Friday Night Kiddush or Do the Greeks Just like Wine?

1492 has a different meaning in Greece. This was the year that thousands of Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain due to the Alhambra Decree and arrived in Thessaloniki. Perhaps this is why I feel such a Spanish presence in the walls of the middle age architecture. One of the main reasons that the Jews elected Greece as their settlement was actually because of the Islamic influences in the Ottoman Empire, which of course at this time, Greece was a part of. The Koran preaches an acceptance and toleration of all people and is rooted in peace—though today’s media seems to have a difficult time portraying this. Therefore, Thessaloniki became a disaporic oasis for the Jews and by 1520, only three decades after the decree, more than half of Thessaloniki’s population was comprised of Jewish exiles.

The Jews, being the new majority, controlled many aspects of social and cultural life. For example, instead of the city being shut down on Sundays as most Christian nations practice, or Fridays as is common in Islamic societies, the ports of Thessaloniki did not operate on Saturday—the day of the Sabbath. However, their prosperity was not infinite.

A few hundred years later, after internal battles and tilts with neighboring states the Jews faced an unavoidable enemy—the Nazis. During the Second World War more than 54,000 Jews from Thessaloniki were taken away most commonly to Auschwitz and Treblinka, but also to more local concentration camps. It is believed that 98% of them did not survive. Prior to their final death train rides the Jews were corralled into numerous ghettos across the city with the Nuremburg laws in full effect. One of the main roads between Larissa (where a US base current resides) and Thessaloniki was built through the forced laboring of the Jews. Come 1950 less than 2,000 Jews lived in the city; today that number teeters right around 1,000.