3 - The Jewish Community of Rhodes: a Revitalised Fragment of the Greek Mosaic

Summary

The second study began on the island of Rhodes in 2006. Its objective was to study a different kind of mobility that affects the territories of Greece. Although featured in the media less prominently than international migration, this other form of mobility just as ably raises the issues which today link different global actors with the outlying Greek territories. We are talking here of the ‘memory-based mobility’ of the descendants of different communities (often minorities) – communities which have long since disappeared – a phenomenon also known as ‘identity tourism’ or even ‘roots-tourism’ (Legrand 2006). In this particular case, we are referring to the descendants of the Jewish population of Rhodes who come to the island in search of the places where their ancestors lived. Just as for Albanian migrants in other parts of Greece, the presence (albeit temporary) of this group in Rhodes provides an opportunity to consider the conditions in which this memory can be expressed – a memory that challenges the official version typically presented to tourists by, for example, tour guides and most of the museums to which they have access. As with some Albanian migrants, these visitors hold the key to an alternative version of the historical narrative of this place: their presence creates the possibility of revitalising dissonant elements of belonging or claiming their autochtony, which is, of course, one of the central tenets upon which the legitimacy of contemporary Greek society rests. The Dodecanese Archipelago to which Rhodes belongs is that much more susceptible to this type of examination because it was the last region to be amalgamated into the Greek national territory, because those who witnessed this unification are still living and because they could well become the heralds of these subversive frameworks of belonging, whilst quite legitimately presenting themselves as ‘locals’ or ‘natives’.

In such a case we can see how a minority group, despite having disappeared almost entirely from the Greek context (and specifically, here, from the local one) can nevertheless, through relying heavily on its well-developed networking skills, still successfully and publicly express its vigorous spatial and temporal memory.