Product Overview
This book provides a multidisciplinary exploration of Salonica's Jewish-owned economy between the years 1912-1940 a period prior to and during Greece's national consolidation. Based on original and newly analyzed archival materials, it presents the results of a comprehensive, comparative, and inter-ethnic study of Jewish entrepreneurial patterns for three distinct historical periods and two levels of analysis. The first period pertains to the multi-ethnic business world of Greek Macedonia (1912-1922) after its incorporation into the Greek nation-state, while the second period refers to the era of minority-majority relations (1923-1930), following radical modification of Salonica's demographic composition - a process that culminated in the ethnic unification of its business world. The third period includes a sectoral analysis of Jewish entrepreneurial patterns as they developed in response to the local and global economic crisis that raged during the 1930s. The macro analysis combines a comparative static overview of Salonica's Jewish vs. Greek business behavior, together with a dynamic comparative analysis focusing on transitions in Jewish entrepreneurial patterns. The micro analysis delves into features of Salonica's Jewish business elite: class resources, family and ethnic networks, business strategies and organizational structures. The research contributes new theoretical insights to the study of ethnic groups in changing environments by applying the ethnic economy approach while crossing the disciplinary boundaries between history, economics, sociology, and their related fields. This study opens a revealing window to the economic and demographic history of the Jewish community of Salonica - the Jerusalem of the Balkans, which was home to the largest concentration of Sephardic Jews before the Holocaust.
