Polemic in Tunisia over Salonika Rabbi's 1912 letter

Abstract

Salonika Chief Rabbi Jacob Meir's 1912 letter to the Greek authorities disclaiming the news that the Greek troops molested Salonika Israelites generated controversy between La Justice (the pioneering organ of revisionist Zionism in Tunisia) and La Tunisie Française (the semi-official organ, prominently anti-Jewish since its appearance in 1892). While La Justice claimed that the Jews had been excessively brutalised and tried to market the idea that the Rabbi's controversial letter was a masterpiece of casuistry probably intended to preach concord, La Tunisie Française, which had been leading a campaign against the Young Turks, Free-Masonry, and the Jews ever since the Young Turks coup in 1908, insisted that the Jewish accusations fall within a Zionist crusade to discredit the French-trained Greek troops and lobby for an international mandate of Salonika followed by self-rule; a euphemism for the town (the three quarters of which are thought to be Jews) becoming a Jewish homeland. Salient in this polemic is that the letter, which inspired 30 of the 88 articles devoted to the Young Turks Revolution from 1908 to 1912, set loose the impulse to cast aspersions on the Jews, treat them as the midwife of the Young Turks' incompetence and violence, outlandishly deny them the molests European press and diplomats confirmed, and justify the unjustifiable.