Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Syria: Aleppo and Damascus

Syria is the most important page on this site that is not about a Western Sephardi city, and the reason is Aleppo. For roughly two hundred years Aleppo was the place where the Western Sephardi world — Livorno, Venice, Amsterdam, London — physically met the Jewish East. Italian and Iberian merchant families settled there, kept their European passports, married among themselves, and did business with kin in Livorno at one end and Baghdad, Basra and India at the other. They were called the Señores Francos, and they are the reason this page exists.

Which three Jewish communities lived in Syria?

The indigenous Musta’arabim, the Sephardim who arrived after 1492, and the European-protected Francos — and establishing which one your family belonged to is the first thing to do.

The Musta’arabim — the “Arabised” — were the indigenous Jews, in place since Roman times and before, Arabic-speaking, with their own liturgy and customs. In Roman Damascus perhaps ten thousand Jews lived under an ethnarch. Benjamin of Tudela found three thousand Rabbanites and a hundred Karaites at Damascus in 1170, and a substantial community at Aleppo in 1173. This is the base layer, and it is not Sephardi.

The Sephardim arrived after 1492 and 1497. They founded their own congregations — in Damascus the synagogue called Khata’ib — and for several decades there was real social friction with the natives. Aleppo Jews of Spanish descent keep a custom found nowhere else: an extra candle at Hanukkah, said to have been instituted in gratitude for their eventual acceptance by the local community. It is a small thing that tells you the acceptance was neither immediate nor assumed.

The two communities nevertheless came to support a common chief rabbinate in both cities, and the chief rabbis were usually, though not always, from Spanish-descended families. In Aleppo there were five successive chief rabbis from the Laniado family — the Laniados being the Sephardi rabbinic dynasty of the city, and a name worth recognising immediately.

The Señores Francos — the “Frankish gentlemen” — came from the seventeenth century onward: Jews of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian origin who settled in Syria to trade and, wherever possible, retained their European nationality so as to fall under consular jurisdiction through the Ottoman Capitulations rather than be treated as dhimmis under Islamic law. They paid no jizya, answered to their consul rather than the qadi, and maintained a distinct social superiority over both the Musta’arabi and the Sephardi Jews. Characteristically they did not build separate synagogues but held their own services in private houses, which is precisely why they are hard to find in communal records.

There was a fourth, smaller group worth knowing about: Jews of Baghdadi origin who claimed British nationality through family connections in India — the same mechanism, a different empire, and a direct link to the merchants described on our India page.

The practical consequence. If your Syrian family held a European passport, the records that matter are consular and are in Europe. If it did not, the records are Ottoman, Islamic-court and communal, and are in Istanbul, Damascus and Jerusalem. Establish which before you start.

How do Aleppo and Damascus differ?

Aleppo traded and looked west; Damascus prayed and looked south. The two should never be treated as one thing.

Aleppo (Halab, and in Jewish tradition Aram Zoba) was a trading city. It sat at the Mediterranean end of the caravan routes and had European consuls, European merchants and a European-facing Jewish elite. The Sephardi and Franco presence was far greater here than in Damascus, with substantial connections to Livorno and Venice. A Spanish visitor in 1634, Captain Domingo de Toral, counted over 800 houses of Jews who spoke Castilian — a striking number, and the plainest evidence that Aleppo held a large Ladino-speaking population well over a century after the expulsion. Aleppo’s Jews were merchants, its rabbis were scholars, and its great synagogue held the Aleppo Codex, the finest manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in existence.

Damascus looked south, toward the Land of Israel, and was religiously rather than commercially defined. It maintained close ties with the Holy Land and was profoundly shaped by the Safed kabbalistic school of Isaac Luria. Two of the most important figures in that tradition were Damascus men: Hayim Vital (1526–1603), Luria’s principal disciple and for many years chief rabbi of Damascus, and the poet Israel Najara. This accounts for real differences of custom between the two cities that persist in their descendant communities today.

Damascus was also more layered. A seventeenth-century traveller found there three separate Rabbanite congregations, each with its own synagogue and its own preacher — one Sephardi, one native (called “Moriscos”), and one Sicilian — plus a Karaite community calling themselves Muallim-Tsadaqah. The last Damascus Karaite died around 1800 and the Karaite synagogue was sold to the Greeks and became a church. Sixty Jewish families lived at Jobar, a mile and a half outside the city, around a synagogue of thirteen marble pillars traditionally associated with the prophet Elisha.

The rule of thumb: for a Sephardi or Franco line, look at Aleppo first. For a kabbalistic or rabbinic line, look at Damascus.

