Sephardic Jews of Croatia: Dubrovnik, Split and the Dalmatian Coast

Croatia’s Sephardic history belongs to two cities on the Dalmatian coast, Dubrovnik and Split, and to almost nowhere else.

Both were ports on the route between the Ottoman Empire and the Italian states, and both received Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century. Dubrovnik established its ghetto in 1546 and Split’s community secured a cemetery on Marjan Hill in 1573.

Inland Croatia had no Jews at all between 1456 and the 1780s, and the communities founded there afterwards were Ashkenazi. Around 80 per cent of Croatia’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, in a state that carried out most of the killing itself.

Which Sephardic world does Croatia belong to?

Both, which is why it matters.

Croatia is a frontier rather than a member of one Sephardic world. Both coastal communities held Western Sephardim who came from Iberia by way of Italy — through Ancona, Venice and Ferrara — alongside Eastern Sephardim who came overland or by sea from Salonika, Istanbul and Ottoman Bosnia.

In Split the two groups were named: Ponentini, the westerners, and Levantini, those from the Ottoman east. Dubrovnik’s families show the same division and the archives record both.

A family traced here may lead in either direction, and this page tries not to prejudge which.

Were there Jews in Croatia before 1492?

Jews were on this coast under Rome.

A Jewish community lived at Salona, the capital of Roman Dalmatia, and had its own burial ground: two inscriptions, a gem, two clay lamps and a fragment of a stone sarcophagus, all bearing the menorah, were found at Gospa od Otoka by the river Jadro, and date from roughly the second to the fourth century. Excavations at Osijek revealed a third-century synagogue, and a tombstone from Salona commemorates a Syrian Jew named Malhos.

When the Avars destroyed Salona in the seventh century the survivors took shelter inside the walls of Diocletian’s palace, and medieval Split grew up inside them. Whether Jews were among them is inferred rather than documented, but two fourteenth-century Split place-names — zuecca, the Jewish quarter given over to tanning and dyeing, and “the synagogue called Sdorium” — show a Jewish presence in the medieval city.

Dubrovnik’s archive begins to run continuously from the late thirteenth century. The earliest entry naming a Jew is from 1281, when Leo of Durrës was recorded as a debtor to a Venetian, though he appears never to have set foot in the city. In 1324 the authorities took an unnamed Jewish physician into public service. About ten Jews are recorded in the second half of the fourteenth century, living among other foreigners in the Giudecca at Ploče, and rather more in the first half of the fifteenth, some from Lecce and some from Provence, from which they had been expelled at the end of the fourteenth century. For most of them Dubrovnik was a stopover.

These were not Sephardim. They are noted here because their surnames sometimes recur after 1546 — Abravanel, Alfandrino, Arari, Benmaior, Coen, Calderon, Nahmias and Tedeschi — and a researcher may otherwise mistake the earlier for the later.

Dubrovnik (Ragusa)

The Republic of Ragusa was a maritime state under Ottoman suzerainty, Catholic in religion and neutral in policy, which gave it trading rights its rivals did not have. Between 1530 and 1540 it displaced Venice in the Ottoman trade. Its Jews were the agents of that trade.

Why were Jews first expelled, then invited back?

Money.

Jews arrived from 1492 onward, many of them in transit to Ottoman territory, some on Ragusan ships. The authorities were hostile: in 1498 they debated the settlement of Jews and New Christians without reaching a conclusion, and in 1502 Sultan Bayezid II had to ask them to allow Jews free passage across Ragusan territory. In 1515 an edict expelled Jews from the republic, with exceptions for visiting merchants and physicians. It was not consistently enforced and did not last.

By the 1530s Jews were recorded in the city again, and the government’s calculation had changed: Jewish agents (sensali) were part of a trading network running from Venice to Istanbul, and the neutral Ragusan port stood to gain from it. Customs privileges were granted to Jewish merchants, chiefly those from Salonika, between 1540 and 1547. In 1546 a ghetto of four houses was created on Žudioska ulica, and the synagogue was probably established soon after.

