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Una llave de Salonica |
A key to Salonica |
It was in this poem by Jorge Luis Borges that I first came across the name Salonica.Salonica? And what did Borges mean by the key to a house in Toledo? There were many unanswered questions.
Subsequently I came across Salonica whilst reading Primo Levi’s «Ist das ein Mensch?», in which he relates how he survived Auschwitz.
I believe that thanks to my nocturnal excursion, the Greek rather overestimated my capacity for being „débrouillard et démerard“, as one so elegantly put it in those days. In my case, I must confess that I principally relied on his extensive experience as well as on his qualities as a Salonica Jew, which as anyone in Auschwitz knew were synonymous with an aptitude for trading and the certainty of making the best out of any situation.
I also well remember being deeply impressed on reading Elias Canetti’s autobiography «The tongue set free», in which he describes his childhood in Rustschuk, Bulgaria, before the First World War:
Apart from the Bulgarians, who often came from the countryside, there were also a lot of Turks, who lived in their own neighbourhood, one that adjoined ours - the Spaniole neighbourhood. The Spanioles’ loyalties were somewhat complicated. They were devout Jews and community life meant something to them. However, they considered themselves to be special and this was related to the Spanish tradition. In the course of the centuries since their expulsion, the Spanish they spoke to each other had changed very little.
Salonica, or Saloniki, refers to Thessaloniki and the Sephardic Jews, who were expelled from Spain by the Spanish inquisition in 1492 and who found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. These Jews spoke Spanish, the Spanish of the 15th century, and they settled in various places within the Ottoman Empire from Istanbul to Sarajevo, from Corfu to Izmir.
But Thessaloniki became the most important city for the Jews from Spain.