For four and a half centuries Salonica, today’s Thessaloniki, was the great Sephardi city of the Ottoman world, a port where Judeo-Spanish was the language of the docks and the Sabbath closed the harbor. Greece is also home to the Romaniotes, Greek-speaking Jews whose communities are older than any Sephardi arrival. This page covers both, from the first Jewish inscriptions to the Holocaust and the small community of today. For the Sephardim of the inland Balkans, see Balkan Jews; for Istanbul and Izmir, see Turkish Jews.
Origins
Jews lived in Greece more than two thousand years ago. An inscription from Oropos, north of Athens, dated to the 3rd century BCE, names a Jew, Moschos son of Moschion. In the 1st century CE the Book of Acts describes synagogues in Thessaloniki, Beroea and Corinth.
Over the Byzantine centuries these communities became the Romaniotes, named for Romania, the Byzantine name for the Eastern Roman Empire. They spoke Yevanic, a Greek dialect written in Hebrew letters, and prayed from their own prayer book, the Mahzor Romania. Ioannina, Chalkida, Arta and Thebes were among their centers.
The Sephardi connection
Salonica had been Ottoman since 1430. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the first exiles reached the city that year from Mallorca and Catalonia, followed in 1493 by Jews from Castile and Sicily, then by refugees from Portugal and conversos returning to Judaism. They founded congregations named after the places they had left. By 1519 Ottoman records show Jews were about 56% of the city’s population, and for most of the next four centuries Salonica was a Jewish-majority or Jewish-plurality city.
- Scholarship and print. Salonica became a center of rabbinic learning; Rabbi Samuel de Medina (the Maharashdam) was among its leading 16th-century authorities. Hebrew printing began there soon after the expulsion.
- Work and trade. Jewish weavers made cloth for the Ottoman army, and Jewish port workers ran the harbor into the 20th century.
- Rhodes. Sephardim settled in Rhodes under Ottoman rule; the Kahal Shalom synagogue still stands in the old Jewish quarter.
- Romaniotes and Sephardim. In most towns the newcomers absorbed the older Greek-speaking congregations. Ioannina and a few other communities kept their Romaniote identity, though over time much of their liturgy followed Sephardi practice.
- Corfu. Under Venetian rule Corfu had both a Greek-speaking community and one of Italian origin from Apulia.
Modern era and departure
Greece took Salonica in 1912. The Great Fire of August 1917 left 52,000 Jews homeless and destroyed half of the city’s synagogues, including the seat of the chief rabbinate and its archives. Many families emigrated to France, Palestine and the Americas. In 1931 nationalists set fire to the Jewish Campbell neighborhood.
In 1941 Greece was divided between German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation. About 72,000 Jews lived in the country, about 43,000 of them in Thessaloniki.
- Thessaloniki. In 1942 the city’s Jewish cemetery, with several hundred thousand graves, was destroyed; Aristotle University stands on the site today. Between March and August 1943 the Germans deported more than 40,000 of the city’s Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where nearly all were murdered on arrival.
- Thrace. About 4,200 Jews in the zone annexed by Bulgaria were deported to Treblinka in March 1943.
- 1944. After Italy surrendered, the Germans deported the Jews of Athens, Ioannina, Corfu and Rhodes. In Ioannina, 1,960 people were rounded up on March 25, 1944; about 110 came back.
- Zakynthos. When the Germans demanded a list of the island’s roughly 275 Jews, Metropolitan Chrysostomos and Mayor Loukas Karrer handed over a list with only their own names and helped the Jews hide. Yad Vashem recognized both as Righteous Among the Nations in 1978.
By late 1944 nearly 60,000 Greek Jews had been murdered, more than 80% of the prewar community. Most survivors emigrated, chiefly to Israel and the United States. Read more: Sephardim in the Holocaust.
Religious life
Salonica followed the Ottoman Sephardi rite in Hebrew, with Judeo-Spanish used for teaching and translation. Romaniote congregations kept their own piyyutim and melodies, some in Greek. The Judeo-Spanish press of Salonica was among the most active in the Ottoman Empire, and Alliance Israélite Universelle schools taught French from the 1870s.
Language, music and food
Judeo-Spanish was the everyday language of Salonica and Rhodes until the Holocaust, while Romaniote families spoke Greek or Yevanic. The kitchen of Salonica’s Sephardim includes pastel and boyos (savory pies), sfongato (a vegetable and cheese bake), avas (white beans) and huevos haminados slow-cooked for Shabbat. See our Sephardic recipes.
The community today
About 4,000 Jews live in Greece (2024 estimate), most of them in Athens and Thessaloniki, with small communities in Larissa, Ioannina, Rhodes and other towns. The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki presents the city’s Sephardi history, and the 1927 Monastir Synagogue, saved during the war because the Red Cross used the building, still opens for the High Holidays. In New York, Kehila Kedosha Janina on the Lower East Side is the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.
Notable people
- Mordechai Frizis 1893–1940 · Chalkida Romaniote army colonel, killed leading his men in the Greco-Italian War.
- Joseph Nehama 1881–1971 · Salonica Educator and historian of Salonica’s Jews; compiled a Judeo-Spanish–French dictionary.
- Isaac Carasso 1874–1939 · Salonica Founded the yogurt company Danone in Barcelona in 1919; father of Daniel Carasso.
- Albert Cohen 1895–1981 · Corfu French-language novelist, author of Belle du Seigneur.
- Rae Dalven 1904–1992 · Preveza Romaniote writer and translator of the poet C. P. Cavafy.
- Alberto Errera 1913–1944 · Thessaloniki Greek army officer; at Auschwitz, one of the possible authors of the 1944 Sonderkommando photographs.
Sources and further reading
- Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (HarperCollins, 2004).
- Devin E. Naar, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 2016).
- Steven B. Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2009).
- Rae Dalven, The Jews of Ioannina (Cadmus Press, 1990).
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Greece”.
- Yad Vashem, “Chrysostomos and Loukas Karrer”.
- Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum, “The Holocaust in Ioannina”.
- 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.