The community grew quickly from the 1570s, with the outbreak of the Ottoman–Venetian war over Cyprus. Miović’s count is that around 350 Jews arrived in Dubrovnik between 1570 and 1620, some with families, most of them working as trade agents.

The physicians

Dubrovnik hired Jewish doctors for seven decades running, beginning with the physician Isac in 1543.

The best documented is Abraham Abeatar, who came from Salonika in 1558 and served as state physician until his death in 1590. His services were sought by Ottoman officials in Bosnia, including the sanjak-bey of Herzegovina, and he was repeatedly harassed by the papal curia and the local clergy because he had returned to Judaism after conversion. The authorities kept him in post regardless. His brother’s son Samuel Abeatar arrived in 1588 and was made state physician immediately; in 1597 four Christian physicians of the city signed a statement in his defence.

Two catastrophes

In 1622 a Christian girl was found dead and a woman confessed to the murder, saying she had been induced to it by a Jew, Isac Jesurun, for ritual purposes. Jesurun was tortured and imprisoned in harsh conditions, and was eventually acquitted after three years.

The consequences for the community were severe and lasting: many families left, some permanently, and it took about ten years for community life to return to normal. The affair also drove Jewish merchants inland, and is one of the documented causes of Sephardi movement from the coast into Ottoman Bosnia. If you lose a Dubrovnik family in the 1620s, look at Sarajevo.

The earthquake of 1667 killed 39 of Dubrovnik’s Jews — 19 men and 20 women.

The eighteenth century and after

The community recovered and by the eighteenth century numbered 218 out of a city population of about 6,000. Births in this period are recorded in the families Ambonetti, Angeli, Ascoli, Asser, Campos, Cittanova, Costantini, Fermo, Janni, Levi Mandolfo, Luzzena, Maestro, Navarro, Pardo, Penso, Russo, Terni, Valenzin, Vitali and Volterra.

Trade remained the main occupation but crafts grew: tailors, coral fishers and bookbinders, the last of whom supplied the state offices with paper and stationery, bound manuscript volumes and repaired damaged documents.

Restrictions returned in the second half of the eighteenth century as the republic declined. From 1755 Jews could not live outside the ghetto or leave it at night. French occupation in 1806–08 brought civil equality, though Jews had to apply for it rather than receiving it automatically as other citizens did. Austrian annexation in 1814 withdrew it again; it was restored under Croatian law in the mid-nineteenth century.

Numbers fell to 55 by the late 1860s, then rose to 119 in 1910. Eighty-seven remained in 1941. Around 20 to 30 people belong to the community today.

Split (Spalato)

Split’s Jewish community was smaller than Dubrovnik’s and never exceeded about 300 people, but its position was in some ways better. It was not confined to a ghetto except for a short period in the eighteenth century, and it did not experience anything comparable to the Jesurun affair.

Who was Daniel Rodriga?

The turning point for Split, and one of the most consequential individual acts in Adriatic Jewish history.

Daniel Rodriga (Rodriguez) was a Portuguese Jew who in 1566 submitted to the Doge a project for a large modern lazaretto at Split. He spent heavily to persuade Venice of its value, obtained permission to build it himself, and then — unable to finish so large an undertaking — handed the construction to the Republic in exchange for guaranteed rights of free life and work in the city, not only for himself but for the Jewish community of Split.

The lazaretto was completed in 1590 and became one of the best equipped in Europe, taking several caravans a day during the peak of the Ottoman–Venetian trade. A contemporary called Split “the golden ring between East and West”.

Venice permitted the Jews of Split to organise as a confraternity, the Università degli Ebrei, with their own consul to look after their interests.

The community inside Diocletian’s palace

The community was concentrated inside Diocletian’s palace, on both sides of what are now Rodrigina and Bajamontijeva streets, in houses left empty by plague. Doorposts in those streets still carry the cut slots where mezuzot were fixed.

