Split

The Jewish presence in the Split region does not begin with the current city, but with its Roman predecessor, Salone (today Solin), capital of the province of Dalmatia and one of the most important Roman commercial ports on the Adriatic. Salone, today a suburb of Split called Solin, capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia and one of the most important Roman commercial maritime ports on the Adriatic, possesses archaeological evidence of a well-established Jewish community in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Excavations there have unearthed objects characteristic of ancient Jewish life. The Romans founded the city of Salone just north of present-day Split in the 1st century, where Jewish merchants and artisans settled; archaeological excavations have discovered objects of Jewish origin dating from this period, including a pendant, ceramic oil lamps decorated with menorahs, and a fragment of an inscription.

This Salonian community was part of the vast network of Jews of the Roman diaspora, dispersed along the maritime and overland routes of the Empire. According to encyclopedic sources, a Jewish community with a cemetery existed in the neighboring Salone (today Solin) in the 3rd century CE. Merchants, dyers, leather craftsmen: the socio-economic profile of these early Dalmatian Jews corresponds to that of the trading minorities of the late Empire, integrated into Mediterranean exchanges without forming an isolated bloc.

The History of Salone shifted in the 7th century. When Salone was destroyed by the Avars in 641, the Jews appear to have taken refuge in the fortified palace of Diocletian, which later became the city of Split. The ZOST, the Jewish community of Split, situates this turning point within a long continuity: the city of Split possesses a long history of Jewish presence, going back to the 7th century, after the neighboring Salone (today Solin) was destroyed by the Avars, forcing a community that had existed there since the 3rd century CE to flee and find protection within the fortified palace of Diocletian. The ruin of an imperial city thus became the founding act of a new Jewish presence, sheltered no longer by a city, but by a monument.

Diocletian's palace is not a backdrop: it is the very matrix of the city of Split and the cradle of its medieval Jewish community. The survivors of Salone, seeking shelter from invasions, settled within the powerful imperial walls, and among them were Jews whose Memory has been inscribed in the very stone. Only a few menorahs carved on stone blocks of Diocletian's palace bear witness to the early presence of Jews in Split. These lapidary graffiti, discreet yet eloquent, are the rare material traces of a presence of which the medieval archives preserve almost nothing.

The ancient topography of the city also retains the memory of this settlement. According to the guide to European Jewish heritage, substantial evidence suggests that a synagogue was soon built in the southern part of the new city; indeed, until the sixteenth century, this district of the city was called "the Synagogue" by its inhabitants. The very toponym — a neighborhood designated by its Jewish place of worship — attests to the antiquity and visibility of the community. The same source nonetheless recalls the documentary fragility of these medieval centuries: traces disappear from them in the Middle Ages, the Jewish communities of Dalmatia being rarely mentioned in surviving texts, and they are sometimes evoked only through terms designating the neighborhoods of tanners and dyers.

This chapter is a place of intersection: oral tradition and toponym are confirmed by the carved menorahs and by the scattered mentions in registers. Thus the register of Church properties in 1397 figures among the earliest documents to evoke the urban realities within which Jewish presence was inscribed. The scarcity of texts does not signify absence: it reflects the discreet status of a tolerated minority, embedded in the artisanal fabric of the city, whose Memory was more legible in street names than in official chronicles.

The decisive turning point in the Jewish history of Split occurs at the junction of the 15th and 16th centuries, when the Iberian expulsions cast thousands of Sephardic families upon the shores of the Mediterranean. These refugees transformed a residual medieval presence into a structured and prosperous community. The Jewish community grew substantially in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as waves of Sephardic Jewish refugees fled Portugal, Spain, and Italy during the Inquisition. Split, then under Venetian rule, offered a relative haven to these exiles whom the Iberian Peninsula had driven out.

It is in this context that the synagogue which remains the community's emblem was built. The synagogue was constructed within the western wall of Diocletian's Palace by Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. The date most commonly cited makes it one of the oldest sanctuaries on the continent: nestled along the narrow lane of Zidovski Prolaz ("Jewish passage"), the synagogue of Split was built in 1510 and is considered one of the oldest synagogues still in use in Europe. The community also established a place of eternal rest: in 1573, a Jewish cemetery was approved and built on the hill of Marjan, which overlooks the city of Split.

This Sephardic settlement is part of the great movement of the Hispano-Portuguese diaspora that redrawn the Jewish map of the Mediterranean after 1492. As historians of the western Sephardic diaspora have shown, these exiles reconstituted communities endowed with their own institutions, an Andalusian rite, and a strong cultural identity [Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity]; their trajectory was one of an emerging modernity forged in exile and the reconstruction of identity [Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within]. The history of Split mirrors this broader movement studied by Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue for the entirety of the Judeo-Spanish world [Benbassa & Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry]: a community born of the Iberian rupture, yet vigorously rebuilt upon the shores of its new home.

The synagogue of Split is one of the rare sanctuaries in the world to be literally embedded within a Roman monument. Built into the thickness of the western wall of the imperial palace, it bears witness to the ingenuity of a community that, lacking space, knew how to make the ancient monument the setting of its religious life. The synagogue of Split thus occupies the first floor of two medieval houses built against this wall, in the tightly clustered quarter that bore the name of the Jewish passage.

