The time when the Jews first settled in Thessaloniki is a question that has not yet been historically resolved. Some researchers claim that there were Jews in Thessaloniki at the time of its founding (315 BC).

Others support that the Jews initialy settled in Thessaloniki in 140 BC coming from Alexandria. Flavius Joseph talks about Jews in Macedonia and further reference to them is made in a letter from Herod to Calligula dated 10 AD.

Another important reference to the presence of a organized Jewish Community in Thessaloniki is to be found in the Acts of the Apostles. The relevant passage informs us that Paul visited the city in 50 AD and taught at the Synagogue on three consecutive Saturdays.

There is also evidence about the continuous existence of a Jewish Community in Thessaloniki during Roman and Byzantine times. These Jews were called “Romaniotes”. They had hellenized their names and spoke Greek. In the middle of the 14th century more Jews arrived in Thessaloniki from Gentral Europe, Sicily and Italy.

However, the most significant settlement was that of 15-20.000 Spanish Jews (Sepharadim) who, being percecuted by the Catholic kings Ferdinand and Isabella and the Inquisition, left Spain and settled in Thessaloniki in 1492. More Jews exiled form Sicily, Portugal and North Africa arrived as well. All these people settled in the city of Thessaloniki which was almost totally deserted after its conquest by the Turks in 1430. They occupied the area from Vardari Square to Diagonios Street and from Egnatia Street to the waterfront promenade.

Demographically, the Jews were the dominant element of the city and turned it into a first rate commercial center. The Sepharadim distinguished themselves in the field of textiles, worked in the mines of Gallikos River and Sidirokapsa, founded the first printing house in Thessaloniki in 1520 and many of them distiguished themselves as rabbis, physicians, philosophers, poets and lawteachers. Thus, the fame of Thessaloniki spread all over Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. This is why Thessaloniki was given the honorary title of “Mother in Israel”.

In 1430, the start of Ottoman domination, the Jewish population was still small. The Ottomans used population transfers within the empire following military conquests to achieve goals of border security or repopulation; they called it Sürgün. Following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an example of sürgün was the Ottomans’ forcing Jews from the Balkans and Anatolia to relocate there, which they made the new capital of the Empire. At the time, few Jews were left in Salonika; none were recorded in the Ottoman census of 1478.

The succesful period was interrupted at the beginning of the 17th century. Commerce received a blow after the discovery of new sea routes and the city itself suffered consecutive fires and epidemics. Still, the determining event at the time was the appearance of a self-proclaimed Messiah, Sabetai Sevi (1655). His popularity alarmed the Ottoman Authorities who arrested him and condemned him to death (1666). In order the save his life Sabetai Sevi converted to Islam. Three hundred Jewish families followed his example.

This mass apostasy truly shook the community which recovered only as late as the middle of the 19th century. A series of modernizing measures taken by the Ottoman authorities in the city enhanced the process of revival. The city expanded. It was lit by elecricity, electric streetcars were installed, the port was modernized and a railroad connection with the rest of Europe was established. From 1873 the Jews received advanced European education thanks to the Alliance Israelite Universelle Schools. It was at that time that the first newspaper ever was published in Thessaloniki. It was the Jewish paper “EL LUNAR” (1864). Industrial development was launched too, with the big steam mill of the Italian – Jews of the Allatini family (1854).

The Jews dominated the commercial scene, were active in all professions and were by far the largest labor force in the city. That is why the city streets were deserted on the Sabbath and on Great Jewish Holidays. In 1891, the Jewish Community founded the working-class neighbourshoods of Baron Hirsch and Kalamaria and established a whole chain of brilliant and unique charity institutions. They created a welfare system that has not been equaled in any other Diaspora community (Allatini and Mair Aboave orphanages, the Baroness de Hirsch Hospital, Mental Asylum, Saoul Modiano Old People’s Home, Bikour Holim Health Organization, etc.). The community had more than 30 Synagogues, numerous chapels and parish schools and the great traditional “Talmoud Torah Agadol” School. After the revolution of 1908 the socialist organization “Federation” was founded and the first Zionist groups made their appearance (Bene Sion, Kadima Macabbe, Misrahi, etc.).

On October 26, 1912 Thessaloniki becomes Greek again. The leaders of the Community are immediately received by King George I and the Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos who promised to respect the rights of the community and offered full equality in the eyes of the Law.

According, to the Greek Authorities Census, the Jews of Thessaloniki numbered 61,439 as compared to 45,867 Muslim 39,936 Greek and 10,600 people of other origins.

A few years later the City was devasted by the 1917 fire. The Community was cruelly hit. It numbered 53,000 homeless members. Almost all synagogues, schools and charity institutions were destroyed.

Although the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration was celebrated with a splendor unmatched in Europe, the decline had begun. The influx of tens of thousands of Greek refugees from Asia Minor, and the departure of Dönme Jews and Muslims from the region as a result of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), significantly changed the ethnic composition of the city. The Jews ceased to constitute an absolute majority and, on the eve of the Second World War, they accounted for just 40% of the population.

