Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi… Which branch do you come from? Each community, linked to its places and its texts.
A community is a people in miniature: families gathered in one place, with their institutions, their customs and their own destiny. The Great Books of communities recount these wholes across the diasporas — their founding, their golden age, their trials and their legacy. From Toledo to Salonica, from Baghdad to Livorno, each community has woven a singular thread of collective memory.
Each diaspora bears its own languages, liturgies, legal traditions and manuscript heritages. Zakhor documents them in a balanced way and links them to the corresponding places, families, manuscripts and printed works.
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Emerging community founded in 1919; formal conversions (Masorti) since 2002.
Central and Eastern Europe. Rhenish Rishonim, Lithuanian and Polish yeshivot, Hasidism. Language: Yiddish.
Emerging Telugu community declaring itself Jewish since the 1980s (unattested ancestry).
Jewish communities of India (Konkan and Kerala). Locally integrated for over a thousand years.
Contested group descended from the Beta Israel, considered crypto-Jewish; rites concealed behind a Christian façade.
Emerging community: Kuki-Mizo tribes claiming descent from the tribe of Manasseh, Judaizing since 1951.
Distinct Turkic-speaking Karaites, claiming Khazar origin.
Crypto-Jews forcibly converted to Islam, secretly practicing Judaism.
Descendants of converted Majorcan Jews, long endogamous; recognized as Jews in 2011.
Generic term for converts to Catholicism, whether sincere or not.
Isolated crypto-Jewish community, rediscovered in 1917 by Samuel Schwarz.
Descendants of conversos of New Spain; customs rediscovered from the 1980s onward.
Disciples of Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam in 1666; departed from normative Judaism.
Beta Israel, an Ethiopian community whose origin probably dates back to antiquity. Sacred texts in Ge'ez.
Followers of Jacob Frank, converted to Catholicism in 1759; an assimilated heterodox sect.
Ashkenazim of Austro-Hungarian Galicia, marked by Hasidism (Belz, Bobov, Sanz).
In Tunis, the Grana (Livornese) and the Twansa (natives) live side by side yet distinctly. A vital bridge with the Livorno–Maghreb axis.
Mystical movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov, structured into dynasties around rebbes.
Sefwi families Judaizing since 1976, claiming descent from a lost tribe; synagogue in 1998.
Anglicized port community, distinct from the Yemenites of the highlands.
Ancient Persian-speaking community, attested by medieval Hebrew epitaphs.
Community Frenchified by the Crémieux Decree (1870), mostly departed for France in 1962.
Rural Jews with their own rite, speaking Yédisch-Daïtsch (Western Yiddish).
Medieval scholarly center (Trani, Otranto, Bari) with its own rite; expelled in 1510-1541.
Iraqi Jewish merchants (the Sassoon dynasty): Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon, Shanghai, Singapore.
Rural Judeo-Berber-speaking communities of the Atlas, attested by Ibn Khaldun.
Judeo-Persian branch speaking Bukhori, on the Silk Road.
Arba Kehillot (Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, L'Isle) under papal protection, with the Provençal rite.
Keepers of the Aleppo Codex, blending indigenous Jews and Sephardim from Spain.
Descendants of Moroccan Sephardim from the rubber boom; revival and aliyah since 1990.
Ancient community of the city of the Patriarchs, blending Sephardim and Chabad Hasidim. It was annihilated by the 1929 massacre.
One of the oldest Persian communities, whose Jubareh quarter is said to date back to the Babylonian deportation. It preserves several active synagogues.
Modern, secularized port community, cradle of the Russian Haskalah, of Ahad Ha'am's Zionism, and of Yiddish literature. It was tried by repeated pogroms and by the Shoah.
A community of western Algeria marked by the influx of refugees from Tétouan and the Spanish presence, home to the sanctuary of Rab Houïta. It left Algeria en masse in 1962.
A Neo-Aramaic-speaking community (lishán didán) of the Lake Urmia region, straddling Iran and the Turkish border. It was one of the last bastions of Eastern Judeo-Aramaic.
Heart of Babylonian Jewry, heir to the Geonic academies and a great urban community of the 20th century. It was traumatized by the Farhud pogrom of 1941 and then the exodus of the 1950s.
A port community of southern Iraq, a commercial hub toward the Persian Gulf and India, from which the Baghdadis of Asia spread. It vanished after the forced departures of the 1950s.
Hasidic community born around the Belz dynasty founded by Shalom Rokeach. Reconstituted after the Shoah, it ranks today among the great Hasidic courts of Jerusalem and New York.
Community of eastern Libya, heir to the ancient Judaism of Cyrene, interned by the Fascists at the Giado camp during the war. It vanished with the emigration after 1948.
A town with a Jewish majority, a high place of Hasidism exemplified by Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev and a great commercial center. Its population was massacred in 1941.
The population of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast founded by the USSR in 1934 as a Yiddish-speaking Soviet "homeland." Settlement remained limited and Jewish culture there is today residual but official.
Old Ashkenazi communities (Prague), modernized under Joseph II.
Baghdadi merchant elite of Bombay, including the Sassoon family, distinct from the local Bene Israel. It built synagogues and philanthropic institutions in the 19th century.
Colony of wealthy Bukharan Jews who founded an affluent quarter outside the walls of Jerusalem beginning in 1891. It exemplifies the early aliyah from Central Asia before the Soviet era.
Community founded around 1798 by Jewish merchants from Aleppo, Baghdad, and Iran, prospering under the British Raj. It preserved an Arab-Sephardic rite and declined sharply after 1947.
The principal of the Four Communities of the Pope, with the oldest synagogue in France still in use (1367, rebuilt in the 18th century). Its "carrière" housed the Jews confined within the Papal States.
A Persian community of Fars, sorely tried by a pogrom and forced conversions in 1910. It remains one of the most active in contemporary Iran.
Malabari congregation distinct from the Paradesi synagogue, one of the historic "eight synagogues" of Kerala. It illustrates the internal divisions among "black" Jews, "white" Jews, and meshuhrarim.
A large community of eastern Algeria renowned for its liturgy and malouf music, exemplified by the singer Cheikh Raymond. It suffered a deadly pogrom in 1934 and emigrated after 1962.
Capital community of the Ottoman Empire bringing together Romaniotes, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Karaites, seat of the Chief Rabbinate. It remains the largest in Turkey today.
Community blending Greek-speaking Romaniotes and Italian-speaking Pugliesi under Venetian rule. It suffered a pogrom in 1891 and then the deportation of 1944.
An ancient community established in the Kazimierz suburb, home of the Rema (Moses Isserles) and of Hebrew printing. It was destroyed by the ghetto and the nearby Płaszów camp.
Romaniote and later Sephardic community of Candia (Heraklion) under Venetian and Ottoman rule. Its last members perished in the sinking of the Tanaïs in 1944.
Community made up of Ashkenazim ("polacos") and Sephardim from Turkey ("turcos") who arrived in the early 20th century, sharply reduced after 1959. A few hundred remain around the synagogues of Havana.
The oldest continuous Jewish community in the Americas, founded by Portuguese Sephardim from Amsterdam around 1651. Its Mikvé Israel-Emanuel synagogue retains a sand floor.
Ancient community distinct from Aleppo, dispersed to Israel and Brooklyn.
An important center of the Mountain Jews (Juhuro) on the Caspian coast, of Judeo-Tat language. It is one of the last cities in the Caucasus to preserve a living Jewish community.
A community of the central Yemeni highlands, renowned for its artisans and scholars. It emigrated almost entirely to Israel in the mid-twentieth century.
Island community of exceptional longevity; pilgrimage to the Ghriba.
Jewish village around the El Ghriba synagogue, distinct from the Hara Kebira, a place of pilgrimage on Lag Ba'omer. It maintains one of the last traditional Judaisms of North Africa.
Community welcomed by the dukes of Este, a refuge for Sephardim and Portuguese Marranos in the 16th century, where the Ferrara Bible appeared. The ghetto was instituted there after the transfer to papal rule.
Community of Morocco's oldest mellah (1438), a major rabbinic center where Maimonides taught and where the megorashim of Spain settled. It shaped much of Moroccan halakha.
Community confined from 1462 to the Judengasse, one of the largest ghettos in Europe, cradle of the Rothschild family. It was a major center of neo-traditional Orthodoxy in the 19th century.
A community isolated in the heart of the Ibadi Mozabite country, long preserved from outside influences and studied by Lloyd Cabot Briggs. Its members emigrated to France and Israel after 1962.
Refounded in the 18th century by merchants from Tetouan; close ties with Morocco.
Isolated Yemenite subgroup from Hadramaut, keepers of ancient traditions, reputed bearers of the jambiya.
A community of ancient Ecbatana, guardian of the traditional tomb of Esther and Mordecai, a place of pilgrimage. It is said to date back to the Achaemenid era.
A twofold community uniting Portuguese Sephardim of Hamburg and Ashkenazim of Altona-Wandsbek (the "Three Communities," AHW). It was a center of halakhic debate and Hebrew printing.
Predominantly Russian Ashkenazi community formed around the Chinese Eastern Railway from 1898. It reached several thousand members before dispersing after the Japanese and Soviet occupations.
A community largely descended from Mashhad refugees fleeing the forced conversions of 1839, home to several synagogues. It emptied through emigration to Israel and India in the twentieth century.
Principal Romaniote center of Epirus, remaining Greek-speaking and faithful to the Romaniote rite without being Hellenized by the Sephardim. Part of it survived and founded a congregation in New York.
Only indigenous Jewish community of China, settled under the Song, largely Sinicized.
A Persian community renowned for its Judeo-Persian poets and its carpet and copper merchants. It declined in favor of Tehran in the twentieth century.
Small community of Sephardic and Ashkenazi merchants, which became a transit point for the refugees saved by Chiune Sugihara's visas in 1940–1941. It survives around the Ohel Shelomoh synagogue.
A historic Georgian community in the west of the country, home to large nineteenth-century synagogues. It was an important center of Gruzini Judaism before the emigration.
Sephardim from Brazil and Amsterdam settled from the 1650s, with the restored Nidhe Israel synagogue. They contributed to the island's sugar boom.
Portuguese Sephardic community established after the English conquest of 1655, active in the trade of Port Royal and Kingston. It merged its Sephardic and Ashkenazi rites in the 20th century.
The "Portuguese Nation" of Marranos returning to Judaism in Amsterdam from 1590, builders of the 1675 Snoge. It counted Spinoza, excommunicated, and Menasseh ben Israel among its members.
Blending natives and Livornese Grana; ~36,000 in 1948, evacuated after 1967.
"Ponentine" Sephardic nation privileged by the Livornina, speaking Bagitto.
Branch of Hasidism founded in Lyozna-Lubavitch by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, structured around the Schneersohn dynasty. It is known today for its worldwide missionary network of emissaries.
A large Galician community divided between the intramural quarter and the suburb, famous for its Golden Rose Synagogue. It was exterminated during the German occupation.
Community that flourished under the Gonzaga, famous for its theatre, its Hebrew printing house, and the composer Salamone Rossi. It had a ghetto from 1612 until emancipation.
One of Morocco's largest mellahs, a crossroads of the communities of the Atlas and the South, renowned for its goldsmiths and its saints. It emptied through the emigration of the 1950s and 1960s.
Crypto-Jews forcibly converted during the Allahdad pogrom (1839), maintaining a secret Judaism.
Third of the ShUM communities, rabbinic center of the famous Rabbenu Gershom, "light of the exile." Its synodal ordinances held authority throughout all of medieval Ashkenazi Judaism.
Learned community of imperial Morocco, home to poets and kabbalists such as the Berdugo and Toledano lineages. Its mellah was a great center of traditional Moroccan Judaism.
Impoverished Judeo-Spanish Sephardic community of Ottoman Macedonia, many of whom emigrated to the United States and Palestine. The rest were deported to Treblinka in 1943.
Ancient community of the Kingdom of Naples, expelled in 1541 and then reconstituted in the 19th century around the Rothschild family. A small congregation survives there.
One of the oldest and most important communities in Central Europe, home to the Old-New Synagogue and tied to the legend of the Maharal's Golem. Its medieval cemetery is an emblematic site.
Medieval community with its own Provençal rite, expelled in 1501.
A Jewish town of the mountaineers of the Quba region, often presented as the last entirely Jewish shtetl outside Israel. Its Tat population maintains synagogues and communal life.
Baghdadi and Indian community settled in Rangoon under British rule, centered on the Musmeah Yeshua synagogue. It was decimated by the Japanese occupation in 1942.
Sephardic community of Dutch Brazil that built Kahal Zur Israel, the first synagogue in the Americas (1636). After the Portuguese reconquest of 1654, its members scattered to the Caribbean and New Amsterdam.
Judeo-Spanish community of the island of Rhodes, called "the little Jerusalem," with its particular Judeo-Spanish. Almost entirely deported to Auschwitz in 1944, its survivors scattered to the Congo, Rhodesia, and the United States.
The oldest Jewish community in Europe, never expelled, with its specific Bnei Romi rite.
Communities of the northern Yemeni highlands, among the last in the country, isolated in tribal and Zaydi territory. A few families subsisted there until the 2000s before a forced exodus.
Community of the golden age of Kabbalah in the 16th century, around Joseph Caro, Moses Cordovero, and Isaac Luria. It remains a mystical center and a stronghold of the Old Yishuv.
« Jerusalem of the Balkans », largest Ladino-speaking Sephardic community, annihilated by the Shoah.
A major center of Bukharian Judaism, organized around the Jewish quarter (mahalla) and the Judeo-Tajik language. A symbolic presence subsists after the massive post-Soviet emigration.
The community of the Yemeni capital, a center of the Sanaani Hebrew pronunciation and of ancient manuscripts. It was transferred to Israel during the Magic Carpet operation of 1949-1950.
Sephardic community of the Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian Empire, guardian of the famous Sarajevo Haggadah. It played a notable role during the siege of the city in the 1990s.
Community present since Roman times, notably in Cagliari and Alghero, under Aragonese administration. It vanished with the expulsion of 1492.
Hasidic community originating in Satu Mare, marked by the radical anti-Zionism of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum. It reconstituted itself in Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel as one of the most numerous in the world.
