For more than four centuries the Ottoman Balkans were one of the great homes of the Sephardi diaspora. Exiles from Spain and Portugal settled in Sarajevo, Sofia, Belgrade and Monastir, spoke Judeo-Spanish for generations, and built communities that lasted until the Holocaust and the emigrations that followed it. This page covers Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Albania and the Sephardim of Romania. The larger communities of Greece and Turkey have their own pages.
Origins
Jews lived in the Balkans long before 1492. The clearest early evidence is the synagogue at Stobi, in today’s North Macedonia, where a Greek inscription records Claudius Tiberius Polycharmos giving part of his house to the Jewish community, around the 3rd century CE. Through the Byzantine centuries, Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews lived in towns across the peninsula. In the 14th century, Ashkenazi Jews expelled from Hungary settled along the Danube, in places such as Vidin and Nikopol.
Ottoman armies took most of the region between the 1380s and the 1460s: Skopje in 1392, the Bulgarian lands by 1396, Serbia in 1459 and Bosnia in 1463. That conquest set the stage for what came next.
The Sephardi connection
After the expulsions from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497, the Ottoman sultans let the exiles settle across the empire. Most arrived first in Salonica and Istanbul, then moved inland along the trade routes. Within a few generations they outnumbered the older Romaniote and Ashkenazi congregations and absorbed them. Judeo-Spanish became the Jewish language of the region, and the Sephardi rite its liturgy.
- Bulgaria. Sephardim settled in Sofia, Plovdiv, Vidin and Nikopol. Rabbi Joseph Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch, grew up in Nikopol and studied there with his father, before settling in Safed around 1535. See Sofia’s Sephardic community.
- Bosnia. Sarajevo’s community dates its permanent settlement to 1565; most settlers came overland from Salonica. In 1581 the Ottoman governor Siyavush Pasha built them a residential courtyard, the Velika avlija, known in Judeo-Spanish as il Kortižo. The Old Synagogue (Il Kal Vieju) from the same period now houses the Museum of the Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- Serbia. Sephardim lived in Belgrade’s Dorćol quarter from the 16th century. See Belgrade’s Sephardim between Ottoman and Habsburg rule.
- Macedonia. By the 16th century Sephardim were the dominant Jewish group in Monastir (Bitola), where congregations kept the names of their Iberian origins, such as Kal Portugal. Around 1900 the town had nearly 11,000 Jews. See Monastir’s courtyard houses.
- Dubrovnik. The trading republic of Ragusa, independent of the Ottomans but tied to them by trade, took in exiles and conversos from Iberia alongside an older Jewish presence. In 1546 the city assigned its Jews a ghetto on Žudioska ulica (Jews’ Street). The synagogue there, legally recognized in 1408, is among the oldest in Europe still in use.
- Romania. A small Sephardi community in Bucharest, mostly merchants and bankers from Ottoman lands, was recognized as a separate congregation by 1730. Its great synagogue, the Kahal Grande, was burned during the Legionnaire rebellion of 1941. Most of Romania’s Jews were Ashkenazi.
- Albania and Montenegro. Small Romaniote and Sephardi communities lived in ports such as Vlorë. Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century messianic claimant, died in exile in Ulcinj (Dulcigno) in 1676.
Modern era and departure
As Ottoman rule retreated in the 19th century, Balkan Jews became citizens of new states: Serbia and Bulgaria became independent in 1878, the same year Austria-Hungary took over Bosnia. Schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle spread French alongside Judeo-Spanish. Thousands left Monastir for the Americas and Jerusalem in the first decade of the 1900s. In Sarajevo, the mutual-aid society La Benevolencija was founded in 1892.
The Holocaust destroyed most of this world.
- Yugoslavia. About 78,000 Jews lived in Yugoslavia in April 1941, most of whom were killed. In Serbia, German forces shot about 5,000 Jewish men as reprisal hostages by December 1941. In spring 1942 more than 6,000 women, children and elderly people were murdered in gas vans at the Sajmište camp outside Belgrade. In Sarajevo, about 9,000 of the city’s 10,000 Jews were deported by the Ustasha regime; only 1,237 returned.
- Macedonia. Under Bulgarian occupation, police rounded up the Jews of Monastir, Skopje and Štip on March 11, 1943. About 7,215 people were held in the Monopol tobacco warehouse in Skopje, then sent in three transports to Treblinka, where nearly all were murdered. The last train carried about 2,300 people from Monastir, ending a community that had existed for four centuries.