Why did Syrian Jews emigrate?

Because the Suez Canal destroyed the caravan trade that both cities lived on. Prosperity, not persecution, drove the first wave.

For centuries the goods of India, Persia and Iraq travelled overland: up the Gulf to Basra, on to Baghdad, then west by caravan to Aleppo, and from Aleppo down to the Mediterranean at Alexandretta. Damascus sat on the parallel route and was also the assembly point for one of the two great annual Hajj caravans, a commercial event in its own right. Both cities lived on transit.

Jewish merchant families were placed along that route deliberately, exactly as they were in the coral and diamond trade described on our India page — kin at each node, because kinship was the only enforceable form of trust across that distance. The Francos are what the Livorno end of that system looked like when it put down roots in Aleppo.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 ended it. Once goods could move from Asia to Europe by sea more cheaply and quickly than by caravan, the overland transit trade that had sustained Aleppo and Damascus for a thousand years simply stopped. An Ottoman-wide economic crisis followed in 1870, and in 1875 the Ottoman state announced it could not repay the loans it had taken from its wealthier subjects — a default that fell directly on the Jewish banking families of Damascus and bankrupted several of them outright.

This is the single most important fact for anyone tracing a Syrian Jewish family, because it dates and explains the emigration. From around 1850, and with increasing frequency until the First World War, families left for Egypt; from Egypt many went on to Manchester, following the cotton trade; and from Manchester a considerable number went on again to Latin America, particularly Mexico and Argentina. From about 1908 a separate stream went to New York, and the Brooklyn Syrian community is now the largest in the world. Others simply moved to the coast, to Beirut, which is the subject of our Lebanon page.

Who were the Señores Francos?

European-protected Jewish merchants at Aleppo — and the thread this site is really following.

The Francos are documented as an Aleppo phenomenon and have never, so far as we can establish, been traced systematically forward. They are the strongest reason for a Western Sephardi site to cover Syria at all.

The best-known family is Picciotto, originally of Livorno, who served as consuls for Austria at Aleppo across several generations and appear later in Beirut and Geneva. Silvera is another: the Livorno firm of Ergas and Silvera, which Francesca Trivellato has reconstructed in detail, traded between Livorno, Aleppo and the Indies, and its partner Isaac Ergas appears on our India page under his commercial name, Fernão Mendes Henriques. The eighteenth-century Damascus elite — Lisbona, Farhi, Picciotto, Stambouli, Angel, Harari — includes both Franco and local families side by side.

Two research warnings follow from what the Francos were.

First, because they held services in private houses rather than founding synagogues, they are under-represented in communal records and over-represented in consular ones. Look for them in the archives of Venice, Austria, France and Britain, not in the Aleppo community registers.

Second, do not assume a Sephardi surname means a Sephardi origin, or the reverse. Aleppan surnames such as Yedid, Sutton, Dwek, Laniado, Antebi, Labaton, Hamaoui, Shamah, Tawil and Safdieh are the community’s own and mostly not Iberian; Picciotto, Silvera and Lisbona are Italian-Iberian. No frequency-based test will separate them. This is a distinct naming regime and it needs to be learned rather than guessed.

What does one family’s papers actually show? The Lisbonas of Damascus

Four consulates, three empires, one family, eighty years — and then Suez, bankruptcy and dispersal to Manchester, Alexandria and Brazil.

We are fortunate to hold a detailed family history contributed by David Lisbona, a descendant living in Haifa. It is worth summarising because it demonstrates, in one family, nearly every structural point on this page.

Iberia to Italy to Damascus. The family left Portugal after the expulsion of 1497 and settled in Italy, where it took the name — Lisbona being the Italian form of Lisbon. It reached Damascus from Italy in the seventeenth or eighteenth century and became wealthy merchants. The earliest trace of the name is Sabbatian: in 1663 Nathan of Gaza, Shabbetai Zevi’s chief propagandist, married the daughter of a wealthy Damascus merchant named Samuel Lisbona.

Consular protection in action. The family’s earliest surviving document is an appeal made by Rafael Lisbona (b. 1710) to the Consul of the Republic of Venice at Aleppo in 1780, seeking confirmation of the patronage rights attaching to the Venetian citizenship acquired during the family’s time in Italy — and noting, pointedly, that he assisted Venetian pilgrims travelling through Damascus to the Holy Land. The consul approved it on 25 July 1780. Rafael prudently obtained a second certificate from the Austrian consulate at Beirut.

