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Devin Naar. Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016, xii+366 pages.

Devin Naar’s book on the changing structure of Salonica’s Jewish community offers an insightful analysis of how the Sephardic Jewish community became embedded in the political frameworks of Ottomanism and Hellenism from the late Ottoman period to the Nazi occupation of the city between 1941 and 1944. The book, consisting of five interrelated chapters, highlights how different actors of the Jewish community developed strategies to negotiate their political positions in the city’s changing political landscape. In the first chapter, Naar focuses on the impact of the institutionalization of the late Ottoman millet system (a self-governing organization based on religious affiliation) on the Salonican Jewish community. The chapter suggests that this institutionalization played a pivotal role in the formation of local Jewish identity during the transition from empire to nation-state. The second chapter deals primarily with the competing discourses and political agendas regarding the nature and status of the Salonican chief rabbinate from the late Ottoman period through World War II. The author argues that, although the chief rabbis continued to exert religious power over the Jews of Salonica, different groups in the city disagreed over their political status. The workings of communal schools constitute the focus of the third chapter, which emphasizes the changing role of language and curricula in the identity formation of Salonican Jews. The fourth chapter explores how changing political and cultural dynamics in the city during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to modern Greece affected the Jewish community’s interest in their own history. Naar claims that, during the interwar years, different political groups began to pay special attention to writing the history of Salonican Jews in order to strengthen their position in the city. The fifth chapter, which is largely descriptive, examines the ways through which the Jewish community sought to protect Salonica’s Jewish cemetery— one of the largest in Europe—from the late Ottoman era to World War II. This final chapter demonstrates that, although the Jewish burial ground N E W