet its study also encompasses the politics of the nation-state, its politics and ideologies, and even moves beyond to the global arena, in which members of the Jewish diaspora may consider themselves linked to one another. The author clearly conducted her fieldwork with sensitivity and has been able to translate her data into an empathetic account of the people with whom she worked. In the process she has made a significant contribution to the anthropological study of food and identity. Pat Caplan Professor of social anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London and ex-director of the Common Wealth Institute, London. Preface to the book by Margaret Kenna It has been said that the most important cooking implements are the nose and the tongue, followed by the eye – does it smell right? does it taste as it ought to? does it look as it should? The tastes, smells, colours and textures of food are intimately bound up with personal and embodied experience, with both cook and eater recognising through their senses what their bodies learnt in the past about that particular substance as an ingredient of a dish, and about that dish as part of a meal. Whether this is a personal or a family past, food triggers memories of a particularly fundamental kind, which are aspects of a multi- faceted identity: as an individual, a family member, the inhabitant of a village or town, resident of a region, and citizen of a particular country. No wonder that the saying “you are what you eat”, and the aphorism of Brillat-Savarin, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”, ring so true: food, memory and identity are inextricably intertwined.