Abraham Benaroya and the Transformation of Otherness: The Dialectics of Socialist Inclusion in the Greek Left-Wing Press (1918–1924)

Abstract Studies of anti-Jewish representations in the Greek press of the 1910s–1930s have focused on right-wing dailies, assuming that class-based universalism precluded similar attitudes within the labor press. This article argues that socialist universalism did not eliminate the production of Jewish Otherness but relocated it. Building on scholarship on Western European socialist newspapers and using a transnational approach centered on human mobility, it shows how Rizospastis (1918–1924), the Greek socialist organ, could simultaneously embrace and marginalize Jewish actors, depending on changing definitions of belonging. This negotiation predates the Socialist Labor Party (SEKE)and emerges from efforts after the 1915 elections to bridge the political cultures of Old and New Greece. The participation of Salonikian Jewish socialists, led by Abraham Benaroya, exposed tensions within this project, challenging notions of Greekness while raising questions of national cohesion. Analysis of Rizospastis traces these shifting boundaries. In 1918, Benaroya appeared as a foreign agitator, an alien within the national body. Between 1919 and 1921, he was recast as a unifying symbol of worker solidarity, embodying a temporary reconciliation between national and international identities. Following the ideological shifts of 1922–1924 and the Bolshevization of the movement, this inclusiveness collapsed: Benaroya’s expulsion in 1924 marked a shift from ethnic to ideological exclusion, as conformity to the Comintern line replaced national belonging as the criterion of inclusion. Rizospastis thus served both as a forum of cross-border solidarity and a site where dissent was displaced, showing that class solidarity did not eliminate Otherness; it merely relocated it.