The Sephardic communities of Europe were the descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, who settled across the Mediterranean basin and in a smaller number of port cities in north-western Europe. By the late nineteenth century the Sephardim were a minority of European Jewry, outnumbered ten or fifteen to one by the Ashkenazi communities of central and eastern Europe. They were nonetheless a distinctive presence with their own languages, their own liturgy, their own institutions, their own intellectual traditions. The German occupation of southern and south-eastern Europe between 1941 and 1944 destroyed most of them.
The dispersion of 1492
The Jews of medieval Iberia had constituted one of the largest and most culturally productive Jewish communities in the world. The expulsion edicts of Ferdinand and Isabella of 1492 in Spain and of Manuel I of 1497 in Portugal forced the conversion or expulsion of perhaps 200,000 Jews. The exiles took with them the Spanish they had spoken in Iberia (which evolved over the following centuries into Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, retaining medieval Castilian and Portuguese forms), their Iberian liturgical traditions, and a sense of distinctness from the Ashkenazim that survived the centuries.
The largest concentrations of post-expulsion Sephardic life were in the Ottoman Empire, where the Sultan Bayezid II had welcomed the refugees and where they spread through Salonika, Constantinople, Smyrna, Adrianople, Sarajevo, Sofia, Monastir and dozens of smaller towns across the Balkans. A smaller secondary settlement took place in north-western Europe, particularly in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Bordeaux, by the descendants of the Iberian conversos who had practised Judaism secretly in Spain and Portugal for several generations before fleeing to Protestant or tolerant Catholic territories where they could return to open Judaism.
The Sephardic communities of pre-1939 Europe
By 1939 the major Sephardic communities of Europe were Salonika (around 50,000, treated on its own page), Sarajevo (around 10,000), Sofia (around 25,000), Monastir or Bitola (around 7,500), Belgrade (around 12,000, of which the majority Sephardic), Amsterdam (around 4,000 Sephardim alongside a much larger Ashkenazi community), Bordeaux and Bayonne (a few thousand combined), and a number of smaller communities in Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Italy. The Sephardim of Vienna and Trieste had largely assimilated into the surrounding Ashkenazi or Italian Jewish communities by then.
The communities maintained distinctive features. Ladino remained a spoken language, particularly in the Balkans, although in retreat among the urban younger generation. The Sephardic liturgical tradition (the Spanish-Portuguese rite) was distinct from the Ashkenazi rite and was preserved in institutions like the Esnoga in Amsterdam, the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London (the oldest synagogue still in use in Britain, dating from 1701), and the synagogues of Salonika, Sarajevo and Belgrade.
The Sephardim produced a Mediterranean port culture distinct from the Yiddish-speaking shtetl world of eastern Europe. Trade, shipping, textiles and finance were Sephardic specialisms. The community of Salonika dominated the textile and tobacco trades of the eastern Mediterranean. The community of Sarajevo, smaller but tightly-knit, was closely involved with the artisan trades of Bosnia. The Sephardim of Sofia and Bulgaria more broadly were among the most assimilated Jews of southern Europe and had been formally protected by the Bulgarian state through the nineteenth century.
1941 to 1944: destruction
The Sephardic communities of the German-occupied Balkans were almost entirely destroyed between 1941 and 1944.
The Salonika community of around 50,000 was deported almost in its entirety to Auschwitz between March and August 1943; around 96 per cent were murdered. The community is treated on its own page.
The Yugoslav Sephardic communities of Sarajevo, Belgrade, Monastir, Skopje and Banja Luka were destroyed in the spring and summer of 1942, mostly through deportations to Treblinka and through mass shootings carried out by German forces and by their Croatian Ustasha allies. Of around 73,000 Yugoslav Jews in 1939, around 65,000 were murdered. The Sephardic core of the Yugoslav community, concentrated in Bosnia and Macedonia, suffered a death rate of around 90 per cent.
The Bulgarian Sephardim were the principal exception. Bulgaria had been allied with Germany since 1941 and had occupied parts of Greek Thrace and Yugoslav Macedonia. Bulgarian Jews from these annexed territories, around 11,000 Macedonian and Thracian Jews, were deported to Treblinka in March 1943 and almost all murdered. The Bulgarian Jews of the Bulgarian heartland, however, around 48,000 people, were saved through a combination of Bulgarian church protests, parliamentary opposition led by Dimitar Peshev, and royal hesitation. King Boris III refused to authorise their deportation. Almost the entire Sephardic community of Sofia and the smaller Bulgarian towns survived the war.
The Sephardic communities of Salonika and Yugoslavia were not reconstituted on their pre-war scale. Most Bulgarian Jews emigrated to Israel after 1948.
Afterwards
The Sephardic centre of European Jewish life was lost in the Holocaust. Ladino, which had been the everyday language of perhaps 200,000 Jews in the Balkans in 1939, has nearly died out as a community language; it is preserved by perhaps a few thousand elderly speakers, mostly in Israel, and by the academic and revival initiatives of the Sephardic Studies programmes of universities in Madrid, Tel Aviv, New York and Salonika.
The surviving Sephardic communities of Europe in 2026 are small. The Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, the Esnoga in Amsterdam, the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue of Hamburg (rebuilt after the war), and a handful of other institutions preserve the liturgical tradition. The community of Sarajevo, around 700 people in 2026, continues; the community of Belgrade, slightly larger, continues; the community of Sofia, several hundred people, continues. The community of Salonika, once the largest Jewish-majority city in Europe, continues at around 1,000 people. The communities of Monastir, Skopje, and dozens of smaller towns no longer exist.
See also
- The Jews of Salonika
- Bulgaria
- Yugoslavia
- The Jews of Rome
- The Netherlands
- Denmark and the Rescue of its Jews
- Spain and Portugal
Sources
- Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey 1860-1925, Indiana University Press, 1990
- Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community 14th-20th Centuries, University of California Press, 2000
- Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History, Modern Library, 2000
- Frederick B. Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution 1940-1944, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972
- Tzvetan Todorov, The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust, Princeton University Press, 2001
- Harriet Pass Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community, Jewish Publication Society, 1979
- Jenny Lebl, Jevreji u Jugoslaviji 1918-1941, Atlantis, 2001
- Yad Vashem, Sephardic communities pages, https://www.yadvashem.org
- American Sephardi Federation, https://americansephardi.org