For this reason many Jews emigrated in the period between the two Wars and especially after the sad incident of arson that destroyed the Kambel neighbourhood (1931). Most of them settled in the Land of Israel. Still, in 1940 the Community numbered more than 50,000 people. The Jews of Thessaloniki lived peacefully along with their Christian neighbors. They fought bravely for their homeland during the 1940-41 War, and 12,898 of them joined the Armed Forces (343 officers). They suffered 513 dead and 3,743 wounded.

The seizure of power by dictator Ioannis Metaxas in 1936 had a significant bearing on the pattern of Greek–Jewish relations in Thessaloniki. Metaxas’ regime was not antisemitic; it perceived the Venizelists and the Communists as its political enemies, and Bulgaria as its major foreign enemy. This endeared Metaxas to two influential Jewish groups: the upper/middle classes, which felt threatened by organized labor and the socialist movement, and Jewish refugees who had fled Bulgaria and the Bitola region during the Balkan Wars.

Thessaloniki’s occupation by the Axis Forces (April 9, 1941) was the beginning of the end. The Nazis applied anti-Jewish measures from the very first days. They forbade the admission of Jews to cafes, cinemas etc. They took over the Hirsch Hospital and many Jewish houses, imprisoned members of the Community Council, looted the Community offices, destroyed its archives and all Jewish libraries.

It is estimated that from the beginning of the occupation to the end of deportations, 3,000–5,000 Jews managed to escape from Salonika, finding temporary refuge in the Italian zone. A recent study by the Jewish Museum of Greece found that 250 Jews of Thessaloniki took part in national resistance movements such as the Greek People’s Liberation Army, the National Liberation Front, and British-loyal units of the Greek Army.

Salonika’s 54,000 Jews were shipped to the Nazi extermination camps. More than 90% of the total Jewish population of the city were murdered during the war. Only the Polish Jews experienced a greater level of destruction.

On July 11, 1942 all male Jews between 18 and 45 years of age were ordered to present themselves at Eleftherias Square. After incredible humiliations, their names were taken down and they were led to labour camps. The Community paid a 2,5 billion drachmas ranson to free them. At the end of the same year all Jewish businessess were confiscated and the more than 2000 year old Jewish Cemetery was destroyed.

In less than ten weeks, 12% of them died of exhaustion and disease. In the meantime, the Thessalonikan community, with the help of Athens, managed to gather two billion drachmas towards the sum of 3.5 billion drachmas demanded by the Germans to ransom the forced laborers. The Germans agreed to release them for the lesser sum but, in return, demanded that the Greek authorities abandon the Jewish cemetery of Salonica, containing 300,000 to 500,000 graves. Its size and location, they claimed, had long hampered urban growth.

As of February 1943 the Jews vere obliged to wear a Yellow Star badge on their breasts and live only in certain areas (ghettos). They were forbitten to work as members of the professions (lawyers, physicians, professors) and to belong to any club or institution. On March 15, 1943 the first train left for the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Until August 1943, another eighteen convoys would follow. They carried almost all the Jews, packed in carriages that had been designed for animals. Their destination was the place of their extermination. A very small number managed to escape thanks to the help of Christian friends or joined the Resistance Forces. These Jews returned to Thessaloniki after its liberation in October 1944 and together with the few refugees from the death camps they managed to start a new life from the ruins.

In his book If This Is a Man, one of the most famous works of literature of the Holocaust, Primo Levi describes the group thus: “those Greeks, motionless and silent as the Sphinx, crouched on the ground behind their thick pot of soup”. Those members of the community still alive during 1944 made a strong impression on the author. He noted: “Despite their low numbers their contribution to the overall appearance of the camp and the international jargon is spoken is of prime importance”. He described a strong patriotic sense among them, writing that their ability to survive in the camps was partly explained by “they are among the cohesive of the national groups, and from this point of view the most advanced”.

It is well known that of the 50,000 Jews of pre-war Thessaloniki less than 2,000 were saved.

Soon after the liberation of the city from the Nazis (October 1944), the few Jews that had joined the Resistance Forces or had joined within Greece turned up. They gathered at the Synagogue of the Monasteriotes, the only one that had been saved from destruction, and elected a Governing Gommittee. This Committee managed to take back the Community’s property and organized some sort of Community life with the help of organizations such as American Joint Distribution Committee and HIAS. After May 1945 those who survived the death camps gradually appeared in Thessaloniki.

Some isolated survivors of the camps made the same choice. There were also several marriages among the post-war survivors. One survivor testified:

I returned to a Salonika destroyed. I was hoping to find my adopted brother, but rumor told that he had died of malaria in Lublin. I already knew that my parents had been burned on their first day at the extermination camp of Auschwitz. I was alone. Other prisoners who were with me had nobody either. These days, I am with a young man that I had known in Brussels. We do not separate from each other. We were both survivors of the camps. Shortly after, we married, two refugees who had nothing, there was not even a rabbi to give us the blessing. The director of one of the Jewish schools served as a rabbi and we married, and so I started a new life.

1,783 survivors were listed in the 1951 census.

A monument in Thessaloniki to the tragedy of the deportation, Menorah in flames, was erected in 1997.