The Coveted City: Salonika

Joseph Nehama

1914

The city modernizes more and more. One hardly sees those baggy, dark, unsightly breeches of old, the ones that Muslims, Christians, and poor Jews still wore in the middle of the last century. Until relatively recently, wealthy Jews attached a quasi-religious value to their majestic and ancient costume. Women wore wide skirts open in the front, the…

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Creator Bio

Joseph Nehama

1881–1971

Born in the great Ottoman Jewish center of Salonika (today Thessaloniki, Greece) to a prominent family, Joseph Nehama studied at the teacher training institute for the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in Paris and embarked on a career in education. Becoming a teacher and then a principal at the AIU school in his native city, he ultimately became city-wide director-general for AIU educational programming. By 1918, Nehama was appointed to the central committee of the AIU, and the following year he was promoted to the post of inspector general of all AIU schools in the Near East. A prolific writer, Nehama wrote a seven-volume history of Salonika’s Jewish community titled Histoire des Israélites de Salonique (1935–1939). He also produced other scholarly works (some under the pen name P. Risal), several literary translations into Ladino, and a Ladino-French dictionary that is still widely used today.

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