Sephardic Jews of Albania: Vlorë, Berat and the Ottoman Communities

Albania’s Sephardic communities were a product of the Ottoman resettlement after 1492. The largest was at Vlorë, where Ottoman censuses of 1506 and 1520 record 528 Jewish households — perhaps 2,600 people — trading textiles, leather and spices between Istanbul, Bursa and the Italian ports across the Adriatic.

Smaller communities existed at Berat, Elbasan and Durrës, and later at Korça and Gjirokastra. The Vlorë community declined after 1571 and effectively ended in 1685; Berat succeeded it.

Almost no archival research has been done on any of them. That is the single most important thing to know before you begin.

Were there Jews in Albania before 1492?

Yes, and for more than a thousand years before.

The synagogue excavated at Saranda — ancient Onchesmos, opposite Corfu — dates from the third or fourth century. A gravestone of 521 at Venosa in southern Italy commemorates Augusta, daughter of Yishai, head of the Jewish community of Anchiasmon. Benjamin of Tudela reported Jews in the region in the twelfth century, and a Jewish community was working in the salt trade at Durrës in the thirteenth.

These were Romaniote Jews — Greek-speaking, long established in the Byzantine world, and a distinct community from the Sephardim who arrived after 1492.

The two lived alongside each other in Albania for centuries, and in some towns it is genuinely unclear which is being described in the surviving sources. This site is concerned with the Sephardim, but the Romaniote presence cannot be disentangled from theirs and is noted throughout.

Where did Albania’s Sephardim come from?

Jewish settlement at Vlorë preceded the expulsion from Spain. The Ottomans encouraged a mercantile community there from 1426, and roughly seventy Jewish families from Valencia settled between 1391 and 1492 — refugees from the Spanish pogroms of 1391 and the pressures of the century that followed, arriving a hundred years before the Alhambra Decree.

After 1492 the Ottoman state resettled further exiles at Vlorë, and the community grew rapidly. It was never purely Sephardi. Contemporary accounts describe four distinct congregations in the town — Sephardi, Portuguese, Italian (mostly from Naples and Puglia) and Romaniote — a pattern familiar from Salonika and Constantinople, where each group of arrivals founded its own synagogue and kept its own rite. Later arrivals came from Corfu, the Venetian territories, France and Naples.

Berat’s community was formed by the Spanish expulsions and numbered twenty-five families in 1519–20, alongside an older Romaniote population. Durrës, Elbasan and Lezhë all grew after Ottoman rule was consolidated in 1501.

One later current is worth noting for anyone tracing an Italian line. In 1873 Emile Isambert reported that Vlorë’s Jews were descended from those driven out of Ancona — a reference to the persecution of the Portuguese Jews there by Pope Paul IV in 1556, after which the survivors scattered across the Adriatic and the Ottoman Balkans.

How did they make a living?

Vlorë was the administrative and commercial capital of the region, and its Jews were merchants. They imported manufactured goods from Europe and exported spices, leather, cotton fabrics, velvets, brocades and mohair drawn from Istanbul and Bursa. Some sources describe the Jewish community as approaching a third of the town’s population at its height in the sixteenth century.

This matters for research, and it is the key to the whole page. A Vlorë merchant’s business took him to Venice, Ancona, Ragusa and Corfu, and his transactions were recorded there — often more fully than in Albania itself. Occupation is the best guide to where a family’s records will survive.

The community also acted collectively. In 1596 the Jews of Berat and Vlorë organised the release of captives held at Durrës, which tells us something about both their resources and their reach.

Why did the Vlorë community disappear?

Two departures matter.

The first was gradual. After the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 the Adriatic and Ionian coasts became dangerous, and Vlorë’s Jewish numbers fell steadily. As Ottoman policy turned against trade with the West, families moved to the great inland centres — Salonika and Constantinople above all.

