History of Greek Jewish Community
Ancient
Jewish presence in Greece dates at least to the mention by Strabo in
approximately 85 B.C.E. that Jews could be found in all the cities of the
eastern Mediterranean (VII 7 4). There may well have been Jews, if not
Jewish communities, living in Greek cities as far back as the Babylonian
Exile (586-530 B.C.E.). After the wars of the Maccabees, between 170 and
161 B.C.E., many Hellenized Jews left Judaea and settled in the new
commercial centers, such as Alexandria and Antioch, of the Hellenistic
world. From these communities smaller groups moved to some of the coastal
Aegean cities such as Ephesus, Smyrna, Thessaloniki, and, according to
tradition, Chalkis. Jewish communities also may have been founded on Crete
at this time. In any case, by the time of the Apostle Paul there were
flourishing Jewish communities in most of the major Greek cities.
The scanty surviving evidence concerning the Jews of the late
antique and Byzantine periods indicates that the Jews in Greece lived more
or less as did their Christian neighbors. The famous 12th century record
of the Jews of Greece compiled by Benjamin of Tudela during his travels
through Greece indicates a uniform dispersion of Jewish communities. The
Jewish community of Thebes was so closely identified with the silk
industry that Roger II of Sicily (1095-1154) forcibly moved almost the
entire community to Sicily to introduce the silk industry in his Norman
kingdom. In Crete, under Venetian rule after the fall of Constantinopole
to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Jews were producers and exporters of
agricultural goods. Kosher wines and cheeses from Crete were sent as faras
the Baltic port of Lubeck.
In general terms the Jews of Greece during this period can be
described as “Romaniot” Jews, i.e. , Jews of the empire of the
“second Rome”, Byzantium. Their status under Byzantine rule was
peculiar, but they were protected by law and only rarely do contemporary
sources convey the impression of persecution. Life was not made easy for
them, lest they forget their refusal to accept the Christian Messiah, but
they were recognized at least as descendants of the Chosen People.
Integration into the cultural pattern of Greek life can be seen in the
loss of Hebrew by many communities. Some communities tried to maintain at
least the form of Hebrew by writing out whole sections of the Tanah in
Greek using Hebrew script, as in the illuminated Book of Job from Crete
(Ms. Gr. 135 Bib. Nationale). Other communities must have been assimilated
completely. In the Mani, in southern Greece, the inhabitants claim to be
descendants of “lost” Jews , claims now mixed with legends of the Ten
Lost Tribes of Israel. Despite this assimilation, on the eve of World War
II there were still several communities of Romaniot Jews in Greece
claiming unbroken continuity back into antiquity. Kerkyra (Corfu),
Zakynthos (Zante), Ioannina, Arta, Preveza, Patras, Chalkis, and Volos
still maintained traces of the old Romaniot minhag, or liturgy.
By the third quarter of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire had
supplanted the Byzantine. Ottoman policy toward minorities was based on
Islamic law, which recognized both Jews and Christians as a separate
millet (nation) with religious and , to an extraordinary extent, legal
autonomy within their own communities. This tolerant millet system
encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe who had been feeling the
brunt of Christian persecution, notably, in the late 15th century, in
Spain. This immigration was welcomed by the Ottomans because of the
economic stimulation it brought. In 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella
proclaimed the Edict of Expulsion for the Jews of Spain, Sultan Bayezid II
proclaimed that Jews from Spain would be welcome in the Ottoman Empire,
and over 20,000 Sephardic or Iberian Jews arrived in Thessaloniki the same
year. Soon afterwards 36,000 Jews left Sicily, many of them to settle in
the Balkans.
Within a generation a Judaeo-Spanish culture had been transplanted
to many centers in the Ottoman Empire. This was not always done smoothly.
Many of the Sepharadim were Marranos, Jews who had converted to
Christianity in the 14th century, thereby being able to participate in
much of Europe’s cultural and intellectual life. Their reconversion to
Judaism was sometimes difficult, and their pride and sense of cultural
superiority caused friction in their dealings with Romaniot Jews.
Whatever
the difficulties, the former Romaniot communities of Constantinople,
Edirne (Adrianople), Thessaloniki, and Rhodes were forced by the weight of
numbers and cultural superiority to adopt not only the minhag but also the
language of the newcomers. A new, and certainly one of the most exciting
periods of Balkan Jewry began. In 1497 the first book printed in
Constantinople was published in Hebrew, well over two hundred years before
the first Greek books were printed in the Balkans. Some Jews, notably
Joseph Nasi (1520?-1579) during the reigns of Suleiman the Magnificent and
Selim II, rose to high positions in the Ottoman service.
The Greek War of Independence brought disaster to the Jewish
communities in the Peloponnesos, where the revolution erupted in 1821. The
Jews, because of their close associate with the Ottoman administration,
were massacred along with the Turks. The Jewish communities of Mistras,
Tripolis, and Kalamata were decimated; the few survivors moved north to
settle in Chalkis and Volos, still under Ottoman rule. Patras lost its
ancient Jewish community, which was refounded only in 1905.
