Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence: Jewish Business and Industry in Greece and British Cyprus

This recording presents the final session of the conference Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence, featuring three papers on Jewish business and entrepreneurship in modern Greece and in 1930s and 1940s British Cyprus.

In the first paper, Ioanna Sapfo Pepelasis and Dimitris Varvaritis examine the Jewish presence in the Greek corporate sector from 1830 to 1929. Drawing on a database of over 500 joint-stock company charters published in the Greek Government Gazette, they identify 54 companies with Jewish board members or founding shareholders. Pepelasis outlines the geographic concentration of these firms in Athens and Salonica and notes their strong participation in the industrial expansion of the 1920s, frequently as minority shareholders alongside Greek investors. Varvaritis analyses the 154 individual and 22 partnership shareholders by residence and occupation, highlighting major investors such as Emile Erlanger and Company, Anselmos Mourtzoukos and Chaim Cohen. They distinguish an early phase (1830 to 1901) dominated by foreign banking houses like the Rothschilds and Hambros from a later phase (1912 to 1929) driven by local Greek Jews.

Evangelia Matthopoulou then examines the expansion of Jewish entrepreneurs from Mandate Palestine into British Cyprus during the 1930s. After Britain excluded Palestine from the 1932 imperial preference tariff system, Jewish businessmen established companies in Cyprus to retain preferential access to the British market while taking advantage of lower Cypriot land prices and wages. Matthopoulou argues that economic incentives worked alongside Zionist ideological goals of securing neighbouring markets and potential refuge for European Jews. She details citrus investments in Famagusta, including the orchards of Ida Persitz in Varosha, and the Cyprus Palestine Plantations Company Limited founded in 1933 by Simon Ambash at Fasouri near Limassol, which also sold land near Akrotiri. In Larnaca, Samuel Simon Bloom founded the Empire Dental Industry Limited in 1934 to manufacture porcelain artificial teeth for export across the British Empire.

In the third paper, Alexander Apostolides, presenting joint work with Matthopoulou, uses the Dominion Manufacturing Company in Larnaca to test whether tariff barriers create lasting industrialisation. Founded in 1936 by Raymond Feinstein to manufacture buttons from Sudanese dom nuts under Cyprus's preferential tariff, the firm lobbied the colonial government for concessions and raised local capital through guaranteed-return preferential shares. Wartime military demand expanded the workforce to nearly 800 employees, but post-war competition and plastic buttons ended its advantage. Apostolides traces how Feinstein concealed the collapse through inter-company sales and obtained large loans from the Bank of Cyprus against boxes filled with broken mother-of-pearl shells before fleeing in 1948, leaving the bank to embed the crushed shells in concrete on its archive building.

A discussion follows on Jewish-Muslim business relations in the region and the local impact of the Larnaca button factory's liquidation, before George Kazamias delivers the closing remarks of the conference.