Its architectural singularity makes it, in the eyes of heritage specialists, an exceptional landmark. Nestled along the narrow alleyway of Zidovski Prolaz ("Jewish passage"), the synagogue of Split, built in 1510, is considered one of the oldest synagogues still in operation in Europe, built uniquely within the western wall of Diocletian's palace. European synagogal heritage surveys rank it among the most venerable Séfarade sanctuaries still active: also known as the old synagogue, the synagogue of Dubrovnik is the oldest Séfarade synagogue still in use today; it was established in 1352, but did not obtain legal status in the city until 1408 — which places Split, with its foundation of 1510, in the leading group of active sanctuaries, alongside its Ragusan neighbour.

Around the synagogue there developed a Jewish quarter whose religious and communal life was animated by renowned rabbis. The ties between the Dalmatian communities were close, and certain sages served several cities in turn: thus rabbi Jacob Pardo (grandson of rabbi David Pardo of Sarajevo), buried in the Jewish cemetery of Dubrovnik, served the communities of Raguse and Spalato (Split). The circulation of rabbis and scholars between Split, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo and Venice traces a coherent Adriatic Séfarade network, in which local loyalties were doubled by a belonging to a shared Judeo-Spanish civilization [Attias (dir.), Les Sépharades et l'Europe].

The late sixteenth century saw Split rise to the rank of a major commercial entrepôt on the Adriatic, a transformation owed in large part to the initiative of a Jewish merchant of Portuguese origin. One of the most notable figures of this period was Daniel Rodrigo (Rodriguez), a wealthy Judeo-Portuguese merchant who found refuge in Split; having obtained special permission to reside within the walls of the palace, he built an imposing residence there for his family. This exceptional authorization, in a city where Jewish status remained circumscribed, measures the strategic importance that Venice recognized in the man and his projects.

Rodrigo's grand design was to make Split the overland gateway for trade between the Ottoman Empire and the Serenissima, substituting a safer, better-protected route for the perilous navigation of the south. To this end, he conceived the infrastructure necessary for a transit port. He set in motion several development projects, including a lazaretto (infirmary), and succeeded in convincing his contemporaries to favor the overland route through the mountains, far safer than sailing south of Split toward Turkey. The lazaretto, a mandatory quarantine for goods arriving from the East, became the beating heart of Spalatin commerce and drew in its wake a growing share of the Balkan caravan trade.

This role as broker between empires illustrates an economic function characteristic of the Séfarades of the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean, articulating Christian and Ottoman markets through the mediation of family and confessional networks [Benbassa & Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry]. The western Sephardic diaspora often asserted itself through international trade and mobility, forging its own path toward economic modernity [Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity]. Under Rodrigo's impetus, the small community of Split found itself at the center of a commercial apparatus that far exceeded the dimensions of the city, and its mercantile golden age secured for the Jewish presence a lasting prosperity and recognition.

After centuries of relatively protected existence under the Venetian and then Austrian umbrella, the Jewish community of Split experienced the harshest trials of its history in the twentieth century. The Second World War plunged Dalmatia into the violence of occupations, and the fate of the Jews of Split was at first ambiguous, then tragic. Under the Italian occupation from 1941 to 1943, the Jews of Split initially suffered a relatively less severe persecution than those in zones under Nazi control. The Italian administration, while enforcing discriminatory measures, long resisted handing Jews over to the German and Ustaše authorities, making Split a temporary refuge for many fugitives who had fled from elsewhere in occupied Yugoslavia.

The Italian capitulation of September 1943 brutally shattered this respite. The entry of German forces exposed the community to raids, deportations, and systematic persecutions that decimated Yugoslav Jewry. The material heritage itself was targeted, and the Marjan cemetery, a classified cultural monument, still bears the stigmata of this history: on a picturesque wooded slope above the city, enclosed by a wall and a gate, the cemetery is designated a cultural monument, yet its upkeep is not good. This site preserves a considerable funerary heritage: the approximately 700 tombstones that stand there constitute one of the richest Sephardic epigraphic ensembles on the eastern Adriatic.

Despite the demographic collapse wrought by the Shoah, the community of Split did not disappear. The synagogue in the Jewish passage remains in use, perpetuating a ritual continuity of more than five centuries. Today it remains, according to heritage inventories, one of the oldest Sephardic synagogues still in use; situated at the heart of Diocletian's Palace, the synagogue stands as a testament to the resilience and enduring spirit of the Jewish community of Split. The present Jewish community, the ZOST, tends this place and this Memory, making Split a living link in the long Sephardic diasporic chain.

The Jewish history of Split unfolds as a long continuum woven from interruptions and rebirths. From the merchants of Roman Salone to the Sephardic refugees of the sixteenth century, from the synagogue embedded in the wall of Diocletian's Palace to the commercial caravans of Daniel Rodriga, the Dalmatian Jewish presence has consistently known how to make adversity a matrix of reconstruction. Each catastrophe — the destruction of Salone by the Avars, the Iberian expulsions, the Shoah — was followed by a new beginning, as if the imperial stone that sheltered the first fugitives had passed on to the community something of its own permanence.

This Great Book has sought to show that Split is not merely a heritage curiosity, but a condensed expression of Mediterranean Sephardic history: the encounter between an ancient Romano-Dalmatian foundation and a Hispano-Portuguese graft, the commercial mediation between Christendom and Islam, the ritual fidelity maintained across the centuries. The living synagogue of Zidovski Prolaz, the cemetery of Marjan, and the menorahs carved into the imperial palace together form a palimpsest in which the entire adventure of the Jewish diasporas of the Adriatic can be read, in watermark. Where the archives fall silent, stone and tradition continue to speak — and it is to this voice, between Memory and History, that the present work has sought to do justice.