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Talk:Campbell pogrom

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Campbell pogrom/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 10:16, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Buidhe (talk · contribs) 00:47, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]


I'll work on this, further comments forthcoming but I do have one suggestion for improvement: I believe it says somewhere in this book that exaggerations about the pogrom in the foreign jewish press fueled disbelief about the holocaust when it occurred, perhaps more info on this could be added to the article. You can access the source via TWL (t · c) buidhe 00:47, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, good spot -- will certainly have a look through it. Looking forward to working with you on this one. UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:24, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article refers to "Greece's Ionian territories" and "Christian Ionian refugees". Although I'm not sure exactly what the source says I would have probably written "loss of the Greco–Turkish War" and "Asia Minor refugees"—how I have seen them mentioned, as they were from various parts of present-day Turkey (including some from Eastern Thrace). Our article on the subject is Greek refugees (t · c) buidhe 14:08, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is useful -- I struggled when writing the article to find the best terminology for the two groups. Many sources talked about "Jews" versus "Greeks", which I didn't want to perpetuate: after all, the allegation that Jews were somehow alien to or less attached to the Greek nation was itself an antisemitic stereotype and a contributing factor to the violence against them. Any thoughts here? I think it's important to be clear that the refugees (at least the ones we're interested in) considered themselves both ethno-linguistically Greek and religiously Christian. UndercoverClassicist T·C 14:17, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Many sources talked about "Jews" versus "Greeks", which I didn't want to perpetuate I noticed that and agree—some sources I found on the Holocaust deliberately contrast "Jewish" vs "Christian" for this reason. But saying Greek refugees from Anatolia or Asia Minor refugees isn't ambiguous. Although it's salient that all were Christian , for the same reason there weren't Jewish refugees from the Turkish territories of the Ottoman Empire that ended up in Greece. Interestingly, I read that many had no knowledge of the Greek language when they arrived, and some communities were still speaking Turkish decades later. (t · c) buidhe 01:27, 6 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That is interesting (I don't suppose you have the source to hand?). I must admit I still have a small worry about "Asia Minor" or "Anatolia" as a full description, if we're trying to include those from Thrace, which is in neither. Just from looking at a map, it looks as though "Ionia and Eastern Thrace" is accurate. I've made a few changes here: when talking about the territories, as a whole, that Greece lost, it's "Ionia and Eastern Thrace", otherwise I've gone back to the sources and stuck scrupulously to whether they've said "refugees" (in general) or specifically those from Asia Minor (as many do). How does it look now? UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:16, 6 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that the refugees didn't just come from the territory that Greece claimed after World War I but also other parts of what is now Turkey (including the Black Sea coast/Pontus, Cappadocia, etc.). Because the Greek control over parts of Anatolia was so short-lived, I think it is potentially more informative for readers to get the context of the war rather than maybe ending up with the impression that these territories had been controlled by Greece for an extended period of time. Given that the departure of the Greeks actually started long before the Greek government asserted territorial claims (1914 Greek deportations), so the essential factor isn't loss of control over territory Greece claimed but rather the conflict between Greece and Turkey.
For the other question, one of the chapters in the holocaust in Greece book is about a village that was still speaking Turkish into the 1940s. (t · c) buidhe 14:21, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK -- I've added a bit to the paragraph on Greek refugees, which should make clearer that there's a broader context here, but also that the loss of Ionia (and particularly the burning of Smyrna, though I don't go into that here) intensified a trend that had already began at a smaller scale. I didn't end up adding the material on the Turkish-speaking villages, though it's extremely interesting, because the source doesn't explicitly say that any of these Turkish-speaking communities ended up in Thessaloniki, and so it would be a bit SYNTHy to say something like "many of the refugees did not speak Greek" when implicitly talking about those in the city. UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:44, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
UndercoverClassicist, I have one question regarding the lead section. The final sentence states that The city's Jewish community remained substantially alienated and weakened until the imposition of a military dictatorship under Ioannis Metaxas in 1936.
I believe that the term "military dictatorship" is not the correct one when it comes to describing the 4th of August regime. It was a dictatorship with a personality cult akin to those of fascist leaders in other European countries at the time, but it was also heavily reliant on the support which Metaxas personally received from the -then King of Greece- Georgios B.
It would be more accurate if we wrote instead that: The city's Jewish community remained substantially alienated and weakened until the imposition of a dictatorship under Ioannis Metaxas in 1936. Popular Punk (talk) 17:54, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello: plenty of sources do call the 4th of August regime a "military dictatorship", but not all do. I don't see a major problem with cutting that down to "dictatorship", so have done so. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:54, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. The sources that i have (greek ones, mostly) simply call it "Metaxas Dictatorship" or 4th of August regime. Popular Punk (talk) 19:00, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Good Article review progress box
Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV ()
3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant ()
Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