An important community of a small town nicknamed "the little Jerusalem of Morocco," with a dense and learned mellah. It was the subject of classic anthropological studies by Clifford Geertz.
Composite population of Baghdadis (Sassoon, Kadoorie), Russians, and refugees from Nazism gathered in the Hongkou ghetto during the war. Almost all emigrated after 1949.
Ancient and numerous Jewish population of the island, organized into dozens of communities under Arab and then Norman and Aragonese rule. It was expelled in 1493 following the Alhambra Decree.
Community of Baghdadi origin established from the 1830s, marked by the Sassoon and Meyer families. It gave Singapore its first Jewish head of government, David Marshall.
Major Judeo-Spanish community of the Ottoman Empire, home of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, born in 1626. It preserves several historic synagogues in the Kemeralti quarter.
Member of the ShUM communities, granted a protective status by the bishop in 1084 and a monumental mikveh. It was struck by the massacres of the First Crusade in 1096.
The linguistic designation of the Mountain Jews speaking Judeo-Tat, an Iranian language, spread between Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and the diaspora. They consider themselves descended from Persian exiles settled in the Caucasus.
The community of the capital uniting Georgian and Russian Ashkenazic Jews, long renowned for its harmony with the surrounding society. It preserves the great Sephardic synagogue of the old city.
German-speaking community of Austro-Hungarian Bukovina, home to a rich German- and Yiddish-language culture from which Paul Celan emerged. It was decimated during the war and the deportation to Transnistria.
Sephardim "Megorashim del Norte," speakers of Haketia, with a preserved Iberian identity.
Greek-speaking Romaniote communities of Volos, Trikala, Arta, and Preveza, distinct from the Sephardim. They preserved a rite and piyyutim of their own until the Shoah.
One of the four holy cities of Judaism, refounded in the 18th century with the support of Dona Gracia and later of Hasidim and disciples of the Gaon of Vilna. It holds the tombs of major sages.
An ancient crossroads community between Morocco and Algeria, famous for the pilgrimage to the tomb of Rab Ephraïm Encaoua at Aïn Témouchent. It was a center of mysticism and halakha.
Principal Libyan community of the capital, marked by the Italian legislation and the pogroms of 1945 and 1948. It emigrated almost entirely to Israel and Italy.
Private Ashkenazi synagogue of the Ghetto Nuovo built around 1531, perhaps by Jews from France or the Comtat. It is adorned with biblical scenes rare in synagogue art.
Congregation of the Italian rite (italkim) of the Ghetto of Venice, founded in 1575 by Jews from the center of the peninsula. Its sober synagogue contrasts with those of the Sephardic nations.
Ashkenazi congregation of the Ghetto Vecchio of Venice, the oldest of the city's five "scuole." Its synagogue of 1528 served Jews of the German rite.
Judeo-Spanish communities of the Bulgarian Balkans, including those of Vidin and Sofia. Saved from deportation in 1943 by civic mobilization, they emigrated en masse to Israel after 1948.
A community repeatedly expelled then reconstituted, becoming a major cultural center under Franz Joseph. It was the cradle of Herzl's Zionism before the Anschluss.
The community of Vilnius, nicknamed "the Jerusalem of Lithuania," capital of the rabbinic study of the Vilna Gaon and of modern Yiddish culture. It was annihilated during the Shoah.
One of the three Rhenish "ShUM" communities, home of the Tosafists and place of teaching of Rashi. Its synagogue of 1034 and its cemetery are among the oldest in Europe.
A community of the central Iranian plateau, neighboring the Zoroastrians, long devoted to weaving and trade. A small Jewish presence still subsists there.
Ladino-speaking Sephardic communities, including Sarajevo, the "little Jerusalem."
« Juhuro » speakers of the Judeo-Tat language, descendants of the Jews of ancient Persia.
Group formed by Carpentras, Cavaillon, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, and Avignon, the only Jews tolerated in France after 1394 under papal protection. They developed a rite and a dialect of their own, Shuadit.
Very ancient rural communities of the Drâa oases, sometimes linked to legends of a pre-Saharan Jewish kingdom. They lived in ksour alongside the Berbers before the twentieth-century exodus.
Moroccan Sephardim settled from around 1850, largely assimilated; descendants proud of their ancestry.
Isolated Saharan community, excluded from the Crémieux Decree, departed around 1962.
Rural Judaism scattered across the villages of southwestern Germany, living from the cattle trade and peddling. Its small towns such as Gailingen or Sulzburg sometimes had a Jewish majority.
Berber-speaking and Arabic-speaking communities of the Sous plain and its Atlas margins. Often blacksmiths and goldsmiths, they maintained "age" ties with the Shleuh tribes.
Sephardic planters who obtained unique privileges and founded the Jodensavanne, an autonomous Jewish village with its synagogue Beracha Ve Shalom. The community dwindled after the abolition of slavery.
Communities of the southern Moroccan oases, notably the mellah of Sijilmassa then of Rissani, on the caravan routes. They venerated many saints and emigrated en masse around 1955-1960.
Oasis communities of the trans-Saharan routes, prosperous in Tamentit, annihilated by the synagogue destructions of 1492 preached by al-Maghili. Their disappearance marked the end of central Saharan Judaism.
Ancient community (Septuagint, Genizah) blending Rabbanites and Karaites; ~80,000 around 1940.
Eastern European agricultural settlers placed by Baron de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association from 1891. Nicknamed the "Jewish gauchos," they created colonies such as Moisés Ville.
Among the oldest communities, assimilated into the Georgian language and culture.
Divided between Oberlander (Germanic orthodoxy) and Unterlander (close to Hasidism).
Igbos practicing Judaism, claiming descent from the tribe of Gad; revival since the 1990s.
Among the oldest communities, cradle of the Babylonian Talmud (Sura, Pumbedita); exodus in 1950-51.
Community of the Italian rite, distinct from the Ashkenazim and Sephardim.
Judeo-Aramaic-speaking community (lishana deni), centered on Zakho, emigrated en masse to Israel.
An Aramaic-speaking community of the Iraqi Kurdish mountains, nicknamed "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan," rich in folklore and oral narrative. It emigrated to Israel in 1950-1951.
Two Sephardic "nations" of the Venetian ghetto, with a distinct mercantile status.
Community of the Chouf and Wadi Abu Jamil (Beirut), dispersed in the 20th century.
Blending native Toshavim and Sephardic Megorashim; among the most numerous in the Muslim world.
Indigenous Arabic-speaking Jews of the Levant, Arabized before the arrival of the Sephardim in 1492.
Ashkenazim who came from Germany and then Eastern Europe from 1620, the majority in Amsterdam.
Largest Jewish community in the world in the 16th century, predominantly Sephardic.
Millennia-old diaspora since the edict of Cyrus; Judeo-Persian language; Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan.
Largest Ashkenazi community of the diaspora, heart of the Yiddish world and the shtetl.
"Portuguese Nation" of conversos returned to Judaism, the Western Sephardic diaspora.
Portuguese New Christians of Bordeaux and Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne, returned to Judaism.
Italo-Apulian community distinct from the Romaniotes, with its own Apulian dialect.
Communities admitted late into Scandinavia, first Sephardic then Ashkenazic, around Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo. The 1943 rescue of the Danish Jews remains a landmark episode.
Community arising from the emigration of Aleppo and Damascus, concentrated in Gravesend and Bensonhurst, attached to its minhagim and to the edict forbidding conversion. It is one of the most cohesive of the American Sephardic diaspora.
Arabic-speaking Sephardic community of Mexico, divided between those from Aleppo (Halabi, Maguen David) and Damascus (Shami, Monte Sinaí). It has preserved distinct institutions by city of origin.
Ancient community; ~105,000 in 1948, dispersed toward Israel and France.
A community ~96% Sephardic, welcomed by Bayezid II in 1492, still active in Istanbul and Izmir.
Movement recognizing the Tanakh alone, founded by Anan ben David; flourishing in Egypt in the 11th-12th centuries.
A Karaite community of Cairo, distinct from the Rabbanites, organized around its synagogue in the Hârat al-Yahûd al-Qarâ'în. It emigrated mainly to Israel, France, and the United States after 1956.
A Turkic-speaking Karaite community established in Trakai from the fourteenth century by Grand Duke Vytautas, speaking Karaim. Recognized as distinct from the Rabbanite Jews, it subsists in very small numbers.
Turkic-speaking Rabbanite Jews of Crimea (Krymchak language), decimated by the Shoah.
Contested people with Judaizing customs; Cohanite Y marker among the Buba clan.
The Jews of Aden formed an ancient community, distinct in many respects from the Jews of the Yemeni interior, notably because of the particular status conferred upon them by the British administration after the port was taken in 1839. Open to the maritime trade of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, the community comprised merchants, artisans, and scholars, and maintained its own religious and educational institutions. After the riots of the mid-twentieth century and the political evolution leading to the independence of South Yemen, virtually the entire community left Aden. Its members emigrated principally to Israel and Great Britain.
Bene Israël community of Gujarat, with the Magen Abraham synagogue.
Rhenish community attested since the Carolingian period, among the oldest in Rhineland.
The Jewish community of Albania, modest in size, was composed mainly of Sephardim settled during the Ottoman period, notably in cities such as Vlorë and Berat. It lived by trade and crafts and maintained its own religious life. The most notable feature of its history lies in the Second World War: in this majority-Muslim country, the local population, invoking in particular the traditional code of honor (the Besa) prescribing the protection of the guest, hid and protected Jews, whether indigenous or refugees. As a result, almost all Jews present in Albania survived the Shoah. The majority subsequently emigrated, notably to Israel, after the fall of the communist regime.
Community of the great Egyptian port, a major Hellenistic center in Antiquity, recomposed in the 19th century by Sephardic and Levantine immigration.
Community of the Algerian capital, strengthened by those expelled from Spain in 1391 and 1492, naturalized by the Crémieux decree of 1870.
Amara, in southern Iraq, was home to a Jewish community culturally close to that of Basra, established in the southern plain traversed by the Tigris. Its members, Arabic-speaking, participated in river commerce and regional trade, and were organized around their synagogues. During the twentieth century, many made their way to Baghdad. After the creation of the State of Israel and the exodus of the Jews of Iraq in the early 1950s, the community emigrated almost entirely, principally to Israel.
Papal port in the Marches, refuge of Portuguese Marranos of whom twenty-five were burned in 1556 by order of Paul IV.
Ottoman Sephardic community of central Anatolia, active in the wool and angora mohair trade.
Antwerp, a great commercial port, welcomed as early as the sixteenth century merchants of Iberian origin, then became above all, from the end of the nineteenth century onward, a major center of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and of the global diamond trade. The community, a significant portion of which is Hassidic and ultra-Orthodox, developed a dense network of synagogues, schools, and institutions, making Antwerp a singular Jewish center in Western Europe. During the Second World War, it was struck by deportation, but reconstituted itself after the war. It remains today one of the most vibrant and visible Jewish communities in Western Europe.
Banat community, among the first in Hungary to adopt the Neologue rite in the 19th century.
Community originally Romaniote, reinforced by Sephardim, became the principal Jewish community of Greece in the 20th century.
Major medieval Swabian community, reconstituted in the 19th century after late medieval expulsions.
One of the "carrières" of the Jews of the Pope in papal territory, with its own Comtadin Hebrew rite.
Community of the Moroccan port on the Oum er-Rbia, attested in the Portuguese period and place of pilgrimage to the saint Rabbi Abraham Moul Niss.
Ottoman Sephardic community of Thrace, major rabbinical center after the expulsion from Spain, until migrations in the 20th century.
Ancient Jewish community of the Adiabene region, in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, welcomed a small Ashkenazic Jewish community constituted under the Russian Empire and then during the Soviet era, with its members often present in the liberal professions, education, and industry. Remaining modest, the community had only limited institutions within the Soviet framework that was unfavorable to organized religious life. After Armenian independence in 1991, a large part of its members emigrated, primarily to Israel, leaving only a reduced Jewish presence.
Before the massive influx of Sephardim expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century, Smyrna (Izmir) had an ancient Romaniote Jewish presence, of Greek-Byzantine rite and Greek speech, heir to the Jewish communities of the Byzantine world. The arrival of the Sephardim, more numerous and bearers of a rich liturgical and cultural tradition of their own, profoundly transformed the Jewish community of the city. Over time, the Romaniotes were largely assimilated or supplanted by the Sephardic component, which became dominant and stamped the Judaism of Izmir with its Judeo-Spanish character. The local Romaniote tradition thus disappeared almost entirely.
Great Transylvanian community, shared between Orthodox and Neologue rites, among the most populous in the region.
Community of western Moroccan Rif, famous for the pilgrimage to the tomb of Rabbi Amram ben Diwan.
Community of the border town of eastern Morocco, in close connection with the Judaism of neighboring Oran.
Place of the tomb of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov, major Hasidic pilgrimage; massacres during the Haydamaks revolt in 1768.
Ancient community of Upper Mesopotamia, of Mizrahi Arabic-speaking tradition, emigrated chiefly to Aleppo and the Land of Israel.
Orthodox center in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, with a reputed yeshiva and active Hasidic life.
Borough near Łódź, seat of the Alexander Hasidic dynasty, one of the most important in Poland.
Large Belarusian community with a Jewish majority before 1917, cradle of Habad Hasidism and the Zionist movement.
The Jewish community of Bahrain formed in the nineteenth century, primarily from merchants of Iraqi (Baghdadi) origin settled in Manama, active in the trade of pearls, dates, and textiles. Always small, it had a synagogue and a cemetery and integrated into the mercantile society of the Gulf. From 1948 onward, in the context of tensions related to the Israeli-Arab conflict, most of its members left the archipelago, leaving only a residual community. This Jewish presence subsists today in a very reduced but symbolic form.
Baku, in Azerbaijan, experienced a surge in the nineteenth century linked to the oil industry, which attracted Mountain Jews (Juhuro, or Jews of the eastern Caucasian mountains) as well as Ashkenazim from the Russian Empire. The city became a notable commercial and industrial center, where several Jewish traditions coexisted, with distinct synagogues and institutions. Under the Soviet regime, religious life was suppressed while a communal identity persisted. After Azerbaijani independence, a large part of the community emigrated to Israel and the United States, while maintaining a Jewish presence in the country.
