From local community to glocal network: Place, memory, and identity politics among the “Jews of Trikala” and their diaspora (Greece)

Abstract

In this paper I present some initial findings from my multilocal ethnographic and ethnohistorical research on the “Trikalan Jews”, i.e. Jews living in or originating from Trikala, a city in the Thessaly region of central Greece. In particular, my research focuses on two axes: The historical processes of community formation and its social transition after World War II as well as the recent sense of belonging of the potential members of that “community” and the ways they experience and negotiate their collective memory and identity. On a theoretical level, the first hypothesis grounded in the field is that the “community” tends to appropriate/be appropriated by subjects who currently live “elsewhere”. In this sense, it is reproduced as a glocal network in which Jewishness and locality are interconnected, experienced, and performed in multiple, fluid, and often fragmented ways. On a methodological level, my research is based on the fundamental techniques of ethnographic and ethnohistorical research which have been adapted to the conditions and restraints of a multilocal field. From the research we can assume that the Holocaust resulted in the extermination of an important part of the Trikalan Jewish community, while postwar emigration led to its gradual social disintegration, diffusion, and integration to broader ethnoreligious and national realities. Today this glocal “community” has imaginary, symbolic, and ceremonial rather than “practical” sociocultural dimensions. However, the recording, “rescue” and disclosure of communal history, memory and “cultural heritage” compose a fundamental field for the reconstitution of the bonds between the potential members of the “community” and thus for its reconstruction as a glocalized network of sociocultural interaction.