Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Greece: Salonica, Rhodes and Corfu

Greece did not exist when this story begins.

Salonica was Ottoman from 1430 until 1912, and for most of that time it was the largest Jewish city in the world by proportion — a port where Jews were the majority, where the harbour closed on Saturday, and where Judeo-Spanish was the language of commerce for four hundred years. Corfu was Venetian, then French, then British, and Greek only from 1864. Rhodes was Ottoman until 1912, then Italian until 1947.

A family traced through “Greece” will spend most of its documented life under other flags, and its records will be in Istanbul, Venice, Rome, Paris and Jerusalem as often as in Athens.

What is the right research frame?

The Ottoman one, not the Greek one.

Salonica belonged to a network whose other nodes were Constantinople, Smyrna, Adrianople, Monastir, Sofia, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Safed, and families moved along it constantly. A rabbi born in Salonica dies in Jerusalem; a printer moves to Constantinople; a merchant is murdered on the road to Monastir.

Treat the Balkans and Anatolia as one research area, not several.

Three Jewish populations, which should not be confused

Sephardim — from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Provence and North Africa, arriving from 1492 onwards, and rapidly dominant. This is the subject of the page.

Romaniotes — Greek-speaking Jews present since antiquity, whose language was Yevanic. By the sixteenth century they had been culturally absorbed almost everywhere the Sephardim settled, and Salonica’s Romaniote community was largely subsumed. Ioannina remained the great exception. Their records and rite are distinct, and researchers on Romaniote lines should treat this page as background only.

Ashkenazim — present in small numbers from 1376, with their own synagogue in Salonica and, later, a dynasty of printers.

The Sephardim did not arrive as one community. They arrived as dozens, and they stayed that way. That single fact governs almost everything about the records.

Where did Salonica’s Sephardim come from?

From everywhere in the Sephardi world, and the synagogues record it precisely.

Salonica’s congregations were named for the places their founders left, and a Jew’s congregation was in effect his ancestral address: Guerush Sfarad (1492), Kastilla, Aragon, Katallan Yashan, Mayorka, Provincia, Kalabria Yashan, Sicilia Yashan, Apulia, Otranto, Lisbon Yashan, Portugal, Evora, Lisbon Chadash, Italia Yashan, Ashkenaz, Mograbis. More than thirty in all, founded across a century and a half, each with its own rite, its own charities and its own governance.

This was not a metaphor. Nehama’s history records people leaving one congregation for another and the disputes it caused, and it records surnames by their place of origin: Astruc from Astorga, Behar from Béjar, Baena from Córdoba, Beja and Algava from Portugal, Bayona from Portuguese Galicia, Cordovero from Córdoba, Toledano from Toledo, Zamora from Zamora, Sevillano from Seville, Alfassi and Fassi from Fez, Agostari from Augusta in Sicily, Capuano from Capua, Romano from Rome, Bedrechi from Béziers, Recanati from near Ancona, Varsano from Conversano in Apulia, Mitrani from Trani.

Ninety-one such origins are stated in his index. For a community whose own archives burned, this is the closest thing to a map of where its families came from.

The Francos

A distinct and later stream were the Francos — Italian, chiefly Livornese, and French Jews who arrived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under foreign consular protection, and who never entirely merged with the Ottoman-subject majority. The Allatini, Morpurgo, Modiano and Fernandez families are the notable examples.

Their foreign protection is why some of their records are in Italian and French archives rather than Ottoman ones.

Former New Christians

They arrived throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sometimes long after the expulsions, and Nehama flags them: families of “Marrano descent” arriving in the 1500s include Almeida, Arnaldo, Baena, Bueno, Caro, Castro, Crespine, Diaz, Ergas, Errera, Fernandez, Franco, Henriquez, Molho, Pinto, Saporta, Silva and Soto.

Some arrived, some passed through, and a few went back — Nehama records men who returned to Christianity and men burnt at the stake for going to Portugal to teach Judaism to New Christians.

