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Book Cover
E-book
Author Shachar, Nathan, author

Title The lost worlds of Rhodes : Greeks, Italians, Jews and Turks between tradition and modernity / Nathan Shachar
Published Brighton ; Portland : Sussex Academic Press, [2013]
©2013

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Description 1 online resource (x, 257 pages) : illustrations, maps
Contents Front Cover; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; 1: Hic Rodus, hic salta! An introduction; 2: France in Rhodes -- Mirage or Promised Land? On the incredible love of France among Eastern Orientals; 3: The Seeds of War -- Italy in 1911 Italian colonialism and the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912; 4: The Road to Psinthos Visiting the last battlefield of 1912; 5: Fiat Lux! Italy -- A Light Unto the Nations? The beginning of Italian occupation and the first reaction of the natives; 6: Incipit vita nova ... Daily life between the old and the new
7: Opening Up The beginnings of tourism8: Kulturkampf Mussolini challenges French cultural hegemony; 9: A New Career -- Going Away Forever On emigration; 10: Twilight The years of Cesare de Vecchi; 11: Greeks and Jews -- A Wound Unhealed On the oldest of bilateral relationships; 12: Holocaust; Index
Summary 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-242) and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Italians -- Greece -- Rhodes -- History
Jews -- Greece -- Rhodes (Island)
Sephardim -- Greece -- Rhodes (Island) -- History
Turks -- Greece -- Rhodes -- History
Minorities -- Greece -- Rhodes (Island)
HISTORY -- Europe -- General.
HISTORY -- Jewish.
Ethnic relations
Italians
Jews
Minorities
Sephardim
Turks
SUBJECT Rhodes (Greece : Island) -- Ethnic relations
Rhodes (Greece : Island) -- History -- 19th century
Rhodes (Greece : Island) -- History -- 20th century
Subject Greece -- Rhodes
Greece -- Rhodes (Island)
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2012029397
ISBN 9781782840541
1782840540
9781782840527
1782840524