The second was abrupt. In 1685, during the Ottoman–Venetian war, the Jews of Vlorë fled to Berat. Those who stayed were taken captive. This is effectively the end of the Vlorë community, and the point at which a family being traced there will disappear from the record.

There was a return current in the nineteenth century, when Romaniote Jews from Ioannina and Preveza in Epirus renewed the communities of Kavajë, Himarë, Delvinë, Vlorë, Elbasan and Berat. Families in Albania in the 1800s are as likely to be Ioanniote as descended from the Sephardim of the 1500s.

If you lose an Albanian family, look next at Corfu, Ioannina, Preveza, Salonika, Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and Ancona.

Which towns had communities?

Vlorë (Valona, Avilona) — the principal community, with four congregations at its height. The town’s only synagogue was destroyed during the First World War: with the Italian occupation of Valona in 1915 it became a military store, and later burned in the great fire of central Valona. There are conflicting reports that a disused synagogue building survives.

Berat — Romaniote in origin, with twenty-five Sephardi households recorded in 1519–20. It became the more important community after Vlorë’s decline, and followers of Shabbetai Zevi were established there. The Solomon Museum in Berat now tells the community’s story.

Elbasan — a Sephardi community, believed founded around 1501. The town retains a quarter known as Samer, the Jewish quarter. Evliya Çelebi reported no Jews there in the seventeenth century, but Edmond Malaj argues he simply missed the Jewish neighbourhood, which had its own market. The synagogue was destroyed in the Second World War.

Durrës — a salt-trading community from the thirteenth century, growing again after 1501.

Përmet — a synagogue with a portico is mentioned in a conservation report on the Greek synagogue at Veroia. It is not known whether the building survives.

Shkodër — Jews largely avoided settling here. They regarded it as religiously hostile and the local rulers would not grant them the rights they enjoyed elsewhere in the empire. A useful reminder that Ottoman toleration was locally administered.

Korça — Sephardim who came from elsewhere in the Ottoman Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean.

Gjirokastra — Jews from at least the eighteenth century; Romaniote families arrived from Ioannina in the early 1930s. Five families — Kofina, Batino and Bituli among them — living mostly in the Varosh district, with a synagogue at Bashteja e Teqe. Matathia Kofina was rabbi. The families moved to Tirana after the war and are believed to have gone to Israel in the 1990s.

Tirana — a modern community. The Hechal Shlomo synagogue opened in 2010.

Are there Jewish cemeteries in Albania?

Albania has no transcribed Jewish cemetery. There are no Albanian entries in the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, and the notes below come from JewishGen’s Cemetery Discovery Project, last updated in 2009, which we have not been able to verify.

Vlorë — the most important, and now lost. When Romaniote Jews from Ioannina and Preveza settled in Valona from 1850 they identified both the old synagogue and the old cemetery, and the cemetery was returned to them. It was later destroyed and a private residence was to be built on the site. A few gravestones could still be identified, and a tombstone was reportedly found around 1990; we do not know where it is now. If photographs or transcriptions were made before the site was built over, they have not been published — and they would be the earliest Sephardic gravestones in Albania.

Berat — a burial ground is listed but nothing is recorded about it.

Elbasan — the town retains the Samer, its Jewish quarter. A Magen David was visible on the upper part of a building; the concrete star was removed and is said to be in the town museum. A cemetery is listed but undescribed.

Përmet — no cemetery is confirmed.

Saranda — no cemetery has been found, though one almost certainly existed. The gravestone of Augusta, daughter of Yishai, dated 521, survives at Venosa in southern Italy. Any burial ground here would be Romaniote and pre-Sephardic.

What records survive?

Almost nothing survives locally. Albania has no Jewish community archive, no synagogue registers, and no published transcriptions.

Record type	Years	Where	Online
Ottoman tax registers (defters), Berat and Vlorë	c.1506–1520	Ottoman archives, Istanbul	No
Albanian census	1930	General Directorate of Archives, Tirana	No
Yad Vashem, Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names	1939–45	Jerusalem	Yes

The defters are the only early modern source naming individual Albanian Jews that we know to have been transcribed. They record household heads for tax purposes, which for genealogical purposes means a name, a town, and a date — the earliest such evidence available for this community.

