Jewish Social Studies

Abstract:

In scholarly and lay circles today, anti-Zionism is commonly perceived as the most recent variant of a resurgent, bipartisan antisemitism. Such a presentist view, however, obscures anti-Zionism’s much longer and variegated history. This article unearths the widespread Christian hostility to Zionism in interwar Salonica, Greece, and links it to liberal politics, Slavophobia, minority policies, and authoritarian state (re)building. Anti-Zionism was the prevalent form of anti-Jewish hatred in Greece, but its popularity was less a clear sign of time-honored traditional Judeophobia or resurgent racist antisemitism than it was an indication of a broader, state-endorsed anxiety about the place and handling of ethnic, religious, and political difference in a modernizing Greece.