One correction worth making. The story that the Sultan sent ships to rescue the Jews of Spain is not supported by evidence. Most arrived indirectly, by way of Italy, Portugal and North Africa, over decades.

How did they make a living?

Textiles above all.

The Sephardim of Salonica were the exclusive suppliers of woollen cloth for the Janissary corps, an arrangement that underwrote the community’s prosperity and its tax position for three centuries — and whose destruction, when the Janissaries were abolished in 1826, began the community’s long economic decline.

Beyond cloth: printing, from the first Hebrew press in 1545 and continuously thereafter, with dynasties of printers (Levy Eskenazi, six generations to 1917), proof-readers and cantors; medicine, with Sephardi physicians at the Sultan’s court in Constantinople; and long-distance trade through the Balkan interior.

Nehama’s index is grimly eloquent about the last: it repeatedly records merchants murdered on the roads to and from the great fairs, several on a single day in September 1614 returning from the Dolia market.

By the nineteenth century the community was industrialising under the Allatini and Saias families — flour mills, brick works, cotton factories, banking — while the majority remained poor: porters, tobacco workers, and the dockworkers who were famous enough that five hundred of them emigrated together to Haifa in 1934 to work the new port.

Where did they go?

Out, in every direction, and increasingly from the mid-nineteenth century.

Within the Ottoman world, constantly: Constantinople, Smyrna, Larissa, Serres, Monastir, Skopje, Sofia, Belgrade, Adrianople, and above all Jerusalem and Safed, where a striking number of Salonican rabbis went to die. Westward to Amsterdam, where a whole Salonican-descended literary circle appears in the seventeenth century, and to Livorno, Venice and Vienna. To Egypt, where Salonican families were established in Alexandria and Cairo by the early eighteenth century. From the 1880s to France — Paris and Marseille above all, because the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools taught in French and made France the natural destination — and to the Americas.

Then the ruptures. The Greek annexation of 1912 cut Salonica off from its Balkan hinterland and damaged its economy. The fire of 1917 burned out ten thousand families. The population exchange of 1922 brought a hundred thousand Greek refugees from Anatolia and made the Jews a minority in their own city. The 1931 Campbell pogrom destroyed the poorest Jewish quarter.

Between them these drove emigration on a scale that had already halved the community — from about 93,000 to 53,000 — before the Germans arrived.

If you lose a Salonica family, look next at Constantinople, Smyrna, Paris, Marseille, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, New York and the Balkan cities.

Salonica (Thessaloniki)

La madre de Israel. Jews were a majority or near-majority of the city for four centuries: 56 per cent in 1519, 68 per cent in 1613, and still 39 per cent officially in 1913 — a figure widely believed to understate the real proportion, thought to be nearer 45 per cent.

Year	Total	Jewish	Per cent
1842	70,000	36,000	51
1870	90,000	50,000	56
1882/84	85,000	48,000	56
1902	126,000	62,000	49
1913	157,889	61,439	39
1943	—	53,000	—
2000	363,987	1,400	0.3

The turning points for a researcher are 1912 (annexation and Hellenisation), 1917 (the fire that destroyed the community archives), 1922 (the population exchange), and 1943 (deportation).

Of roughly 55,000 deported, fewer than 5,000 survived — around 90 per cent of the community murdered, one of the highest proportions anywhere in Europe.

Two episodes belong to Salonica’s Jewish history and are often mishandled elsewhere. The messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi split the community in the 1660s and left a permanent residue: the Dönmeh, followers who converted to Islam with him and remained a distinct group until they were transferred to Turkey as Muslims in the 1922 exchange. And the Salonican Jews deported to Auschwitz took part in the Sonderkommando uprising of 7 October 1944, destroying Crematorium III and singing the Greek partisan anthem before they were killed.

Which other communities were there?

Rhodes. Ottoman from 1522, Italian from 1912, German-occupied from 1943, Greek only from 1947. A Judeo-Spanish-speaking community of about 4,000 at its 1920s peak, known for rabbinic scholarship and printing. In 1840 it was the site of a blood libel. In July 1944 almost the entire community was deported to Auschwitz; the Turkish consul Selahattin Ülkümen saved forty-two families by asserting Turkish citizenship. Italian records for 1912–43 are the distinctive source here.

