Thessaloniki Jewry’s wealth made the city a major center of Sephardic Jewry in the Ottoman Empire

Title: Jerusalem of the Balkans

Location: Thessaloniki (Salonica), Greece

Document: Jewish community census binder

August: 1917

Salonica Population Register is one of the featured chapters in the excellent recently published book entitled 100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research — a sweeping journey through Jewish life, memory, and survival, told through a carefully curated selection of artifacts. This beautifully illustrated coffee-table volume showcases rare manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera, each accompanied by insightful essays from leading scholars that bring these treasures vividly to life.

Following the 1492 expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, a new Sephardic diaspora came into being, predominantly settling in the lands of the vast Ottoman Empire, which stretched to the Balkans. Many settled in the Mediterranean port city of Thessaloniki (also known as Salonica or Saloniki). By the 1519 Ottoman census, Jews accounted for 54% of the city’s total population, making it the largest Jewish community in the world, and the only major European city with a majority Jewish population. It soon came to be known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans” and for centuries was a predominantly Jewish city.

The Jews of Thessaloniki dominated local commerce, trade, and manufacturing and were prominent in the shipping that passed through the city’s important port. Although the strategic port served as a commercial gateway between the Mediterranean basin and southern and central Europe, it was closed every Shabbos because most of the city’s population was Torah observant.

Thessaloniki Jewry’s wealth made the city a major center of Sephardic Jewry in the Ottoman Empire, and produced dozens of shuls, prominent yeshivos, and a rabbinical elite boasting some of the Jewish history’s greatest Torah scholars and leaders.

By the turn of the 20th century, the Jewish share of Thessaloniki’s population had fallen to 40%, although Jews still comprised the largest ethnic group. In the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, Greece wrested control of the city from the Ottoman Empire, formally annexing it. Many of Thessaloniki’s Jews viewed the new Greek government with distrust, and the community entered a slow decline.

The Greek government actually made overtures to the city’s Jews, permitting them to keep their shops open on Sunday to accommodate their Shabbos observance. It also encouraged the development of the Zionist movement, viewing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine as an additional potential dismemberment of the hated Ottoman Empire.

World War I halted trade and slowed commerce, bringing a further downturn in Jewish fortunes in the city. Greece formally joined the Allies, and British and French troops were quartered in Thessaloniki at this time, further straining the city’s resources.

On the afternoon of August 18, 1917, an accidental fire started in a kitchen in a home in the city’s center. The Great Thessaloniki Fire raged for 32 hours and completely destroyed over a third of the city. Due to chaotic war conditions, the requisitioning of the water supply by the Allied troops stationed there, high winds, a long drought, and an antiquated and ineffective fire service, the devastating conflagration rendered half of the city’s population homeless and nearly three-quarters unemployed.

The Jews of Thessaloniki bore the brunt of the damage. Some 52,000 Jews were left homeless, more than half of the city’s Jews had their livelihoods and shops destroyed, and 16 out of 33 synagogues burned down. The Jewish community’s schools, yeshivos, public and social institutions, historic printing press, philanthropic institutions, and libraries all went up in smoke.

Perhaps one of the most irreplaceable losses sustained by the community was that of the offices of the grand rabbinate, holding the communal archives. All the written records of one of the largest and most glorious communities in the world were completely lost to the flames. The community register of births, marriages, deaths, professions, status, rabbinical history, rabbinical court records, all documentation of the collective and individual identity of the centuries-old Thessaloniki Jewish community were gone in an instant.

Though the community was ultimately rebuilt on the outskirts of the city, it would never attain its former glory. Over 20,000 people couldn’t even obtain temporary shelter and were forced to emigrate to Athens, France, the United States, and Eretz Yisrael.

Those who did remain began an intense effort of restoration. One of the first projects was a brand-new community register. The kehillah conducted an internal census, noting each household, including their name, former and current place of residence, profession, to what extent they had been damaged by the fire and whether they were in need of physical assistance. Recorded in the now almost-unused Hebrew script for writing Ladino, the predominant language of Sephardic Thessaloniki Jewry, this ledger formed the basis of the community’s renewal.

Communal administrators continued to record cases adjudicated by the local beit din, identity documents of individual community members, births, marriages and deaths, and other basic census information. By the time the Nazis looted the communal ledgers with their occupation of Greece in 1941, vital information on 75,062 of Thessaloniki’s Jews had been recorded in 24 thick volumes.

Over 90% of Thessaloniki’s Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. The Nazis established ghettos, and deportations to Auschwitz and Treblinka ensued. Though some survived Auschwitz, and others escaped or found refuge in hiding, by and large this ancient and glorious Sephardic community was utterly decimated.

The silent ledger books are a testament to both the individuals recorded there as the only evidence of their lives, as well as the collective story of the Thessaloniki community. The Ladino handwritten script is testament to the eternal survival of Jewish life and the echoes of the Thessaloniki Jewish community’s influence on the larger Jewish world.

Rishon L’Tzion in Salonica

Born in Yerushalayim to a Sephardic family from Greece, Rav Yaakov Meir (1856–1939) was hired in 1907 as the rabbi of Thessaloniki and served until 1919. He was at the community’s helm during the great fire, and his possessions were among the casualties of the great destruction. His home, office, magnificent Torah library, and many chiddushei Torah — primarily halachic writings and responsa on Shulchan Aruch — were devoured by the flames.

Ignoring his own personal losses, Rav Yaakov Meir threw himself entirely into assisting the members of his community. Utilizing his relationships with various government officials, he was able to secure medicines and other health care items that were in short supply. He then turned his energies to general rehabilitation efforts. In private correspondence, he confessed that his writings were irreplaceable; he couldn’t rewrite them from scratch due to the loss of his seforim library, his many community responsibilities, and his advanced age.

In 1919 he was recalled to Yerushalayim, where he was appointed the first Sephardic chief rabbi, known as the Rishon L’Tzion, under the new British Mandate for Palestine.

The Sound of Salonica

In 1972 legendary songwriter, composer, and singer Rabbi Baruch Chait produced the first of what would soon be a series of music albums entitled Kol Salonika. This rather odd choice of a name was aptly explained on the dust jacket:

The music on this record presents a novel creation projecting the historic character of the Universal Jew. It is a colorful merger of original chassidic songs of today with the melodic background of the music of Salonika. Its new, exotic, and scintillating tones translate the traditions of the past into the musical idiom of the present. Baruch Chait, creator of The Rabbi’s Sons, has made another exciting contribution to modern Jewish music through these extraordinary compositions and his unique “New Greek Chassidic Sound.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1078)