Vol.:(0123456789) Archival Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-022-09405-3 1 3 ORIGINAL PAPER Use of port archives made public: criticism of hegemonic history pertaining to the Jewish presence in Greek Thessaloniki Shai Srougo 1 Accepted: 7 October 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022 Abstract The Thessaloniki Port Archives, whose collections were recently catalogued, cover the history of the waterfront from the 1920s to the present day. Among their vari- ous collections, the Minutes Books of the Port Authority for the 1920s–1940s are a unique repository that sheds light on unknown chapters in the history of local Jews who found a living in dock works. While the Jewish Salonikian historiography iden- tifes the early 1920s as the period in which local Jews were in fact excluded from the port labor market, the Minutes Books tell a very diferent story; a reality of con- tinued presence until the German Occupation of World War II. Studying the dock activities contributes to the ongoing discussion on Greek Jewry in terms of memory, metanarrative, and archiving, and by using the postmodern lens on the archiving process, this research will also be able to ofer new perspectives on the economic history of Salonikian Jews in the challenging times of the interwar years, and in World War II as well. Keywords Historical narrative · Archival violence · Archival turn · Archival ethnography · Port archives · Jewish longshoremen · Greek Thessaloniki Introduction Until the 1980s, the study of the Salonikian Jews in Greece of the 1910s–1940s focused on the male leaders and elites, being infuenced by the nineteenth century theory that regarded the great men as the sole agents of historical changes (Carlyle 1840; Spector 2015). The main source of information comprises testimonies and memoirs produced by the local leaders and intellectuals whose experience in Greek Thessaloniki allegedly refects a wider and similar reality experienced by the whole * Shai Srougo ssrougo@univ.haifa.ac.il 1 The Department of Jewish History, University of Haifa, 199 Aba Khoushy Ave., 3498838 Haifa, Israel