The war in Ukraine serves as one of several contemporary examples in which state actors across Central and Eastern Europe have sought to mobilise minorities and exploit existing grievances to further broader geopolitical goals. In this context, the authors ask how relevant one’s minority status, language, religion or loyalty to state institutions actually are amidst the chaos of full-scale conflict. More broadly, does someone’s sense of group belonging actually matter in times of epidemic, natural disaster, war or other forms of manmade catastrophe? Although such occurrences do not discriminate between those affected, government, public and international responses are often defined by unspoken hierarchies, pejorative cultural stereotypes and entrenched structural biases. This introduction syntheses the key findings from the articles included in this special issue to explore historical parallels in which minorities were similarly affected by different types of crises, as well as responses to these instances of historical crisis, such as the provision of relief and medical aid or maintaining law and order. Other issues included government reactions, how periods of crisis influenced or reshaped state-minority relations, the longer-term consequences of specific crises and the role of international and diaspora responses.
The issue, published in JGO Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Volume 71, December 2023, issue 3 consists of the following publications:
Olena Palko and Samuel Foster, Introduction: Being a Minority in Times of Crisis
Samuel Foster, Between the Young Turks and the Great Fire: The Crisis that Created Thessaloniki’s Jewish Working Class, 1908-1917
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Aegean port of Thessaloniki was recognised as a global centre of Jewish cultural, spiritual and economic life. However, the increasingly turbulent political climate within the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled over the city since 1430, began to disrupt this unique social dynamic. In November 1912, following the First Balkan War, Thessaloniki’s sovereignty was ceded to the neighbouring Kingdom of Greece. The subsequent Great Fire of August 1917 left much of the historic city centre in ruins, accelerating the pre-war decline of its Jewish presence. While earlier debates have tended to codify Thessaloniki’s Jews in this period as a homogenised ‘ethnic’ minority, such an approach has been criticised for privileging the perspective of the elites. This article builds upon this reassessment by considering how these wider historical developments impacted Thessaloniki’s Jewish working class as an emerging ‘social’ minority. Key to this was the Young Turk Revolution in July 1908, which precipitated a gradual politicising of the city’s poorer residents through a heightening awareness of their economic status. Despite lacking a modern industrial base, such a shift was revealing of Thessaloniki’s rapid integration into a transnational European milieu increasingly defined by socioeconomic class.
Anca Filipovici, Health Care at the Periphery of the Nation: Ethnic Minorities and Social Diseases in Romania before the Second World War
Public health was always a difficult task on the modernisation agenda of the Romanian national state aiming for a strong healthy nation. Before and after 1918, health regulations and interventions were never able to keep up with the social and medical diseases that affected especially the poor strata of society. In the interwar decades, Romania was still periodically affected by typhus, scarlet fever, diphtheria, pellagra and tuberculosis, touching vulnerable categories of the population in poor rural areas and at the periphery of the cities. In these unfortunate contexts, some ethnic minorities faced the status of double ‘victims’. They were impacted by the state’s incapacity to provide proper medical health care, but were also marginalised citizens, who did not fit the ideal of an ethnically homogenous nation. The Romanians dominated a national state with a large diversity of ethnic groups, and the issue of public health offers a fruitful perspective on how the nation was defined. This paper provides a generic view on social diseases in Romania before the Second World War, taking ethnic minorities as the starting point for discussing nationalism and the government’s responses in relation to minorities. By using social surveys, medical reports and statistics, the text analyses medical discourses and public health as a dimension of state modernisation; the policies of integration/assimilation and rejection of the non-Romanian populations; eugenics and the imaginary of the otherness from a public health perspective.
Barbara Warnock and Elise Bath, Discrimination Against Roma and Sinti Survivors of Nazi Persecution: Case Studies from the International Tracing Service
This article deploys evidence from the under-utilised archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS), also known as the Arolsen Archives, to trace the ways in which Roma and Sinti victims of Nazi persecution in Germany and Austria struggled to obtain recognition and compensation for their suffering in the immediate post-war period. The case studies that we have examined show that prejudicial attitudes, legal exclusions and continuities of personnel between the Nazi and the post-war era in the police force and the ITS itself contributed to the difficulties that Roma and Sinti faced. They also reveal the agency displayed by Roma and Sinti survivors in their efforts to obtain restitution in the early post-war period. Our study also reveals the utility of the ITS Digital Archive in researching the histories of Roma persecuted by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Igor Vucadinovic, The 1972 Smallpox Outbreak in Yugoslavia and the Health Status of the Albanian National Minority in Kosovo
The research presented in this paper has two main goals: first, to establish the health and social status of the Albanian national minority in socialist Yugoslavia and place it into the context of its political status within the territorial autonomy of Kosovo and Metohija; second, to look into political mechanisms of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) in cases of serious disaster and unexpected security challenges. The 1972 smallpox epidemic in Yugoslavia was an event that saw the two issues intertwine, since the outbreak was most severe in Kosovo. Although the epidemic has been relatively successfully eradicated, it demonstrated a number of problems in the Yugoslav and Kosovo health systems similar in many ways to those seen worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research is primarily based on analysis of press news and unpublished government and party documents held in the Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and the Central State Archives of Albania in Tirana.
Study Group for Minority History 