By the late 19th century much of the energy of the Greek state was
being spent in attempts to regain those southern Balkan territories
historically associated with Greek history and language. National
“Hellenic” consciousness became the ideal, and Jews, along with the
other non – “Hellenic” peoples of the country, found themselves in
the process of Hellenization. This was not much of a problem to the Jews
of southern or northwestern Greece, for as Romanios they already were
Hellenized to a great extent in both language and custom. For the
Sepharadim in northeastern Greece, however, who came under the Greek rule
after the Balkan Wars of 1912/3, there was a problem.
Thessaloniki was a bizarre city even by Balkan standards. At the
turn of the century its population was approximately one-third Greek and
more than one-half Jewish, with the balance made up of Turks, Bulgars, and
other nationalities. The language of government and law was Osmanli, but
the general commercial life of the city was conducted in the language of
the Sepharadim, Ladino, the Spanish of Cervantes with heavy accretions of
Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Bulgarian. The city’s horizon was spiked
with minarets and in its center lay a sprawling Jewish cemetery that
reached up to the walls of the old city. On Friday afternoons almost all
of the city’s commercial life ceased for most of the stevedores and
porters were Jews. Over 32 synagogues, with names like Aragon, Castille,
Toledo, and Magrebi, reminiscent of a time long past in a land abandoned
in desperation and sadness, provided religious centers for the Sepharadim.
The population included Karaites as well as Donmeh, followers of the
17th century pseudo-Messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Hellenization sought to absorb
this incredibly medieval city into contemporary Greek life.
For the Sepharadim, their Spanish culture was a means of preserving
their Jewish identity when religious observance began to slip. If a
Sephardic Jew were to lose his religious commitment to Judaism, he had a
strong secular Judaeo-Spanish culture to fall back on. By the late
1930’s, however, several factors had disrupted much of this culture.
Hellenization required the official imposition of the Greek language; of
the establishment of Sunday, not Saturday as the day of rest; and the
considerable re-organization of the traditional religious life of the Jews
according to the laws of the Greek state. In August 1917, fire swept
through the Jewish quarter, causing great loss of life and property, from
which it did not recover. Confiscations, which continued until the late
1930’s, began of of vast sections of the ancient cemetery. In the
1920’s the enormous influx of Greek refugees from Asia Minor resulting
from the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey fundamentally
altered the city’s ethnic structure. National and economic life
increasingly came to be centered in Athens, and many Jews from
Thessaloniki moved south to the capital. As these factors weakened the
Thessaloniki Jewish community, more and more of its members left Greece
altogether, for Palestine, Europe, South Africa, and the United States. By
1939 the Thessaloniki Jewish community had fallen from approximately
90,000 at the turn of the century to 56,000.
If the Thessaloniki Jewish community was unique in its
identification with its Spanish past, the Athens Jewish community was
equally unique for its heterogeneity. Throughout the Middle Ages and into
the 17th century when Sabbatai Zevi visited the city there are periodic
references to a Jewish presence in Athens. The absence of Jews in Athens
immediately following the Greek War of Independence is ominous, indicating
that they either fled or were massacred as were the Turks. We hear of the
first ‘new’ Jews in the city when the Bavarian King Otto I of Greece
settled in Athens in 1834, for with him came a man named Max Rothschild,
perhaps the first Jew to arrive in the new capital. He was soon followed
by a number of other Jews, most of them Bavarian and therefore Ashkenazi
in background. Within a short period of time Jews from Turkey, many of
them from Smyrna if one can judge by family names, began to settle in the
city. By the middle of the 19th century a small Jewish community, but one
with no determining tradition, had been established in Athens.
For a time this community was the object of attention for the
Duchess of Plaisance, Sophie Berbe Marboise. A highly eccentric
French-American lady who had married the Duke of Plaisance, a member of
the Napoleonic aristocracy, Sophie fancied herself an adherent of what she
called ‘the faith of Moses.’ She dressed heavily in veils, ate no
pork, befriended Jews, and would seem to have lived in her own world of
fancy and romance. On her death in 1854 Sophie left much of the
considerable property she had bought in Athens to the Athens Jewish
community, which at that time had no official charter of incorporation.
The land she donated stretched from the Zappeion southwest around the
acropolis and north to Omonia Square. The Jews of Athens never claimed
their gift. Even if the community’s legal position had been defined, the
time was not such for it to press claims in Athens.
During the 1840’s a regular part of the Easter celebrations in
Athens included the ritual burning of a ‘Judas’ in effigy. In 1847 Max
Rothschild persuaded the Greek prime minister, John Kolettis, to stop this
practice. Lacking a Judas, public feeling focussed on a Jew of
questionable business integrity named Don Pacifico, who had been born on
Gibraltar and was therefore a British citizen. Rioters sacked Don
Pacifico’s house and burned his warehouse. Don Pacifico’s exorbitant
claims for restitution were supported by the British prime minister,
Viscount Palmerston, who sent the British fleet to blockade Piraeus.
Whatever the justification for Don Pacifico’s unsavory reputation, the
strength of public feeling against him does not suggest a secure position
for the Jewish community in Athens at the time.
Secure or not, the community was well established by the late 19th
century. It was legally organized in 1885 and its official charter was
granted in 1889. A synagogue was built in 1904 and dedicated in 1906 as
Etz Hayyim (indicating a strong Romaniot element). Heterogeneous as it
was, the Athens Jewish community had several advantages in its favor
against the coming Nazi storm.
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