JEWISH PRESENCE IN OTTOMAN SALONIKA THROUGHOUT CENTURIES

With the arrival of the Sephardim following the issue of Alhambra Decree that ordered the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, Salonika became a Jewish center. Beginning from the late fifteenth century, Muslims happened to be the second largest group coming after the Jewish population. Before the conquest of the city by the Ottoman Sultan Murad II in 1430, Salonika already had local Greek-speaking Jews called Romaniots, many of whom were forced to resettle in Istanbul after its conquest in 1453 to revive the economy of the new capital. Accordingly, the Iberian refugees outnumbered the local Jews. Interestingly enough, the new Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city also exceeded in number the indegeneous Greek Orthodox population and Salonika remained as a Jewish city until it was annexed to the Kingdom of Greece in 1913. Following the Turco-Greek Population Exchange (1923), migration flows to Palestine and the Holocaust, the city became a pure Greek city which was cleared from its Muslims and Jews. Despite its history as a Jewish center within an Islamic Empire, Salonika was never accepted as one of the major centers of Judaism in Turkish and Greek nationalist historiographies. For this very reason the article at hand aims at showing the Jewish life with its economic, social and cultural dimensions in Salonika throughout its presence as an Ottoman city.