The northwest tower of the palace was known as the Jewish Tower, because Split’s Jews defended it — during the Ottoman siege of 1657 they held it successfully.

The synagogue, on Židovski prolaz, was built into the western wall of the palace after a fire destroyed an earlier building in 1507. It is among the oldest synagogues in continuous use in Europe.

Rabbi David Pardo was the community’s most important rabbinic figure, author of Maskil le-David; he later moved to Sarajevo and Travnik, where he founded the yeshivot, which is one of several direct links between the Split and Bosnian communities. Pardo instituted a local observance on 7 Adar, marking the acquittal of community leaders imprisoned in the eighteenth century.

Italian fascists sacked the synagogue on 12 June 1942, burning its books and archives in the main square, and the community’s historic documents were destroyed with them. Of about 284 members before the war, roughly two thirds died in the camps or fighting. One hundred and fifteen Split Jews who died in the camps have no grave on Marjan. About 100 members remain.

What survives in the cemeteries?

Split — Marjan Hill

The most important Sephardic cemetery in Croatia and one of the oldest anywhere. Established 1573, on the eastern slope of Marjan, and in use until the end of the Second World War; the community has used a section of the Lovrinac municipal cemetery since 1949.

The founding date survives only indirectly. The 1662 certificate of the Split syndic Šimun Nadali, confirming that the community had held the ground as a cemetery since 16 January 1573, was destroyed by Italian fascists in 1942 along with the rest of the synagogue archive — but a photograph of it was saved, and it is reproduced in Efron and Kečkemet.

About 700 tombstones survive, mostly eighteenth and nineteenth century. The oldest Efron could read dates to 5477 (1717); he thought older stones had sunk and become illegible. Two forms occur: a low slab laid flat or slightly inclined, and a sarcophagus-roof of two triangles and two trapezoids laid directly on the ground. The stones face south, towards the sea and the town.

Three features tie the cemetery directly to Sepharad:

The monogram C.M.K. — Cijun Macevet Kvurat, “sign of the burial place” — found on dozens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stones and, Efron says, at no other cemetery. The phrase is known in Spain from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, in the Balearics and in North Africa.
The sarcophagus-roof form, which recalls Jewish monuments in Castile from the thirteenth century onward.
So-called illuminated lettering, cut as a double curving line on smooth stone rather than incised, a technique with a long history in Jewish Spain; the type specimen is the stone of Don Feduenio at Salamanca, dated 1282.

Two seventeenth-century stones with figurative carving were brought to Marjan after the Second World War from the nearby islands — one from Jelsa on Hvar, with Noah’s dove and an olive branch, commemorating “Klara the widow”; one from Bol on Brač, showing an angel climbing a ladder, for Jedidja. Fragments of two more are known from Cres. These are the only surviving traces of Jewish burial on the Dalmatian islands.

Named on stones described by Efron and Kečkemet: Rabbi Mordehai Atias (d. 6 Av 5531 / 1771) · Rabbi Nahum Halevi of Sarajevo (d. 4 Nisan 5543 / 1863, aged 83, twenty years in office at Split) · Rabbi Jakov (d. 1734) · Bela Valencin (1777) · Avraham Elijahu (1816) · Moše Hai Navaro · Klara, widow, from Jelsa (17th c.) · Jedidja, from Bol (17th c.) · Vid (Hai) Morpurgo (d. 1911). Other sources add Rabbi Chaim Yitzchak Musafiya (d. 1837) and Raffael Valenzin (d. 1878, aged 30), and the families Tolentino and Camerici.

The building at the cemetery gate, now the Vidilica café, still carries the inscription Tziduk ha-Din. It is usually described as a former mikveh; a burial prayer over the gate of a cemetery makes it more likely to have been the taharah house, where bodies were washed.

The cemetery is a protected cultural monument. It has never been systematically transcribed or photographed. This is the largest single gap in Croatian Sephardic genealogy and the one most easily filled.