Corfu. Venetian until 1797, then French, then British, and Greek from 1864 — the least Ottoman of these communities and the most Italian. A ghetto, the Evraiki, was established in 1516. The community was mixed Romaniote and Sephardi, and had its own Italkian dialect. Anti-Jewish riots in 1891 drove heavy emigration. Of about 1,900 Jews in 1944, roughly two hundred escaped; the rest were deported in June. Of four synagogues, only the Scuola Greca survives. The old Sephardi cemetery has stones from 1702.

Kastoria — mainly Romaniote with a Sephardi element into the twentieth century. Researched by Michael Coffield.

Ioannina — the great Romaniote community, with some Sephardi influence. Most murdered in 1944. Thirty-five Romaniotes remained there in recent count. See Kehila Kedosha Janina in New York.

Volos — Sephardi from the sixteenth century. In the Italian zone; Rabbi Moses Pesach, Archbishop Ioakeim and the EAM resistance hid the community on Mount Pelion and 74 per cent survived, the best rate in mainland Greece.

Larissa — Sephardi, with a comparatively high survival rate.

Chalcis (Halkida) — mixed Romaniote and Sephardi, poor, following the Sephardi rite but bearing Greek surnames: Marzoukos, Kosty, Moschonas, Sakkys, Politi, Daskalaki.

Zakynthos — the whole community of 275 survived, hidden by the islanders after Bishop Chrysostomos and Mayor Karrer handed the Germans a list of two names, their own.

Patras, Trikala, Veria, Drama, Kavala, Serres, Xanthi, Didimoticho, Chios, Kos — smaller communities, most destroyed. Those in the Bulgarian occupation zone, including Kavala and Komotini, were deported to Treblinka.

What happened to the Salonica cemetery?

It was the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, and it was destroyed.

An estimated 500,000 graves over some three hundred and fifty acres, in use from the fifteenth century. As the city grew after 1917 it became surrounded and coveted. In December 1942, under occupation, it was systematically destroyed. Gravestones were taken for building material and used in pavements and in the reconstruction of the church of Agios Dimitrios. The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was built on the site.

The destruction coincided exactly with the ghettoisation and deportation of the living community.

What survives are the transcriptions made before 1942:

Isaac Samuel Emmanuel, Matsevot Saloniki, 1963 — 1,858 inscriptions in two volumes
Isaac Samuel Emmanuel, Precious Stones of the Jews of Salonica, Ben-Zvi Institute, 1968 — probably a reissue
Isaac Samuel Emmanuel, Gedolei Saloniki le-dorotam, 1936 — prominent individuals
Michael Molho, Matsevot beit ha-ʻalmin shel Yehudei Saloniki, 1974 — 1,640 inscriptions plus 465 further names
Jewish Museum of Greece, Stories Set in Stone — 108 inscriptions

Roughly 3,500 recorded inscriptions from perhaps half a million burials.

The USHMM Salonica files include correspondence with the university and the Greek authorities about the confiscation, maps delineating the cemetery boundaries, lists of graves destroyed, and photographs — which makes that correspondence, unexpectedly, a cemetery source.

Elsewhere, Jewish burial grounds are recorded by JOWBR at Athens, Chalkis, Chios, Corfu, Didimoticho, Drama, Ioannina, Kavala, Kos, Larissa, Patras, Rhodes, Salonica, Serres, Trikala, Veria, Volos, Xanthi and Zakynthos.

What records survive?

The governing fact is that Salonica’s community archives burned in the fire of 18 August 1917, together with thirty-two synagogues, ten rabbinic libraries and eight schools. Almost nothing of the community’s own record-keeping survives from before that date. What exists for the earlier period is printed scholarship, foreign archives, and Ottoman administration.

What survives from after 1917 is, by contrast, remarkably rich — and its survival is itself a story. In 1945 the Red Army captured a train outside Berlin carrying 297 files looted from the Jewish community of Thessaloniki and 117 from Athens. They went to Moscow. They have been digitised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as RG-11.001M.51, Fond 1428, and the Jewish community of Thessaloniki has been formally requesting their return since 2016.