When Napoleon extinguished Venice in 1797 the family simply changed patrons. In 1811 Moshe Eli Lisbona (1770–1832) obtained from the French consul at Aleppo a document granting him “the patronage of Napoleon the Great, Emperor of France and King of Italy”. In 1834 the French consul at Damascus recorded that Moshe Eli’s sons Haim and Rafael had been refused diplomatic protection by the governor and heavily taxed, and authorised them to travel to Alexandria to petition through the Austrian consul. In 1862 Abraham Lisbona applied to the Austrian consul at Aleppo for a passport to travel to Alexandria by way of Beirut.

This is what Franco status actually looked like in practice, and it is why consular archives are the first place to look.

Suez, default, dispersal. After 1869 and the Ottoman default of 1875 this branch was bankrupted. Moshe went to Manchester, where he was among the founders of the city’s Sephardi congregation and is commemorated in the Manchester Jewish Museum; his son Nissim was killed on the Somme in 1916, and his descendants remain in Britain and Ireland. His brother Abraham went to Alexandria in 1872, had eight children, and after 1948 their descendants scattered to Israel, France and the United States. Portugal to Italy to Damascus to Manchester and Alexandria — and on again.

The other branch, and the Damascus Affair. Nathaniel (Shehade) Lisbona (1793–1866) appears in the records of the 1840 Damascus Affair: the protocol of the inquiry at the French consulate shows that he attempted to bribe one of the consul’s aides to have the matter dropped. His son Meir Lisbona (1832–1913) held the rank of kadi in the Ottoman system and sat in the Damascus majlis; his house had two gates, one opening into the Jewish quarter and one into the Muslim. Descendants went to New York, Beirut, Egypt, Israel and Mexico, and Brazil now holds the largest number of Lisbona descendants. Meir’s grandson Tzadok Lisbona, born in Damascus in 1902, emigrated to Palestine, worked as a clerk at Barclays Bank in Haifa and commanded a Haganah unit; he was shot dead on 4 August 1947 pursuing an Irgun squad that had robbed his own branch.

The Lisbona House. Built between about 1810 and 1820 alongside the two great Farhi houses, in matching style and — according to Stefan Weber — apparently linked to them by an underground passage, which suggests it was originally part of the Farhi family’s own estate before passing to the Lisbonas. Isabel Burton called it “the second most beautiful building in all of Damascus”. It was remodelled between 1865 and 1872 at a cost of at least £20,000, had some eighteen rooms around a courtyard, and probably housed a synagogue and a seminary. The Prince of Wales visited in 1862; so did Dom Pedro of Brazil.

Burton also recorded the contrast that matters most: magnificence inside, deliberate shabbiness outside — two poor doors and an unkempt yard onto the street. That is what wealth under insecurity looks like, and it is the truest single image on this page.

The Jewish community school later moved into the house and operated there until 1990. Restoration began in 1997–98, stopped, and the building is now classified as a hazardous structure.

What violence shaped the community?

A series of episodes, each of which both scattered families and generated documentation.

The Damascus Affair, 1840. The defining event. After the disappearance of a Capuchin friar, Father Thomas, and his servant, leading members of the Damascus community were accused of ritual murder, arrested and tortured; sixty-three children aged between three and ten were seized to force confessions from their parents. The intervention of Moses Montefiore, Adolphe Crémieux and Salomon Munk — who travelled to Egypt, then ruling Syria — secured a release. The affair is conventionally, and correctly, treated as the origin of modern international Jewish advocacy: it led directly to the founding of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860. For genealogists it also produced an unusually thick file of consular and legal documentation naming individuals.

1860. After the Druze and Muslim massacre of Christians in Damascus, Jews were accused of complicity. Two hundred faced execution and the community was fined four million piastres. They were saved by the intervention of Fuad Pasha, the Prussian consul Dr Johann Wetzstein, Montefiore, and the bankers Abraham Salomon Camondo of Constantinople and Shemaya Angel of Damascus. Further blood accusations followed later in the century without the same consequences.

Aleppo, December 1947. After the United Nations partition vote, a pogrom devastated the community: seventy-five Jews killed, hundreds injured, more than two hundred homes, shops and synagogues destroyed. The Great Synagogue was burned and the Aleppo Codex damaged, with roughly a third of it lost. This is the moment the Aleppo community effectively ends; what follows is departure.

Damascus, August 1949. A grenade attack on the Menarsha synagogue killed twelve and injured dozens.

Qamishli, 1967. After the Six-Day War, fifty-seven Jews were reportedly killed; the communities of Damascus, Aleppo and Qamishli were placed under house arrest for eight months.