Dubrovnik — Boninovo

Dubrovnik lost its old cemetery twice. The burials, including those from the early sixteenth century, were moved to the present cemetery at Boninovo in 1911. During the First World War most of the gravestones were taken to reinforce the citadel walls. About thirty survive.

Some are flat rectangular slabs in the Sephardic manner with Hebrew inscriptions and pseudo-heraldic ornament of Italian influence; others carry sun, moon or stars; others again are obelisks of the Austro-Hungarian period.

Miović was able to use the surviving stones to supplement the registers, because some of those buried there do not appear in the death registers at all.

Where are the Dubrovnik registers?

Not in Croatia. This is the single most important fact for anyone researching the community.

The fullest runs of the Jewish vital registers were removed during the Second World War and are held in Moscow; microfilms are in Jerusalem.

Record type	Years	Where
Births, Jewish community of Dubrovnik	1815–1847, 1845–1873	State Archive in Dubrovnik (DADU)
Marriages	1817–1847, 1848–1873	State Archive in Dubrovnik
Deaths	1848–1873	State Archive in Dubrovnik
Births	1825–1901/2	Russian State Military Archive, Moscow (Sonderarchiv, Fond 1439); microfilm at CAHJP, Jerusalem
Marriages	1825–1940	as above
Deaths	1825–1940	as above
Register of newborn children, petitions, certificates	1709–1825	as above
Pinkasim — minutes of the community council, income and expenditure	1750–1899	as above
Births	1903–1945	Registry Office, Dubrovnik — restricted under data protection law
French administration registers	1812–13	Archive of the Diocese of Dubrovnik
Baptisms, Grad parish	1799–1812	Archive of the Diocese of Dubrovnik
Jewish elementary school reports	1824–25	State Archive in Dubrovnik, HR-DADU-845

The Moscow material was identified by Ivan Čerešnješ of the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University, who had it microfilmed. The same fond is catalogued by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as RG-11.001M.98, described there as two digitised reels of marriage, death and birth registers together with financial records and an account book, covering 1709–1940. USHMM and CAHJP therefore hold copies of the same material, and either may be the easier route.

Republic-period records

For the period before civil registration, the archival material is unusually rich, and Miović’s book is in effect a guide to it.

The relevant series of the State Archive in Dubrovnik include Acta Consilii Rogatorum and Acta Minoris Consilii (the two councils), Diversa Cancellariae and Diversa Notariae, Diversa de Foris, Debita Notariae, Libri Dotium Notariae (dowries), Testamenta Notariae (wills), Tutores Notariae (guardianships), Procure (powers of attorney), Naula et Securitates (freight and maritime insurance), Lamenta del Criminale and Lamenta de Intus et de Foris (criminal and civil complaints), Fedi ed Attestati, and the sentence books of the criminal court from 1559 to 1812. Municipal indexes survive for 1909, 1914, 1918 and 1930–40.

Maritime insurance registers are worth singling out: they name Jewish merchants repeatedly and across decades, and they are the reason a Dubrovnik merchant’s career can often be reconstructed even where no vital record survives.

Split

The community’s own archive was destroyed on 12 June 1942. What survives is scattered: Venetian administrative and commercial series, notarial records, and the Marjan tombstones themselves. This is not a solved problem, and we are not aware of any survey of what remains.

Where else should you look?

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem. The microfilmed Dubrovnik registers and pinkasim. The first place to write.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Fond 1439 as RG-11.001M.98; catalogued and viewable at collections.ushmm.org.

Jewish Community of Sarajevo. Sephardi birth registers 1893–1946, Ashkenazi 1880–1946, marriage and death registers, and family registers for both communities, plus a family register of the Jews of Mostar. Miović found these essential to constructing the Dubrovnik genealogies, because the link between the two communities was continuous. The Danon, Escenasi, Finzi, Hajon, Levi, Pappo and Pinto families of Dubrovnik all came from Sarajevo.

State Archive in Zagreb. Records of the commission investigating the crimes of the occupiers, for the Holocaust.

