The Jews of Salonika

The Jewish community of Salonika, today Thessaloniki in northern Greece, was the most distinctive Sephardic community of twentieth-century Europe and one of its most ancient. From the late fifteenth century until 1943 Salonika was a Jewish-majority city for much of its history; the community spoke Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish brought by Iberian exiles in 1492; it had its own institutions, its own commerce, and its own port culture. The 1941 community of around 50,000 was reduced to fewer than 2,000 by August 1943, after the deportation of 96 per cent of its members to Auschwitz in the spring of that year. The community of Salonika, more than any other in occupied Europe, was annihilated.

Five centuries of a Sephardic city

The Sephardic refugees from the Iberian expulsions of 1492 arrived in Salonika in numbers from the early sixteenth century. The Ottoman Empire welcomed them; the city, then a small Ottoman provincial centre, was transformed by their arrival. By 1519 Jews were a majority of the city’s population; by 1613 they were two-thirds of it. They brought with them the Spanish they had spoken in Iberia, which became the everyday language of the city for the next four centuries; they brought their printing presses, which made Salonika one of the first centres of Hebrew printing in the Ottoman world; they brought the trades of textile manufacture, dyeing, silk and tobacco that built the city’s commercial life.

The community was internally diverse from the start. Different congregations were named after the towns of origin in Spain and Portugal: Toledano, Aragon, Castilla, Catalan, Évora, Lisbon. Each had its own synagogue and its own customs. Over the centuries the congregations merged and split and merged again; by the early twentieth century there were thirty-five synagogues in the city, almost all of them Sephardic, with two small Romaniote synagogues representing the older Greek-speaking Jewish tradition.

The port culture was substantially Jewish. Most stevedores in the port of Salonika were Jews, and the port effectively closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fishermen, the dockers, the boatmen, the customs officials were Jews. Jewish foundries, shipping firms and trading houses dominated the regional commerce. The Allatini family ran a flour mill, a brick factory and a tobacco company that made them one of the wealthier industrialist families in the eastern Mediterranean.

1912 to 1940: from Ottoman to Greek

Salonika passed from Ottoman to Greek rule in 1912 in the First Balkan War. The change was difficult. The Greek state, building a national community, treated the Jewish-majority city of Salonika as a problem to be solved through Hellenisation. A great fire in August 1917 destroyed most of the Jewish quarter, leaving 50,000 Jews homeless; the rebuilt city was planned by the Greek state in ways that dispersed the Jewish population away from its old centre. The arrival in 1922 of around 92,000 Greek refugees from Asia Minor, expelled in the population exchange following the Greco-Turkish war, transformed Salonika into a Greek-majority city for the first time in four centuries.

The community remained the largest in Greece, around 53,000 in 1928, but had become a minority in its own city. Many of the wealthier and more mobile families emigrated in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly to France, the United States and Palestine. By 1940 the community numbered around 50,000.

1941 to 1943: occupation and deportation

Greece was occupied by Axis forces in April 1941, with Germany taking direct control of Salonika and northern Greece. The German occupation of Salonika began with the seizure of Jewish property and the imposition of forced labour. Around 9,000 Jewish men were forced to work on road and railway construction in north-eastern Greece in 1942; many died.

The deportations to Auschwitz began on 15 March 1943. Adolf Eichmann’s representatives in Salonika, Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner, organised the operation in close cooperation with the local German military authorities. The community was ghettoised in three districts; transports left the city by rail at intervals of every few days. By 9 August 1943 nineteen transports had carried around 48,500 Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz. Of these, around 1,950 survived. The deportation rate of 96 per cent is the highest of any major Jewish community in occupied Europe.

The reasons for the completeness of the destruction are several. Salonika was under direct German control, not Italian or Bulgarian. The community was geographically concentrated and socially identifiable, marked by language, occupation and quarter. The Greek state, then a German-occupied territory governed by collaborationist administrations, did not protect them; the Greek Orthodox Church and the Greek resistance offered some help, but on nothing like the scale needed. The deportations took place in a single short period, with no time for organised hiding to develop. The destination was Auschwitz at the height of its operational efficiency. Few transports anywhere produced lower survival rates.

Afterwards

The community of Salonika did not recover. Around 1,950 survivors returned from the camps; a few hundred had survived in hiding or in the resistance; a few hundred more returned from emigration. The post-war community numbered around 1,500 to 2,000. It rebuilt institutions on a small scale, but the Ladino-speaking Jewish-majority city of the Ottoman period was gone. The 35 pre-war synagogues had been destroyed; only the Monastir Synagogue, completed in 1925 and surviving the war because of its use as a Red Cross warehouse, remains.

The Jewish community of Thessaloniki in 2026 numbers around 1,000 people. The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, opened in 2001 in a building that survived the 1917 fire, documents five centuries of Sephardic life and three years of destruction. The Holocaust Memorial of Thessaloniki, in the Plateia Eleftherias where the deportations had been organised, was unveiled in 1997. The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, built on the site of the old Jewish cemetery (whose 350,000 graves had been bulldozed in December 1942), did not formally acknowledge the cemetery until 2014.

See also

Sources

  • Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, HarperCollins, 2004
  • Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941-1944, Yale University Press, 1993
  • Joseph Nehama, Histoire des Israélites de Salonique, seven volumes, Communauté Israélite de Thessalonique, 1935-1978
  • Steven B. Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews 1940-1945, Stanford University Press, 2009
  • Bea Lewkowicz, The Jewish Community of Salonika: History, Memory, Identity, Vallentine Mitchell, 2006
  • Devin E. Naar, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, Stanford University Press, 2016
  • Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, https://www.jmth.gr
  • Yad Vashem, Salonika community pages, https://www.yadvashem.org