Significant community from German and then East European immigration, major port of entry on the Atlantic coast.
The Jewish presence in Bangkok began with the settlement of merchants, among them Baghdadis and foreign residents, from the nineteenth century onward, in the context of Siam's commercial opening. The community was never large, but it was renewed in the twentieth century with the arrival of other immigrants and, later, expatriates and Israelis. Bangkok today has an active communal life, with a synagogue and institutions serving both residents and travelers. The community remains modest in size but durably present.
In Bangui, in the Central African Republic, a small Jewish presence took shape in the twentieth century, consisting essentially of merchants and a few families of Mediterranean or North African origin established during the colonial and post-colonial era. This presence always remained very limited and never formed a community of any significant size. It dispersed over the decades, in connection with the country's economic difficulties and political instability.
The faubourg of Saint-Esprit, near Bayonne, welcomed from the sixteenth century onward crypto-Jewish refugees of Iberian origin, who formed one of the first Sephardic communities in France. Gradually returning to open Jewish practice, its members developed an active trade, particularly with the Iberian Peninsula and the colonies, and tradition attributes to them a role in the spread of chocolate to Bayonne. The community had its own synagogues and institutions. At the time of the Revolution, like the other Sephardim of the southwest, they gained full French citizenship early.
Béja, in the agricultural region of northern Tunisia, sheltered a Jewish community active in the grain trade and peddling serving the hinterland. Of local Sephardic tradition, its members were organized around their synagogues and communal institutions. Under the French Protectorate, they integrated partially into modern economic life and benefited from access to education. After independence, the community emptied in the mid-twentieth century, its members emigrating primarily to France and Israel.
Community of the Kabylie maritime port, flourishing in the Middle Ages under the Hammadides and then the Hafsides.
Belgrade, under Ottoman domination, was home to a Sephardic community established after the Iberian expulsion, speaking Judeo-Spanish and organized around its lower-city neighborhood (Dorćol). In the nineteenth century, after Serbian autonomy and then independence, Ashkenazim from Central Europe joined them, and the Jews gradually obtained civic equality. The community, mercantile and artisanal, had both Sephardic and Ashkenazi synagogues as well as communal institutions. After the German occupation of April 1941, the Jews of Belgrade were among the first in Europe subjected to systematic massacres, perpetrated by the Wehrmacht and the SS with the assistance of local collaborators, and virtually all were exterminated between 1941 and 1942. A small community reconstituted itself after the war.
Subcarpathian Ruthenian community with strong Hasidic presence, prosperous before the Shoah.
Largest Jewish community in Germany, center of the Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums, annihilated under Nazism.
Community concentrated in the Wadi Abou Jamil neighborhood, which became the main Jewish center in Lebanon during the 20th century.
Medieval Languedoc Jewish community, active until the expulsions from the kingdom of France in the 14th century.
Białystok, a textile industrial center in eastern Poland, was home to a large and dynamic Jewish community that constituted a large share of the urban population. An important center of the Jewish labor movement, notably the Bund, it also developed Zionist currents, Yiddish and Hebrew schools, and a dense associative life, its members working in weaving, crafts, and commerce. The city was the birthplace of Dr. Ludwik Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto. Under Nazi occupation, the community was almost entirely annihilated: the ghetto, site of an armed uprising in August 1943, was liquidated and its inhabitants deported to Treblinka and other camps.
Community of the Ziban oasis, at the gates of the Algerian Sahara.
Northern Transylvanian community, active in commerce and Orthodox religious life.
Community of the northern Tunisian port, mixing indigenous Twansa and Grana of Livornese origin.
Established in Blida, on the Mitidja plain, Jews formed a community of merchants, craftsmen, and small manufacturers integrated into the economic life of this Algerian city. The Crémieux Decree of 1870 conferred French citizenship upon them, promoting their schooling and participation in modern urban life. Under Vichy, they suffered the temporary abrogation of this status and antisemitic measures. Like all Algerian Jewry, the community of Blida left the country at independence in 1962, primarily for France.
The Jewish community of Colombia, concentrated in Bogotá as well as Barranquilla, Cali and Medellín, was formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the immigration of Sephardim from the Levant and North Africa and Ashkenazim from Eastern and Central Europe, some fleeing the persecutions of the 1930s. Established in trade, import-export and industry, its members integrated into the country's economic life. The community organized itself into distinct congregations reflecting its origins and built active communal and educational institutions. Remaining small in size, it continues to be a structured, predominantly urban community.
Community of the Papal States, prosperous in the Renaissance then expelled in 1569 during the papacy's anti-Jewish policies.
The Bene Israel, distinct from the Baghdadi community established in Bombay in the nineteenth century, constitute one of the oldest components of Indian Judaism and claim a very ancient presence on the Konkan coast, south of Bombay. Long a village-dwelling community engaged notably in oil-pressing, they preserved certain Jewish observances while integrating into the local environment, and drew closer to normative Judaism through contact with the Jews of Cochin and then the Baghdadis, adopting Sephardic customs. During the British colonial era, many migrated to Bombay, where they distinguished themselves in the administration, the army and the professions, and built synagogues and institutions. After 1948, the great majority emigrated to Israel, leaving only a residual community.
Bône (today Annaba), in eastern Algeria, was home to an ancient Jewish community that played a notable commercial role under the Ottoman regency and then under French rule. The Crémieux Decree of 1870 granted French citizenship to the great majority of the Jews of Algeria, accelerating their Frenchification, their schooling, and their entry into commerce and the liberal professions. Under the Vichy regime, this citizenship was stripped from them and antisemitic measures were applied before being repealed. Like all the Jews of Algeria, those of Bône left the country en masse at the time of independence in 1962, settling mainly in France.
Medieval Rhenish community present along the Middle Rhine, with a Moorish-style synagogue in the 19th century.
Bordeaux was one of the first Sephardic communities tolerated in France, formed from the sixteenth century onward by 'New Christians' of Iberian origin, Marranos who gradually and openly returned to Judaism. Merchants and traders, its members played an important role in Atlantic and colonial commerce, and the community obtained letters patent recognizing its status. At the time of the French Revolution, the Sephardic Jews of the Southwest were among the first to be granted full citizenship, before the Ashkenazim of the East. Bordeaux subsequently maintained an established community, integrated into the life of the city.
Community developed by East European immigration around the West End and later Brookline and Newton.
Pressburg (Bratislava), long the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary under the Habsburgs, was one of the great centers of Ashkenazic Talmudic scholarship, marked by the yeshivah led in the early nineteenth century by Moses Sofer, known as the Hatam Sofer, a major figure in the defense of Orthodoxy against reforms. The community, anchored in an ancient Jewish quarter, was a stronghold of Central European Orthodoxy and retained considerable religious weight. In the twentieth century, after the creation of Czechoslovakia, it participated in modern communal life. Under the collaborationist Slovak State, from 1942 onward, Jews were deported to the Nazi extermination camps; the community was decimated, and only a minority survived.
Major center of Silesia, seat of the reformist rabbinical seminary of Frankel and of Wissenschaft des Judentums.
City in Podolia that gave its name to the Breslov Hasidism founded by Rabbi Nahman.
Brest (Brisk in Yiddish), a border city between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, was one of the oldest and most prestigious centers of Talmudic scholarship in Eastern Europe. It is associated with the Soloveitchik rabbinical dynasty and the "Brisk method," an analytical approach to the Talmud that lastingly shaped Ashkenazi rabbinical study. Its Jews, long a majority in the city, were merchants, artisans, and scholars, and the community possessed numerous synagogues and institutions of study. Under German occupation, the ghetto was established and then liquidated, and virtually the entire Jewish population was massacred in 1941–1942.
Brno (Brünn), the metropolis of Moravia, welcomed after the lifting of residence restrictions in the nineteenth century a largely German-speaking Ashkenazic community, integrated into the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie of this great textile city. The community established modern institutions, synagogues, and schools, and participated in the economic and cultural life of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then of Czechoslovakia. Under German occupation, from 1939 onward, its members were persecuted and then deported, many passing through the Theresienstadt ghetto before being murdered in the extermination camps. After 1945, only a reduced community was reconstituted.
Important commercial and religious center of Galicia, cradle of the Haskalah and crossroads between Empires.
Brussels first attracted merchants of Iberian origin in the early modern period, then, especially from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ashkenazi immigrants from eastern Europe fleeing poverty and persecution. The community, active in commerce, crafts, and trades, established synagogues and institutions, and Belgium recognized the Israelite faith among the officially organized religions. During the Second World War, a significant proportion of Belgium's Jews was deported from the Malines assembly camp, but many were also saved by networks of resistance and rescue. After the war, the community reconstituted itself, with Brussels and Antwerp remaining its two major centers.
Bucharest, the capital of Romania, was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Balkans, composed of an older Sephardic nucleus and a substantial Ashkenazi population that arrived mainly in the nineteenth century. Very active in commerce, crafts, the press, and cultural life, it had numerous synagogues, schools, and institutions, and was the scene of struggles for emancipation, long denied. During the Second World War, under the Antonescu regime, Jews suffered persecution, spoliation, and a pogrom in Bucharest, even though the interior of the country was not subjected to systematic deportation. Under the communist regime, a large part of the community emigrated to Israel, sometimes through agreements negotiated between the State of Israel and the Romanian government.
Largest Jewish community in Latin America, formed by Ashkenazi and Sephardic immigrants around the Once neighborhood.
Sephardic community of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, formed by modern port development.
Bursa, a former Ottoman capital, had a Jewish presence dating back to the Byzantine era, reinforced at the end of the fifteenth century by the arrival of Sephardic refugees expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Jews were active there in commerce and crafts, particularly in silk and textiles for which the city was a renowned center. The community, organized around its synagogues, existed within the tolerant framework offered by the Ottoman Empire to Jews. In the twentieth century, it declined through emigration, its members moving primarily to Istanbul and Israel.
Ottoman Sephardic community of the Dardanelles Strait, trading port on the Aegean Sea.
The Jewish presence in Venezuela dates back to the settlement of Sephardim from Curaçao in Coro, but it was Caracas that became in the twentieth century the principal center of a community that was both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, prosperous and well organized. Active in commerce, industry and the liberal professions, the community built synagogues, schools, clubs and social and Zionist institutions, forming one of the most structured communities in South America. The political and economic instability of the country in the early twenty-first century led to the departure of a large portion of its members to the United States, Israel, Panama and other countries, greatly reducing its numbers.
Hasidic community in northern Transylvania, linked to the Satmar current and local rabbinate.
Community of the great Atlantic Moroccan port, which became the most numerous in the country during the 20th century through rural and urban exodus.
Piedmontese community of Montferrat known for its richly decorated baroque synagogue.
Hessian community, seat of the Israelite consistory of the ephemeral Kingdom of Westphalia under Jérôme Bonaparte.
Chalcis (Chalkida), in Euboea, is home to one of the oldest Romaniote communities in Greece, its Jewish presence dating back to Antiquity and mentioned in ancient sources. The community, of Romaniote tradition, maintained its own religious life and a synagogue, and always remained modest in size. During the German occupation of Greece in the Second World War, its members were targeted by the deportations; some managed to hide with the help of the Greek population and Resistance. A Jewish presence was maintained there after the war, and a synagogue as well as a cemetery still attest to its antiquity.
Charleston, in South Carolina, was one of the earliest and most important Jewish communities in North America, founded by Sephardim in the colonial era and later joined by Ashkenazim. Thanks to a tolerant colonial charter, the Jews there enjoyed early religious freedom and integrated into the commerce and life of the city. Charleston was a cradle of Reform Judaism in America, a reform movement having emerged there in the first half of the nineteenth century within the congregation Beth Elohim. Long one of the largest Jewish communities in the country, it remains a major historical center of American Judaism.
Old community of eastern Poland, famous in Jewish folklore for its « sages of Chełm ».
Community formed by German and then East European immigrants, concentrated around Maxwell Street and later northern neighborhoods.
The island of Chios, in the Aegean Sea, had an ancient Jewish presence, attested in the Byzantine period and then under Genoese and Ottoman rule. The community, of Romaniote tradition and later influenced by the Sephardic influx, lived by trade on this island renowned for its productions, notably mastic. It always remained small in size. Over the centuries and through political upheavals, it was gradually dispersed or assimilated, leaving only a residual presence in the modern and contemporary eras.
Capital of Bessarabia; the Easter pogrom of 1903 sparked international emotion and marked modern Jewish history.
Cincinnati, the great Ohio city on the river of the same name, became in the nineteenth century a major center of American Judaism, particularly of the Reform movement, driven by a significant immigration of German-speaking Jews. The city hosted the founding of Hebrew Union College in 1875, the first enduring rabbinical seminary in the United States and a great center of Reform Jewish training, closely linked to the work of Isaac Mayer Wise. The Jewish community, prosperous and integrated, contributed greatly to the economic, cultural, and religious life of the city. Cincinnati thus played a structuring role in shaping modern American Judaism.
Cleveland, a major industrial center in Ohio, first attracted German-speaking Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, then substantial waves of Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe from the end of the century onward. Established in commerce, industry and the professions, its members formed a large and active community. The community developed a dense network of religious, educational, social and philanthropic institutions, covering the different currents of Judaism. As in other industrial cities of the Northeast, its population moved in the twentieth century from immigrant neighborhoods to the suburbs. Cleveland remains an important Jewish community in the Midwest.
Cluj, the principal city of Transylvania, was home from the eighteenth century onward to an Ashkenazi Jewish community that grew rapidly following emancipation granted by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Deeply divided among Orthodox, Neolog (Reform), and status quo currents, it developed synagogues, schools, and a Jewish press in Hungarian and German, with members active in commerce, the liberal professions, and industry. After the annexation of northern Transylvania by Hungary in 1940, its Jews were confined to a ghetto and then deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, where the vast majority perished. Survivors briefly reconstituted a community after the war before most emigrated to Israel and the West under the Romanian communist regime.
Medieval Rhenish community at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle, attested since the 11th century.
Franconian community of Bavarian Landjudentum, marked by medieval expulsions and modern renewal.
Oldest attested Jewish community north of the Alps, documented presence as early as 321 under the Roman Empire.