State Archives of Venice. For Split above all — the lazaretto, the Università degli Ebrei, consular and commercial series.

Trieste. From the nineteenth century Dubrovnik families married into Trieste and moved there for work, generally the poorer members of the community looking for a better living. Trieste money also paid for the restoration of the Split cemetery in 1919.

Ancona, Venice, Ferrara, Livorno, Salonika, Istanbul. The trading network. A Ragusan or Split merchant’s transactions were recorded at both ends.

Yad Vashem and the USHMM databases, for the Holocaust.

EHRI Portal, which indexes Holocaust-era fonds in Croatian repositories.

Which families are recorded in Dubrovnik?

The list below is the roster of families in Vesna Miović’s Židovski rodovi u Dubrovniku (1546–1940) (Zagreb–Dubrovnik, 2017), the standard prosopography of the community. Miović traced every name appearing in the archival record, whether the family settled permanently or passed through, and gives each a narrative account and, where the evidence allows, a full genealogy. The book runs to 560 pages with a 48-page index of persons. Anyone researching a Dubrovnik family should begin there and not here.

Not all of these are Sephardi. The later nineteenth and twentieth-century entries include a substantial Ashkenazi element arriving under Austria-Hungary, and a handful of names belong to individuals who merely visited. We have not attempted to separate them, because Miović’s own judgement is that the archival record often will not support the distinction.

