Like Jerusalem, the northern Greek port city of Salonica on the Aegean Sea—or Thessaloniki, as it is more often known today—has for most of its long history been governed from elsewhere: from the 15th to the 20th centuries, by Constantinople (or Istanbul); after 1912, by Athens; and during World War II, by Berlin. Throughout, its often sizable Jewish community has been caught in the city’s political storms and buffeted by its shifts of fortune.
In “Family Papers,” Sarah Abrevaya Stein, a historian at UCLA, looks at the city’s past through the aperture of a single family. Tracing a documentary trail across 30 archives in 10 countries, she shows how the Levy family’s rise and fall in the heartland of the Sephardic diaspora mirrored the trajectory of Ottoman and Greek history and captured, in its varied fate, how an era of empires gave way to an age of nationalisms.
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