Narrowed Minds and Destroyed Communities: Anglo-American Perceptions of Jewish Heritage in Thessaloniki, 1943–46

War and conflict can endanger humanity and its heritage in a multitude of different ways. This paper examines the fate of the property and past of one persecuted community, the Jewish population of the Greek city of Thessaloniki, during the Second World War, and the heritage threatened and lost through its forced movement and murder. The vulnerability and destruction of that community has increasingly attracted the attention of modern scholars, but this paper adopts a new lens. Illustrating implications of considering cultural heritage as something to be measured and ranked, as well as how perceptions of value depend on the observer, it shows how the city’s rich Jewish culture fell outside official Anglo- American assessments of which forms of heritage in wartime Greece should be prioritised for preservation.