Abas · Abeatar · Abemusa · Abendana · Abeniacar · Abinun · Abramović · Abravanel · Abuaf · Abuaf Suarez · Abudaram · Abudente · Abulafia · Achim · Adaroch · Adiges · Adler · Alabbo · Albahari · Albala · Albalak · Albelda · Alboher · Alcaide · Alchalel · Alevi · Alfandrino · Alfarin · Alkalaj · Almali · Almaši · Almoslino · Altarac · Aluf · Alva · Amadio · Amar · Amariglo · Ambonetti · Amslberg · Ancona · Andauer · Angeli · Arari · Aroni · Arut · Ascoli · Asser · Attias · Avi · Azman Consolo · Azubi · Badt · Banchieri · Baraffael · Barazriel · Barbos · Bardavi · Barjuda · Barnatan · Barocha · Baron · Baruh · Bassan · Basso · Bauer · Baumgarten · Beigel · Benado · Benatave · Bencastiel · Benghiat · Benhabib · Benmaior · Benmeleh · Benporath · Bensahen · Benvenisti · Nasci · Benvenisti Nasci · Berner · Bernstein · Bianchi · Binfelt · Biton · Blanes · Blum · Bonaiuto · Bondi · Bonfil · Bonsignor · Boritzer · Breitenfeld · Brill · Brunnenwasser · Bryn · Bueno · Buli · Cabiglio · Cahanet · Calderon · Calfon · Callo · Calvo · Camerini · Campos · Cantoni · Capetta · Capponi · Carcason · Cardiel · Caro · Castro · Casuto · Catalano · Catan · Categno · Catinela · Cavaliero · Celebi · Cerf · Cidi · Cittanova · Coduto · Coen · Coen Belinfante · Coen Camargo · Coen De Herrera · Cogliano · Conforte · Conort · Consolo · Coronel · Corrieri · Costantini · Crespin · Criado · Cugnin · Curiel · Cusi · Danon · Darmon · David · De Camis · De Leon · De Luna · De Mora · Del Vechio · Dellero · Diamant · Dorado · Dubellier · Elazar · Elekes · Eliau · Engel · Ergas · Ernszt · Escenasi · Esperiel · Faion · Falchon · Fanno · Farcho · Felner · Feracio · Ferber · Fermo · Ferrera · Ferro · Fidanchi · Finzi · Fisch · Flesch · Flores · Formon · Forte · Franco · Frankel · Frankfurter · Frauenglas · Frei · Freudenfeld · Frisch · Fuchs · Gabai · Gabes · Galego · Galicho · Galindo · Gaon · Gentili · Gentiluomo · Glatter · Glück · Goldberg · Goldschmidt · Graziani · Grego · Gross · Grünberg · Grünberger · Grünwald · Hacker · Haim · Hajon · Hassan · Haten · Hazan · Heidelsberger · Herz · Herzer · Herzfeld · Herzig · Hessel · Hirsch · Hodara · Hofstadter · Horowitz · Horstowsky · Huppert · Israel · Jahja · Janni · Jellinek · Jesurun · Job · Joel · Jona · Kaldor · Karoli · Karzelpold · Kaufer · Kaufmann · Kerenji · Klein · Kohari · Kohlmar · Kohn · Kolin · Kont · Kosch · Kraus · Kuhe · Königsberg · Lachner · Lanciano · Landau · Laszlo · Latino · Leca · Lenghi · Leone · Levarie · Levi · Levi Mandolfo · Levi Merkadić · Lewgoy · Lima · Lindo · Linenberger · Lubar · Lubello · Lumbroso · Lunel · Luzzena · Luzzena Abuaf · Löwenschuss · Löwy · Macorio · Macerata · Maestro · Maimon · Mair · Mandel · Mantler · Maradel · Maraz · Marcos · Marido · Marmorstein · Matalon · Mathies · Matuszewicz · Mazaod · Mazza · Meixler · Melle · Membrech · Menahem · Mendes · Mendola · Minerbi · Minzi · Miranda · Misraki · Mocenigo · Monpier · Montesino · Montiglio · Mordehai · Morpurgo · Moscato · Motro · Mucciacon · Mugnion · Mursa · Musafia · Musafir · Nahamun · Nahas · Nahmias · Nahmulli · Nasso Moschati · Navarro · Nebenzahl · Neumann · Nuhanović · Nuñes · Oef · Opperman · Ortes · Pace · Pacifico · Palumbo · Panzieri · Papić · Pappo · Pappo Sasson · Pardo · Parente · Passo · Penso · Perez · Perl · Perlstein · Pernicha · Perrera · Pesah · Pesso · Piade · Piazza · Piliš · Pimienta · Pincas · Pinsker · Pinto · Piziglia · Pizzo · Polgar · Pollak · Pollitzer · Polzer · Primo · Principal · Priuli · Puretz · Randegger · Ranvas · Rappaport · Reicher · Reinisch · Reiss · Rendeli · Ribera · Richetti · Robes · Rodriga · Rodrigues · Rois · Rosenberg · Rosenberger · Rosner · Rubba · Ruben · Ruch · Ruhvarger · Runio · Russo · Saar · Saba · Sabah · Sabatai · Safich · Safrano · Sages · Sal · Salama · Salom · Saltiel · Salvati · Samaria · Sapira · Saralvo · Sarfatin · Sarug · Sasso · Scachi · Schaar · Scheuer · Schick · Schiff · Schmindling · Schuster · Schwabenitz · Schwartz · Schönbaum · Scölesi · Seferović · Segovia · Semaia · Semo · Senior · Serussi · Servadio · Sfes · Siena · Silva · Singer · Sinigaglia · Sipilli · Slesinger · Sohn · Solomon · Sommerfeld · Sonin · Sorger · Sornaga · Spektor · Sperber · Spiegel · Spiller · Spitzer · Stampfer · Steindler · Steiner · Steinitz · Stella · Stelzer · Stern · Sulam · Supitshitsh · Suranyi · Szamek · Tausk · Tedeschi · Terni · Tesoro · Testo · Thau · Theler · Timföld · Tirado · Tivoli · Tobi · Tolentino · Traube · Treves · Trigo · Trincha · Troglios · Truces · Ungar · Usiel · Usiglio · Usque · Valenzin · Vales · Valle · Valmarin · Vekman · Venturra · Viagio · Vilna · Vitali · Viterbi · Vititi · Vivanti · Vives · Volterra · Weiner · Weisberg · Weisberger · Weiss · Wellisch · Werner · Weszel · Willheim · Windspach · Winkler · Wolf · Wollach · Zacuto · Zaloscer · Zevi · Zimdin · Zumbulović · Štekl