The Jewish community of Copenhagen was founded in the seventeenth century by Sephardim, later joined by Ashkenazim, and benefited from increasing tolerance in Enlightenment Denmark, until full emancipation in the early nineteenth century. Well integrated into Danish society, its members were present in commerce, finance, the liberal professions, and cultural life, and the city had a grand synagogue and communal institutions. In October 1943, faced with the German occupier's deportation plan, almost all Danish Jews were saved through a maritime evacuation to Sweden, organized with the assistance of the population. After the war, the community reconstituted itself and remains active.
Flourishing Andalusian community under the Umayyad caliphate, homeland of Maimonides, declined after Almohad persecutions.
Coro, a town in northwestern Venezuela, welcomed in the early nineteenth century Sephardic Jews from Curaçao, who formed the first official Jewish community in the country. Active merchants in Caribbean trade, they integrated into the life of the city while periodically enduring the hostility of part of the population, which at times provoked their departure. The community left a lasting heritage, notably the Jewish cemetery of Coro, one of the oldest still preserved in South America. The Jewish presence there subsequently declined, as Caracas became the center of Venezuelan Judaism.
The Jewish community of Costa Rica formed mainly in the first half of the twentieth century, from Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe, notably from Poland, fleeing poverty, persecution and the rise of Nazism. Concentrated in San José, these immigrants often began as peddlers before making a place for themselves in commerce and industry. The community built a structured institutional life, including a synagogue, school and communal organizations, and was characterized by strong internal cohesion. Remaining modest in size, it continues today to be an organized and active community.
Major community of eastern Latvia, seat of Rabbi Meir Simcha and the Dvinsk yeshiva.
Debdou, in the eastern Moroccan Oriental region, sheltered a singular Jewish community, largely founded by families of Iberian origin who settled there following the persecutions of the late Middle Ages. Relatively isolated, it long preserved Sephardic traditions and a pronounced family cohesion, its members being craftsmen and merchants. Organized around its synagogues and scholars, it maintained its own religious life. During the twentieth century, the community dispersed to the major Moroccan cities and to Israel.
Important community in northeastern Hungary, marked by the Neologue current and expansion in the 19th century.
Hasidic community in Transylvania, seat of a dynasty and important regional center.
The Jewish presence in Delhi is recent and always remained limited, formed mainly by Bene Israel and Baghdadis from Bombay and Calcutta, to whom expatriates and diplomats were added in the twentieth century. Unlike the ancient communities of the western coast or Cochin, Delhi never housed a large, historically rooted Jewish community. Communal life there remained modest and largely informal. The Jewish presence in the Indian capital remains marginal today.
Community of the foothills of the High Atlas, one of the oldest rural mellahs in the Marrakech region.
Romaniote then Sephardic community of Greek Thrace, endowed with a remarkable wooden synagogue.
Diyarbakır, in southeastern Anatolia, sheltered an ancient Jewish community, partly Judeo-Aramaic-speaking, neighboring the Kurdish, Armenian, and Syriac populations of the region. Its members were merchants and craftsmen, organized around their synagogues and religious traditions. During the twentieth century, in a context of regional upheaval and emigration, the community declined sharply. Its members moved largely to Istanbul and then to Israel.
Major industrial center; the father of the Rabbi of Lubavitch served as rabbi there before the Revolution.
Drama, in Greek Eastern Macedonia, was home to a small Sephardic community of Judeo-Spanish speech, whose members worked mainly in the tobacco and cotton trade that was the source of the region's wealth. Organized around its synagogue, it formed part of the network of Sephardic communities of northern Greece. Under Bulgarian occupation during the Second World War, the community was deported in 1943 and exterminated in the Nazi camps, leaving practically no survivors.
Community of the Saxon capital, with a synagogue designed by Gottfried Semper, destroyed under Nazism.
The Jewish community of Dublin, long modest in size, developed mainly in the late nineteenth century with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe, who settled particularly around the Portobello neighborhood, sometimes nicknamed "Little Jerusalem." Its members were merchants, peddlers, and artisans, and they established synagogues and communal institutions. James Joyce immortalized this presence through the character of Leopold Bloom in his novel Ulysses. The community, always small, has declined in the second half of the twentieth century while retaining active institutions.
The maritime Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) tolerated Jews as intermediaries in trade between Christendom and the Ottoman Empire, while subjecting them to restrictions and confining them to a ghetto established in the sixteenth century. The community, of Sephardic tradition, included merchants and physicians, and some of its members played a role in the commercial exchanges and diplomacy of the city. The synagogue of Dubrovnik, fitted out as early as the sixteenth century in the ghetto street, is one of the oldest preserved in Europe and bears witness to this centuries-long presence. The community always remained small and declined in the modern and contemporary eras.
Medieval Rhenish community, becoming important in the 19th century in the Rhenish industrial basin.
Kaffa (Feodosia), a former Genoese trading post on the Crimean coast, sheltered one of the oldest Jewish presences on the peninsula, attested for a long time and composed of several groups: Greek-speaking Romaniotes, Turkic-speaking Krymchaks of rabbinical rite, and Karaites. A commercial crossroads of the Black Sea under Genoese and then Ottoman domination, the city offered Jews a role in trade. The community later experienced integration into the Russian Empire. During the German occupation of Crimea in 1941–1942, the Jews of the city, in particular the Krymchaks, were massacred by the Einsatzgruppen, and the community was almost entirely annihilated.
Figuig, a great oasis on the border between Morocco and Algeria, was home to an ancient Jewish community whose members, often Berber-speaking, were merchants and craftsmen established at this important caravan crossroads. Organized around their synagogues, they participated in trade between the Sahara and the cities of the north. During the twentieth century, and particularly from mid-century onward, the community emptied through emigration to the major Moroccan cities and then to Israel.
Tuscan community protected by the Medici, endowed with a ghetto in 1571 and then a great synagogue after emancipation.
Small Sephardic community of western Greek Macedonia, annihilated during the Shoah.
Major center of talmudic studies in Franconia, called « the Franconian Jerusalem » for its yeshivot.
Established in the coastal oasis of Gabès, in southern Tunisia, Jews formed an ancient community of small merchants and craftsmen, neighbors of the Berber and Arab populations. Of local Sephardic rite, they were organized around their synagogues and religious institutions and preserved distinct traditions particular to the Judaism of southern Tunisia. Under the French Protectorate, they partly opened themselves to modern education. After Tunisian independence, the community gradually emptied, its members emigrating primarily to France and Israel.
Gafsa, a city in west-central Tunisia that was both a caravan crossroads and a mining center, was home to an ancient Jewish community of merchants and artisans. Of local Sephardic rite, its members spoke Judeo-Tunisian Arabic and were organized around their synagogues. Under the French Protectorate, they partially opened themselves to French education and language. During the twentieth century, and especially after independence, the community largely emigrated to France and Israel.
Hasidic hamlet in southern Slovakia, seat of a renowned dynasty and yeshiva.
Gallipoli (Gelibolu), a port on the Dardanelles, welcomed after the Iberian expulsion a Sephardic community connected to the commercial circuits of the Aegean Sea and the Straits region. Its members spoke Judeo-Spanish and were organized around their synagogues, participating in the maritime trade of the Ottoman Empire. A community of modest size, it was gradually absorbed by the attraction of the great Ottoman Jewish centers, such as Istanbul and Salonika, to which its members migrated.
Jewish community of southeastern Anatolia, of Mizrahi tradition close to the Syrian world of Aleppo.
The Jewish presence in Genoa, attested since the early Middle Ages, was intermittent, with the Ligurian Republic alternating between commercial tolerance and expulsion measures. Around the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, the city served notably as a transit port for Jews expelled from Spain after 1492, many of whom were kept in precarious conditions before continuing their journey. Sephardic merchants and Italian Jews (Italkim) were permitted to reside there for periods, especially from the sixteenth century onward, when the Republic sought to attract Levantine trade. The community always remained modest, subject to residency restrictions, before achieving a more stable existence after nineteenth-century emancipation. During the German occupation of 1943–1945, some Genoese Jews were deported.
Medieval Catalan community, center of Spanish Kabbalah around Nahmanide, annihilated by the violence of 1391.
Glasgow was home to the principal Jewish community of Scotland, formed mainly by Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its members were active in commerce, crafts, peddling, and later the liberal professions, and were concentrated for a time in the Gorbals neighborhood before moving to other parts of the city. The community established synagogues, schools, and social and religious institutions. It constituted one of the most significant Jewish concentrations in the United Kingdom before declining demographically in the second half of the twentieth century.
Town near Warsaw, seat of the great Hasidic dynasty of Ger (Gur), among the largest.
Goulimine (Guelmim), at the gateway to the Sahara in southern Morocco, was home to a Jewish community of merchants and caravaneers participating in trans-Saharan trade. Often Berber-speaking, its members served as intermediaries in the trade of desert and oasis products. Organized around its synagogue and traditions, the community maintained ties with other Jewish communities of southern Morocco. During the twentieth century, its members emigrated to Agadir, Casablanca, and Israel.
Grodno (Hrodna), in the Polish-Belarusian border region, was an ancient Jewish commercial and intellectual crossroads, where the community enjoyed privileges dating back to the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Merchants, artisans, and scholars maintained synagogues and houses of study there, and the city was part of the Lithuanian (litvak) tradition of learning. In the modern era, it saw a diverse Jewish political life, from labor movements to Zionist currents. Under German occupation, the community was confined to ghettos and then liquidated in 1942–1943, its members deported to Treblinka and Auschwitz.
The Jewish community of Guatemala took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from immigrants of diverse origins, among them merchants from Central and Eastern Europe as well as Sephardim. Established mainly in Guatemala City, its members concentrated in commerce, import-export, industry, and the liberal professions. The community established religious and communal institutions corresponding to its various components. Remaining small, it nonetheless constitutes an organized community with a lasting presence in Central America.
Place of the tomb of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Habad Hasidism.
Important center of orthodoxy and rabbinic studies in Saxony-Anhalt, with a large baroque synagogue.
Lower Saxon community with a great synagogue designed by architect Edwin Oppler.
Community formed by Ashkenazi and Sephardic immigrants in the capital of former Southern Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe.
The Jewish community of Helsinki traces part of its origin to former Jewish soldiers of the Imperial Russian army (the cantonists) permitted to remain in Finland, then a grand duchy under Russian rule. Remaining one of the smallest Jewish communities in Europe, it organized itself around a synagogue and communal institutions, its members often being merchants and later members of the liberal professions. During the Second World War, despite Finland's co-belligerency with Germany against the Soviet Union, the country refused to hand over its Jewish citizens, and the community survived. It remains active in Helsinki.
Significant Belarusian community, marked by the 1903 pogrom and the Jewish self-defense that organized there.
Under British colonial rule, Hong Kong attracted Jewish merchants as early as the mid-nineteenth century, notably Baghdadis from Bombay and the Indian Ocean merchant diaspora, several of whose prominent families played a leading role in the region's commerce and finance. The community established a synagogue and institutions, and several of its members left their mark on the colony's economic and civic life. Over time, its composition broadened to include Ashkenazim and expatriates of various origins. Hong Kong today retains an organized community, combining permanent residents and expatriates.
Iași (Jassy), former capital of Moldavia, was one of the great centers of Jewish life in Romania, rich in synagogues, houses of study, and cultural institutions. The city is associated with the beginnings of professional Yiddish theater, founded by Abraham Goldfaden in the nineteenth century, and hosted an intense Jewish religious and political life. In 1941, Iași was the scene of an extremely violent pogrom, one of the deadliest of the Shoah in Romania, which claimed very many victims. After the Second World War, the deeply stricken community almost entirely left the city, mostly for Israel.
Under the Dutch East India Company, a few Jewish merchants, including Sephardim, were present in Batavia (Jakarta) from the colonial era, within the commercial networks of the Dutch East Indies. The Jewish community of the archipelago always remained very small and dispersed, also including Baghdadis and immigrants of other origins settled in the port cities. Never numerous nor strongly institutionalized, it declined after Indonesian independence. The Jewish presence in Jakarta is today almost nonexistent.
The discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand at the end of the nineteenth century gave birth to Johannesburg and drew large numbers of Jewish immigrants there, the majority of them Litvaks from Lithuania, who lastingly shaped the character of the South African Jewish community. Established in commerce, the mining industry, finance, and the professions, they built a prosperous and strongly organized community, endowed with synagogues, schools, Zionist organizations, and charitable institutions. Predominantly Orthodox in affiliation, the community of Johannesburg was the heart of Jewish life in South Africa. After the end of apartheid in 1994, a significant proportion emigrated, notably to Israel, Australia, the United Kingdom, and North America, reducing its numbers.
Major center of Volhynia, seat of a renowned Hebrew printing house and a state rabbinical seminary in the nineteenth century.
Kabul was home to the principal Jewish community of Afghanistan, heir to an ancient Jewish presence in the region and strengthened in the nineteenth century, notably by Jews from Bukhara and Persia fleeing persecution. Its members were primarily active in trade, particularly in carpets, textiles, wool and precious stones, and lived gathered around their synagogues. Subject to increasing restrictions in the twentieth century, the community emptied through waves of emigration, principally to Israel, between the 1940s and 1970s. Only a handful of individuals remained until the end of the twentieth century.
Great Talmudic center of medieval Ifriqiya (10th–11th centuries), seat of academies in correspondence with the geonim of Babylonia.
Oldest documented Jewish community in Poland, whose Statute of Kalisz (1264) guarantees rights.
Kandahar, a major crossroads city in southern Afghanistan, was home to a Jewish merchant community integrated into the exchange networks linking India, Iran and Central Asia. Of Eastern tradition, close to the Jews of Bukhara and Persia, it lived by trade and crafts. Subject to the same constraints as Afghan Judaism as a whole, it emptied over the course of the twentieth century. Its members emigrated almost entirely, notably to Israel and India.
Under British administration of India, Karachi saw the establishment in the nineteenth century of a Jewish community composed mainly of Bene Israel from the western coast of India and Baghdadi merchants. Its members served in the administration, crafts, and commerce, and the city had a synagogue and communal life. The partition of 1947 and the creation of Pakistan, a majority-Muslim country, along with tensions arising from the Israeli-Arab conflict, led to the almost total emigration of the community to India and Israel. Only a negligible presence remains today.
