Romania is thought of as an Ashkenazi country, and it was — overwhelmingly so. Of perhaps 250,000 Jews in Romania before the Second World War, the great majority were Ashkenazim, concentrated in Moldavia and coming down from Galicia and the Russian lands. The Sephardim never numbered more than a few thousand.
But they were there first. Spanish Jews were crossing Wallachia and Moldavia before the Ashkenazim arrived, and the first communities to settle were Sephardi.
Today the community is almost entirely gone — fewer than fifty Sephardim remain in the whole country — and it is largely forgotten, including by Sephardim. It deserves to be remembered, and this page is an attempt to do that.
Where did they come from, and when?
The Sephardim came up the Danube from the Ottoman Balkans.
Spanish Jewish merchants were using the route from Constantinople through Silistra and Galați to reach Western Europe well before 1492. After the expulsion, once they had settled in the Ottoman Empire, they began crossing regularly into Wallachia and Moldavia and forming communities — in Bucharest, Iași, Craiova and the Danube and Black Sea towns, because they were traders and those were the trade towns. Later arrivals came from Vienna and from the Italian ports.
The historian Meir Abraham Halevy dated the first documented Sephardim in Wallachia to 1496 and divided their history into two periods: 1496 to 1711, and 1711 to 1821. The break at 1711 matters because that is when the Ottomans began appointing the Phanariot rulers — wealthy Greek merchants from the Phanar quarter of Constantinople who bought the thrones of the principalities — and the Greek revolt of 1821 closed the period.
The earliest Bucharest evidence is a set of documents from 1550, under Prince Mircea Ciobanul, mentioning Jews who owned shops — unusual for the time. This is corroborated by a responsum of Rabbi Samuel de Medina of Salonica concerning the killing of an Ottoman Jew near the town, and a second responsum of Rabbi Yosef Karo of Nicopolis in 1559 on a similar case, which repeats two of the same names — evidence that these were settled people, not passing traders. A Sephardi cemetery is thought to have existed at a village called Budești near Bucharest, though only indirect references survive.
Numbers grew with each Russo-Turkish war, as Jews fled north from Ottoman Bulgaria and the Dobruja. The war of 1828–29 in particular pushed Sephardi merchants from Silistra and elsewhere into Wallachia as refugees — in 1831 twenty Sephardi merchants who had fled Silistra applied at Giurgiu for a tax waiver as refugees, and were granted it.
How were they different from the Ashkenazi majority?
Two things distinguish the Romanian Sephardim, and both are worth holding onto.
They were better integrated. The Polish-born doctor Iuliu Barasch, describing Bucharest in a book published in Vienna in 1854, wrote that the “French or Spanish Jews” wore Wallachian dress and spoke a corrupted Castilian — Ladino — among themselves, and could communicate with Christians and with the Polish Jews only in Romanian. Because Ladino was close enough to Romanian, and because many spoke French, they assimilated into Romanian society far more easily than the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, and they were on the whole wealthier.
They were connected outward. This was not a closed provincial community. Its leading families married into the Camondo banking dynasty of Constantinople, the Rodriguez-Pereira bank of Paris, and eventually the German-Jewish banking houses. Its members were born in Bucharest, died in Vienna or Paris, and traded across the Ottoman and European worlds.
The community’s own dead reflect this: Romanian-born Sephardim recorded as dying in Vienna include Sabetay of Craiova and Calafat, Alschech, Mitrany, Semo, Lazar and Elias of Bucharest, and De Majo and Farchy of Craiova.
The town clusters that recur in the records are Bucharest above all, then Craiova, Calafat, Turnu Severin, Galați and Brăila — the capital and the Danube ports.
Timeline
16th century — first Sephardim settle in Wallachia from the Ottoman Empire. Bucharest documents of 1550 mention Jewish shop-owners.
1580 — the Iași community is led by Rabbi Solomon Ben Aroyo, a Sephardi of Italian origin, teacher of the scholar Joseph Solomon Delmedigo.
1711 — Ottomans begin appointing Phanariot rulers; second period of Sephardi history begins.
1714 — Prince Ștefan Cantacuzino demolishes the Sephardi synagogue in Bucharest and forbids Jewish assembly for prayer, part of a hardening of attitudes at the end of the seventeenth century.
1730 — Prince Nicolae Mavrocordat, advised by Daniel de Fonseca and the merchant Celebi Mentz Bali, recognises the Sephardi community of Bucharest as a separate, independent structure.
1819 — the Spanish community builds Cahal Grande, the Great Spanish Temple, its largest synagogue.
1838 — first census to record nationality. Many Sephardi bankers appear as Austrian subjects.
1859 — union of Wallachia and Moldavia.
1865 — the Sephardi cemetery opens, recording the birthplaces of the community.
1866 — the new constitution reclassifies Jews as foreigners; naturalisation is blocked until 1923.
1877 — Romania gains independence from the Ottoman Empire.
1890 — Cahal Grande rebuilt.
