ABSTRACT
Another Near-Eastern city that ceased being cosmopolitan and suffered genocide was Thessalonika, ‘a great Balkan cosmopolitan city for centuries, a veritable Babel of languages, religions, cultures and local traditions’ (Brown 2006). As in Istanbul, Jews were invited to the city after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. As in Odessa, and indeed in Baghdad before 1948, Thessalonika ‘was said to be the only city of its size hosting a Jewish majority; for centuries it was known by names such as “mother of Israel”’ (Hatziprokopiou 2012, 196). Jews controlled much of the mercantile trading in the city while Jewish workers monopolised the city’s great port. Indeed, Jewish stevedores from Thessalonika were invited in the 1930s by the Jewish settlement in Palestine to build the new port in Tel Aviv. The segregation between its different populations living enclaved lives, however, led
arguing that beyond elites, cosmopolitanism is often essentially coerced (BrinkDanan 2012, 84); that ‘the choice of whether to become or remain an “alien” or a “non-national” is not as a general rule a voluntary one but a response to acute need, political repression or a threat of starvation’ (Beck and Sznaider 2006, 78). Thus refugees, asylum seekers, trafficked women and even labour migrants may become cosmopolitan by default, by fostering relations with others sharing the same fate.6 But this is only the context in which the experience of cosmopolitanism may arise among non-elites. Even when thrown together by external circumstances, there is still always a moment of ethical choice and active agency – of either xenophobic rejection or cosmopolitan encompassment, as experiences in women’s refugee camps in Serbia during the Balkan wars proved (see Korac 1999).
