The jewish longshoremen in the ottoman and Greek periods: Cultural practices and shifting values in the port labor market of thessaloniki, 1900-1925

In Ottoman Thessaloniki of the early twentieth century, the cargo-handling services between the ships and the docks were performed primarily by Jews. In Greek Thessaloniki of the early 1920s, the docks became less ethnically homogeneous as a result of the arrival of great numbers of non-Jewish Greek laborers. The longstanding assumption in scholarship has been that the Jewish tenure on the wharf of Thessaloniki could only have been possible because of the Ottoman regime's tolerant attitude, whereas after the incorporation of Tessaloniki into Greece (October 1912) this Jewish predominance came to an end because of the intolerant stance of the Greek nation-state. While the existing literature of Salonikian Zionist intellectuals has tended to see two narrow categories-Ottoman cosmopolitanism versus Hellenic parochialism-the lens of social history provides new insights into the port labor market and its working population. A study from below reveals the multiple dimensions of Jewish longshoremen's culture which enabled these workers to maintain a high degree of dominance in the labor market even after the Ottoman period.