By Rachel Avraham
The first Jews settled in Ioannina in 70 CE, right after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. According to the Oral Tradition, the lives of the Romaniot Jews were spared by Titus when he decided to dump them on the Albanian coast instead of drowning them in the sea. Most of these same Jews would eventually make their way to Ioannina, which would become the center of Romaniot Jewry. During the first half of the 13th century, these Jews would suffer from various persecutions. However, things improved for the Jews under the reign of Emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus. When the Ottoman Turks arrived in Ioannina in 1431, they found a sizable Romaniot Jewish community.
Under Ottoman Turkish rule, a sizable community of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain and Sicily in 1492 would arrive in Ioannina under the invitation of Sultan Bayazid II. I am a direct descendent of these Jews. Aviva Ben-Ur noted in Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History that Sultan Bayazid II saw the expulsion of the Jews from Spain as an “incomparable opportunity” to enrich Turkey at the expense of the Catholic monarch Ferdinand, who “impoverished Spain by the expulsion of the Jews.” Thus, Sephardic Jews were “encouraged, assisted and sometimes even compelled to settle in Ottoman lands.” As the famous historian Bernard Lewis noted, “Like the Muslim sovereigns of the East, they patronized poets, writers and scholars; these last were sometimes able to render them great services.”
The Sephardic Jews did everything to encourage enlightenment in Ottoman lands. David and Samuel Ibn Nahmias introduced the printing press into the Ottoman Empire. Rabbi Joseph Caro wrote the Shulchan Aruch, the standard code of Jewish law, under Ottoman Turkish rule. The Lekhah Dodi prayer which Jews to date traditionally sing on Friday evening was composed by Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz under Ottoman Turkish rule. Additionally, Rabbi Yaakov Culi’s Me’am Loez, an extremely popular Torah commentary written in the Ladino language, was published under the Ottoman Turks. So was Rabbi Avraham ben Isaac Asa’s translation of the Tanakh into Ladino.
The Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews into their borders historically due to the economic stimulation that came with their settlement. As Zion Zohar noted in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews: From the Golden Age of Spain to Modern Times: “The sultans consistently protected Jews from Christian attacks and never gave the slightest credence to blood libels. The multilingual Spanish Jews soon flourished as perfumers, blacksmiths, carpenters, technicians, gold workers, gunsmiths, mapmakers, creators of navigation instruments, and in exceptional cases, tax farmers, bankers, and doctors. Jews came to occupy administrative posts and played important roles in the intellectual and commercial life throughout the empire.”
Indeed, many Jews served even as court physicians, translators, advisors, government officials and military personnel were even part of the tax-exempt class in the 15th century and later centuries. As Aviv noted, “In general, Jews trusted the Ottoman judicial system and used it even in their own internal affairs, despite strong opposition by rabbis.”
Initially, there was tension between the Romaniot Jews and the Sephardic Jews. The Sephardic Jews viewed themselves as superior to the Romaniot Jews. However, eventually, the two communities would merge together as one. Sephardic prayer books dominated in Ioannina synagogues, while Greek became the common language of the Jews of Ioannina. In general, Jews thrived under Turkish rule.
According to the book, Synagogues without Jews, by Rivka and Ben-Zion Dorfman: “A kehillah of 800 was recorded in Ioannina in 1670, when 160 families engaged in silk manufacture. Rabbis visiting from Palestine were warmly welcomed and often stayed for extended periods. The rule of the cunning and cruel Ali Pasha from 1788 to 1822 brought a period of prosperity for Ioannina and the kehillah. Ioannina developed as a commercial center and literary capital. Ali Pasha allowed the Jews religious freedom and appointed Jews to his council.”
However, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, tension arose between the Jews and their Christian neighbors in Ioannina. Many Jews were massacred around this period. As Efrat Aviv wrote in Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Turkey: From Ottoman Rule to AKP: “The Greeks were hostile to the Jews and become more so following the Greek rebellion of 1821. […] On October 5, 1821, the entire population of Tripolitsa, where the Ottoman governor of Morea resided, was exterminated in a barbaric way. There were 35,000 Jews among them. In Haydarpasa during the riots of April 1885, the windows of most Jewish houses were broken and passerbys were stoned in the street. The riots were so remarkable that Osman Pasha, the minister of war, had to intervene in person to stop the fighting.”
In my grandfather Sallee Salomon’s native town of Ioannina in 1869, Yad Vashem noted that two massive fires broke out in the city that destroyed 500 shops and 500 private homes. All the Jewish shops were burned to the ground and many Jews were left homeless. Three years later, there were anti-Jewish riots because the local Greeks considered the Jews to be loyal to the Turks, whom they were struggling against.
Between the two massive fires and the Greek-Jewish tensions within the country, Jews were leaving Ioannina in droves. As one of my relatives related, “In 1897, an all-out war broke out between Greece and Turkey and unrest prevailed among our people all over the land. When the war was over, Turkey, the victor, claimed a good portion of Greece as bounty and again our people became uneasy, ever careful not to offend the conquering Turks or the conquered Greeks. Another war in 1912 and Greece, the victor, regained most of the land she lost, plus. In the intervening years, this turmoil aroused our people to finally seek a new land and so began the migration to America in 1900.” By the start of WWII, only 2,000 Jews were left in the city.
