The earliest Jewish communities in what is today's Greece emerged as early as the 4th-3rd centuries BCE. Those were the Romaniotes, who spoke a now disappeared Greek dialect. Thessaloniki was a major focal point for the Romaniotes. In the 1st century many Greek Jews in Salonika, Corinth, Athens and Philippi adopted Christianity, prompting St Apostle Paul to send epistles to their communities.
In Byzantium, Jews were sometimes discriminated against by special taxes and occasional demands to convert. Yet, Constantinople became a centre of Jewish spiritual life. At the beginning of the 14th century some Jewish settlers from Venice were so successful in international trade that they were granted special privileges, including land-owning rights in the capital.
The resettlement of Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century changed Jewish demographic forever as they became the dominant group.
With its work and business opportunities to new arrivals, Salonica, a busy trade port on the Aegean coast, became the largest Jewish community within the empire.
Modern Greece emerged as a sovereign state after its 1821-1830 War of Independence. Its current borders date back to the end of the First World War. In 1910-1920 Greece had at least 100,000 Jews.
Greek Romaniote Jews from Volos. Licensed under CC by 2.0
Jews in Greece were sometimes exposed to attacks organised by local Greeks and Armenians. However, attitudes to them were generally tolerant. In 1917 Greece was among the first countries to endorse the Balfour Declaration in support of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Greek Jews started on their journey to Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Like elsewhere in Europe, the Second World War was the turning point for Jewish life in Greece. At the beginning of the war the Greek Army had 13,000 Jewish servicemen. Greece was first occupied by fascist Italy, in 1941. Hitler gave Aegean Thrace and Vardar Macedonia to the Bulgarians to administer. Technically, the Kingdom of Bulgaria, a Nazi ally, did not "occupy" these territories. However, the Bulgarian army, the Bulgarian police and the Bulgarian civil service ran them.
The Italians failed to do a "proper" job in Greece and Hitler replaced them by his own troops, in 1943. As much as 80 percent of all Greek Jews were deported to Treblinka and Auschwitz. Less than 2,000 survived. In Aegean Thrace and Macedonia and Pirot the Bulgarians rounded up over 11,000 Jews. These people were put into Bulgarian State Railway cattle cars and transported, mainly through Bulgarian
territory, to the Bulgarian port of Lom on the River Danube. Then they were hoarded into barges upriver. Few of them survived.
The occupation of Greece was as cruel as it could get. Yet some Jews managed to survive, chiefly owing to their neighbours. One example was in Athens. As many as 1,200 Jews were given counterfeit certificates by Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens and police chief Angelos Ebert that they had converted, and were thus spared.
The majority of Greek Jews emigrated to Israel after the war. At present, there are about 5,000-6,000 Jews in Greece.
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