Minna Rozen

Rozen served as head of the Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University, and specializes in the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan states.

Rozen's historiographical approach is an interdisciplinary one combining historical research with several disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, such as sociology, literature, art history, gender studies, and diaspora theories.

Over the years, Rozen's writing has focused on grassroots history, manifesting in a large documentation projects she conducted about the Jews of Turkey and Greece, and the Franco communities around the Mediterranean.

[4] Because the collection documents a societal group that maintained continuity for 450 years, it allows to follow the community's multifaceted history and its relations with the surrounding Ottoman culture.

In a book published in 1994 she showed how from the 17th century, the Jewish community in Istanbul accepted the social, aesthetic, and spiritual values of the surrounding Muslim society.

The Thessaloniki Jewish community, known as "Jerusalem of the Balkans", which was remembered as a city of scholars, international traders, and large industrialists, was revealed as a society whose core during the 19th and 20th centuries were impoverished workers and small artisans living from hand to mouth.

Prof. Rozen's students, Dr. Gila Hadar and Dr. Shai Srougo, placed the lives and struggles of the simple Thessaloniki Jews, the female tobacco workers, the port stevedores, and their families on the historiographical agenda.

The new sources in Rozen's study show how Thessaloniki's transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state in 1912 led to a drop in the community's political status, and a severe decline in the condition of the lower classes.

The chosen Rabbi was Dr. Zvi Koretz, a young man with a PhD in Oriental Studies from Vienna University, who was also a graduate of the Rabbinical Seminar in Berlin.