Place
Salonika סלוניקי
The city where tens of thousands of Sephardim settled after the expulsion from Spain; for centuries it was genuinely a Jewish city.
The Ottoman Empire took in the exiles of 1492, and Salonika became their chief city: quarters named for the communities they came from — Castile, Aragon, Portugal — with their own courts, presses and yeshivas. The port did not work on Shabbat, because the stevedores were Jews.
Ladino held on here into the twentieth century. In 1943 some forty-five thousand Salonika Jews were deported to Auschwitz; fewer than two thousand came back.
On the timeline
5260 · 1500 CEWhere the Exiles Went: The Turning Point of the Diaspora5257 · 1497 CEPortugal, the Anusim and the Inquisition5325 · 1565 CER. Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch and the Rema's Mappah5699 · 1939 CEThe Shoah: the Destruction of European Jewry
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Responsa of R. Shmuel de Medina (Rashdam) — the life of the Salonika community from inside: courts, trade, disputes between quarters
Basis: documents and evidence.