Kastoria, in Greek Macedonia, was home to an old Romaniote community, whose presence is long attested in this city renowned for its fur industry. The Jews of Kastoria were distinguished precisely in the manufacture and trade of furs, an activity that gave them a distinctive economic identity. Sephardic contributions were added to the Romaniote component over time. During the German occupation, in 1944, virtually the entire community was arrested and then deported to the Nazi extermination camps, and there were almost no survivors.
Kaunas (Kovno), provisional capital of independent Lithuania between the wars, was home to a large and well-organized Jewish community, endowed with schools, newspapers, and several great yeshivot, notably in the suburb of Slobodka, a renowned center of the Moussar ethical movement. Jews there were merchants, craftsmen, and members of the liberal professions, and the city was a hub of Lithuanian Jewish cultural and political life. During the German occupation, beginning in 1941, mass massacres took place at the Ninth Fort, followed by the establishment of a ghetto. Liquidated in 1944, this ghetto saw the great majority of its inhabitants perish.
Kavala, a port in eastern Greek Macedonia, sheltered a Sephardic community active in the tobacco trade that brought prosperity to the city. Judeo-Spanish-speaking, its members were organized around their synagogues and institutions. During the Second World War, the region came under Bulgarian occupation, and in 1943 the community was deported along with those of other territories occupied by Bulgaria, and almost entirely exterminated in the Nazi camps.
Ancient Lithuanian community, one of the most tolerated in the Grand Duchy, with preserved synagogues.
Ancient Jewish community of western Iran, on commercial routes to Mesopotamia.
Kharkiv, a major industrial and university center in eastern Ukraine, attracted a large Jewish community from the nineteenth century onward, particularly after the easing of residence restrictions. Its members distinguished themselves in commerce, industry, medicine, teaching, and the liberal professions, and the city had a notable Jewish cultural life, both religious and—during the Soviet era—secularized. The Shoah, with the massacres perpetrated during the German occupation, and the Soviet anti-religious policy considerably reduced the community. A Jewish presence nonetheless persisted after the war and was renewed at the end of the twentieth century.
Khénifra, in the heart of the Moroccan Middle Atlas, sheltered a Jewish community whose members, often Berber-speaking, were craftsmen — notably goldsmiths — and merchants in close contact with the Berber populations of the region. Organized around its synagogues, the community preserved traditions specific to the Judaism of the mountain regions. In the mid-twentieth century, its members emigrated to Casablanca and then to Israel.
City in New Russia where Jewish agricultural colonies were established in the early nineteenth century.
Orthodox community in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, marked by the influence of rabbi Moshe Schick.
Kielce, in central Poland, was home to an Ashkenazi Jewish community that developed mainly in the nineteenth century, its members being merchants, craftsmen, and small industrialists. The city had synagogues, schools, and communal institutions, and knew a diverse Jewish political life before the Second World War. Under Nazi occupation, almost the entire community was confined to a ghetto, then deported and exterminated, notably at Treblinka. Kielce is tragically renowned for the pogrom of July 1946, perpetrated against survivors who had returned to the city, which claimed several dozen victims and hastened the departure of many Jews from Poland.
Although Jewish residence was long restricted under the Russian Empire, Kyiv eventually came to host a large Jewish community, principally Ashkenazi, in the nineteenth century as the city became a major commercial and industrial center. Its Jews were present in trade, sugar, banking, crafts, and the liberal professions, and the city was the scene of pogroms as well as the notorious Beilis trial in the early twentieth century. Under the Soviet regime, religious communal life was repressed while a secularized Jewish culture developed. During the German occupation, the Babi Yar massacre of September 1941 exterminated tens of thousands of the city's Jews within a matter of days.
Small Sephardic community of Greek Macedonia, in the northern border region.
Community largely composed of Rhodian Sephardim settled in the Belgian Congo.
Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, sheltered an ancient Jewish community inscribed in the long history of Mesopotamian Judaism. Its members, speaking Arabic and, in part, Neo-Aramaic dialects, were merchants and craftsmen organized around their synagogues. The region experienced strong development in the twentieth century linked to oil extraction. After the creation of the State of Israel and the exodus of Iraq's Jews in the early 1950s, the community of Kirkuk emigrated almost entirely, to Israel and the diaspora originating from Iraqi Judaism.
Small town in Poland associated with Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk, major figure of Hasidism.
Kolhapur, in southern Maharashtra, was home to a small Bene Israel community integrated into local society as artisans, employees, and merchants. Like other Bene Israel communities in the region, it maintained an organized religious life and kept ties with neighboring communities, notably Bombay and Poona. The community always remained small. During the second half of the twentieth century, its members emigrated almost entirely to Israel.
Sephardic community of western Thracian Greece, deported in 1943 under Bulgarian occupation.
East Prussian community, center of Haskalah on the eastern border of Germany.
Eastern Slovak community developed in the 19th century, among the most important in the region before the Shoah.
Ancient community of Volhynia renowned for its rabbinic erudition and study institutions.
Community of northwestern Morocco, with a strong Sephardic component of haketia language.
The Jewish presence in Dominica is connected to the merchant networks of the Caribbean, with Sephardic traders having frequented the island as part of Atlantic colonial commerce. This presence remained tenuous, however, and did not give rise to a permanent and organized community. The island never had enduring Jewish institutions. Jewish settlement there remained marginal.
Sephardic families, some of whom came from Dutch Brazil after the Portuguese reconquest, settled in Guadeloupe in the seventeenth century and participated in the sugar economy and colonial trade. The Jewish presence there was, however, undermined by the restrictive legislation of the French monarchy, notably the Code Noir, which ordered the expulsion of Jews from the colonies. The community declined sharply and left only an intermittent presence. In the contemporary era, a Jewish life has been able to reappear, sustained notably by Jews coming from metropolitan France and North Africa.
Dutch Sephardic and Ashkenazi community established in the city of residence of the States General.
As in Guadeloupe, Sephardic refugees from Dutch Brazil settled in Martinique in the seventeenth century and took part in the sugar economy and colonial trade. The Jewish presence there was hindered by the restrictive legislation of France, in particular the Code Noir, which provided for the expulsion of Jews from the French colonies. The community then declined sharply. In the contemporary era, a Jewish life has reappeared on the island, notably due to the settlement of Jews from metropolitan France and North Africa.
A great commercial port at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans harbored, from the colonial era and especially during the nineteenth century, a Jewish community composed first of Sephardim and then of Ashkenazim, closely tied to commerce, notably the cotton trade. Its members integrated into Creole society and the economic life of the city, and some attained notable public positions. The community established congregations and institutions and contributed to the civic life of the city. It constituted one of the principal centers of Judaism in the American South.
Spanish-speaking Sephardic community of the northern Atlantic Moroccan port, in the Iberian sphere of influence.
Larissa, in Thessaly, was one of the oldest centers of Romaniote Judaism in Greece, with Jewish presence attested from very ancient times. The community, composed of long-established Romaniote families to which Sephardim were added under Ottoman rule, maintained a vibrant religious and cultural life. Its members were active in trade and crafts. During the German occupation of Greece in the Second World War, the community was targeted by the deportations that destroyed Greek Judaism, and a large portion of its members was murdered; a few survivors nonetheless allowed a Jewish presence to persist after the war.
Leeds, in Yorkshire, saw the rise of a major Ashkenazi community following Jewish immigration from eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. Its members concentrated notably in the ready-made clothing industry, which made the city's reputation, as well as in commerce and crafts. The community established a dense network of synagogues, schools, and communal institutions. It gave rise to several figures of British public and cultural life, before declining demographically in the second half of the twentieth century.
Community linked to the great commercial fair of Saxony, prosperous in the 19th century with a strong presence of Ostjuden.
There was never an established Jewish community in Lhasa: the Jewish presence in Tibet was limited to a few itinerant merchants, primarily Baghdadis coming from Calcutta, who traveled there in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the trade in wool and other goods within the Himalayan commerce network. It was an episodic and individual commercial presence, not an organized communal life. No lasting Jewish institution was ever founded there.
Ancient community in western Belarus, seat of a yeshiva founded by Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines.
Baltic port in Latvia, Jewish community marked by emigration to America and the Shoah.
The first Jews present in Peru were conversos who arrived at the time of the Spanish conquest; under the viceroyalty, the tribunal of the Inquisition in Lima prosecuted those suspected of Judaizing. The modern community took shape mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the arrival of Ashkenazim from eastern and central Europe and Sephardim from the Near East and North Africa. Established largely in commerce and industry, its members organized in Lima several distinct congregations according to their origins, endowed with synagogues, schools, and communal institutions. Remaining modest in size, the community is well structured and concentrated in the capital.
Łódź became, in the nineteenth century, thanks to the rise of the textile industry, one of the largest Jewish communities in Poland and Europe. Its Jews were at once workers, craftsmen, traders, and major textile industrialists, and the city hosted a vibrant political, trade union, Yiddish-speaking, and Zionist life, with press, theater, and schools. Under German occupation, the Łódź ghetto (Litzmannstadt), established as early as 1940 and administered by the Judenrat of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, was one of the largest and one of the last to be liquidated in 1944. The vast majority of its inhabitants were deported and murdered at Chełmno and Auschwitz, annihilating this once immense community.
Community present until the expulsion from England in 1290, refounded after the 'readmission' authorized by Cromwell in 1656.
Community established in the mid-19th century, which became one of the largest Jewish centers in the United States around Fairfax.
Ancient community of Volhynia, with a fortified synagogue of the seventeenth century among the most remarkable.
Lublin, in eastern Poland, was one of the great centers of Ashkenazi Talmudic learning from the late Middle Ages onward, earning the name "the Jerusalem of the Kingdom of Poland." Home to a renowned yeshivah and the meeting place of the Council of Four Lands (Va'ad Arba Aratzot), the city gathered Hebrew printers, rabbinical decisors, and, in the modern era, major Hasidic centers and the Hokhmei Lublin founded in the twentieth century. Its Jews were merchants, artisans, and scholars, and the community remained one of the most vibrant in Poland until the Second World War. Under Nazi occupation, the ghetto was liquidated and virtually the entire population exterminated, notably as part of Aktion Reinhard and at the nearby camp of Majdanek.
Jewish intellectual center of medieval Languedoc, home of the Tibbonide family who translated Judeo-Arabic works into Hebrew.
Distinct from the large rabbinical Jewish community of Lwów (Lemberg), a Karaite community established itself in the region and practiced a Judaism based on Scripture alone, rejecting the rabbinical oral tradition. The Karaites of eastern Europe, present in Galicia, Volhynia, and Crimea, spoke Turkic languages (Karaim) and maintained their own liturgy and customs. Over the centuries, they were often regarded legally as a group separate from rabbinical Jews, a status that influenced their fate under various regimes. The small Karaite community of the Lwów region disappeared during the twentieth century, through emigration, assimilation, and the upheavals of the period.
Lyon had a Jewish presence as early as Roman antiquity and then, after long medieval interruptions, saw a community revive in the modern era and especially in the nineteenth century, with the arrival of Alsatian immigrants and then those from Eastern Europe. Its members were active in commerce, silk, industry, and the liberal professions, and the city acquired a grand synagogue and consistorial institutions. During the Second World War, Lyon was both a major center of the Resistance, including Jewish resistance, and the seat of the Gestapo directed by Klaus Barbie, responsible for persecutions and deportations. After the war, the community reconstituted itself and grew considerably with the arrival of Jews from North Africa.
Madeira, the Portuguese Atlantic island, attracted from the time of its colonization New Christians — descendants of converted Jews — in the context of the rise of the sugar economy. Subject to inquisitorial surveillance, some maintained crypto-Jewish practices in secret for several generations. The Jewish presence there remained discreet and eventually faded through assimilation. In the nineteenth century, a few Jews, notably of North African and British origin, settled on the island, leaving traces such as a cemetery.
Community of Sephardic and Baghdadi merchants on the Coromandel Coast, with an ancient Jewish cemetery.
Community of the Sahel Tunisian port, former Fatimid capital, with Jewish presence attested since the Middle Ages.
The Jewish community of Manchester developed mainly from the nineteenth century onward, with the massive arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants from eastern Europe, and numbered among the most important in Britain outside London. Active in the textile industry and commerce, it established a dense network of synagogues, schools, and social, religious, and charitable institutions. Manchester was also an important center of the British Zionist movement, associated notably with Chaim Weizmann, who taught chemistry there. The community remains today one of the most vibrant in the United Kingdom, with a notable Orthodox presence.
The Jewish community of Manila, in the Philippines, formed during the late Spanish colonial era and especially under American administration, bringing together merchants of diverse origins, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, as well as foreign residents. In the 1930s–1940s, the Philippines received a notable number of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi Reich, which temporarily enlarged the community. Manila had a synagogue and an organized communal life during this period. After the war, most of these refugees and residents departed for the United States, Israel or elsewhere, and the community shrank to a residual presence, composed mainly of expatriates.
Ottoman Sephardic community of Aegean Anatolia, in the hinterland of Smyrna.
Lithuanian community in the Suvalki region, active center of Jewish life until 1941.
An ancient Mediterranean port, Marseille knew a Jewish presence from Roman and then medieval times, and became in the twentieth century a major point of arrival for Jews from North Africa. A place of transit and emigration, the city was also during the Second World War a center where rescue and departure networks were organized, before the community suffered roundups and deportations under the occupation. After the independence of the Maghreb countries, the influx of Jews from Tunisia, Morocco, and especially Algeria profoundly transformed the community, which became predominantly North African Sephardic. Marseille today houses one of the largest Jewish communities in France.
Community of the hinterland of Oran, in Algeria, organized around its Jewish quarter.
A modest Jewish community formed in Muscat, under the Sultanate of Oman, from merchants of Iraqi and Persian origin attracted by the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its members participated in exchanges between the Gulf, the East African coast, and India, at a time when Oman constituted a regional commercial power. Always small, the community did not endure as an organized entity and ceased to exist in that form during the nineteenth century.
Established in Mazagan (today El Jadida), a former Portuguese stronghold on the Moroccan Atlantic coast, Jews formed a community of merchants and intermediaries between the interior of the country and the coastline. Organized around their synagogues, its members benefited under the Protectorate from the education of the Alliance israélite universelle. The community participated in the economic life of a developing port city. In the mid-twentieth century, it dispersed largely to Casablanca and Israel.
