The following description of the Greek city of Salonika featured in a novel by Philip Kerr:  Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018, paperback edn. pp161-3).  It is notable for its description of Jewish migrations.  

Many Jews fled the Ottoman Empire after being implicated in separatist revolts—stirred up by Britain and its allies during World War One—with some settling in Greece.  This is referred to below as “Muslim persecutions”!

Unfortunately there were further “persecutions” after Britain implicated the Greeks in their second World War against Germany:  Germany occupied Greece, disrupting social arrangements.  Here is how the situation was explained by Philip Kerr, through a character in the novel:

“…Salonika… is now our second city, Thessaloniki…  Before the war [WW2, ed.] Thessaloniki was home to a large number of Jews.  Possibly as many as there existed anywhere in Europe outside of Poland.  Sephardic Jews mostly, from Spain;  but also a great many who had fled from Muslim persecution in the Ottoman Empire.  But, unlike most countries, Greece… gave its Jews full citizenship, and they thrived.  As a result of all this, perhaps the majority of people in Thessaloniki—at least sixty thousand—were Jews.

…most of the Jews in Thessaloniki were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and gassed to death.  Meanwhile their property was subject to confiscation and resale by the collaborationist Hellenic government of Ionnis Rallis…  Those Jews who survived the camps—less than two thousand, it would seem—returned to Thessaloniki and found their homes and property in the possession of Greek Christians who had bought them in good faith from the Germans.  And any attempts at Jewish property restitution quickly failed when a British-backed right-wing anti-communist IPE government came to power in Athens.  None of these men had much time for the Jews, and of course Greece collapsed into civil war soon afterwards.  A civil war that lasted three years…

“…this regrettable situation is complicated by the fact that many of the properties bought by Jews long before the war had themselves been owned by Muslims previous to the so-called diaspora that followed the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922.  Many Muslims were obliged to sell up at knockdown prices and emigrate to Turkey, while many Greeks, including thousands of Jews, were obliged to leave their Turkish homes and go to Thessaloniki…”

*

Incidentally, the novel also refers to the ‘Elgin Marbles’, meaning—  

“…marble friezes taken from the Parthenon by the Turks, and sold to the British Lord Elgin for seventy thousand British pounds during the Greek war of independence that was fought against the Ottoman Empire…”

Angela Clifford