The World’s Biggest Jewish City Used to Be in Greece
By: George Dillard
Tags: Society, Religion, Immigration, History, Judaism

The World’s Biggest Jewish City Used to Be in Greece

A story of how countries can help refugees — and refugees can help their hosts George Dillard Follow Jan 26 · 6 min read

A Jewish family in Salonika, 1917 (PD)

In the 1500s, Jewish people lived all over eastern Europe and the Middle East. There were big Jewish populations in Jerusalem and other cities in the Levant, of course, along with Poland and much of the rest of Europe. But the biggest Jewish city in the world during the sixteenth century was not where you’d think— it was Salonika (modern-day Thessaloniki), in Ottoman Greece.

Salonika became a thriving center of Jewish life for two reasons: the intolerance of the Christian world and the opportunism of Ottoman rulers. Salonika remained one of the most important Jewish communities in the world until its Jewish population was nearly exterminated during World War II. The story of Salonika shows what countries can do for refugees — and what those refugees can give back to their host countries.

The expulsion

Origins of the Jewish population of Salonika (CC 3.0)

The Jewish community in Salonika was created through persecution elsewhere. Before the 1400s, Salonika, like most cities in the region, had a small Jewish population — a few hundred people, perhaps. In the 1300s and 1400s, small groups of Jewish people fleeing persecution in central Europe — the Black Death had led to terrible scapegoating and persecution of Jews — came to settle in the region, many of them in Salonika. But the event that made Salonika a major center of Jewish life happened further West.

You may know Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain’s newly powerful monarchs at the time, for sponsoring Columbus’ voyages to the Americas, but their rule was also a period of cruel persecution. The Spanish crown, having conquered the Muslim areas of Iberia, was determined to enforce religious uniformity in the kingdom. The monarchs issued the Alhambra Decree, which ordered Jews to convert to Catholicism or be expelled from Spain. About 2/3 of Spain’s large Jewish population converted to Christianity, but as many as 100,000 Jewish Spaniards chose to maintain their faith and were expelled.

The “Catholic Monarchs,” Ferdinand and Isabella (PD)

Sadly, this wasn’t the first time a European country had expelled its Jewish population — England, France, and many other kingdoms had done so at various points in the Middle Ages. But these other expulsions had often been temporary. They were usually part of a scheme to seize Jewish property by money-hungry monarchs, and Jewish citizens were allowed back into the country after their property had been stripped, in most cases.

The Alhambra Decree was different — Jews who did not convert or leave by the deadline were executed. Those who fled to nearby Portugal were driven from that country a few years later when the Portuguese King, Manuel I, expelled them to gain favor with his Spanish neighbors. With nearby European countries unfriendly to Jews and North Africa wracked by famine, Spain’s Jewish population had to look farther afield for a place to live.

Opportunistic Ottomans

At the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire couldn’t believe the news coming out of Spain. Bayezid II, who had become sultan in 1481, saw what the Spaniards were doing as self-harm. In his eyes, Spain had just expelled many of its most educated, prosperous, and industrious people. Bayezid sent a decree out throughout the Ottoman Empire, ordering his officials to try to attract Jewish refugees. Anyone who harmed or turned away a Jewish immigrant was to be executed.

He scoffed at the Spanish monarchs, reportedly saying,

“You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”

Bayezid settled the largest group of Jews in Salonika, which soon became the “Jerusalem of the Balkans” and the largest concentration of Jews in the world. Over the next few centuries, other Jewish refugees, fleeing persecution in central and eastern Europe, came to Salonika to join its well-established Jewish population.

Why was the Ottoman Empire — which was ruled by Muslims, after all— so eager to welcome tens of thousands of Jewish refugees? The Ottoman rulers weren’t interested in imposing their faith on religious minorities. They ruled over a diverse empire with many different ethnicities and religions, and if a group contributed to the greater good, the Ottomans generally left them alone. As long as Jews and Christians paid an extra tax to the government, they were free to practice their own religions; no one tried to force them to convert. Minorities were allowed to form their own autonomous communities.

This strategy succeeded. Jews made up nearly 70% of Salonika’s population by the 1600s, and Bayezid’s prediction was correct. The Jewish population of Salonika helped to power the golden age of the Ottoman Empire. Salonika’s Jews flourished — they organized their own educational system and many of the merchants and bankers in Salonika formed the backbone of the trade systems in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean. Over the centuries, the Jewish community created a unique mix of Spanish, Greek, and Jewish cultures, and Salonika became a center of Jewish learning. The unique language of Spanish Jews, Ladino, was heard on the streets of Salonika into the twentieth century.

The post-Ottoman period

Salonika’s Jewish population remained one of the biggest in the world for centuries, although life became more difficult for Salonika’s Jews over time. The competition between different minority groups in the empire became more intense, and the Ottomans’ Christian neighbors pushed the sultans to treat Christians better than the Jews. But Salonika still housed one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, with over 50,000 Jewish residents into the twentieth century.

The end of Salonika’s five centuries as a center of Jewish culture was abrupt and awful. The city remained a hub of Jewish life through the independence of Greece, but when the Germans occupied Greece in World War II, they targeted the Jews of Salonika. The story is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied the Holocaust. In 1942, the Germans forced 9,000 of Salonika’s Jews to participate in slave labor camps. They also created ghettoes to segregate the Jewish population from the rest of the city.

Nazi occupiers register the Jewish population of Salonika, 1942 (CC 3.0)

Then, in 1943, 45,000 Jews were sent by train from Salonika to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Only 2,000 Jews survived the war in Salonika, either by fleeing to the hills or by escaping to other countries. The city still has a small Jewish community of just over 1,000 people who have worked tirelessly to preserve the centuries of history that their community has built.

The Jewish population of Salonika was more than a historical curiosity. It served as a demonstration that nations that allow immigration, even by refugees, can often benefit from doing so. The Ottoman Empire became richer, both economically and culturally, because it allowed a Jewish community to thrive in Greece.