An exhibition reveals the Jewish presence in Greece since Antiquity

Often forgotten in official Greek history, the Jewish community of Greece returns to center stage in Athens, simultaneously at the Jewish Museum of Greece and the Epigraphic Museum of Athens.

"For the first time, we are exhibiting inscriptions that reveal the Jewish presence in the Greek world since the 4th century BC," explains Anastasia Loudarou, curator of the exhibition "Stone paths-stories of stones, Jewish inscriptions in Greece ".

Since the 2000s, Anastasia Loudarou and the Jewish Museum of Greece have been trying to "prove that Greek society has always been multicultural" and that Greek history is not only dominated by the Orthodox religion.

"integral part"

"The Jewish community is an integral part of Greek identity, which has been too often denied throughout the centuries," Greece's chief rabbi Gabriel Negrin told AFP.

Some 5,000 Jews now live in Greece, where the population is more than 90% Orthodox Christian.

Visitors to the exhibition "Paths of stones-stories of stones, Jewish inscriptions in Greece", on May 17, 2022 at the Jewish Museum of Greece, in Athens Louisa GOULIAMAKI AFP

Until February 2023, foreign and Greek visitors can discover for the first time stelae documenting the life of the Jews from the 4th century BC until the Byzantine period.

"This exhibition is vital", at a time when the few Greek survivors of the Holocaust are no longer numerous to testify, underlined Gabriel Negrin, on the sidelines of the opening of the exhibition.

About 60,000 Greek Jews perished in Nazi death camps, an estimated 83% of their pre-war community.

"This history must be passed on to new generations and must make it possible to combat ignorance and prejudice from which often arise anti-Semitism and hatred of the other," said the chief rabbi.

In Greece, the remaining anti-Semitic attitudes are linked to the powerful Orthodox Church which has not officially pardoned the Jews for the death of Jesus Christ.

A visitor admires a stele from the exhibition "Paths of stones-stories of stones, Jewish inscriptions in Greece", on May 17, 2022 at the Jewish Museum of Greece, in Athens Louisa GOULIAMAKI AFP

Some 36% of Greeks have 'negative feelings' towards Jews and nearly 60% believe in conspiracy theories of a 'secret Jewish network that influences economic and political affairs', according to a League of Nations poll. action and protection published in 2021.

"The Listings Don't Lie"

At the Jewish Museum of Athens, ancient objects attached to contemporary works of art allow "a dialogue on the question of diversity", underlines the director of the museum Zanet Battinou.

Thus, an inscription dating from 300 to 250 BC evokes the liberation of a Jewish slave while the work of the artist Viktor Koen presents his grandmother, a former black slave in the United States.

A visitor admires a stele from the exhibition "Paths of stones-stories of stones, Jewish inscriptions in Greece", on May 17, 2022 at the Jewish Museum of Greece, in Athens Louisa GOULIAMAKI AFP

Adjoining the Archaeological Museum of Athens, the epigraphic gallery reveals some thirty objects that take us to Delos, a small island in the Cyclades, a sanctuary dedicated to Apollo, where the remains of a synagogue were found, but also to Chalkida on the island of Euboea where a Jewish cemetery was unearthed, or in the Byzantine city of Mystras in the Peloponnese, where Jewish funerary stelae were discovered.

"The inscriptions are evidence that cannot lie," notes Eleni Zavou, archaeologist at the Epigraphic Museum.

They "attest to the multiculturality of the Greek world, to the importance of the Jewish communities at the political, artistic, religious and economic levels".

In December, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed on the return of the archives of the Greek Jewish community, which the Nazis had seized and which Moscow had recovered after the capture of Berlin by the Red Army in May 1945.

A stele from the exhibition "Paths of stones-stories of stones, Jewish inscriptions in Greece", on May 17, 2022 at the Jewish Museum of Greece, in Athens Louisa GOULIAMAKI AFP

Their return to Greece constitutes "an event of great historical importance which closes a tragic chapter of Greek Judaism and opens another, more brilliant one, for the scientific community which will now be able to reconstruct the long history of the Jewish presence in Greece". , Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said at the time.

© 2022 AFP