Tracing People From 1863: The Jewish Community on Rhodes

One of the engrossing aspects of Rhodes Town is its palimpest of cultures, literally layered on top of each other but with numerous changes across centuries and sometimes even decades. There are various highlights of changes to monuments and much more work has been made since I was last here, gulp, 25 years ago.

There are so many layers - Ancient / Ionian Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian / Genoese, Knights of St John, Ottoman, Italian, modern Greek - it can be hard to disenangle them. But you can see the changes if you know how to look. What then about the people in this Island on the edges of East / West?

Under Ottoman rule from 1522, the Turks took control of the main city and the Greeks lived outside the walls on one side - mainly where the new town is now. The Jewish population lived in a quarter of the Old Town nearest to the harbour. There had been Jewish people in Rhodes since at least the Roman period, though many of the Greek speaking people (the ancient community) left after 1502 due to the Spanish Inquisition enforcing its anti-Semitic rules on the Kinights. This inquisition led to many Spanish Jews leaving for the Ottoman Empire and the relative freedom and autonomy there. They were encouraged to settle in Rhodes after 1522 and became a vital part of the community there.

When Charles Thomas and Mary Severn Newton visited the island with Gertrude Jekyll in 1863 there were roughly 2,000 Jewish people living in the town and one of these became a much trusted servant called Mordecai. He and his family were Sepherdic and Spanish speaking - Ladino - and Gertrude records them as having red or fair hair. As well as helping Mary and Gertrude with dinner - pictured in their album below - Mordecai and his family sat for both female artists for the portraits. One of which - Mordecai and his family - is recorded in being in Charles’ front drawing room in his will in 1889 and left to his sister in law.

Unfortunately, Mordecai’s surname is not recorded by either Gertrude or Mary in their letters and diary and so I could not trace them in the lists of those deported. I hope later generations of his family emigrated - as many Jewish people did - before the German Nazi deportation of this ancient population to Auschwitz in July 1944. The ancient Jewish legacy lives on in a remaining Synagogue and a small community, which has put together an engrossing museum and memorial to all the souls murdered. https://jewishrhodes.org/the-kahal-shalom-synagogue/

The museum captures the lives, more than the deaths, of these people. It has helped me think about how I capture how the population of Rhodes has changed since 1863 for Holiday Sketches exhibition The Portico Library next month. More importantly, it made me put the tasteless fascist renovation of the Grand Master Palace - rebuilt for Mussolini, though he never came - into context. History and things from the past are always claimed and controlled by power and particularly by authoritarian rulers.