- Bulgaria. Bulgaria passed anti-Jewish laws and deported 11,343 Jews from the territories it occupied in Greek Thrace and Macedonia. The Jews of Bulgaria proper, about 50,000 at the 1934 census, were not deported. Deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev, leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and public protest stopped the plan, though Sofia’s Jews were expelled to the provinces in May 1943.
- Albania. Albanians sheltered Jewish refugees under the code of besa. The country ended the war with about 1,800 Jews, several times its prewar number. Yad Vashem has recognized 75 Albanians as Righteous Among the Nations.
Most survivors left. More than 35,000 Bulgarian Jews had emigrated to Israel by 1948, and most of the rest by 1950. Thousands of Yugoslav Jews followed, and Albania’s remaining Jews left for Israel in the early 1990s. During the siege of Sarajevo (1992–95), La Benevolencija ran a soup kitchen and pharmacies for the whole city and helped more than 2,000 people of every faith leave it.
Read more: Sephardim in the Holocaust.
Religious life
Balkan Sephardim followed the Ottoman Sephardi rite, with Hebrew as the language of prayer. They read the Bible and commentaries in ladino, the word-for-word Judeo-Spanish translation. On the anniversary of a death families held a meldado, an evening of study and prayer.
- Rabbi Judah Alkalai, born in Sarajevo in 1798 and rabbi of Semlin (Zemun), was one of the first to call for an organized Jewish return to the Land of Israel.
- Sarajevo kept its own local Purim, Purim de Saray, marking the release of Rabbi Moshe Danon and communal leaders imprisoned for ransom by the Ottoman pasha in 1820. It falls early in Heshvan.
- The Sarajevo Haggadah was made around 1350 in Aragon, probably Barcelona. It traveled with the exiles, and the National Museum bought it in 1894 from Sarajevo’s Koen family. In 1941 the museum director Jozo Petrović and curator Derviš Korkut hid it from the Germans, reportedly in a village mosque on Mount Bjelašnica.
Language, music and food
Judeo-Spanish was the language of home, street and press until the Holocaust. In Sarajevo, Laura Papo Bohoreta wrote plays and essays on the lives of Sephardi women. Balkan Sephardim sang romansas, ballads that came with them from Spain, and kantigas, songs of love and daily life. Sarajevo-born Flory Jagoda’s “Ocho Kandelikas” is now sung at Hanukkah around the world.
The kitchen is the Ottoman Sephardi one: burekas and boyos, keftes de prasa (leek patties), huevos haminados slow-cooked overnight for Shabbat, and sutlach (rice pudding). See our Sephardic recipes.
The community today
Small communities remain, organized by Shalom in Bulgaria, the Jewish Community of Sarajevo, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia and the Jewish Community of North Macedonia. Core Jewish population estimates for 2024 are about 2,000 in Bulgaria, 1,500 in Serbia, 1,500 in Croatia (mostly Ashkenazi), 500 in Bosnia and Herzegovina and 100 in North Macedonia. The Sofia Synagogue, opened in 1909, is the largest on the Balkan peninsula and still holds services. Skopje’s Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia tells the story of the 1943 deportations. Most descendants of Balkan Sephardim live in Israel today.
Notable people
- Judah Alkalai 1798–1878 · Sarajevo Rabbi in Semlin (Zemun) and early advocate of return to the Land of Israel.
- Laura Papo Bohoreta 1891–1942 · Sarajevo Playwright and essayist in Judeo-Spanish.
- Isak Samokovlija 1889–1955 · Goražde Physician and writer of stories about Bosnian Sephardim.
- Jules Pascin 1885–1930 · Vidin Painter of the School of Paris, born to a Sephardi father.
- Elias Canetti 1905–1994 · Ruse Writer, born to a Sephardi family; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981.
- Flory Jagoda 1923–2021 · Sarajevo Singer and composer of Judeo-Spanish song; NEA National Heritage Fellow, 2002.
Sources and further reading
- Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (University of California Press, 2000).
- Harriet Pass Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community (Jewish Publication Society, 1979).
- Michael Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews (Adams Media, 1998).
- Muhamed Nezirović, “The Sephardim of Bosnia”, Spirit of Bosnia 3, no. 1 (2008).
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Bulgaria” and “The Holocaust in Macedonia: Deportation of Monastir Jewry”.
- EHRI Portal, “Serbia”.
- National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Sarajevo Haggadah”.
- Sergio DellaPergola, core Jewish population estimates for 2024, as tabulated by the Jewish Virtual Library.
Revised October 2026 to correct errors in an earlier version of this page.