The Moscow files (USHMM RG-11.001M.51, Fond 1428)

Nearly three hundred folders, overwhelmingly 1917–1941, and genealogically the most important body of Greek Jewish material in existence.

Series	Years
Registration books of community members (many volumes)	1917–1941
Birth registration books	1924–1939
Marriage registration books	1917–1941
Ketubot, registered as acts	1929–1940
Registration books of deceased members	1917–1927
Divorce register	1921–1931
Beth Din minutes and decisions	1921–1939
Certificates of vital statistics, addresses, marital status, income, occupation	1924–1941
Lists of voters	1933–1934
Emigration registers and Palestine immigration applications	1921–1935
Registration of families needing relief	1930–1941
Tax and membership dues registers	1926–1940
Registration books of cantors and choir singers	1916–1937
Correspondence with communities and consulates worldwide	1902–1941
Cemetery confiscation correspondence, maps, lists of destroyed graves	1930s
Registration books with photographs of the registered	1931–1939

Several folders contain a thousand pages or more.

The certificate series are the sleeper. Because the chief rabbinate had to certify vital statistics, addresses, family composition and income to the Greek state for taxation and conscription, these files amount to a running census of a community in its last two decades.

Other record groups

Record type	Years	Where	Online
AIU registers: births, marriages, deaths, Salonica	1864–1919	Published (Nehama, CNRS, 1978)	No
Community census after the fire	1917–18	Partially transcribed, Cercle de Généalogie Juive	No
Greek census of Macedonia	1913	Historical Archive of Macedonia, file 45	No
Ottoman census of Salonica	1902	Ottoman State Archives, Istanbul	No
Ottoman sharia court registers (sicils)	16th–19th c.	Ottoman State Archives, Istanbul	No
Salonica records, post-fire period	1917–	CAHJP, Jerusalem	Partly
Municipal records, Thessaloniki	from 1925	Thessaloniki County / FamilySearch	Partly
Conscription registers	pre-1940	Greek State Archives	Partly
Notarial records	19th–20th c.	Greek State Archives	No
Portuguese provisional protection registers	1913–1917	Consulate registers burned 1917; traces at AHD-MNE, Lisbon	No
Italian protection and evacuation lists	1942–43	ASMAE, Consolato Salonicco, busta 84	No
Spanish protection list, Orden Circular 2217	1949	Spanish MFA	Yes
Yad Vashem victim database	—	Yad Vashem	Yes
JDC relief records	WWI–	JDC Archives	Partly
YIVO Greek material	1917–1939	YIVO	Partly
IOSIPOS digital archive	various	Jewish Community of Thessaloniki	Yes

The IOSIPOS project, developed with EU funding, holds over 200,000 records and around two million digitised items — photographs, documents, drawings and oral testimony — across Greek Jewish communities. It is the most significant recent development in this field.

The foreign-protection files

These deserve separate attention because they are the one place where individual Salonican Jews are named, by family, in surviving European archives.

Portugal. The consul Jacques Missir began enrolling Jews “of Portuguese origin” in the Portuguese consular registers in 1913; some 300 to 500 signed on. Lisbon later clarified that they were protected persons, not nationals. The Salonica registers burned in 1917, but the policy and nominative traces survive in the Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático in Lisbon.

Italy. The consulate’s files on italiani provvisori — provisional Italians — cover the racial measures and the 1943 evacuation, and contain nominative lists, individual certificates and cables. They are in ASMAE, Consolato Salonicco, busta 84, and are reproduced in part in Carpi’s edition of Italian diplomatic documents and analysed by Sarfatti.

Spain. The list of 1949, under Orden Circular 2217, names 144 households claiming Spanish protection, with birth years for every person listed — heads of household born between 1851 and 1903, together with wives, children, siblings and widowed mothers, some 380 individuals in all.