I'm only concerned bout two areas of the GA criteria: focus and image copyright. As far as I can tell, USHMM marks all of the NARA images as public domain, which is correct when dealing with German images, but as far as I know that only applies to the defeated Axis (see Alien Property Custodian), and it's hard to see how these photographs can be provably public domain without knowing the author and/or original publication date. The other issue is that the background section is quite long and goes into a lot of detail on matters that may not be verifiably related to the pogrom. For example, the entire paragraph on electoral issues seems excessive. Ideally this content would be covered in another article that can be linked here. (t · c) buidhe 04:37, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, buidhe.
  • On the images: to me, if the presumptive copyright holder (the NARA via the USHMM) has declared that they believe the image to be PD, that should at least push the assumption overwhelmingly towards "it's PD unless we can find good reason to believe otherwise". I'm happy to change the description to something like "the publisher, the USHMM, has identified it as being in the public domain, and no evidence of any other copyright holder has been found.", if that would be an improvement? It would seem a shame to lose these images out of what would, in my view, be an abundance of caution: that the USHMM might be wrong and some unknown entity might hold the copyright. There certainly are other images/licenses which say something like "this image has been identified as being free of all known copyright restrictions", though I couldn't immediately find the template for that.
I remember going round this one here and on Commons with the page image for Kyriakos Pittakis, which was in a similar position with slightly less evidence (probably PD, this time due to age, but no definite proof of the author or publication) and there the outcome was that it should be considered PD unless evidence emerges to the contrary.
  • On the text: yes, the background section is long, but I think we need this information: we're charting a few strands here:
    • How Thessaloniki went from being one of Europe's great Jewish cities to a place where pogroms could occur.
    • How a big chunk of the Jews there became an impoverished group living in shanty-towns.
    • How the Greek state went out of its way to alienate the Jewish population of the city, over many decades, beforehand.
    • How the pogrom doesn't come out of nowhere: it's an escalation of campaigns of hatred that ran over those decades.
    • Trying to thread the needle of explaining how Venizelism wasn't necessarily antisemitic (in other words, that this isn't Nazi Germany), but that Venizelists used antisemitism where it was already a political force, particularly in the north, and that Venizelos wasn't exactly a friend to the Jews even if he wasn't their worst enemy.
In the case of the paragraph on electoral issues, I think that's doing important work: it breaks down as follows:
  • Venizelos defined the Jews as a non-Greek community in Thessaloniki: this wasn't (entirely?) borne out of antisemitism, but did give fuel to it.
  • The referendum on the monarchy revealed an important point of ideological difference between Jews and refugee Christians -- Jews generally supported the king; refugees and Venizelists generally didn't. This feeds into the explanation as to where the animosity between Jews and refugees comes from, and why the Venizelists weren't exactly quick to rush to the Jews' defence.
  • However, he announced after the election that the constituency would remain until, as he put it, the Jews of Thessaloniki considered themselves Greek citizens is, I think, a strikingly inflammatory statement that forms an important part of the picture as to how Christian-Greek society looked upon Thessaloniki's Jews in the years before the pogrom: if readers don't understand that, it's hard to understand (e.g.) why it was seen as "obvious" in certain quarters that a Jewish sports team visiting Sofia would be secretly agitating for Bulgarian revolutionaries.

Do you think some subdivisions would help here? UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:36, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well for starters NARA doesn't hold the copyright to most material in its collection. A lot of it is really old, US federal government work, and/or alien property from the world wars, therefore public domain, but these photographs are none of the above. There is no evidence that NARA has marked the photos as public domain and I cannot access https://catalog.archives.gov to check. The Pittakis image is older than 120 years so it is quite unlikely to be copyrighted in Greece, but these images are less than 100 years old. (t · c) buidhe 14:13, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can access that, but I think I might need a steer as to how I would find what I'm looking for! Otherwise, I suppose there's no harm in simply asking the USHMM on what basis they've marked them as PD? UndercoverClassicist T·C 14:16, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The website is working again but I was unable to find your photographs searching for keywords like "Greece", "Salonica", etc., filtering to photographs from the 1930s.My guess is that these photographs, like the ones from the 1936 international statistical Institute Meeting in Athens, are still under copyright. (t · c) buidhe 18:54, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I failed to find them on the National Archives too, which makes me wonder whether the provenance given by the USHMM is even correct -- and that pushes me in your direction. I think there's a good FUR for at least the ruined-building one: I had half a mind to make a map at one point as well. Will have a think about some other image options too. UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:07, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thinking harder on this, I think the Leon Vidal image might be suspect as well -- it was published, outside the United States, with no credited author in 1931. If I read the Hirtle chart correctly, that means it's not PD-US for at least the next couple of years (until 95 years after creation, which is 2026). However, I think we can probably construct an FUR here as well: there's clear encyclopaedic value to having this image and nobody who is likely to be hurt or commercially disadvantaged by it, given that it's already PD in its source country (as of 2001). Can I ping you again when I've had a chance to take another swing at the illustrations in the article as a whole set? UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:21, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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