Named individuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Physicians and surgeons. Benedikt, “formerly a Jew” (1354/7) · David of Durrës (1368) · Samuel, surgeon and eye specialist (1414) · Elia Sabati of Fermo (1427) · Moše Maralio or Marcilio (1495–1502, accused of ritual murder and strangled in prison; his wife Gracija and sons Haim and Izak lived with him in Dubrovnik) · Isac (1543, ten years in state service) · Abraham Abeatar (arrived from Salonika 1558, d. 1590) · Samuel Abeatar, son of Abram (arrived 1588) · Danijel Abeatar, physician to the chief defterdar at Istanbul, who moved to Dubrovnik in 1595 · Aron Abeatar (arrived from Sarajevo in the early 1590s, d. between 1623 and 1626) · Jozef Salama, who married Abraham Abeatar’s daughter Đoja.

Merchants and others. Moše Matejev (1368) · Moše Solomonov of Durrës (1368) · Muscullus (1386) · Jozef Abramov of France, coral fisher (1399) · Astruk Jakobov, called Bonaventura (1400) · Rabbi Aron of Lecce · Izak Ergas, formerly agent to Gracia Mendes, wounded in the head in a quarrel of 1575 · Isac Jesurun (1622).

Those who arrived under Christian names and returned to Judaism. Michele Mondego Vas, who came with his family in the 1580s and was known at Dubrovnik as Moše Sarfatin, and his son Jacob, formerly Diego — both also recorded as Sarfatin Mondego · Pietro de Silva and his son Orlando, who left Florence for the Ottoman Empire and arrived from Istanbul as Leon and Joseph Mazaod (1587) · the brothers Isac and Jacob Abeniacar, formerly Manuel and Alvaro Pimentel, who also arrived from Istanbul in the early seventeenth century · and members of the Abendana, Abinun, Marcos and Nahmias families. Miović’s judgement is that there were certainly many more.

Visitors. Gracia Mendes (Beatrice de Luna) was in Dubrovnik in the second half of 1552, then left for Istanbul, from where she traded through the Dubrovnik port until her death in 1569. The kabbalist Abraham Coen de Herrera (Alonso Núñez de Herrera) lived in Dubrovnik in the early seventeenth century; in the preface to Puerta del Cielo he records that it was at Dubrovnik that Rabbi Israel Sarug introduced him to Lurianic kabbalah. Solomon Usque also appears. Amatus Lusitanus, the physician, and the poet Didacus Pyrrhus both took refuge in Dubrovnik after Paul IV expelled the Jews from Ancona in 1556.

The Holocaust

Around 25,000 Jews lived in Croatia in April 1941. The Independent State of Croatia, a German and Italian client, passed antisemitic legislation immediately and required Jews to wear a badge bearing the letter Ž, for Židov. It established its own camps, of which Jasenovac was the largest; about 20,000 Jews were killed there.

Of 29,000 to 31,000 Jews murdered in the territory of the NDH, roughly three quarters were killed by the Ustaše rather than the Germans — around 79 per cent of the pre-war population.

The Dalmatian coast was in the Italian zone and the pattern there was different. Jews from across Yugoslavia fled into it. In November 1942 the Italians interned the Jews of Dubrovnik and the refugees who had gathered there — about 750 people — at Gruž and on the island of Lopud, and in June 1943 transferred them to the camp at Rab. During the interval between the Italian capitulation in September 1943 and the German occupation, the Partisans moved most of them to liberated territory; some joined the Jewish battalion formed on Rab. The 180 to 200 who could not leave Rab were taken by the Germans and killed.

