Kastoria

The Jewish presence in Kastoria most likely dates back to the Byzantine era, if not earlier. The Romaniote Jews, whose name derives from Rhomania — the designation the Byzantine Empire gave itself — formed a Greek-speaking population dispersed throughout mainland Greece, Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia. Their own liturgical rite, the minhag Romania, and their use of Judaized Greek set them clearly apart from Western Jews as well as Iberian Sephardim.

The most celebrated testimony concerning the Jews of medieval Macedonia and Epirus remains that of the traveler Benjamin of Tudela, who journeyed through the Mediterranean world in the twelfth century and recorded the communities he encountered. While his itinerary does not mention Kastoria with certainty, it attests to the existence of a dense network of Romaniote communities in the region, engaged in silk weaving, trade, and craftsmanship. Comparison with neighboring communities, such as those of Larissa in Thessaly, sheds light on what Jewish life in Kastoria may have looked like during this period: a population integrated into the Byzantine urban economy, organized around its synagogue and rabbinical court [Messinas, 2012].

Kastoria, a Byzantine stronghold briefly contested among Bulgarians, Serbs, and Byzantines, underwent many changes of rulers before its Ottoman conquest. Against this backdrop of instability, the Romaniote Jews, protected by the status of tolerated communities, were able to maintain their continuity. The Byzantine imprint of Kastoria — still visible today in the frescoes of its dozens of churches — forms the backdrop of a Jewish existence whose earliest documentary traces unfortunately remain fragmentary. This is why, for this period, it is appropriate to reason from converging evidence rather than archival certainties, following the approach that scholarship has established for other ancient Hellenic communities, such as those of Cyprus studied by Charitini Tzavara [Tzavara, 2010].

The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, radically transformed the conditions of Jewish life in the region. Kastoria came under Ottoman rule and was integrated into an imperial system which, unlike the contemporary Christian kingdoms, did not practice the expulsion of Jews but organized them into fiscal communities, the millet, enjoying broad internal autonomy.

The decisive turning point came in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Sultan Bayezid II, according to a widely reported tradition, is said to have welcomed the Iberian exiles by mocking the folly of King Ferdinand, who was impoverishing his own kingdom to enrich his. The Séfarades then flocked to Salonique, Constantinople, Andrinople, and the secondary cities of Macedonia, including Kastoria. Jonathan Ray has shown how profoundly the experience of Séfarade exile constituted an identity refoundation, in which communities reconstituted themselves according to their cities of Iberian origin before gradually merging [Ray, 2006].

It is here that communal Memory and the archive answer one another. The Kastorian oral tradition, transmitted into the twentieth century, preserved the memory of a "Spanish" origin for many families, while patronyms and the residual use of Judeo-Spanish confirmed this Séfardization. The institutional mechanism of this transformation is perfectly documented elsewhere: the Castilians of Fès, for example, endowed themselves as early as 1492 with a corpus of their own statutes, the Sefer ha-Takkanot, to preserve their customs in the face of the indigenous population [Sefer ha-Takkanot des Castillans de Fès, 1871]. In Kastoria as throughout the Ottoman world, the coexistence between the ancient Romaniot rite and the imported Séfarade rite first gave rise to distinct synagogues, then to a slow absorption of the former by the latter, as the cultural and demographic prestige of the Iberian exiles gradually prevailed.

Under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1912, the Jews of Kastoria developed a structured communal life and a remarkable degree of economic integration. The city had been, since the Middle Ages, a center of the fur trade: the working and commerce of furs — notably the crafting of garments from scraps and offcuts assembled with a widely reputed skill — constituted the emblematic activity of Kastoria. Jews played a significant part in it, alongside Christian artisans, in textile trade and craftsmanship, activities complemented by small commerce, peddling, and other artisanal trades.

Religious life was organized around the synagogue and the classic communal institutions of Ottoman Judaism: the Talmud Torah for the instruction of children, the hevra kadicha (burial society), charitable foundations, and the rabbinical court. Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, became the dominant vernacular language, just as in the great neighboring metropolis of Salonika, the true capital of the Sephardic Balkan world. Benbassa and Rodrigue have emphasized that this Judeo-Spanish culture was not a mere survival but a living civilization, endowed with its own literature, its press, and its musical traditions, which radiated outward to small satellite communities such as Kastoria [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000].

The rhythms of Kastorean Jewish life followed those of the Hebrew calendar and the commercial seasons. The great fairs, the religious festivals, the endogamous marriages sealing alliances between notable families, the transmission of trades from father to son: these were traits found, with local variations, throughout the Sephardic communities of the Mediterranean, whether in Larissa in Greece [Messinas, 2012] or in Tlemcen in North Africa, whose millennium of history Simon Schwarzfuchs traced [Schwarzfuchs, 1997]. This Ottoman community, modest in number yet solidly rooted, comprised, in the nineteenth century, several hundred souls.

The year 1912 marked a major rupture: at the conclusion of the First Balkan War, Kastoria, along with the whole of southern Macedonia and Salonique, was incorporated into the kingdom of Greece. The Jews of the city, until then Ottoman subjects, became Greek citizens. This shift, which simultaneously affected the tens of thousands of Jews of Salonique, imposed profound adaptations: learning Greek, military service, and integration into a national framework that was no longer that of the Ottoman millet.

