Salonika - Jewish Cemetery

Salonika.—In the Israelite Cemeteries.—Old Serbian.

Salonika’s Jewish cemetery was a popular postcard motif, not always for its own sake but in at least some instances because it offered an idyllic vantage with spectacular views of the city and its harbour. This card seems more interested in the foreground and—although this may not have been its principal intention—shows one of the beautifully crafted and particularly ornate sarcophagi.

Following the Ottoman conquest and the removal of the city’s Jewish population to Constantinople, a new Jewish community emerged in Salonika when, after 1492, following on the heels of Ashkenazi expellees from Central Europe, very substantial numbers of Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula and Spain’s Italian holdings settled in Salonika, almost trebling its population within a few decades to roughly 30,000. The disparate origins of these groups of immigrants notwithstanding, the Jewish population in its entirety maintained a distinctly Sephardi character. Tens of thousands of Jews now lived in the city, organized in some two dozen congregations, and Salonika became, for the best part of half a millennium, one of the principal centres of Jewish civilization in general and Sephardi and Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) culture in particular. Jews were consistently the largest ethnic group in the city and for long stretches of time formed the majority of the population. In the 1930s, some 30,000 Jews left Salonika, more than half of them for the Yishuv. Of Salonika’s remaining 56,000 Jews, 54,000 were murdered in Auschwitz or perished on the death marches. Having for many centuries formed by far the largest ethnic group in the city, there are now barely more than 1,000 Jews among Thessaloniki’s 325,000 inhabitants.