Split’s Jews survived the Italian occupation under conditions Kečkemet describes as hatred, humiliation and physical assault, but not deportation. After the Italian capitulation the Germans rounded up those who had not joined the Partisans or gone into hiding, in October 1943 and March 1944, and deported them. One hundred and fifteen Split Jews died in the camps or in the fighting and have no grave in the Marjan cemetery. A memorial by the sculptor Nandor Glid stands in the Lovrinac cemetery.

Miović lists separately those members of the Dubrovnik community who died in the Holocaust; for some of them, a name on the list of Dubrovnik victims is the only evidence that they had lived in the city or in the surrounding districts administered by the Dubrovnik community.

Around 130 people from Croatia have been recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, among them Olga and Dragica Bartulović of Split, honoured in 1965.

After 1945

About half the survivors left for Israel, renouncing Yugoslav citizenship and signing away all property in order to do so. The post-war community was heavily assimilated: 80 per cent of Zagreb’s 1,500 Jews were born of mixed marriages or married to non-Jews.

The 2011 census recorded 509 Jews in Croatia and the 2021 census 410 people giving their ethnicity as Jewish, though both figures are believed to exclude many. Ten Jewish municipalities exist, at Čakovec, Daruvar, Dubrovnik, Koprivnica, Osijek, Rijeka, Slavonski Brod, Split, Virovitica and Zagreb. Zagreb is much the largest. Dubrovnik and Split have around 20–30 and 100 members respectively; neither has a resident rabbi.

Some post-war families settled or resettled in Dubrovnik and appear in Miović’s work through their descendants: Altarac, Atijas, Engel, Levi, Papo and Zon.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Dubrovnik is well served and Split is not.

Vesna Miović has produced three books on the Dubrovnik community — on the ghetto, on its women, and the family study drawn on here — working from an exceptionally complete archive. Jorjo Tadić’s Jevreji u Dubrovniku do polovine XVII stoljeća (1937) remains valuable and is also the principal early source for Sarajevo Jews trading on the coast. Bariša Krekić worked the medieval material. Together these amount to a body of scholarship few Sephardic communities of comparable size can match.

Split has Duško Kečkemet’s history of the Jews in the city (1971) and the cemetery booklet with Zusja Efron (1973), and very little else. The community archive was burned in 1942. No transcription of the Marjan cemetery exists, which for a site of 700 stones running from 1717 is a serious omission — the more so because the cemetery preserves Sephardic epigraphic traditions found nowhere else in the region.

For the whole of Croatia, the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry lists Dubrovnik, Ragusa and Split among its burial locations, but there is no comprehensive transcription of any Croatian Jewish cemetery.

Sephardic World lectures relevant to Croatia

The Jews of Bosnia — Francine Friedman (2021). The Sarajevo–Dubrovnik link runs both ways.

The Venetian Jews: Sephardim, Germans and Levantines in the ghettos — Nardo Bonomi Braverman (2025). Venice governed Split and shaped both communities.
Researching Jewish Ancestors in the Ottoman Empire — David Mendoza (2023)
The Lost World of Monastir — David Mendoza (2024)

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Any photographic or transcription record of the Marjan cemetery in Split. Seven hundred stones, from 1717, never surveyed. This is the single most valuable thing anyone could contribute to Croatian Sephardic genealogy.
Photographs or transcriptions of the surviving thirty stones at Boninovo, Dubrovnik
Access to, or copies of, the Dubrovnik registers microfilmed at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People — births 1825–1901, marriages and deaths 1825–1940
A transcription of the Dubrovnik community pinkasim, 1750–1899
Anything surviving from the Split community archive burned on 12 June 1942 — copies, photographs, or material held privately before that date
Records of the Jewish elementary school at Dubrovnik beyond the 1824–25 reports
Family papers, correspondence or photographs from any Dubrovnik or Split 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

Croatian research means an exceptionally rich Ragusan archive in Italian and Latin, vital registers held in Moscow and microfilmed in Jerusalem, a Split community whose own records were burned in 1942, and family lines that run to Sarajevo, Venice, Ancona, Trieste and Salonika. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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