The Jews of Salonika

Modern Thessaloniki seems a quintessentially Greek city but, during the First World War, it was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural city which, just a few years before, had been part of the Ottoman empire. It was especially a Jewish city.

There has been a Jewish presence in the city for over 2,000 years, but it was the influx of some 20,000 Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia in the late 15th century who made the city the largest Jewish community in the world, giving it the names Madre de Israel (Mother of Israel) to its Jewish inhabitants and the Jerusalem of the Balkans to non-Jews. In addition to their religious and cultural heritage, the Sephardic migrants brought skills in printing, cartography, medical and military sciences. At a time when other Greek cities were in decline, Thessaloniki flourished and grew, gaining an international character and becoming the second most important port in the Ottoman empire.

If the 16th century was the ‘Golden Age of Salonica’, there was decline in the 17th century which brought impoverishment to the Jewish community, although its fame remained and continued to attract new settlers. In the late 19th century railway links and improvements to the port brought the city into the modern age. New banks brought commerce and economic growth and Jews established many new businesses – flour mills, factories and tobacco workshops – although most of the Jewish population remained poor. With Jews constituting the largest element of the population, they determined the city’s social and political dynamics, publishing numerous newspapers, not just in Judeo-Spanish but also Turkish, French and Greek. Even into the early 1920s – ten years after the city’s incorporation into the modern Greek state – the port remained closed on Saturdays (Shabbat) and all Jewish holidays.

Members of the Jewish community in Salonika walking along the waterfront road on the Sabbath, May 1916. © IWM (Q 31948).

The first great shock to the Jewish community came in August 1917 with the ‘Great Fire’, which destroyed most of the Jewish quarter in the heart of the city. From then the Greek government passed laws to Hellenize the city, from which Jews become second class citizens. This in turn encouraged anti-Semitic activities and a pogrom which saw many Jews emigrate.

The great fire in Salonika town, 18-21 August 1917: refugees with their salvaged possessions observe the blaze from a place of safety. © IWM HU 58890

This, though, was nothing compared to what happened in 1941, described starkly in a leaflet from the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki:

In 1941, Thessaloniki under the Nazis, with its community of some 49,000 Jews, was ill prepared for the horrors of the ‘Final Solution’. By the end of the 1945, only a handful of Jews remained; 96.5% of the Jewish Community of the city was exterminated in the death camps of Poland.

These deaths are commemorated by the Holocaust Memorial Menorah in Freedom Square. Little remains of the vibrant Jewish city: there are three surviving synagogues, some surviving mansions (notably the Villa Allatini, 198 Vassilisis Olgas), the Modiano Market, the New Jewish Cemetery in the Stavroupoli district (the original cemetery, which was vast, was destroyed during the Nazi occupation and is now the site of the University) and a rare survival of the 1917 fire which now houses the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki.

---

My sources for this post are an article by Dr Rena Molho – The Jewish Community, Mother of Israel – published in a tourism magazine I picked up in the city in 2016, GREECE IS – THESSALONIKI 2015-16 and a leaflet from the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki (11 Agiou Mina Str), which is well worth a visit.

A fascinating account of Jewish life in pre-First World War Salonica can be found in Leon Sciaky’s memoir Farewell to Salonica.