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The Lost World of Rhodes
Greeks, Italians, Jews and Turks between Tradition and Modernity
| Nathan Shachar |
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| Nathan Shachar is the Jerusalem correspondent of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. His previous books include The Mysterious Passion, a widely acclaimed interpretation of Spanish History, and prize-winning collections of essays on the Middle East and Latin America. His The Gaza Strip: Its History and Politics was published in early 2010 (“Conveys his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Gaza Strip by means of a moving and entertaining narrative”–, Ramy Wurgaft, El Mundo, Madrid), and has recently been reprinted.
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Four peoples, each with its own culture, language and faith, shared a small Mediterranean town and experienced, each in its own way, the upheavals of war, modernity, emigration and occupation. With the German takeover in 1943, the Holocaust in 1944 and the beginning of Greek rule in 1947, this multiethnic world perished forever. At the centre of this book stands the Sephardi community – Spanish-speaking Jews who arrived in Rhodes sometime after the Spanish expulsion edict of 1492 and who remained the largest single group within the old city walls until Italy adopted German racial legislation in 1938.
… When sultan Abdulhamit II ascended to the Ottoman throne in 1876, the Jews of Rhodes were among his most loyal and traditional, not to say hidebound, subjects. But within the course of a few decades, this bastion of piety and rabbinical tradition was thoroughly transformed by French rationalism, Italian secularism and the pressures of economic globalization. Many unlikely characters come alive in this spirited account of the vibrant and irretrievably lost world of Rhodes: The French monks who impart universal values to provincial Turks, Greeks and Jews; the Rhodian schoolboy lost in a Congolese jungle; the Italian general who brings sanitation to the medieval town; the Greek shepherd who knows the history of Rhodes better than any scholar; the Turkish diplomat whose wife was murdered by the Nazis and then risked his life to save Jews from the SS. These are just some of the stories related directly to the author, who combines journalism with scholarship in the recreation of a unique cultural microcosm.
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Chapter 1
Hic Rodus, hic salta!
An Introduction
Chapter 2
France in Rhodes - Mirage or Promised Land?
On the incredible love of France among Eastern Orientals
Chapter 3
The Seeds of War – Italy in 1911
Italian Colonialism and the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912
Chapter 4
The Road to Psinthos
Visiting the last battlefield of 1912
Chapter 5
Fiat Lux! Italy – A Light Unto the Nations?
The beginning of Italian occupation and the first reaction
of the natives
Chapter 6
Incipit vita nova ...
Daily life between the old and the new
Chapter 7
Opening Up
The beginnings of tourism
Chapter 8
Kulturkampf
Mussolini challenges French cultural hegemony
Chapter 9
A New Career: Going Away Forever
On emigration
Chapter 10
Twilight
The years of Mario de Vecchi
Chapter 11
Greeks and Jews – A Wound Unhealed
On the oldest of all bilateral relationships
Chapter 12
Holocaust
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Reviews to follow |
Publication Details
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Paperback ISBN: |
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978-1-84519-455-0 |
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Page Extent / Format: |
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256 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
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Release Date: |
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September 2012 |
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Illustrated: |
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Yes |
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Paperback Price: |
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£19.95 / $34.95 |
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| This book can be ordered online or by telephone. |
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