The Campbell pogrom, also known as the Campbell riot, was an antisemitic pogrom that took place on 29–30 June 1931 in the Campbell neighbourhood of Kalamaria in Thessaloniki, in the Macedonia region of northern Greece.
Campbell was an impoverished Jewish settlement, set up in the aftermath of the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 to house Jewish refugees. The fire severely damaged the economic position of Thessaloniki's traditionally strong Jewish community. During the 1920s, the Jews became politically isolated, and were held responsible by the Venizelist political faction for both the Venizelists' defeat in the 1920 Greek legislative election and the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922. In the mid-1920s, the first fascist organisations appeared in Thessaloniki, and engaged in antisemitic activities with tacit governmental approval. Venizelist newspapers, particularly , ran articles characterising the Jews as a foreign population that sought the destruction of Greece. While antisemitism had little prominence in Greek national politics, it became an important force in Venizelist politics in northern Greece, and among Christian refugees from Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace.
Encouraged by false accusations of Jewish collaboration with Bulgarians and communists to bring about the independence of Macedonia from Greece, refugees from Asia Minor, reservists of the Hellenic Army and members of nationalist organisations enacted a campaign of antisemitic violence and intimidation throughout June 1931. Following limited responses from the local authorities, including the governor-general of Macedonia, Stylianos Gonatas, nationalists attacked several Jewish neighbourhoods on the night of 29–30 June 1931. The greatest violence took place at Campbell, where the attacks resulted in the destruction of the neighbourhood, the deaths of a Christian resident, and dozens of injuries. Other attacks took place in other Jewish neighbourhoods, including one in the "151" camp in Kato Toumba, in which a Jewish resident, Leon Vidal, was fatally wounded. Local authorities largely failed to prevent violence, and hindered attempts by Jewish residents to resist the attacks.
In the ensuing trial, the perpetrators of the attack were all acquitted, while members of the Hellenic Parliament defended the pogrom as an act of patriotism. The government of Eleftherios Venizelos stated that it would support the Jewish community, but provided minimal financial assistance towards its recovery, with the result that thousands of Jews permanently left Thessaloniki, particularly for France and Palestine. The city's Jewish community remained substantially alienated and weakened until the imposition of a dictatorship under Ioannis Metaxas in 1936.
Background
Thessaloniki had been a centre of Greek Judaism for centuries, and Jews remained the largest ethnic group in the city until around 1912. Most of the Jewish population were Sephardic speakers of Ladino, which was widely spoken as a lingua franca in the city until the 1910s. The Jews were treated with suspicion by the Greek government; during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, as a result of which Thessaloniki was annexed by Greece, the Jewish community had openly supported the former Ottoman rulers, and the arrival of Greek forces in the city had been followed by attacks on Jews and their property. Around a third of the Jewish population, disproportionately drawn from the wealthier sections of society, emigrated in the first decade of Greek rule.
In 1912, the Greek state unsuccessfully attempted to expropriate Jewish cemeteries. The Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 severely damaged the city's Jewish quarter: it completely destroyed two majority-Jewish areas of the city, as well as thirty-two of its thirty-seven synagogues. The fire forced Jews to abandon their previously concentrated quarter of the city. In its aftermath, the Jewish community were economically impoverished and disillusioned by a perception that the state had acted against them in its response to the fire. The total number of displaced people exceeded 70,000, of whom more than 50,000 were Jews, but the Greek government prioritised finding homes for Orthodox Christians. Jewish community groups, as a result, collectively purchased military barracks and hospitals that had previously been used to station Allied troops during the First World War: Campbell, sold to the Jewish community by the British Levantine businessman Robert Campbell, was one such area, and came to be occupied by some of the poorest Jews.
Greek refugees had been leaving the Ottoman Empire in large numbers since the beginning of the twentieth century, often settling within the Greek state. They were motivated both by informal local persecutions and by state-organised deportations. The former included an economic boycott on the island of Crete in 19101911, as well as attacks and forced expulsions by Turks returning to the region of Eastern Thrace in the spring of 1914, shortly after the reoccupation of the region by the Ottoman Empire. The latter expulsions occurred with the approval and assistance of the Ottoman state, which employed punitive taxation and conscription policies, and similar pressures were placed upon Greek villages in western Anatolia in 1913 and 1914. The rate at which refugees arrived increased after the loss of Greece's territories in Ionia and Eastern Thrace in 1922, creating widespread poverty in the Thessaloniki by the late 1920s in conjunction with a decline in the market for tobacco, one of its major industries . Greek authorities feared that the city was becoming a focus for communist agitation, and that Jewish groups were co-ordinating with communists from other communities against the state. In 1920, the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs translated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic fabrication, into Greek, and published them in the Athenian newspaper in 1925 in an effort to fight communism, alongside other articles by Ioannis Sofianopoulos in relating his experiences of the Soviet Union.