General Directorate of Archives (Drejtoria e Përgjithshme e Arkivave), Tirana. Believed to hold Ottoman-period court records (criminal, civil and property cases), land records including surveys, deeds and tax registers, and military records. Whether any of these name Jews is unknown. As far as we can establish, no one has looked.

Where else should you look?

For most Albanian families, the surviving evidence is not in Albania. Vlorë’s merchants traded across the Adriatic and into the Ottoman interior, and they appear in the records of the places they traded with.

Ottoman archives, Istanbul. Beyond the defters, the kadi court registers (kadı sicilleri) for the sancaks of Avlonya and Berat are the obvious unexamined source. These record property transactions, debts, disputes and inheritance — the everyday business of a merchant community — and they name individuals. They are largely unindexed and require Ottoman Turkish.

State Archives of Venice. Hold material on Dalmatia and Albania for 1614–1720, and Venice maintained consulates at Shkodër, Berat and Vlorë. Venetian commercial and consular series routinely name the merchants they dealt with. It is not known whether the Jewish community is referenced.

Ragusa (Dubrovnik). Directly across the Adriatic and a major hub of the same trade. The Dubrovnik archives are unusually complete and Jewish material there has been studied.

Corfu. Two nautical miles from Saranda and closely tied to Vlorë by family and business.

Ioannina and Preveza. The source of the Romaniote families who revived several Albanian communities from 1850.

Ancona. If Isambert was right that Vlorë’s Jews descended from those expelled by Paul IV in 1556.

Salonika and Constantinople. Where Vlorë’s families went as the Adriatic trade declined.

Foreign consulates. Jews in the Ottoman Empire frequently held the protection or citizenship of a foreign power, in which case records may survive in that country’s archives rather than locally. Consulates operated in Albanian territory as follows: Venice (Shkodër, Berat, Vlorë), Austria-Hungary (Shkodër, Vlorë, Durrës), Russia (Shkodër), France (Durrës), United Kingdom (Durrës), Greece (Korça), Italy (Vlorë).

Who is named in the surviving sources?

These are the individuals we have so far identified by name in sources relating to the Jewish communities of present-day Albania, drawn chiefly from Edmond Malaj’s survey. It is a small list, because the sources are few — but as far as we know it is the only such list published anywhere.

Vlorë. Fraini, son of Josef (1417, salt merchant trading with Ragusa) · Gozio (1430, intermediary in grain transactions with the Venetians) · Abraham Trink (1518, merchant, petitioned Ancona over customs) · Messer David ben Jehudah Leon (1512, rabbi of Vlorë, who unified the town’s congregations; came from Italy by way of Salonika) · Meir ibn Vergan (early 16th century, a Catalan Jew) · Isak Trink (1541) · Angelo Samuel (mid-16th century, nephew of Isak Trink) · Angelo Kudotto (1637) · Daneil Kudotto · Yaako Kudotto (from Ancona) · Josip Maestro · Zakaria Graciano · Moses Albelda (mid-17th century, hakham) · Nehemiah Haion (rabbi, enslaved after the Venetian siege of 1685) · Abraham Zarfat (whose house was used for Sephardi worship)

Berat. Popo (1681, merchant buying farm produce) · the wife of Isak (1685–86, who lent 26,000 akçe to the tax collectors) · Ruben, known as Avraam Albalag, and his brother Shimon, known as Shemuel Albalag (1692, in a tax and oath case at Kastoria) · Shemuel Ichak (17th century, rabbi adjudicating a tax case in the Berat–Kastoria region)

Lezhë. Izak Kovesti (1578, merchant, recorded in the Dubrovnik archive) · David Mihael and Shemuel Benjamin (1694, silversmiths from Ioannina, killed near Elbasan while travelling to the Lezhë fair)