Médéa, on the Algerian high plateaus, was home to a small, ancient Jewish community integrated into the local commercial and artisanal fabric. The Crémieux Decree of 1870 granted its members French citizenship, which encouraged their Frenchification and schooling. Under the Vichy regime, they were temporarily deprived of that status and subjected to discriminatory measures. Together with all the Jews of Algeria, the community left the country at the time of independence in 1962, settling mainly in France.
Cradle of Hasidism: the Baal Shem Tov, founder of the movement, lived there and is buried there.
Melbourne is home to the largest Jewish community in Australia, whose origins go back to the beginnings of British colonization but which came into its own with the immigration of Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe and then, after the Second World War, with the reception of a large number of survivors of the Shoah and their families. This history profoundly marked the community, which is characterized by strong institutions, a religious life ranging from Orthodoxy to liberalism, and a dense network of Jewish schools. Active in commerce, industry and the professions, the community is also a notable center of Shoah Memory and Yiddish culture in Australia. It remains today vibrant and well organized.
Great Ashkenazi community of Lorraine, with a reputed yeshiva, one of the Jewish communities tolerated under the Old Regime.
Milan, the great economic center of northern Italy, saw a Jewish community develop primarily from the nineteenth century onward, following emancipation, joined in the twentieth century by refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. Composed of Italkim (Italian Jews) and immigrants of various origins, including later Jews from the Sephardic and Oriental worlds, it became one of the principal communities in Italy. Under Fascism, the racial laws of 1938 struck its members, and the German occupation led to deportations to the extermination camps. After the war, the community reconstituted itself and remains one of the most important in the country.
Minsk was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Belarus, deeply rooted in Yiddish culture and very active in the labor movement as well as in Jewish political parties, from the Bund to Zionism. Under the Soviet regime, the city was a center of Jewish culture in the Yiddish language, with schools, a theater, and institutions. During the German occupation, the Minsk ghetto, established in 1941, was one of the largest on Soviet territory and saw organized resistance. The great majority of its inhabitants were exterminated between 1941 and 1943, and the community reconstituted itself only weakly after the war.
Small Belarusian town famous for the Mir yeshiva, one of the most influential in the Lithuanian world.
Great community in northeastern Hungary, important Orthodox and commercial center before the Shoah.
Emilian community protected by the dukes of Este after their withdrawal from Ferrara, endowed with a ghetto in 1638.
Essaouira (Mogador) was founded in the eighteenth century by Sultan Mohammed III, who established there Jewish merchants, the Tujjar al-Sultan, as the kingdom's commercial agents open to the Atlantic. These prosperous traders maintained commercial links with Europe, the Sahara, and beyond, and the city became a great center of Moroccan Judaism, endowed with numerous synagogues, schools including those of the Alliance israélite universelle, and an active rabbinical life. The community, long one of the most significant in the country proportionally, mingled indigenous families with descendants of Iberian exiles. During the twentieth century, it gradually emptied toward Casablanca, France, and Israel.
Ancient community on the Dnieper, one of the most populous in eastern Belarus before the Shoah.
Community of the Tunisian Sahel, near Sousse and Mahdia.
Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, received in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries waves of Jewish immigration, both Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe and Sephardic from the Mediterranean basin and the Near East, attracted by the country's secular and liberal tradition. The community organized itself into several societies and congregations reflecting the diversity of its origins, and developed active educational, cultural and Zionist institutions. Active in trade, crafts and the professions, it integrated into a society renowned for its openness. The second half of the twentieth century saw a certain demographic decline through emigration, notably to Israel, but the community remains structured.
Montreal long hosted the largest Jewish community in Canada, formed mainly by the massive immigration of Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe beginning in the late nineteenth century, to whom were later added survivors of the Shoah and, in the second half of the twentieth century, French-speaking Jews from North Africa. Concentrated notably around Boulevard Saint-Laurent, the community was a great center of North American Yiddish culture, with its press, theater, schools, and institutions, as well as an active Zionist and labor movement. Active in garment-making, commerce, and the professions, it developed a dense communal, educational, and social network. The dual Anglophone and Francophone character—the latter reinforced by Sephardic immigration—makes it a singular community in Canada.
Community marked by the expulsion of 1891 and then by a revival; Choral Synagogue inaugurated in 1906.
The Jews of Mosul, in northern Iraq, constituted one of the oldest communities of Mesopotamia, whose presence is inscribed in the long Jewish history of the region. Some of them spoke Neo-Aramaic dialects (Suret), while also practicing Arabic, and the community preserved liturgical traditions specific to Iraqi Judaism. Merchants, craftsmen, and scholars, its members were organized around their synagogues and institutions. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the mass departures of Iraq's Jews in the early 1950s, the community of Mosul emigrated almost entirely, primarily to Israel.
Community of the Oran coast, in western Algeria, with ancient roots strengthened during the French period.
Sephardic community of Herzegovina, secondary Jewish center of Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian Bosnia.
Community of the Bavarian capital, important in the nineteenth century, destroyed under national socialism.
Major Hasidic center in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, seat of the Munkács dynasty and bastion of orthodoxy.
Black Sea port, center of Habad Hasidic activity and birthplace of the Rabbi of Lubavitch.
Nabeul, a city in Cap Bon renowned for its pottery, was home to a Jewish community of merchants and craftsmen integrated into the local economy. Of Tunisian Sephardic tradition, its members had their own synagogues and communal institutions and benefited under the French Protectorate from access to modern education. Like all Tunisian Jewry, the community endured the trials of the Second World War. After independence in 1956, it dispersed, its members emigrating primarily to France and Israel.
The Jewish community of Nairobi formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the context of British colonization and the construction of the railway connecting the coast to Uganda, attracting merchants and settlers of various origins. Remaining modest, it organized itself around a synagogue and communal institutions serving the Jews of Kenya. The territory was at one point discussed, in the early twentieth century, in connection with a Jewish settlement project debated by the Zionist movement, which was never realized. The community persisted during the colonial period then declined in the second half of the twentieth century, while continuing to exist on a reduced scale.
Jewish community of Lorraine established in the 18th century, seat of a consistory after the Revolutionary emancipation.
Ancient Languedoc community renowned for its talmudic academy and the lineage of the Kalonymides according to medieval tradition.
Site of a major massacre in 1648 commemorated in the liturgy; Hasidic center in subsequent centuries.
The small island of Nevis, in the eastern Caribbean under British rule, welcomed in the seventeenth century a Sephardic community connected to the sugar economy and the Atlantic commercial networks. Jewish merchants played a role in colonial trade there. The vestiges of an old synagogue and a Jewish cemetery still attest to this presence. The community subsequently declined and disappeared as the island's economic importance diminished.
First Jewish community of North America (1654, Nieuw Amsterdam), which became the world's largest Jewish center after East European immigration.
Newport, in the colony of Rhode Island renowned for its religious tolerance, was one of the first centers of organized Jewish life in North America, welcoming Sephardim from the colonial era onward. Jewish merchants participated in Atlantic maritime trade there. The Touro Synagogue, consecrated in 1763, is the oldest synagogue still standing in the United States, and the community is also associated with the famous letter from George Washington affirming religious freedom with regard to Jews. The community subsequently declined with the city's economic retreat after the War of Independence, before Jewish life reappeared there at a later time.
Community of the County of Nice, long attached to the House of Savoy before French annexation in 1860.
Jewish community of the island of Cyprus, attested since Antiquity and linked to modern Zionist migrations.
Historic capital of the Jews of Moravia and seat of the Great Rabbinate of Moravia for several centuries.
Sephardic community of southern Serbia, deported and exterminated during the German occupation.
Ancient community of western Slovakia, famous for its yeshiva led by rabbis Ungar and Weissmandl.
Ashkenazi and Sephardic community of Voivodina, struck by the Hungarian raid of January 1942.
Medieval Franconian community, struck by the pogrom of 1349 linked to the Black Plague.
The Jewish community of Oslo (formerly Christiania) took shape after the lifting, in the nineteenth century, of restrictions that had long prohibited Jews from settling in Norway. Always small, it brought together mainly Ashkenazi immigrants from central and eastern Europe, present in commerce and crafts, and established a synagogue and communal institutions. During the German occupation, a significant portion of Norwegian Jews was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, while another part managed to flee to neutral Sweden. After the war, the community reconstituted itself, remaining modest in size.
Venetian community whose university welcomed Jewish medical students, home to scholars such as Moses Hayyim Luzzatto.
A commercial crossroads of the isthmus linking the two oceans, Panama attracted from the colonial era, and especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sephardic Jews from Curaçao and the Caribbean, as well as Sephardim from the Mediterranean basin and Ashkenazim. The construction of the canal and the growth of import-export trade favored the settlement and prosperity of several families. The community organized itself into distinct congregations according to origin, endowed with synagogues, schools and communal institutions. Remaining active and well structured, the Panamanian Jewish community counts among the most solidly established in Central America, and some Jews there have held prominent public office.
Lithuanian community whose Ponevezh yeshiva was refounded in Bnei Brak after the Shoah.
Transdanubian Hungarian community, center of Talmudic studies and Hebrew printing.
Community of the French capital, present since the Roman period, expelled in 1394 and reborn after the emancipation of 1791.
Patras, a port in the Peloponnese, was home to an ancient Jewish presence, attested since Antiquity, which persisted through a small Romaniote community in the Middle Ages. Under Ottoman rule, Sephardim came to join them, enriching the religious and commercial life of the community. Active in trade, it always remained modest in size. During the Second World War and the occupation of Greece, the community of Patras suffered the persecutions and deportations that decimated Greek Judaism; a few descendants remain in Greece.
Distinct from the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng, a modern Jewish presence took shape in Beijing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries onward, composed mainly of expatriates, diplomats, and foreign merchants. This presence remained limited and dependent on the political climate. After the Communist victory of 1949, the foreign community dispersed and virtually ceased to exist as an organized entity. An expatriate Jewish presence has reappeared in Beijing in recent decades with the country's economic opening.
Community of Western Australia, founded in the nineteenth century and strengthened by twentieth-century immigration.
Budapest, born from the union of Buda, Óbuda, and Pest, became in the nineteenth century one of the greatest centers of Jewish life in Central Europe, driven by an emancipation granted within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The community saw intense development of the Neolog (Hungarian Reform) and Orthodox currents, and was a center of Jewish press, literature, and scholarship. The great synagogue on Dohány Street, completed in the mid-nineteenth century, is one of the largest in the world. From May 1944, following the German occupation of Hungary, provincial Jews were deported en masse to Auschwitz, and the Jews of Budapest were confined to a ghetto and subjected to the violence of the Arrow Cross; a significant proportion nonetheless survived, partly thanks to the actions of diplomats from neutral countries. Budapest remains today one of the principal Jewish communities in Europe.
Early colonial community, seat of the Mikveh Israel congregation and major center of nascent American Judaism.
Plovdiv (Philippopolis), in Bulgaria, was home to one of the most important Jewish communities in the country, whose presence dates back to antiquity and was reinforced by the arrival of Sephardim following the Iberian expulsion of 1492. Judeo-Spanish in language, its members were merchants and craftsmen, organized around their synagogues and institutions. During the Second World War, the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria's pre-war borders was prevented thanks to protests from public opinion, parliamentarians, and the Church, so that the community survived. After 1948, the great majority emigrated to Israel.
Pinsk, a city in Polesia now in Belarus, was an important center of Yiddish-speaking Jewish life, where Jews formed for a long time a major part of the population. A center for the trade in timber and agricultural products transported via waterways, the community housed synagogues, houses of study, Hassidic movements, and, in the modern era, an active Zionist and socialist life. Several figures of Zionism and Israeli public life originated there. Under German occupation, the community was confined to a ghetto and massacred by the Einsatzgruppen in 1941–1942.
Tuscan community benefiting, with Livorno, from the Medici 'Livornine' charters that attracted Sephardic and Marrano merchants.
Small Tuscan community nicknamed the 'Little Jerusalem', tolerated by the Orsini counts and then the Medici.
Sephardic community of northern Bulgaria, whose synagogue hosted young painter Jules Pascin.
One of the oldest Jewish communities in Mazovia, attested since the Middle Ages on the Vistula.
Community in eastern Ukraine, center of Zionism and Habad Hasidic activity before the Revolution.
The Jewish presence on the island of Hispaniola dates back to the colonial period, with Sephardic families connected to Caribbean commercial networks. A more visible community formed in Port-au-Prince in the twentieth century, sustained notably by immigrants from the Levant and Europe, and in the 1930s–1940s by refugees fleeing Nazism, Haiti having issued documents to some of them. Always very small, this community of merchants remained poorly structured institutionally. The political and economic instability of the country in the twentieth century led to its erosion, and today only a symbolic presence remains.
Major community of Greater Poland, influential rabbinic center and renowned seat of talmudic studies.
Eastern Slovak community, regional center of Orthodox and Neologue Judaism.
Preveza, a port on the Ambracian Gulf in Epirus, sheltered a small Jewish community, including a Sephardic component, active in maritime and local trade. Under Venetian and then Ottoman rule, the city was a point of exchange where Jews played a commercial role. The community always remained small in size. During the occupation of Greece in the Second World War, it was struck by the persecutions and deportations that annihilated Greek Jewry, and it was almost entirely destroyed.
Sephardic community of Ottoman Kosovo, connected to the Judeo-Spanish sphere of central Balkans.
Ancient community of Galicia, important crossroads of Jewish life between Sephardic and Ashkenazi tradition.
Poona (Pune), in Maharashtra, was home to one of the principal concentrations of Bene Israel outside Bombay. The presence of garrisons and institutions during the British colonial period attracted many Bene Israel, who served notably in the army and administration and established themselves in various professions. The community had synagogues and a religious life organized according to the customs adopted by the Bene Israel. During the second half of the twentieth century, the majority of its members emigrated to Israel, greatly reducing the local community.