This transition was not without tensions. Greece, an Orthodox nation-state in the making, tolerated its minorities but encouraged them toward Hellenization. For a community still largely Judeo-Hispanic in speech, adapting to Greek citizenship entailed a significant cultural transformation. Nevertheless, in Kastoria, a provincial community more integrated than the vast Salonican metropolis, coexistence with Christian neighbors generally remained peaceful, grounded in centuries of shared life and economic exchange.

The first decades of the twentieth century were also marked by emigration. As in all small Greek communities, a portion of Kastoria's youth left to seek their fortunes in the major cities — Salonique, Athens — or abroad, notably in the United States. This phenomenon, combined with low birth rates and the economic hardships of the interwar period, gradually reduced the size of the community. On the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish population of Kastoria numbered a few hundred individuals, forming an aging yet still living community, attached to its synagogue and its traditions. This dynamic of contraction and emigration, common to many Sephardic centers in the modern era, recurs in the history of communities as distant as those of the Maghreb, where rural exodus and the pull of major cities gradually emptied the old centers, as documented in works devoted to Tlemcen [Botbol, 2000].

The invasion of Greece by Axis forces in April 1941 precipitated the Jewish community of Kastoria toward its annihilation. Western Macedonia was initially placed under Italian occupation, which was relatively less brutal toward Jews. The situation shifted dramatically in September 1943, when, following Italy's capitulation, German troops took control of the region and extended to it the extermination policy already implemented in Salonique from the spring of 1943.

In Kastoria, the Jewish community then lived its final months in anguish. On March 24, 1944, the eve of the Christian feast of the Annunciation, the German authorities carried out the roundup of nearly all the Jews of the city — approximately seven hundred people. Gathered and then transferred, they were transported via Salonique to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they arrived at the beginning of April 1944. The vast majority were murdered upon arrival in the gas chambers; only a handful of deportees, selected for forced labor, survived until liberation. This pattern — brutal roundup, transit through Salonique, deportation to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 — struck all the communities of Macedonia and Epirus at that time, including Ioannina, Larissa, and the other Romaniote and Sephardic centers.

The annihilation of the Kastoria community is part of the near-total destruction of Greek Judaism, one of the oldest in Europe, of which nearly nine-tenths of the population perished in the Shoah. In Kastoria, it was the abrupt end of a millennial Jewish presence. A few survivors returned after the war, but the communal fabric, its institutions, its synagogue, and its living Memory had been irreparably shattered. Silence fell over the alleyways where, just a few years earlier, Judeo-Spanish and the prayers of the ancient rite had still resounded.

From the Jewish community of Kastoria, only faint traces remain today, which research and the duty of Memory strive to gather and preserve. The Jewish quarter, the sites of the synagogue and the old cemetery, a few houses and family names inscribed in the urban landscape bear witness to a presence erased by violence. As with so many vanished communities, topography becomes archive here: in the absence of abundant documents, stones and places carry the memory.

Transmission now passes through descendants scattered across the world — in Greece, in Israel, in the United States — who perpetuate the Memory of their Kastorian ancestors. Contemporary genealogical databases, by reconstructing family trees and cross-referencing Sephardic patronyms, make it possible to recover the broken threads of these lineages and restore to the victims their individuality [MyHeritage / Geni — Arbre Encaoua, 2024]. This work joins the broader effort to preserve communal archives and registers, in the manner of what was accomplished for other Mediterranean communities, such as the cemetery registers and rabbinical archives of North Africa [Registres du cimetière juif de Tlemcen] [Archives du Mellah de Fès].

Here again, Memory and History intertwine. Family tradition — the account of an Iberian origin, the memory of a trade, the name of a deported ancestor — fills the silences of the fragmentary archive, while official documents, deportation lists and census records, confirm and refine these accounts. This dialectic between what has been transmitted and what has been established forms the very heart of any memorial undertaking devoted to annihilated communities. To restore Kastoria is thus to hold together the testimony of survivors, the rigor of research, and faithfulness to an engulfed world.

The history of the Jews of Kastoria condenses, in a single trajectory, the great sequences of Mediterranean Judaism: the Romaniote rootedness in the Byzantine world, the Sephardic refoundation after 1492, the flourishing within the Ottoman Empire, the difficult integration into the Greek nation-state, and then the annihilation in the Shoah. A community modest in number, it was nonetheless an authentic link in that long chain connecting Byzantium to Spain, the Ottoman Orient to modern Greece.

What the Kastorian destiny reveals is the power of continuities and the brutality of their rupture. For more than a millennium, generations of Jews were born there, prayed there, worked the fur trade there, and transmitted a language, a rite, and a Memory. In a matter of days in March 1944, that patiently built edifice was annihilated. The disappearance of Kastoria, like that of so many Greek communities, reminds us that the Jewish History of the Mediterranean is not to be read only in its splendors but also in its erasures.

To restore this vanished world — with the caution imposed by fragmentary sources and the honesty that distinguishes the documented from the transmitted — is a duty that is at once scholarly and memorial. May this Great Book contribute to that end, inscribing Kastoria in the constellation of Jewish hearths whose light, though extinguished, continues to reach us.