1974. Four Jewish girls — the Zeibak sisters and their cousin — were murdered while attempting to flee to Israel; their bodies were found in the Zabdani mountains together with those of Natan Shaya, 18, and Kassem Abadi, 20, from an earlier killing.

1984. A pregnant woman and her two young children were murdered in Aleppo.

These are recent, and there are living relatives. Handle them accordingly.

What did the closed years, 1948–1992, do to the records?

They produced two generations of Syrian Jewish life with almost no accessible documentation and no probate at all.

Syrian Jews were never formally expelled. They were, from 1948, systematically immobilised.

The sale of Jewish property was banned in 1948 and bank accounts frozen in 1953; property was confiscated and Jewish homes given to Palestinian refugees. From 1964 Jews could not travel more than five kilometres from their home town, hold government or bank employment, obtain a driving licence, or buy property — and, critically for genealogists, the state confiscated the property of every Jew on death, so there is no inheritance record. Religion was marked on Jewish passports and identity cards; Jews were the only minority so marked. Anyone permitted to travel had to leave a bond and family members as hostages.

The secret police kept a file on every member of the community, attended synagogue services, weddings and bar mitzvahs, tapped telephones and read mail. An airport road was driven across the Jewish cemetery in Damascus, and the largest Jewish cemetery in the country was later reported demolished.

Emigration was clandestine. Judy Feld Carr, working from Canada, is credited with getting 3,228 people out. During the 1980s Chief Rabbi Avraham Hamra smuggled out nine Bible manuscripts between 700 and 900 years old, forty Torah scrolls and thirty-two cases, now at the National Library of Israel. In 1992, following pressure at the Madrid conference, exit permits were finally granted at Passover and some four thousand people left within months, chiefly for the United States, France and Turkey; over twelve hundred were subsequently brought to Israel in a covert two-year operation.

What the community carried out, it carried in its hands. That is why family papers matter more here than almost anywhere else on this site.

What has changed since December 2024?

The fall of the Assad regime has reopened questions that were closed for sixty years — and this section may already be out of date.

Our information runs to around May 2026 and this is a fast-moving situation. Check for more recent news.

What we can report: a representative of the transitional government met the head of the remaining community and stated that Jews would be protected and that Syrian Jews abroad would be permitted to return. The Jobar synagogue became accessible again after decades and there are plans for its restoration; Jewish delegations from the United States have visited and been received warmly. In December 2025 the Jewish Heritage in Syria Foundation was registered — reportedly the first Jewish organisation ever formally registered in the country — with the stated aims of recovering confiscated property and restoring Jewish sites. A 2024 study valued Jewish assets seized in 1947 at over $200 million at the time. Against this, in April 2026 Syrian authorities reported disrupting a plot against a rabbi in Damascus.

Why this matters here. Property restitution requires proof of ownership and descent, which requires records. If confiscated property is genuinely returned, Syrian Jewish documentation may become accessible for the first time in sixty years — including, potentially, the state’s own files on the community. It is too early to say. It is not too early to watch.

What about Qamishli?

The third community, and the one everybody forgets.

Qamishli lies in the north-east on the Turkish border. It was formed comparatively recently, in the 1920s, largely by Jews from Nusaybin and the surrounding district after the new frontier cut them off from Turkey, and it was Kurdish-speaking as well as Arabic-speaking. It suffered the reported killings of 1967. Two elderly Jewish women were still living there in recent years. It has its own history and almost no genealogical literature.

What records can you actually reach?

Ottoman and local

Sharia court records (sijill) — Damascus files survive from 1583 to 1909, and the Islamic courts dealt constantly with Jewish property, debt, inheritance and taxation. This is the deepest named source for the Ottoman centuries and it is badly under-used. Requires Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. See Mandaville’s guide to the Ottoman court records of Syria and Jordan, and the Brown University Library project on the Ottoman records of Greater Syria.
Ottoman State Archives (BOA), Istanbul — tahrir (survey) and nüfus (population) registers for the Aleppo and Damascus vilayets, tax and temettuat records.
Ottoman rabbinical and communal material — letters from the Syrian communities to the Hakham Bashi in Constantinople, held at the CAHJP in Jerusalem.

Aleppo community records

Aleppo is comparatively well served, and these are the sources to start with:

Circumcision register, 1868–1945 — a database exists. Registers of this kind typically name the child, the father and the grandfather, which makes them the single richest structured source for any community that has one.
Marriage database.
Surname index.
Eulogies and tombstone inscriptions, and photographs of 345 gravestones through JewishGen.
Diarna — the Aleppo cemetery.