Shkodër. Izrael, son of Samuel, and Avram, son of Jako (1680, a debt case; the first belonged to the Sephardi congregation of Sofia, the second to the Ashkenazi) · Armand A. Kohen (1897, who proposed a trading company with the Shkodër merchant Pashko Saraçi)

Delvinë and Gjirokastër. Salomon Manahen Jantov and his wife Astros (1850, settlers from Ioannina) · Jakov Ilia Vituli (19th century, Gjirokastër) · Siegberg Auerbach (19th century, a physician from Austria)

The consuls of Ragusa at Vlorë

Seven of the men above — Isak Trink, Angelo Samuel, Angelo Kudotto, Daneil Kudotto, Yaako Kudotto, Josip Maestro and Zakaria Graciano — served as consul of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) at Vlorë, an office that appears to have run in two or three families across more than a century. Isak Trink was the first, appointed in 1541.

Their correspondence and appointments should survive in the Dubrovnik archives, which are among the most complete in the Mediterranean. We are not aware that anyone has looked for them. This is probably the most promising single piece of unworked evidence for Albanian Sephardic genealogy.

Beyond present-day Albania

Malaj’s survey covers the Albanian-speaking lands as a whole, and names a further fifty or so individuals from Skopje, Bitola (Manastir), Prishtina, Ohrid, Arta, Ioannina, Preveza, Kastoria and Salonika. Several of the families who later appear in Albania are recorded there first. If you are researching any of these places, please get in touch.

What happened in the twentieth century?

The Albanian census of 1930 recorded 204 Jews. The community was formally recognised in 1937, by which time it numbered around 300. From the mid-1930s Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland arrived, and the Albanian legation in Berlin continued to issue visas when other countries would not.

During the Second World War Albanian families — Muslim and Christian alike — sheltered Jews, an obligation widely attributed to besa, the Albanian code of honour. Albania emerged from the war with more Jews than it had at the start, the only country in occupied Europe to do so. Accounts of the numbers vary considerably: estimates of the post-war Jewish population range from under 200 to 2,000, depending on whether refugees who left immediately are counted. Sixty-nine Albanians have been recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Religion was banned outright under Enver Hoxha from 1967 to 1990. After the borders opened in 1991 almost all Albania’s Jews emigrated, most to Israel. Around 40 to 50 remain, mainly in Tirana.

For genealogical purposes the useful records of this period are the 1930 census and Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Very little.

Two Albanian scholars have worked on the community: Apostol Kotani, Albania and the Jews (1995), and Edmond Malaj, Hebrenjtë në trojet shqiptare (2nd edn, Shkodra, 2016), together with a number of articles, mostly in Albanian. Ferit Duka published on the Vlorë and Berat communities of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Studime Historike in 2002. Melsen Kafilaj has written on the rabbis of Vlorë.

Beyond that, we know of no archival genealogical research on Albania’s Jews at all: no cemetery survey, no transcription project, no published family reconstructions. If you know otherwise, we would very much like to hear from you.

Help us find records

We are trying to build the fullest possible record of the Sephardic communities of Albania. We are specifically looking for:

Photographs or transcriptions of the Vlorë cemetery, particularly anything made before the site was built over
The tombstone reportedly found at Vlorë around 1990 — where is it now?
Any transcription of Ottoman defters covering the Avlonya or Berat sancaks
Confirmation of whether the Përmet synagogue survives
Anyone who has worked in the Tirana archives on Ottoman-period material
Correspondence or appointment records of the Ragusan consuls at Vlorë, in the Dubrovnik archives
Family papers, correspondence or photographs from Albanian Jewish families

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

Tracing a family through the Ottoman Balkans is difficult work, and Albania is among the hardest cases: the local records are gone, and what survives is scattered across Istanbul, Venice, Dubrovnik and Corfu in four languages. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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