1923 — constitution provides for general naturalisation of Jews. Undone by the citizenship-revision law of 1938.
1941 — Cahal Grande destroyed in the January pogrom.
1948 — Communists dismantle the separate Sephardi community.
1955 — the ruins of Cahal Grande demolished.
1965 — the Sephardi section within the Ashkenazi community is closed.
Two men who made the community
Two individuals shaped the community’s standing, and both illustrate how it worked.
Daniel de Fonseca was a physician appreciated in both the West and the Ottoman Empire. He was, in effect, kidnapped by Prince Nicolae Mavrocordat from the French embassy in Constantinople, where he had served for seventeen years, to enter the Wallachian prince’s service while keeping French protection. From Mavrocordat’s library he deciphered and copied Greek manuscripts and popularised the prince’s collections in a wide correspondence with scholars in France and Italy. It was Fonseca, with the merchant and creditor Celebi Mentz Bali, who persuaded Mavrocordat to recognise the Bucharest community in 1730.
A century and a half earlier, Joseph Nasi — the Portuguese converso of the Mendes family, Duke of Naxos, who held such influence at the Ottoman court that in 1571 Sultan Selim II offered him the Moldavian throne, which he was wise enough to decline — stands as the emblem of the sixteenth-century phase.
The Halfon family: a worked example
The best-documented Sephardi family in Romania is the Halfon banking dynasty, and it repays following because it shows both the reach of the community and the kind of sources that survive.
Solomon Halfon was born in Adrianople in 1790, descended on his grandmother’s side from the old rabbinic Gaon family. He married at seventeen, had three sons in Adrianople — Abraham, Joseph and Nissim — and moved up the Danube in stages, through Silistra and Brașov, settling the whole family in Bucharest by 1829. There he founded, with the Brașov merchant Gheorghe Ioan, a loan office, and in 1832 the bank Solomon Halfon and Sons, which ran for three generations and operated until 1907.
The bank was among the most important in nineteenth-century Romania: it credited the Wallachian and Serbian treasuries, held monopolies on the export of salt and timber, and in 1866 facilitated the first significant foreign loans contracted by the new Romanian state, through Stern and Oppenheim. In 1880 the family took part in founding the Romanian National Bank.
The family married outward at every turn. Solomon sent his youngest son Nissim to Constantinople to learn business in the house of Abraham de Camondo. His son Abraham sent his own son Michel to the Camondos, where he married Rebecca de Camondo. A later Halfon married into the Rodriguez-Pereira bank of Paris; others married into the German-Jewish houses of Ellissen, Lazard and Bruner. The family scattered across Bucharest, Constantinople, Vienna and Paris — one branch produced the founder of the Cannes Festival through marriage; three Halfon descendants died in the Holocaust.
For the researcher, the value of the Halfon story is the sources it rests on: family correspondence in French at the Romanian National Archives; the published parliamentary financial records of 1895–96; the records of the Bucharest Sephardi cemetery, which give parents, siblings, children and relatives; and Solomon’s will, written in Ladino and translated into French by a grandson in 1911.
A warning that applies to all Romanian research
Solomon Halfon’s entry in the 1838 census gives his age as 51 when he was 48, his wife’s as 40 when she was 45, and a son’s name wrongly.
The Romanian sources are approximate — but the census still shows which children had been born by that date, and in other Sephardi families it proves that children were born before the dates their own later documents claim.
Cross-check everything, and use the census for who existed, not for the details.
Notable families and individuals
The nineteenth century was the community’s peak, and it produced figures across every field.
Bankers and merchants: the Halfon, Manoach, Elias, Mavrogheni-Blanc and Hillel families; Solomon Halfon and Menahem Hillel Manoach. The Manoach and Hillel families were, like the Halfons, both bankers and communal leaders, and both intermarried with them.
Rabbis and scholars: Haim Bejarano, who arrived as a refugee from the war of 1877, preached at Cahal Grande for thirty-two years, was principal of the Spanish boys’ school, and later became Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire — a man who spoke fourteen languages and was a corresponding member of the Academy of Madrid. Sabetai Djaen, born in Pleven in 1883, Chief Rabbi of the Spanish Jewish community of Romania from 1931 to 1944, a playwright in Judeo-Spanish who wrote more than twenty theatre plays in Ladino and campaigned for the return of the Jews to Spain.
Others born in Bucharest of Sephardi descent include the mathematician David Emanuel, the psychodrama pioneer Jacob Levy Moreno, and a series of writers, journalists, musicians, editors and actors — the Alcalay, Beraha, Cambos and other families.
Moses Gaster, Haham of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of London and an eminent scholar, was a Romanian Jew — though his description as Sephardic is questionable. His grandfather Azriel Gaster married into the Ashkenazi Brill family; the connection to the Sephardi world is real but indirect, and worth flagging rather than asserting.
What survives in the cemeteries?