Thirty-three surnames account for the whole list, and the concentration is striking: Saporta 31 households, Hassid 20, Gattegno 14, Benveniste 11, Carasso 8, Frances 7, then Saltiel, Abravanel, Nahmias, Botton, Revah, Nehama, Sides, Benadon, Naar, Bourla, Arditti, Sasson, Benosiglio, Salem, Ezratty, Saias, Mijan, Haguel, Asqueroni, Capuano, Moché, Bentata and a handful more.

This is the post-Holocaust remnant of families claiming Iberian descent, listed with dates of birth. As a genealogical document it is exceptional, and it connects directly to the deep past. Twenty-three of those surnames appear in Nehama’s index of Salonica across the preceding four centuries — Benveniste, whose earliest entry is Abraham Benveniste, chief rabbi of Castile and minister to King John II in 1432, sixty years before the expulsion; Abravanel; Saporta, recorded as arriving of Marrano descent in the sixteenth century; Carasso, a poet in the later 1500s; Salem, a physician in the same period; Sides, a witness to a split in the Catalan synagogue in 1510.

Four and a half centuries, one city, the same names.

Nehama’s history and its index

Joseph Nehama’s Histoire des Israélites de Salonique, seven volumes published between 1935 and 1978, is the single most important source for this community, and effectively the substitute for the archives that burned. It is not indexed in the original.

Mathilde Tagger’s annotated index of 2002 opens it: some 1,200 entries, over 500 distinct family names, each with volume and page references and a biographical note — dates of death, offices held, books published, synagogue affiliation, place of origin, cause of death, family relationships. It covers rabbis, printers, physicians, poets, merchants, hazanim, philanthropists, murder victims, converts and false messiahs, and it records the 1880 donor lists, which are a rough index of the community’s leading families in the late Ottoman period.

For anyone with a Salonican line, this index is the place to begin. It will tell you whether your surname is documented, in which centuries, and exactly where to read about it.

Newspapers

Salonica was a centre of Jewish publishing, and the press is an underused source for births, marriages, deaths and business.

Journal de Salonique (French, 1895–1910), partly digitised by Gallica. El Avenir (also El Porvenir), Zionist, 1900–1918. Le Progrès de Salonique, French. La Epoca, El Shamar and El Rizon, in Judeo-Spanish. Aksiyon, from 1928. La Verdad and To Fos, both cited in the Moscow files.

The National Library of Israel holds Greek Jewish newspapers, and the Central Municipal Library of Thessaloniki is digitising the local press.

Where else should you look?

Ottoman State Archives, Istanbul — the 1902 census, and the sharia court registers in which Jews appear constantly as litigants, creditors and witnesses. The Islamic courts took precedence over Jewish and Christian ones, which is why Jewish business ended up in them.

Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris — school records and correspondence from 1873, and the reason so many Salonican families went to France.

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem — a significant Salonica collection for the post-fire period, and material for Corfu.

Historical Archive of Macedonia; Greek State Archives; Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs diplomatic archive.

Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS), Athens — the umbrella body, holding archives for all Greek communities.

Foreign consular archives: the Italian consulate in Salonica; the French consulate (a doctoral thesis covers 1781–1913); British consular records at the National Archives, London; and, for early modern Western Sephardi merchants, the Chambre de Commerce archives in Marseille.

USC Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum of Greece — survivor testimony, which routinely names family members and places of origin.

The synagogues of Salonica

The list is a genealogical document in itself, since congregational membership generally followed ancestral origin.

Synagogue	Founded
Ets ha Chaim	1st century (traditional)
Ashkenaz or Varnak	1376
Mayorka	1391
Provincia	1394
Italia Yashan	1423
Guerush Sfarad	1492
Kastilla	1492–3
Aragon	1492–3
Katallan Yashan	1492
Kalabria Yashan	1497
Sicilia Yashan	1497
Apulia	1502
Lisbon Yashan	1510
Talmud Torah Hagadol	1520
Portugal	1525
Evora	1535
Estrug	1535
Lisbon Chadash	1536
Otranto	1537
Ishmael	1537
Tcina	1545
Nevei Tsedek	1550
Yahia	1560
Sicilia Hadash	1562
Beit Aron	1575
Italia Hadash	1582
Mayorka Sheni	16th century
Katallan Chadash	16th century
Italia Sheni	1606
Shalom	1606
Har Gavoa	1663
Mograbis	17th century
Monastirlis	1927

