Jerusalem of the Balkans

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.