In the 1923 Greek legislative election, the Jews of Thessaloniki were assigned to a separate electoral constituency. The move was an attempt by the governing Liberal Party, led by Eleftherios Venizelos, to gerrymander a political bloc considered likely to vote against them, and exacerbated stereotypes of Jews as unpatriotic and as opposed to Greek national interests. The decision was hugely unpopular among the Jewish community, and many Jews boycotted the election in protest. Jews were seen as likely to support Royalist politics, while Christian refugees from Asia Minor generally supported the anti-monarchist Venizelists: Jewish voters had heavily backed the monarchy in the 1920 referendum on the return of Constantine I. Before the elections of 1928, Venizelos claimed that the separate constituency had been a temporary measure, intended to protect the Jews, and that it would be abolished. However, he announced after the election that the constituency would remain until, as he put it, the Jews of Thessaloniki considered themselves Greek citizens.
After the 1928 election, relations between the Liberals and the Jews of Thessaloniki improved: the Jewish League for Assimilation, which favoured the Liberal Party, was founded, and in December 1930, a Liberal candidate with strong Jewish support was elected as mayor of the city. However, during the same period, a Greek translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published by newspapers in the city, while the local newspaper Makedonia continued a campaign, begun in 1915, of antisemitic articles accusing the Jews of being a foreign population working to undermine the Greek nation. From 1928, it drew heavily upon the Protocols in its portrayal of Jews. Other Greek newspapers, such as , carried out antisemitic campaigns with the support of government agents. Although explicit antisemitism was not generally a feature of Venizelism at a national level, and indeed Venizelos had condemned in 1929 an antisemitic movement among senior military officers as "absolutely irregular", it nevertheless became a prominent feature of Venizelist and refugee politics in the north of Greece. Perceptions of Greek Jews as disloyal have been characterised by the historian Mark Levene as an undercurrent of Greek national politics of the period, particularly among Venizelists. In January 1930, Christian refugees from Asia Minor destroyed seventy graves in Thessaloniki's Jewish cemetery in protest at the cemetery's gates being closed, blocking their shortcut home from work.
Preliminaries to the pogrom
Makedonia and the Sofia conference of 1930 Although fascism in Greece never acquired the mass appeal that it did in other European countries, fascist organisations were active in northern Greece during the early 1930s. The most prominent of these was the National Union of Greece (EEE), founded in 1927 by merchant refugees from Asia Minor who saw Jews as their competition. By the 1930s, it had a reported membership of 7,000 nationally and 3,000 in Thessaloniki. Working closely with Makedonia, and with the tacit approval of the security forces, the EEE's activities included writing anti-Jewish graffiti and attacking cafes, bookstores and cinemas popular among leftists. In the summer of 1930, the Jews of Thessaloniki appealed to Stylianos Gonatas, the governor-general of Greek Macedonia, to ensure that Jews of non-Greek origin would be allowed to maintain official participation in civic life: Gonatas granted their request, sparking a series of antisemitic articles in .
On 2 September 1930, falsely reported that a Greek delegate, by the name of Arditti, at the conference of the Macedonian Youth Movement (being held in Sofia at the same time) had warned the Bulgarians of Macedonia that Jewish Macedonians, including those of Thessaloniki, would fight for the independence of their homeland. The newspaper called upon the Jewish sporting club Maccabi Thessaloniki to disavow the Bulgarian Maccabee movement. Meanwhile, the EEE and other nationalist organisations issued a joint statement, accusing Maccabi Thessaloniki of sympathising with the IMRO and calling upon Gonatas to dissolve it as an anti-Greek organisation. In response, the Jewish newspapers of Thessaloniki, including the French-language , accused of fabricating the accusations. In Athens, suggested that the attendance of Thessalonikan Jews at the Sofia conference was evidence of their lack of loyalty to Greece.
Early conflicts in 1931 In June 1931, the Jewish Maccabee Sports Association held a series of sporting events held in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary. Maccabi Thessaloniki sent a delegation, including one Yitzhak Koen, which was seen by local Greek nationalists as a sign of the Jews' disloyalty towards Greece. The Maccabee event was roughly contemporary with a conference of Bulgarian Macedonians in Sofia, which passed a resolution for the independence of Macedonia from Greece and Bulgaria. accused Koen of having travelled to Sofia to attend the latter conference: in truth, he had either not attended it at all, or left before the resolution had been passed. called again for the dissolution of the Maccabee movement: EEE issued an aggressively worded exhortation urging the Christians of Thessaloniki to boycott Jewish businesses, accusing Jews of collaborating with communists and Bulgarian revolutionaries. Small-scale violence broke out between EEE members and Jews who tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the promulgation of the EEE document.