[MGSA-L] Rodrigue Lecture on the Jews of Rhodes: 8 Feb 2012 in Berkeley

[Roland Moore]

Wednesday, February 8

>From the Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust: 
The Jews of Rhodes & End of the Sephardi Levant, 1900-1944 

A Pell lecture by Professor Aron Rodrigue 
Department of History, Stanford University 
5:00 PM / 2121 Allston Way / Berkeley, CA 
(The Judah Magnes Collection Museum)

The small Sephardi Jewish community of the island of Rhodes lived under Ottoman rule for centuries. The island was conquered by Italy in 1912, and the community underwent a complete political and economic transformation as a result of the new circumstances that prevailed. Passing from a traditional imperial setting to a new one whereby European "modernity" arrived under the guise of Italian colonialism, the Jews of Rhodes became Italianized rapidly and adapted to the new circumstances. It was only with the adoption of anti-Semitic legislation of 1938 that their situation began to deteriorate, with many restrictions imposed on Jewish political and economic activity. The German military occupied the island in 1943 after the fall of Mussolini. The Jews were deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Jewish life in Rhodes came to an end. With the disappearance of the mother community, the Rhodes Jewish diaspora created networks of communication and
 produced a significant literature about the lost ancestral homeland. Rhodes became an important Sephardi site of memory. 

Lecture sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. 

For more information, email the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/public/mgsa-l/attachments/20120206/81418d79/attachment.html