The Bellu Sephardic cemetery in Bucharest is the principal surviving site. The Sephardi cemetery opened in 1865, and its records are among the most valuable genealogical sources for the community, because they record the birthplaces of the dead — a direct map of where the Romanian Sephardim came from.
Those birthplaces are worth listing, because they are the community’s origin story in miniature: Constantinople, Smyrna and Adrianople in Turkey; Salonica and Yanina in Greece; Italian towns; Vienna; Belgrade; Skopje; Paris; and, above all, a great many from Bulgaria — half from Ruse, the rest from Silistra, Nikopol, Vidin, Varna and other Danube towns.
The cemetery records also give parents, siblings, children and relatives, which makes them a genealogical source in their own right and not merely a list of names.
One caution on the physical cemetery: the surviving monuments at Bellu do not look typically Sephardic, which is worth knowing before drawing conclusions from appearance alone.
What records survive?
Romanian research is difficult, and the records are approximate. The community’s own losses compound the problem: Cahal Grande was destroyed in 1941 and demolished in 1955, and the separate Sephardi community was dismantled by the Communists in 1948.
Civil registration began in 1865, though implementation varied by region — births, marriages and deaths.
Censuses were taken in 1859, 1899, 1912, 1930 and 1941. The 1838 census is the earliest to record nationality and is the key document for establishing which families held Austrian, Russian, French or British protection — many Sephardi bankers bought Austrian subjecthood, because Austria, unlike France or Britain, actually intervened on behalf of its Jewish subjects. The 1930 census records ethnicity and religion and is particularly valuable.
Remember that the ages and details are unreliable; use the census to establish who was present and when.
The Romanian National Archives hold civil registration, census data, and — for well-documented families — private correspondence, as in the Halfon case. Some material is available through FamilySearch.
Why foreign archives matter here
Because so many Romanian Sephardim held foreign protection, their records may sit in foreign archives. A family registered as Austrian subjects in 1838 may appear in Austrian legation records; families with French, British or Russian protection likewise.
This cross-referencing between the Romanian census and the consular archives of the protecting powers is one of the few ways past the thinness of the domestic record before 1838.
What has and hasn’t been researched
The Sephardim of Romania are one of the least-studied Sephardi communities anywhere, and until recently were almost invisible even to specialists.
Professor Felicia Waldman of the University of Bucharest is the expert on the subject, and her work — including Tales and Traces of Sephardic Bucharest, written with Anca Tudorancea Ciuciu — is the essential modern account. Jacob Geller’s Hebrew study of the rise and decline of the Sephardi community of Bucharest is the other substantial work.
What is missing is almost everything a genealogist would want. Nobody has systematically worked the 1865 cemetery records to reconstruct families, or cross-referenced the 1838 census against the consular archives of the protecting powers, or traced the many families who left for Vienna, Paris and Constantinople.
The community was small, its records are scattered across at least four countries, and the domestic sources before 1838 barely exist. But the material for a family like the Halfons shows what can be done when the correspondence, the cemetery records and a surviving will come together.
Further reading
Felicia Waldman and Anca Tudorancea Ciuciu, Tales and Traces of Sephardic Bucharest.
Jacob Geller, The Sephardic Jews in Rumania: The Rise and Decline of the Sephardic Jewish Community in Bucharest (Hebrew).
Meir Abraham Halevy, on the history of the Jews in the Romanian principalities.
Iuliu Barasch, description of the Jewish population of Wallachia and Bucharest (Vienna, 1854).
Sephardic World lectures on Romania
- Sephardim in Romania — Felicia Waldman
- The Sephardic Jews of Romania — World Jewish Congress
- București sefard
[LINKS NEEDED — confirm and link before publication]
Organisations and repositories
Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania — jewishfed.ro
Romanian Jewish History Museum — museum.jewishfed.ro
National Archives of Romania (Arhivele Naționale ale României) — arhivelenationale.ro
Bellu Sephardic Cemetery, Bucharest
FamilySearch — for Romanian State Archives material available online
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- A transcription of the Bucharest Sephardi cemetery records from 1865, with their birthplace data
- The 1838 census returns naming Sephardi families and the foreign protections they held
- Cross-references between Romanian Sephardi families and the Austrian, French, British and Russian legation records
- Records of Romanian Sephardim who settled in Vienna, Paris and Constantinople
- Any surviving register of Cahal Grande or the other Bucharest Sephardi synagogues
- Family papers, correspondence, or wills from any Romanian Sephardi family — as with the Halfon material, these are exceptionally valuable
- Records of the smaller communities: Craiova, Calafat, Turnu Severin, Galați, Brăila and the Danube ports
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
Romanian Sephardi research means a small, scattered community whose records sit in Romanian, and in the archives of the Ottoman Empire and the four powers whose protection its families bought, with unreliable domestic sources before 1838. It is difficult work, but a family that left correspondence, cemetery records and a will can be traced across three countries and two centuries. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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See also: Sephardic Jews of Bulgaria · Turkey and the Ottoman Empire · Sephardic Jews of Serbia · Sephardic Jews of Greece