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| Nicolas Sarkozy's Greek roots |
| From Thessaloniki to the Elysee Palace |
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| French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the scion of a prominent Jewish family from Thessaloniki. |
French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s mother was born to the Mallah family, one of the oldest Jewish families of Thessaloniki (Salonika), in Greece.
His yet-to-be-fully-revealed family history involves a true and fascinating story of leadership, heroism and survival. In the 15th century, the Mallah family (in Hebrew: messenger or angel) escaped the Spanish Inquisition to Provence, France and moved, about one hundred years later, in the late 16th century, to Thessaloniki.
In Greece, several family members became prominent Zionist leaders, active in the local and national political, economic, social and cultural life. To this day many Mallahs are still active Zionists around the world. Sarkozy’s grandfather, Aron Mallah, nicknamed Benkio, was born in 1890. Beniko’s uncle Moshe was a well-known rabbi in Thessaloniki and a devoted Zionist who, in 1898, published and edited “El Avenir”, the leading paper of the Zionist national movement in Greece at the time.
His cousin, Asher, was a senator in the Greek Senate and in 1912 he helped guarantee the establishment of the Technion – the elite technological university in Haifa, Israel. In 1919 he was elected as the first President of the Zionist Federation of Greece and he headed the Zionist Council for several years. In the 1930’s he helped Jews flee to Israel, to which he himself immigrated in 1934.
Another of Beniko’s cousins, Peppo Mallah, was a philanthropist for Jewish causes, served in the Greek Parliament, and in 1920 he was offered, but declined, the position of Greece’s Minister of Finance. After the establishment of the State of Israel he became the country’s first diplomatic envoy to Greece.
In 1917 a great fire destroyed parts of Salonika and damaged the family estate. Many Jewish-owned properties, including the Mallah’s, were expropriated by the Greek government. Many Jews emigrated from Greece and much of the Mallah family left Salonika to France, America and Israel.
Sarkozy’s grandfather, Beniko, immigrated to France with his mother. In France Beniko converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Benedict in order to marry a French Christian girl named Adèle Bouvier.
During the Holocaust, many of the Mallahs who stayed in Salonika or moved to France were deported to concentration and extermination camps. In total, fifty-seven family members were murdered by the Nazis. Testimonies reveal that several revolted against the Nazis and one, Buena Mallah, was the subject of Nazis medical experiments in the Birkenau concentration camp. |
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