Rabat, the administrative capital of Morocco, was home to a Jewish community combining Toshavim (indigenous residents) and Megorashim (descendants of those expelled from Spain), who lastingly shaped the religious and cultural life of the city and its neighbor Salé. As merchants, artisans, and scholars, some Jews served as commercial and diplomatic intermediaries for the Makhzen and foreign traders. The community had synagogues, yeshivot, and charitable institutions, and the mellah of Rabat formed the heart of Jewish life. Under the Protectorate, many settled in the new city and gained access to modern schooling, notably through the schools of the Alliance israélite universelle. After independence in 1956, the community emptied in waves toward Casablanca, France, and Israel.
One of the oldest communities of the Empire, attested as early as the tenth century, expelled in 1519.
Riga, capital of Latvia, was home to an influential Jewish community, blending Germanized Jews oriented toward German culture and Litvaks from the Lithuanian tradition. Its members were active in commerce, industry, the liberal professions, and intellectual life, and the city had synagogues, schools, and a diverse Jewish political life, from Zionism to the labor movement. During the German occupation, the community was confined to a ghetto, and a large number of its members were massacred in 1941 in the Rumbula forest. The few survivors emigrated after the war, notably to Israel.
Community formed by European and North African immigration, long established in the Praça Onze neighborhood.
Dutch port community bringing together Portuguese Sephardim and Ashkenazim from the 17th century onward.
Sephardic community of the Bulgarian Danube, commercial crossroads where writer Elias Canetti was born.
Rzeszów (Reisha in Yiddish), in Galicia, was home to an active Jewish community from the early modern period, present in commerce, crafts, and the peddling trade of the hinterland. The city was also a center of Ashkenazi religious life, with synagogues, houses of study, and a Hasidic presence. Emancipated under the Austro-Hungarian administration, its Jews participated in the economic and cultural life of the region. Under German occupation, the community was confined to a ghetto and then almost entirely exterminated between 1942 and 1944, notably at Bełżec.
Community of the Atlantic Moroccan port, active during the Portuguese period and later under the Saadians and Alaouites.
Under French colonial rule in Indochina, Saigon was home to a small Jewish community composed of European expatriates, civil servants, and merchants, among them Jews from North Africa and the Near East as well as Baghdadis. The community had an organized life during the colonial period and continued to exist under the Republic of South Vietnam, with a synagogue. The fall of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975 led to the departure of its members, who dispersed to France, Israel, the United States, and other countries. The Jewish presence there then disappeared as an organized community.
The small Dutch island of Sint Eustatius (Statia) was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a flourishing Caribbean commercial crossroads, nicknamed the 'Golden Rock,' which attracted Sephardic merchants. They founded a congregation there and built a synagogue, whose ruins (Honen Dalim) still bear witness to this presence. The island's prosperity rested on re-export trade, in which Jewish merchants participated actively. With the commercial decline of Sint Eustatius, following in particular the upheavals of the late eighteenth century, the community dwindled and then disappeared in the nineteenth century.
Imperial capital where an authorized Jewish elite built a community and the Great Choral Synagogue.
Saint-Thomas, a Danish free port in the Caribbean, was home to one of the most active Sephardic communities in the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at the heart of transatlantic commercial networks. Jewish merchants prospered there in trade and participated in the life of the city of Charlotte Amalie. The synagogue of Charlotte Amalie, still in use, is among the oldest in the Americas and bears witness to this presence. Saint-Thomas also gave birth or refuge to figures of Caribbean Judaism. The community declined as the island's commercial importance waned, while leaving a legacy that remains visible.
Salé, an Atlantic port neighboring Rabat on the other bank of the Bou Regreg, was home to an ancient Jewish community composed of artisans, merchants and commercial intermediaries. Renowned for its corsair history in the early modern period, the city offered Jews a role as agents in trade and the ransoming of captives. The community lived according to the Moroccan rite and maintained close ties with neighboring rabbinical centers. In the twentieth century, like Moroccan Judaism as a whole, it gradually emptied through emigration to Casablanca, France and Israel, especially after independence in 1956.
The California Gold Rush attracted to San Francisco, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, numerous Jewish merchants, mostly of German-speaking origin, who quickly made it one of the principal Jewish communities on the West Coast of the United States. Rather than seeking gold, many established themselves as traders, suppliers and founders of commercial houses, and several Jewish families played a prominent role in the city's economic development. The community distinguished itself by an open Jewish life and a strong implantation of Reform Judaism, with large congregations. Active in philanthropy, culture and public affairs, it remains today an important and liberal community of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Chilean community from Ashkenazi and Sephardic immigration of the early 20th century.
Large Brazilian community from East European and Levantine immigration, historically concentrated in the Bom Retiro neighborhood.
Shortly after the founding of the Georgia colony in 1733, a group of Jews, mostly Sephardim who had arrived from London, landed in Savannah, making it one of the oldest centers of American Judaism. The community formed around the congregation Mickve Israel, one of the first organized Jewish congregations in North America. Its members took part in the commerce and life of the colony and then the state. Over time, Ashkenazim joined the Sephardim, and the congregation evolved toward Reform Judaism. Savannah remains a notable historical center of Southern Judaism.
Sevastopol, a port city and naval base in Crimea founded in the late eighteenth century, saw the establishment of a Jewish community, predominantly Ashkenaze, after the city was opened to civilian residence during the nineteenth century. Its members, merchants and craftsmen, participated in the life of a major military port of the Russian Empire. The community had religious life and institutions. During the German occupation of Crimea in 1941–1942, the Jews of Sevastopol were massacred by Nazi forces, and the community was almost entirely destroyed.
Serrès (Serres), in Greek Macedonia, was home to a Sephardic community descended from the Iberian exiles received in the Ottoman Empire. Its members, Judeo-Spanish in language, were active in commerce, notably in tobacco and the region's agricultural products. The community had synagogues and communal institutions. During the Second World War, the region came under Bulgarian occupation, and in 1943 the community was deported and almost entirely exterminated in the Nazi camps.
Community of the Constantinois highlands, in eastern Algeria, formed during the colonial period.
Settat, in the Chaouia region of Morocco, was home to a small Jewish community composed mainly of merchants and peddlers serving the agricultural hinterland. Organized around their synagogue and institutions, its members maintained ties with the larger neighboring communities. During the twentieth century, the community gradually emptied toward Casablanca, France, and Israel.
Sfax, a major port in southern Tunisia, was home to a Jewish community of local Sephardic tradition, active in trade, crafts, and commerce centered on olive oil, almonds, and the region's agricultural products. Under the French Protectorate, its members benefited from the education provided by the Alliance israélite universelle and opened themselves to French culture. During the Second World War, the city experienced, like the rest of Tunisia, German occupation and the imposition of forced labor measures on Jews. After independence, the community dispersed primarily to France and Israel in the mid-twentieth century.
Šiauliai (Shavl), in Lithuania, was home to a dynamic Jewish community closely linked to the leather and textile industries, several firms of which were founded and run by Jews. Merchants, artisans, tanners, and workers animated an active Ashkenazi communal life, with synagogues, schools, and associations. During the German occupation in 1941, a large part of the community was massacred, and the survivors were confined to a ghetto. The ghetto was liquidated in 1944 and its inhabitants deported, leaving only a handful of survivors.
Community of Oran, in Algeria, established during the colonial period around the garrison city.
Ancient Jewish community of the Lebanese port, equipped with a synagogue in the old Jewish quarter.
Hasidic community in Maramureș, seat of the Sighet dynasty and birthplace of Elie Wiesel.
Skopje (Üsküb under the Ottomans) was home to a Sephardic community established after 1492, heir to the great Judeo-Spanish centers of the Balkans and speaking Ladino. Merchants, craftsmen, and peddlers, its members lived grouped in a Jewish quarter and maintained a religious and cultural life of Sephardic tradition. The community experienced, in the early twentieth century, the upheavals of the Balkan wars and integration into the Yugoslav kingdom. In March 1943, under the occupation of Macedonia by Bulgaria, Germany's ally, almost all of Skopje's Jews were gathered and then deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered; there were almost no survivors.
Birthplace of the Hasidic dynasty of Slonim, a Belarusian community with a rich rabbinical heritage.
Belarusian community with a misnagdim heritage, seat of a yeshiva and eminent Lithuanian rabbis.
Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, housed the largest Jewish community in the country, predominantly Sephardic and Judeo-Spanish-speaking, heir to the Iberian exiles welcomed into the Ottoman Empire. Merchants, craftsmen, and members of urban professions, its members had synagogues — including the great synagogue of Sofia — and communal institutions. During the Second World War, despite antisemitic legislation and deportations carried out from occupied territories, the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria's pre-war borders was prevented, and the community survived. After 1948, nearly all of Bulgarian Jewry emigrated to Israel.
Community of eastern Constantinois, in Algeria, near the Tunisian border.
Long present in Sousse, the coastal city corresponding to ancient Hadrumetum, the Jews formed a community of merchants and craftsmen integrated into the regional economic life. Of local Sephardic tradition, they had synagogues and communal institutions, and benefited under the French Protectorate from the schooling of the Alliance israélite universelle. Like all the Jews of Tunisia, they experienced the German occupation during the Second World War. After independence in 1956, the community gradually left the city, its members emigrating primarily to France and Israel.
Split (Spalato), under Venetian dominion, welcomed a Sephardic community whose merchants animated Adriatic trade, particularly after the development of a commercial entrepôt linking the city to the Ottoman hinterland. The Jews were confined to a ghetto there but participated actively in the port city's maritime growth. The community subsequently passed under Austrian administration, which gradually brought emancipation. During the Second World War, Dalmatia occupied by Italy offered relative respite to the Jews, but after the Italian capitulation of 1943 and the arrival of German forces, part of the community was deported while others joined the partisans or sought safer areas. A Jewish presence survived after the war.
Stanisławów (today Ivano-Frankivsk), in eastern Galicia, was home to a significant Jewish community integrated into the commercial and artisanal life of a city of mixed Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish populations. The Jews there had synagogues, schools, and institutions, and the community encompassed various currents of Ashkenazi Judaism, from Hasidism to Zionism. Under German occupation, beginning in 1941, it was struck by mass massacres, including a large killing at the cemetery, and then confined to a ghetto. The ghetto was liquidated in 1943, and virtually the entire Jewish population was exterminated.
Permitted to settle in Sweden from the late eighteenth century, the Jews of Stockholm formed a bourgeois Ashkenazi community, progressively emancipated and well integrated into Swedish society. Its members were active in commerce, finance, industry, the arts, and sciences, and the city established a grand synagogue and communal institutions. Sweden having remained neutral during the Second World War, the community escaped the Shoah and welcomed Jewish refugees, including almost all the Danish Jews saved in 1943. It remains today one of the leading Jewish communities in Scandinavia.
Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, was long a heart of the Ashkenazic Jewish life of the region, marked by a rich rabbinical tradition and a surrounding rural Judaism. Alternately French and German according to the conflicts, the community played an important role in the modernization of French Judaism, notably within the consistorial organization established under Napoleon. Its members were present in commerce, crafts, education, and the liberal professions. During the Second World War, the community was evacuated and struck by persecution, before reconstituting itself after the war and remaining one of the most important in France.
Predominantly Neologue community of Voivodina, endowed with a large Art Nouveau synagogue.
Kurdish-speaking Jewish community of Iraqi Kurdistan, almost entirely emigrated to Israel after 1950.
Community of Baghdadi and Ashkenazi merchants in the principal port of eastern Java.
The Jewish community of Sydney is one of the oldest in Australia, its origins going back to the first convoys of the British penal colony, among which Jews figured, as well as to the free immigrants who came afterward. During the nineteenth century, it built institutions and synagogues and participated in the economic and civic life of the colony of New South Wales. Strengthened later by immigration from Eastern Europe, by survivors of the Shoah and by Jews from South Africa and other countries, it presents a diverse composition. Active and well established, it constitutes, along with Melbourne, one of the two great centers of Australian Judaism.
Neologue community in southern Hungary, with a large Art Nouveau synagogue designed by Lipót Baumhorn.
Ancient Jewish community in Iranian Azerbaijan, speaking a local Judeo-Persian dialect.
Tashkent, a major administrative and industrial center of Russian and then Soviet Central Asia, was home to a Jewish community composed of Bukharan Jews (Bukharim), of Judeo-Tajik speech and ancient Eastern tradition, and of Ashkenazim who came with the Russian administration. During the Second World War, the city received a large number of Jewish refugees evacuated from western regions threatened by the German advance. The community maintained a religious and cultural life, despite the constraints of the Soviet regime on practice. After the fall of the USSR and the independence of Uzbekistan, the vast majority emigrated, notably to Israel and the United States.
Tallinn (Reval), in Estonia, was home to a small Ashkenazi Jewish community, formed mainly in the nineteenth century and well integrated into the bourgeois and cultural life of the city. Independent Estonia granted its Jewish minority a remarkable degree of cultural autonomy in the interwar period. During the German occupation in 1941, the community was almost entirely exterminated, and Estonia was presented at the Wannsee Conference as "free of Jews." The Jewish presence reconstituted itself only weakly after the war.
Community of the Strait, with a strong Spanish-speaking Sephardic component (haketia), cosmopolitan at the time of the city's international status.
Tarnów, in Galicia, was the seat of a large Jewish community in which Jews constituted a significant share of the population and were active in commerce, crafts, and industry. A crossroads of Ashkenazi Jewish currents, the city brought together both Hasidic circles and Mitnagdim, as well as, in the modern era, supporters of the Jewish Enlightenment, Zionism, and the labor movement. Synagogues, schools, and communal institutions testified to an intense Jewish life. Under German occupation, the community was confined to a ghetto and then almost entirely exterminated between 1942 and 1944, at Bełżec, Auschwitz, and through on-site executions.
Community of the corridor between Fès and eastern Morocco, organized around its mellah.
In addition to the long-established Georgian Jews and the more recent Ashkenazi community, Persian Jewish merchants settled in Tbilisi, playing the role of intermediaries in trade between Iran, the Caucasus and Russia. Stemming from Iranian Judaism, they were distinguished by their origins and customs from the other Jewish components of the city. Over time, this small community drew closer to and partly merged into the broader Georgian Jewish ensemble. Like the other Jews of Georgia, its descendants emigrated in large part in the twentieth century, notably to Israel.
