This ketubah is typical in its decoration program and visual components to marriage contracts made in the Veneto region of Italy. The Italian influence is also apparent in the family names of the bride and groom; Finzi and Picerillo. However, many of the ornamentations are of local Greek origin. The text also attests to the Romaniote rite written in one column, and comprises a special obligation declared by the bride for maintaining her purity and ritual cleanliness, according to Jewish law; in addition, the groom is required not to divorce her or marry another woman.
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It's been one year and twenty days since me and another trainee were pulled aside by a drill sergeant and told about the attacks in Israel. It's been one year and twenty days since I recieved a red cross message that my cousin was a hostage.
There are less than 200 speakers of Italki dialects now. Less than 68,000 of us left.
etz hayyim (“tree of life”) synagogue in chania, crete, greece. the building dates to the 14th-15th centuries, and was originally a venetian catholic church. it was acquired by chania's jewish community and converted into a synagogue in the late 17th century. chania's jews were deported due to the holocaust in 1944, after which the building remained abandoned until restoration in the 1990s.
romaniote jews are the oldest jewish community in europe and one of the oldest in the world, thought to have lived in and around present day greece since before 70 ce. they have their own liturgy that is unrelated to the more commonly used european ones (ashkenazic and sephardic).
What are some non-Ashknazi marriage traditions/rituals that y'all do? I was reading up on weddings and a lot of stuff (the bedeken, the walking around the groom) was written to be Ashkenazi tradition. I know a lot about henna, but that's basically it.
What really sucks is how, while many Greek Jews have been here for literally centuries, and even for the ones that came later on, still, our traditions are so heavily linked with the standard Greek traditions (Purim which is our Apokries, has been transferred for a long time, two weeks earlier and is celebrated during the Christian Apokries instead of the standard)and it sucks that people still claim that "jews are not truly Greeks" and how we don't belong here. Sadly I have been hearing that rhetoric even more lately to the point that I don't mention that I'm Jewish to people I don't know well, in case they are weirdos. And the way that the government is going (far right with the Spartans and everything) I don't see the situation getting better soon.
What's your opinion on this theitsa;
Hello! :) First of all, thank you for entrusting me with your thoughts! It means a lot!
It irks me when I hear "they don't belong here" about people who have been citizens of this country for a very long time! (it irks me regardless, but whatever) What the fuck "belong" even means?? And who the fuck decides that?? They are here, they are citizens, they are part of the Greek history, the end! Even more so if these people speak Greek, they have Greek education, they live the Greek reality every day, they fight for the same things as the rest of the Greeks, and so on.
It sucks that this country makes you feel like you have to hide, or explain yourself in case they learn you are Jewish. This shouldn't have to happen! And, to be fair, no one is 100% "pure" Greek (I hate the concept of purity but I mention it here for argument's sake). We all have at least ONE ancestor of Slavic (/Arvanite), German, Turk, Egyptian, Hebrew, Armenian, Persian etc descent. We don't live in a bubble! Markos Botsaris (+ his crew) and Laskarina Bouboulina were Arvanites!
For this reason, I think "How Greek" one is, shouldn't define how much respect they get as Greek citizens. We are all enclosed in the same borders under a common government and we will achieve shit if we give in to infighting about who is The Best.
At the same time, I don't mean to diminish your argument about Jewish Greeks having Greek cultural elements. It makes sense that Jews in Norway and Jews in Greece won't have the exact same culture, and that they will be affected by the culture around them. I imagine it's hurtful when this part of your identity is overlooked. I'm just saying that all people here are "allowed" to be here, since our law has allowed it.
I wish I could tell you "don't be afraid! go forth and be yourself!" but realistically you will be the judge of what's safer for you. At least from my perspective, most Greeks won't have an issue. They might be very interested, even. But one or two times there will be Greeks who will create an issue for you. And these bigoted Greeks might be even more than we think.
The "funny" thing about far-right parties like the Spartans is that, while they claim to be "for Greece", they seem to parrot USAmerican rhetoric (non-Greek rhetoric) which goes against how the locals historically viewed the Jews in Greece.
Correct me if I am wrong, anon, but I feel like the rise of antisemitism in our days is very connected to the US-Americanization of Greece? This type of antisemitism (the type of conspiracies) and the intensity is the exact same I see from people in the US who worry when Jews are in positions of power.
Now, it's a historical truth that certain Greeks worked with the Nazis for power, at the time Greece was under Nazi/Axis occupation. (The Greeks still hate these families that were Germanophille at the time, because these families also worked against the interests of the rest of Greeks) So antisemitic sentiments existed before. But the land of what is now Greece was under the Ottoman Empire for centuries and the Ottoman Empire was a haven for Jews who were heavily discriminated against and killed in West Europe.
Many Jews acquired power and influence in big Greek cities like Thessaloniki, owning factories, businesses, newspapers, and real estate. They were allowed to prosper and they were an important part of our societies. (The Byzantine Museum of Thessaloniki has an exhibition this year about the Thessalonian Jewish community. It's outside and left of the cafeteria, they have a new room)
At the same time, obviously, being Jewish didn't make you automatically rich and influential. Before the second world war, there were Greeks and Turks, and French who were very rich and influential, too. Traditionally the Greeks understood this was a Class thing, not an Ethnicity thing. (And, in any case, no people deserve a freaking genocide!!!) But my point is, in the Old Times I didn't see sentiments such as "oooo the Jews are here to control us!!" whereas I feel this is a big part of the Greek antisemitic rhetoric today.
