Wednesday, December 7th from 7:00 – 8:30 pm
JMC Library, Case Hall
Greece’s Romaniote Jews are among the oldest and least known Jewish communities of Europe. Living in Greece since before the Common Era, the Romaniotes adopted the Greek language and blended it with Hebrew words, forming a unique dialect in written and oral form. Worshiping in Hebrew and daily speaking in Greek they kept their traditions, customs and habits living along with the local Christian population. During the dark days of persecution and deportation, they kept their Greek identity and language even in the concentration camps.
Marcel Nadjari’s testimony, as a Sonderkommando of the Nazis unspeakable crimes was found in 1980 buried near where Crematorium III was located; a chilling testimony of 13 pages written in Greek. Shortly after his liberation from Auschwitz, Romaniote Jew Haim Kostis from Chalkida wrote a letter to his family in Greek about his suffering. As did the Romaniote Jews who migrated abroad before the war, the  surviving Romaniote Jews kept their language as their unique form of identity: “I am the language I speak.”

Dr. Andreas Bouroutis is a historian/political scientist/economist and he is the Ada Weintraub Finifter Visiting Scholar sponsored by the Serling Institute to teach in the History Department during Fall 2022.

Dr. Bouroutis came from the Department of Political Sciences at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and at the Hellenic Open University. In 2019-2020 he headed the scientific research program “Postwar transformations of Thessaloniki and the fate of the Jewish assets.”