Ports of promise and prejudice: reimagining the Mediterranean Jewish experience on the Salonikian and Palestinian waterfronts (1920s–1930s)

This paper foregrounds the agency of Salonikian longshoremen in Haifa in the 1930s through previously unexamined grassroots sources, images, and texts of the laborers themselves. These sources suggest that Salonikians actively navigated restrictive British immigration policies, colonial labor regimes, and institutional pressures within the Yishuv, while challenging Orientalist and Labor Zionist narratives that marginalized them. Positioning this study at the intersection of labor history, migration studies, and post-Orientalist critique, it exposes tensions around class, ethnicity, and ideological conformity that shaped inclusion and exclusion within Palestine’s Jewish labor community, contributing to current scholarship on Sephardic historical experiences.