Thus, around the turn of the century, half of my family moved to what was then Palestine and half of my family moved to America. No one on that side of our family remained behind. Our family all left Greece before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, due to the Great Fire of 1869 in Ioannina, the City Hall of Records burned to the ground, which led to many relatives who accompanied Grandpa Sallee to America facing problems with the immigration authorities: “It housed all the birth data. Arriving in Ellis Island, they were forced to take potluck in declaring their proper ages.”
However, my family made the right decision to immigrate then, even though Grandpa Sallee would subsequently be drafted into the US Army during World War I only to watch his entire unit perish in the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918. Later on, 87% of Greek Jewry would perish in the Holocaust. In March 1944, 1,870 Jews from Ioannina were deported to Auschwitz. Only 164 of these Jews from Ioannina survived the Holocaust. As the writer of my family tree proclaimed, “In September 1967, it was discovered that only a mere handful now remain.”
Many other Jewish communities in Greece did not fare better during the Holocaust. For example, according to Mark Mazower in Salonica: City of Ghosts, soon after the Nazis arrived in Salonika, the Jewish owner of the historic Attikon cinema was handed over by local Greeks to the SS in order to extort him to hand over his business, which was housed in a historic Ottoman-era mosque that some Greeks wanted to demolish: “One rabbi had half his beard shaved; another was forced to discuss the Talmud whilst being beaten.”
Mazower described how local Greek journalists under Nazi inspiration wrote numerous anti-Jewish propaganda: “Nikolaos Kammonas wrote ‘the Jews managed to secure their financial and racial empire on the corpse of Macedonian Hellenism.’ One described the Jews as a “sort of epidemic” and called on the authorities to remove traders near the Hirsch Hospital and to “force them to wash themselves and their houses and stop their bazaars.”
A survivor recalled how the Nazis with their Greek collaborators destroyed the Old Jewish Cemetery in the city, which had graves dating back to the fifteenth century: “The sight of it was devastating. People were running between the tombs begging the destroyers to spare those of their relatives; with tears, they collected the remains. In my family vault, there were the remains of my brother, age twenty, who died during a journey to Rome. His body was brought back from abroad and put in two coffins, one in metal and the other in wood. When the second coffin was opened, my poor brother appeared in his smocking and his pointed shoes as though he had been put there yesterday. My mother fainted.”
These local antisemitic measures soon led to the massive dismissal of Jewish workers, seizure of Jewish properties and businesses, the forced wearing of a yellow Star of David and the transfer of Salonika’s Jews into a ghetto: “It was a sad irony that this neighborhood (where the Salonika ghetto was located) had originally been built in the late nineteenth century to house Ashkenazi refugees from Tzarist pogroms.”
It was from here that the city’s Jews would ultimately be deported to Auschwitz: “Almost no Jews remained in Salonika. Fifteen or so were exempted because they were married to non-Jews—some well-connected Greek men with Jewish wives had protested angrily to the Germans and managed to save their families—and up to one hundred were hiding with friends. Two women were helped by men that they later married; another older woman was hidden by a Christian relative. An unknown number of children were adopted—five of those were returned to the city’s orphanage in 1947. All of those left facing a terrifying underground existence in the city itself where searches for hidden Jews continued until liberation. At least three Jewish men, married to Christian women, were later arrested and deported.”
According to Stefania Zezza, a Holocaust researcher, the fate of Greek Jews deported from Salonika to Auschwitz was quite dire: “Actually the percentage of losses among the Jews deported from Salonika was one of highest in Europe, similar to that of Poland. According to K.E Fleming, 42,830 were deported from the city alone, and 38,386, were immediately murdered: ‘Records from Auschwitz Birkenau indicate that of the 48,974 Jews who arrived from Northern Greece in spring and summer 1943, 38,386 were immediately gassed.’ Many of those who had been admitted into the camp died in the following weeks as a consequence of their being affected by malaria and of the conditions inside the camp. As a result, there were only about 2,000 Jews who survived and were living in Salonika in 1946.”
However, although very few Greek Jews survived Auschwitz, Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz noted that the Greek Jews left their mark on the concentration camp: “Everyone knows that ‘caravana’ is the bowl, and that ‘la comedera es buena’ means the soup is good; the word that expresses the generic idea of theft is ‘klepsi-klepsi’, of obvious Greek origin. These few survivors from the Jewish colony of Salonika, with their two languages, Spanish and Greek, and their numerous activities, are the repositories of a concrete, mundane, conscious wisdom, in which the traditions of all the Mediterranean civilizations blend together.”
According to him, “That this wisdom was transformed in the camp into the systematic and scientific practice of theft and seizure of positions and the monopoly of the bargaining Market, should not let one forget that their aversion to gratuitous brutality, their amazing consciousness of the survival of at least a potential human dignity, made of the Greeks the most coherent national nucleus in Lager, and in this respect, the most civilized.”
The silence of the non-Jewish Salonika community to the fate of the city’s Jews was deafening Inside Salonika, “from the university professors and students, businessmen and lawyers associations, there was barely a whisper. The municipality enquired of the governor-general when it should advertise vacancies for the jobs previously filled by Jews and renamed the few streets in the city that commemorated Jewish figures.” Today, the University of Thessaloniki stands on top of what used to be the historic Jewish Cemetery and there is very little left of Jewish Salonika.
However, it should be stressed that Archbishop Damaskinos in coordination with a number of Athens business associations condemned the deportation of Greek Jewry, stressing that Salonika’s Jews should be resettled internally rather than sent outside the country. It should be noted that Athens Jewry fared better than Salonika Jewry, with 50% of that city escaping deportation.