Distinct from the ancient community of Georgian Jews (Gruzinim), an Ashkenazi community established itself in Tbilisi under the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, composed of officials, military men, merchants and members of the liberal professions who came from the Russian provinces. Russian-speaking and of Ashkenazi tradition, it was distinguished by its language and customs from the long-established Georgian Jews. Under the Soviet regime, it shared in the life of the city while enduring the constraints weighing on religious practice. After the fall of the USSR and the independence of Georgia, the majority of its members emigrated, above all to Israel and Russia.
Jewish center of central Ukraine, seat of a Hasidic dynasty stemming from the Chernobyl lineage.
Ukrainian town birthplace of an important Hasidic dynasty founded by Rabbi Menahem Nahum.
Tébessa, in the far east of Algeria, was home to a Jewish community that was close, in culture and ties, to the neighboring Tunisian communities. Its members were peddlers, merchants, and artisans serving the city and its hinterland. The Crémieux Decree of 1870 granted them French citizenship in principle, accelerating their integration, which was nonetheless suspended under the Vichy regime. When they departed during the twentieth century, its members settled in France or neighboring Tunisia.
Primary Jewish community of Iran in the modern era, which became the center of Persian Jewish life in the twentieth century.
Ottoman Sephardic community on the Thracian coast of the Sea of Marmara, active commercial port.
Lithuanian city renowned for the Telz yeshiva, a major center of misnagdim Talmudic study.
Community of Russian and Ashkenazi refugees settled in the treaty port of northern China.
Timișoara, a multicultural city in the Banat, welcomed a developed Jewish community under Habsburg rule, blending older Sephardim with German-speaking and Hungarian Ashkenazim. Emancipated in the nineteenth century, its members distinguished themselves in commerce, industry, medicine, and the cultural life of a city where Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, and Serbs coexisted. As a large part of interior Romania was not subjected to systematic deportation, the community survived the Shoah in part, despite the persecutions, forced labor, and antisemitic legislation of the Antonescu regime. After the war, the majority emigrated to Israel and the West, leaving only a residual community.
Tirana, the capital of Albania, was home to a small Jewish community as well as, in the years before and during the Second World War, Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in other European countries. In keeping with the general attitude of the country, and notably in the name of the traditional code of honor of Besa, the local population offered refuge and protection to Jews during the occupation. This solidarity contributed to the survival of virtually all the Jews present in Albania. After the war and under the communist regime, Jewish life remained discreet, and most Jews subsequently emigrated, above all to Israel.
Ottoman Sephardic community of the Smyrna hinterland, in Aegean Anatolia.
Tiznit, in the Souss region of southern Morocco, was home to a Jewish community renowned for its goldsmith and jeweler craftsmen, who produced the famous silver jewelry of the Amazigh tradition. Often Berber-speaking, its members were integrated into the economic exchanges with the surrounding Berber populations and organized around their synagogues. From 1948 onward, and even more so during the 1950s and 1960s, almost the entire community emigrated, primarily to Israel.
The Jewish presence in Tokyo, and more broadly in Japan, began with the country's opening in the Meiji era and the settlement of foreign merchants and residents. A more visible community took shape in the twentieth century, fed notably by refugees fleeing pogroms, the Russian Revolution, and then Nazism, some of whom transited through Japan. Tokyo developed an organized communal life, with a synagogue and institutions serving a population composed mainly of expatriates. The community remains modest in size but durably established, with an active religious and cultural life.
Major Castilian community of medieval Spain, endowed with famous synagogues, dispersed by the pogroms of 1391 and the expulsion of 1492.
The Jewish community of Toronto developed strongly from the late nineteenth century onward with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe, first settled in immigrant neighborhoods and the garment industry. Over the course of the twentieth century, it experienced considerable growth and social mobility, and eventually surpassed Montreal to become the largest Jewish community in Canada. It built a rich network of synagogues, schools, social and cultural institutions covering all currents of Judaism. Strengthened by successive waves of immigration, including survivors of the Shoah and Jews from many countries, it constitutes today a large and highly diverse community.
Medieval Jewish community of Languedoc, subject to the ritual of the episcopal "slap," then reconstituted in the contemporary period.
Ancient Rhenish community, among the oldest in Germany, birthplace of Karl Marx.
The community of Trieste developed after the city was established as a free port by the Habsburgs in the early eighteenth century, attracting Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Levantine merchants. The Edicts of Toleration of Joseph II at the end of the eighteenth century fostered early emancipation and deep integration into the merchant and financial bourgeoisie of the Adriatic, notably in insurance and maritime shipping. The community, prosperous and cultured, was a notable center of intellectual and literary life in the Austro-Hungarian city. A large, monumental synagogue was built there at the beginning of the twentieth century. Under German occupation after 1943, Trieste was the site of the only Nazi extermination camp on Italian soil (the Risiera di San Sabba) and part of the community was deported.
Trikala, in Thessaly, was an ancient center of Romaniote Judaism in Greece, with a long-attested Jewish presence. The community, composed of Romaniote families to whom Sephardim were added under Ottoman rule, lived from commerce and crafts and maintained its synagogue and traditions. During the German occupation of Greece in the Second World War, its members were targeted by deportations to the extermination camps; a portion nonetheless managed to hide with the help of the local population and the Resistance, so that a Jewish presence survived in Trikala after the war.
The Jewish presence in Trinidad dates back to the Sephardic merchant networks of the Caribbean during the colonial era, but it was primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that a more visible community took shape, reinforced by immigrants from Europe and, in the 1930s–1940s, by refugees fleeing Nazism. With many of its members established in commerce, they formed a small community. A communal life, with a place of worship, was organized notably in Port of Spain. The community has remained small throughout its history.
Ancient medieval community of western Slovakia, expelled then reconstituted in the modern period.
11th-century Champagne community, homeland of Rashi, major center of Ashkenazi biblical and Talmudic exegesis.
Community in Podolia annihilated during the Khmelnytsky massacres in 1648, emblematic place of Jewish chronicles.
Established in Tunis since antiquity, the Jews of the Tunisian capital formed an ancient and stratified urban community, distinguishing the Twansa (Toshavim, indigenous Jews of the Tunisian rite) from the Grana (Livornese in origin, come from Italy). Long concentrated in the hara, they were craftsmen, merchants, goldsmiths, and — under the French Protectorate — increasingly present in modern commerce and the liberal professions, many adopting the French language and culture. The community had synagogues, schools including those of the Alliance israélite universelle, and active rabbinical institutions. After Tunisian independence in 1956, and even more so after the tensions of the 1960s, the great majority emigrated to France, Israel, and North America.
Turin, capital of Piedmont, was home to an ancient Italian Jewish community (Italkim), long confined to the ghetto under the Ancien Régime. The Jews of the Kingdom of Sardinia were emancipated in 1848 by the Statuto Albertino, and those of Turin participated actively in the Risorgimento and the construction of unified Italy, some attaining prominent positions in the army, the administration, and public life. The city acquired a grand synagogue, the Mole originally conceived as testimony to its ambition. Under Fascism, the racial laws and then the German occupation struck the community, which reconstituted itself after the war and remains active.
Varna, a Bulgarian Black Sea port, was home to a largely Sephardic Jewish community active in maritime commerce and regional trade. Judeo-Spanish in speech, its members were organized around their synagogues and institutions. Like all the Jews within Bulgaria's former borders, the community escaped deportation during the Second World War. After the independence of the State of Israel, the great majority of its members emigrated, principally to Israel.
Largest Jewish community in Europe before 1939, major cultural and religious center, annihilated in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Romaniote then Sephardic community of Greek Macedonia, whose synagogue remains in the Barbouta quarter.
Venetian community endowed with a ghetto in 1599, one of the oldest in northern Italy.
Important Jewish center in Podolia, severely struck by the Shoah during the massacres of 1941-1942.
Vitebsk, in Belarus, was the heart of a rich Yiddish-speaking community in which Jews constituted a significant proportion of the urban population. Merchants, craftsmen, and workers, they animated synagogues, houses of study, and communal institutions, and the city became, in the early twentieth century, a notable artistic center, birthplace of the painter Marc Chagall and seat of an avant-garde art school. Under the Soviet regime, religious life was suppressed while a secularized Jewish culture persisted. During the German occupation, the community was confined to a ghetto and almost entirely exterminated in 1941.
Volos, a port in Thessaly, was home to a Jewish community comprising an ancient Romaniote component as well as Sephardim, active in trade, notably maritime trade. The community had synagogues and institutions and participated in the life of the city. During the occupation of Greece in the Second World War, a portion of the Jews of Volos escaped deportation thanks to warnings and the assistance of the Greek population and Resistance, as well as local civil and religious authorities, many managing to hide in surrounding villages. Despite losses, a notable portion of the community survived, and a Jewish presence was maintained there after the war.
Seat of the famous Volozhin yeshiva, founded in 1803, model for Lithuanian Talmudic academies.
Community of the New Zealand capital, founded in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Xanthi, in western Greek Thrace, sheltered a Sephardic community whose members worked primarily in the tobacco trade, the region's major activity. Judeo-Spanish-speaking, they were organized around their synagogue and communal institutions. During the Second World War, the region came under Bulgarian occupation, and the community was deported in 1943 and annihilated in the Nazi camps.
Zagreb (Agram in German) was home to the principal Jewish community of Croatia, composed mainly of German- and Hungarian-speaking Ashkenazim who settled from the early nineteenth century onward as residence restrictions were lifted. Highly integrated into the urban bourgeoisie, the community was active in commerce, industry, medicine, and the liberal professions, and established modern institutions as well as a grand synagogue. Communal life combined Neolog (Reform) and Orthodox currents, in keeping with the Austro-Hungarian sphere. After the establishment in 1941 of the Independent State of Croatia under the Ustaše movement, allied with Nazi Germany, the community was subjected to persecutory laws and then deportation, and the great majority of its members were killed in Ustaše and Nazi camps. A reduced community reconstituted itself after 1945.
Zante (Zakynthos), an Ionian island long under Venetian and then British rule, was home to a Jewish community comprising Romaniotes and Italkim (Italian Jews), reflecting its ties to the Venetian world. Its members were active in trade and crafts. The history of this community remains renowned for its fate during the Second World War: according to the transmitted tradition, the Orthodox bishop and the mayor of the island refused to hand over the list of Jews to the occupiers and organized their protection, so that the entire community survived the Shoah. After the war, most of the Jews left the island, notably for Israel and Athens.
In the Azores, a Portuguese Atlantic archipelago, New Christians (cristãos-novos), descendants of Jews forcibly converted in Portugal, settled from the early modern period onward. Subject to Inquisition surveillance, some quietly preserved crypto-Jewish practices on several islands. In the nineteenth century, after the abolition of the Inquisition, Jews coming notably from North Africa settled on the islands, founding communities and cemeteries, particularly in Ponta Delgada and Angra. These communities remained small and eventually ceased to exist through emigration and assimilation, leaving heritage vestiges behind.
The Jewish presence in the Cayman Islands is connected to the Sephardic merchant networks of the Caribbean, with families of Jamaican and Curaçaoan origin having frequented the archipelago as part of regional trade during the colonial era. This presence remained marginal and did not give rise to an organized and durably established community. Jewish life may have reappeared in the contemporary era with the territory's rise as a financial center. The historical rootedness there nonetheless remained tenuous.
Rabbanite community of Fostat and then Cairo, known through the Genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue, distinct from local Karaites.
Cape Town harbored the oldest Jewish community in South Africa, with a Jewish presence attested from the very beginnings of European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, and an organized congregation taking shape in the first half of the nineteenth century. The community was subsequently considerably reinforced by Litvak immigration from the late nineteenth century onward. Active in commerce and the professions, it established synagogues, schools, and communal institutions and played a prominent role in the life of the city. Like all South African Jewry, it experienced significant emigration after 1994, while remaining a rooted and structured community.
Community of the city of northwestern Tunisia, mixing Twansa and contributions of Algerian origin.
The Jewish community of Paraguay, concentrated in Asunción, took shape in the twentieth century from immigrants coming from Eastern Europe as well as Sephardim, in a country with a more modest Jewish immigration than its neighbors. Paraguay also served, in the 1930s and 1940s, as a country of transit or refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in Europe. The immigrants settled mainly in commerce and developed a communal life with synagogues and organizations. Always small, the community experienced a decline through emigration to Argentina, Israel, and other countries in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Tafilalet, a vast oasis region in southeastern Morocco, was one of the oldest centers of Jewish presence in the Maghreb, situated on the routes of trans-Saharan caravan trade. Its Jews, Arabic- and Berber-speaking, played a role as commercial intermediaries and moneylenders, and the region was renowned for its religious traditions and venerated saints. The communities, dispersed among villages and small towns such as Rissani and Erfoud, preserved their own customs and liturgies. After 1948, and over the following decades, the Jewish population of the Tafilalet emigrated in large part to Israel.
Ashkenazim of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, rationalists and Talmudists (Vilna Gaon), opposed to Hasidism.
Maghrebi community of Jerusalem founded in 1860 by David ben Shimon.
"Black" subgroup of the Cochin Jews, the oldest, who mostly departed for Israel.
Jews forcibly converted to Christianity practicing Judaism in secret.
Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Kurdistan). Heirs of the Babylonian communities, Talmudic and Gaonic traditions.
Jews converted to Catholicism, holding a distinct social status under the Inquisition.
« White » Jews of Cochin, descendants of Sephardim, synagogue from 1568.
Greek-speaking Jews of the Byzantine Empire, present even before the post-1492 Sephardic dispersion. Minhag Romania.
Israelite community of Mount Gerizim, ~800 members in Kiryat Luza and Holon.
From the Iberian Peninsula before and after the expulsions of 1492–1497. Dispersed toward the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, Italy, the Americas. Language: Ladino / Judeo-Spanish.
Iberian exiles of the Ladino-Judezmo tongue, a distinct cultural world within the Ottoman Empire.
Russian "Sabbath-observing" peasants who adopted Judaic practices from the eighteenth century, some of whom fully converted. Many were deported to the Caucasus then emigrated to Israel.
In the Maghreb, the duality between native Jews (toshavim) and those expelled from Spain (megorashim) shapes centuries of communal life.
Jews of German origin with the West European minhag; emigrated to the Yishuv from 1933.
Community of Yemen, isolated and preserved for over two millennia. Liturgy and pronunciation close to biblical Hebrew.