Some thirty-two of these burned in 1917 or were destroyed in 1943. The Monastirlis synagogue, built in 1927 by Jews from Monastir, survives, as does the Yad Lezikaron. Pallini and Scaccabarozzi’s study In Search of Salonika’s Lost Synagogues addresses the rest.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Salonica has a serious scholarly literature and almost no genealogical infrastructure. That gap is the defining problem.

Nehama’s seven volumes, Naar’s Jewish Salonica, Mazower’s Salonica, City of Ghosts, Molho, Emmanuel, Bowman and Fleming between them give the community a historiography most Sephardi communities lack entirely. Tagger’s index makes Nehama searchable. The Cercle de Généalogie Juive has transcribed registers and partially transcribed the 1917–18 post-fire census.

What is missing is the systematic work on the Moscow files. Nearly three hundred folders of registration books, vital records, Beth Din minutes and certificates, digitised and available at USHMM, and as far as we are aware no comprehensive name index exists for any of it. That is the largest single opportunity in Greek Jewish genealogy, and it is sitting in a digitised collection waiting for someone to work it.

Also unworked: the Ottoman sharia registers, in which Salonica’s Jews appear constantly and which nobody has read for genealogy; the notarial records in the Greek State Archives; the 1902 Ottoman census, if it survives; and the pre-1912 press.

Devin Naar compiled a preliminary finding aid to the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki archive, 1905–1943. Aliki Arouh has written on the historical archives of the community.

Organisations and repositories

Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki

Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS), Athens

Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — RG-11.001M.51, Fond 1428

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Jerusalem

Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris

Cercle de Généalogie Juive, Paris

General State Archives of Greece; Historical Archive of Macedonia

Ottoman State Archives, Istanbul

Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático (AHD-MNE), Lisbon

Archivio Storico-Diplomatico (ASMAE), Rome

National Library of Israel — newspapers and ketubot

YIVO; JDC Archives; Yad Vashem; USC Shoah Foundation

IOSIPOS digital archive

Rhodes Jewish Museum; Jewish Community of Rhodes

Greek Ancestry (Gregory Kontos) — church records, directories, voter and military lists

Hellenic Genealogy Geek

Help us find records

We are looking for:

A name index to the Moscow files (USHMM RG-11.001M.51) — the registration books, vital records and Beth Din minutes, 1917–1941. This is the single biggest gap in Greek Jewish genealogy
Transcriptions of the AIU registers of births, marriages and deaths, 1864–1919
The 1902 Ottoman census of Salonica, if it survives
Any transcription of the 1913 Greek census material in the Historical Archive of Macedonia, file 45
Ottoman sharia court registers (sicils) for Salonica, and anyone reading them for Jewish names
The complete Portuguese consular protection lists, 1913–1917, or the Lisbon traces of them
The Italian italiani provvisori lists from ASMAE, Consolato Salonicco, busta 84
Any surviving Burial Society records for the Salonica cemetery
Copies of the Emmanuel and Molho cemetery transcriptions, and any photographs of gravestones taken before 1942
Pre-1912 issues of La Epoca, El Shamar, El Rizon and El Avenir
Records of the smaller communities — Kastoria, Volos, Larissa, Chalcis, Veria, Serres, Drama, Kavala, Xanthi, Didimoticho
Family papers from any Greek Sephardi family

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

Greek Sephardi research means a community whose own archives burned in 1917 and whose survivors were murdered in 1943; records scattered between Thessaloniki, Athens, Jerusalem, Moscow-via-Washington, Istanbul, Paris, Rome and Lisbon; sources in Judeo-Spanish, Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, French, Italian and Greek, much of it in Rashi script; and a printed historiography of seven volumes that is the substitute for the archive. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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