The reason I think this sentiment is brought by the US is that in the US there are many Jewish communities and many have acquired wealth or they had generational wealth. But in Greece there as soooo few Jews and they don't hold the same amount of wealth. Like, the bigoted conspiracies of the far right don't even make sense in the Greek reality 😂
For those who don't know: Despite the efforts of Greek Jews to escape the holocaust and the efforts of many Greeks to help them escape in the Επαρχία (rest of the country, outside of Athens), like in Zakynthos, an extremely large number of Jews in Greece got killed by the Axis powers in the Second World War. Hence, the large Jewish population of Greece has dwindled, and the community is really small nowadays. The community (at least in Thessaloniki) is also cautious to open their culture to other Greeks because they fear antisemitic sentiments might hurt them again. (Which is understandable to me. Btw I heard this cause a friend writing her thesis needed access to the Hebrew records in Thessaloniki)
Sorry for the long response, anon! My thoughts were many, as you can see. I would be very happy if you could tell us more things about Greek Jewish culture, if you don't mind! (how it's similar or dissimilar to the more frequent version of Greek culture) I could not find many things online, or even in museums, about it and I am genuinely curious.
Feel free to correct me on historical stuff, if you have different info! I am sure we would all be better for learning it because so much culture and historical perspective was lost from the collective average Greek consciousness with the holocaust. I hate that this gap gave rise to the rhetoric of far-right parties. I would also like to be more equipped to speak against their antisemitism by knowing more facts.
I also wonder if it's any awkward celebrating Hanukkah as a Greek Jew? 😅 I think it's not awkward (because the Greek Seleucid Empire was a looong time ago), but I am really curious if the Greek Jews think some way about it.
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"Folk song may be recognized in the discourse of a culture simply because it is more redundant at more levels than any other form of utterance." -Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 1968
This two-and-a-quarter hour album collects performances from 15 Canary digital albums of material that might have been included on the 3CD set To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-29 (Tompkins Square Records, 2011), had they been available at the time, as well as 5 more tracks that didn't fit on any of those digital albums.
This collection functions as both a "Greatest Hits" drawn from a cross-section of 15 of the roughly 50 new digital-only albums that Canary has released since joining bandcamp seven years ago as well as being an extension of the ongoing work that that was undertaken 15 years ago and first resulted in To What Strange Place a decade ago.
One of the great things that bandcamp has offered is enormous malleability in presenting projects, allowing me to present in-progress research and audio restoration in real time. I have released albums as they seemed to function on their own as a narrative, but I have also relentlessly added to them, sometimes breaking them apart and creating new albums from existing ones when it felt right. This process is likely to continue. An older fella once told me, "Getting obsessed is the easy part. The trick is to get obsessed and STAY obsessed."
I have thought constantly about the thousands of people who have supported my work by purchasing downloads and the hundreds who listen every day. It's great that I can make the material available to everyone and a platform to tell the stories to the best of my ability, because roughly one in every thousand listens results in someone buying an album. It's the support of listeners that makes it possible for the hundreds of hours of music and thousands of words of notes to be freely available to anyone with internet access and the inclination to look into the subject(s).
This is the second sampler album Canary has released drawn primarily from previously-released material. Being pathologically adverse to boredom, I am adverse to the redundancy that is part and parcel of cultural work, particularly online, I do recognize the value of recontextualisation and reconfiguration of component parts of music that assist in the creative act of listening.
I have said over and over that the underlying foundation of Canary is the belief that music is good. It is a branch of the best part of human beings, and the attention we pay to it - any act of participating in it - connects us to the source of creative action from which we came and of which we are a part and which is, in that sense, the "meaning of life." There are laughter and singing at the bottom of the world.
Although for expediency's sake, the biographical texts that have been central to the project of Canary Records are not included for this album, that information, or something similar, for the vast majority of these performances here can be found in the notes to each of the albums from which the tracks were drawn. Listeners can find those sources in the credits to this album.
The Yevanic language, also know as Ρωμανιώτικη or Γεβανικά, is a dialect of Greek spoken by the Romaniote community, Greek Jews. It is almost extinct, with only around 50 or so speakers left. Wikipedia cites how, “The assimilation of the Romaniote communities by the Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, the emigration of many of the Romaniotes to the United States and Israel, the murder of many of the Romaniotes during the Holocaust have been the main reasons of the decline of [Yevanic]. The survivors were too scant to continue an environment in which this language was dominant and more recent generations of the survivors have moved to new locations such as Greece, Israel, and The United States and now speak the respective languages of those countries; Standard Modern Greek, Hebrew, and English” (source). It is largely mutually intelligible with modern Greek, but it uses the Hebrew script and has a lot of loans from Hebrew and Aramaic.
Writing script:
(Source)
(Source)
There is also a cursive script (Rashi) that was used.
(Source)
(Source)
Examples:
I posted about this-this morning, but I’m going to go into more detail. Here is a website that has examples of Yevanic. Most seem to come from holy books and are written in both Yevanic and (Koine?) Greek. Personally, I’m having difficulty understanding the layout of them. For example, this is their Jonah 1:1-2 vs Omiglot’s
As you can see, they put קֵאִיטוֹן on the left when it should be on the right. Maybe I just don’t know how to read it, I’m not sure. Regardless, this is a great resource!
Video Resources:
Spoken language example
The language and people
Romaniote Shema
Purim song
(I’ve literally been trying to post this for months, but it refused to post. I literally can’t believe it finally worked!!!!)
some folk costumes from the salconia and yanya vilayets - today a part of greece - of the former ottoman empire, from the elbise i-osmaniyye.
the elbise-i osmaniyye - popular costumes of the ottoman empire - was a photographic album commissioned by the ottoman government for the world's fair in vienna in 1873. it's both a document of various folk costumes across the former ottoman empire and an auto-orientalist testament to how the empire viewed and presented itself.