Damascus

Rabbinical burials — a list of 196 rabbis buried in Damascus between 1650 and 1933.
Note that the principal Damascus cemetery was destroyed, so epigraphic survival is poor.

Consular and European

For Franco families this is where the records are.

France — consular archives for Syria, 1824–1945, and the Centre des Archives diplomatiques, Nantes, for the French Mandate (1920–1946) and consular series.
Austria — Habsburg consular records for Aleppo and Damascus, where the Picciottos served as consuls and many Francos held protection.
Venice — the Republic’s consulate at Aleppo, to 1797. Archivio di Stato di Venezia.
Britain — Foreign Office and Levant Company records at The National Archives; the Levant Company’s factory at Aleppo generated substantial documentation.

Jewish institutional

Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris — schools at Aleppo and Damascus, with reports that describe the communities in detail.
Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem.
National Library of Israel — including the manuscripts smuggled out in the 1980s, and the Aleppo Codex material.
Central Zionist Archives; Israel State Archives; Israel Genealogy Research Association.
Sephardic Heritage Museum, New York, and the institutions of the Brooklyn Syrian community — the largest concentration of Syrian Jewish descendants anywhere, with their own congregational records.
Manchester — the Sephardi congregation founded in part by Syrian and Egyptian arrivals, and the Manchester Jewish Museum.
Les Fleurs de l’Orient (Alain Farhi) — the large online database of Middle Eastern Jewish families, and the natural first stop. The compiler’s surname is itself a Damascus one.
SephardicGen and JewishGen, both of which carry Aleppo and Damascus material.
Sarina Roffé and the Sephardic genealogical community in the United States — the working expertise on Aleppan family research is largely there.

Sephardic World lectures

Our video pages carry lectures touching on the Livorno–Aleppo trading network, the Damascus Affair, and the Syrian families who reached Manchester and Brooklyn. The Lebanon page covers the same rabbinic families from the Beirut end.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Francos have not been traced forward. They are documented as an Aleppo phenomenon; nobody appears to have followed them systematically into Beirut, Manchester, Alexandria, Geneva and Latin America. This is the gap, and the Lisbona history above is a model of what filling it looks like.
The Aleppo circumcision register, 1868–1945, deserves proper treatment. If it names father and grandfather it is structurally the best Syrian source in existence.
The sharia court records are the great untouched body of material for the Ottoman centuries — three hundred and twenty-six years of Damascus files alone.
Consular records are scattered across four national archives and nobody has assembled a list of Jewish protégés at Aleppo and Damascus. That list would effectively be a register of the Franco families.
Qamishli has almost no genealogical literature.
Be careful with the devotional literature. Zvi Zohar’s critique of Aleppo: City of Scholars — that it recasts a diverse mercantile community as a uniformly pious one — is a fair caution about a whole genre. Use these books for names and dates, and read the academic historians for interpretation.

Organisations and repositories

Ottoman State Archives (BOA), Istanbul; Archivio di Stato di Venezia; Centre des Archives diplomatiques, Nantes; The National Archives (UK); the Austrian State Archives.

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem; National Library of Israel; Central Zionist Archives; Israel State Archives; Israel Genealogy Research Association.

Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris.

Sephardic Heritage Museum, New York; the congregations of the Brooklyn Syrian community; Manchester Jewish Museum.

Les Fleurs de l’Orient; Diarna; SephardicGen; JewishGen.

Help us find records

Syria is a subject where a great deal is in private hands and where the political situation may be about to change what is possible. We are looking for:

Consular registrations, protection certificates and passports issued to Jews at Aleppo, Damascus or Beirut by Venice, Austria, France or Britain — these are the Franco records and they are the priority
Family papers documenting the Aleppo or Damascus to Egypt to Manchester to Latin America route
Anything from the Aleppo circumcision, marriage or burial registers
Photographs or transcriptions of gravestones from either city
Documentation of property confiscated after 1948, which may now matter practically as well as historically
Ketubot and community certificates carried out in 1992 or before

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Syrian Jewish research is done almost entirely outside Syria: in the consular archives of four European states, in the Ottoman archives at Istanbul, in Jerusalem, and in the records of Manchester, Alexandria, Brooklyn, São Paulo and Mexico City. Expect to work in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, Italian and Hebrew, and expect the decisive question to be whether your family held a European passport. We will tell you which kind of family yours was before you commit to anything. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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