Romaniote Jews

The Romaniote Jews or the Romaniotes (, ''Rhōmaniôtes''; ) are a Greek-speaking ethnic Jewish community. They are one of the oldest Jewish communities in existence and the oldest Jewish community in Europe. The Romaniotes have been, and even remain historically distinct from the Sephardim that have settled in Ottoman Greece after the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal after 1492.

Their distinct language was Yevanic, a Greek dialect that contained Hebrew along with some Aramaic and Turkish words, but today's Romaniotes speak Modern Greek or the languages of their new home countries. Their name is derived from the endonym ''Rhōmanía'' (), which refers to the Eastern Roman Empire ("Empire of the Romans", ). Large Romaniote communities were located in Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Arta, Preveza, Volos, Chalcis, Thebes, Corinth, Patras, and on the islands of Corfu, Crete, Zakynthos, Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes, and Cyprus, among others.

Most of the Jews of Greece were murdered in the Holocaust after the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II and the deportation of most of the Jews to Nazi concentration camps. After the war, a majority of the survivors emigrated to Israel, the United States, and Western Europe. Today there are still functioning Romaniote synagogues in Chalkis (which represents the oldest Jewish congregation on European soil), Ioannina, Veria, Athens, New York City, and Israel.

Name

The name ''Romaniote'' refers to the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, which included the territory of modern Greece, which this Jewish group inhabited for centuries. Historically, the Empire was commonly referred to as ''Rhōmanía'' () and its Christian citizens as ''Rhōmaîoi'', "Romans" (), while the Greek-speaking Jews were called ''Rhōmaniôtes'' (Ῥωμανιῶτες), essentially meaning inhabitants of Rhōmanía.

History

Jews have lived in Greece since at least the Second Temple era (516 BCE – 70 CE). Recorded Jewish presence in Greece dates back over 2,300 years to the time of Alexander the Great. The earliest reference to a Greek Jew is an inscription dated , found in Oropos, a small coastal town between Athens and Boeotia, which refers to "Moschos, son of Moschion the Jew", who may have been a slave.

A Hellenistic Jewish synagogue was discovered in 1829 near the ancient military port of the capital of the island of Aegina by the Scottish-German historian Ludwig Ross, who was working for the court of King Otto of Greece. The floor was covered for protection and was studied again by Thiersch in 1901, Furtwängler in 1904, E. Sukenik in 1928 and Gabriel Welter in 1932 under the auspices of the National Archaeological Service. Based on the quality of the floor's mosaic, the building is believed to have been constructed in the 4th century CE (300–350 CE) and used until the 7th century. The mosaic floor of the synagogue consists of multi-colored tesserae that create the impression of a carpet, in a geometric pattern of blue, gray, red and white. Two Greek inscriptions were found in front of the synagogue's entrance, on the western side of the building. Today, only part of the synagogue's mosaic floor is extant, and it has been moved from its original location to the courtyard of the island's Archaeological Museum.

In 1977 another ancient synagogue was discovered in Athens, the Synagogue in the Agora of Athens, which may be the synagogue in which Paul the Apostle preached. Inscriptions in the Samaritan and Greek alphabets found in Thessaloniki may originate from Samaritan synagogues. Concurrently the oldest synagogue found in the diaspora is also the oldest Samaritan synagogue: it is the Delos Synagogue, which has an inscription dated between 250 and 175 BCE

The Romaniotes are Greek Jews, distinct from both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, who trace back their history to the times of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Jews and can be subdivided in a wider sense in a Rabbanite community and in the Greco-Karaite community of the Constantinopolitan Karaites which still survives to this day. A Romaniote oral tradition says that the first Jews arrived in Ioannina shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Before the migration of the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi Jews into the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the Jewish culture in these areas consisted primarily of Romaniote Jews.

The Romaniote rites represent those of the Greek-speaking Jews of the Byzantine (or former Byzantine) Empire, ranging from southern Italy (in a narrower sense the Apulian, the Calabrian and the Sicilian Jewish communities) in the west, to much of Turkey in the east, Crete to the south, Crimea (the Krymchaks and Eastern Europe.

The Sefer Yosippon was written down in the 10th century in Byzantine Southern Italy by the Greek-speaking Jewish community there. Judah Leon ben Moses Mosconi, a Romaniote Jew from Achrida edited and expanded the Sefer Josippon later. This community of Byzantine Jews of southern Italy produced such prominent works like the Sefer Ahimaaz of Ahimaaz ben Paltiel, the Sefer Hachmoni of Shabbethai Donnolo, the Aggadath Bereshit and many Piyyutim. The liturgical writings of these Romaniote Jews, especially the piyyut were eminent for the development of the Ashkenazi Mahzor, as they found their way through Italy to Ashkenaz and are preserved to this day in the most Ashkenazi mahzorim.

The Jews of Southern Italy (where they were living together with their Greek-speaking Christian counterparts) continued to be Greek-speakers until the 15th century. When they were expelled and went to different regions of Greece, especially Corfu, Epirus and Thessaloniki, they could continue to speak their Greek language, even if this language was somewhat different from that of Greece.

In the 12th century, Benjamin of Tudela travelled through the Byzantine Empire and recorded details about communities of Jews in Corfu, Arta, Aphilon, Patras, Corinth, Thebes, Chalkis, Thessaloniki, and Drama. The largest community in Greece at that time was in Thebes, where he found about 2000 Jews. They were engaged mostly in cloth dyeing, weaving, in the production of silverware and silk garments. At the time, they were already known as "Romaniotes".

The first Romaniote synagogue coming under Ottoman rule was ''Etz ha-Hayyim'' (Hebrew: עץ החיים, lit. "Tree of Life", frequently a name of Romaniote synagogues) in Prousa in Asia Minor which passed to Ottoman authority in 1324. After the Fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453, Sultan Mehmed II found the city in a state of disarray. The city had indeed suffered many sieges, a devastating conquest by Catholic Crusaders in 1204 and even a case of the Black Death in 1347, and now had been long cut off from its hinterland, so the city was a shade of its former glory. The event of the conquest of Constantinople was written down by a Romaniote Payetan in a lament hymn, composed with several phrases from the Old Testament in the ''shibusi style''.

As Mehmed wanted to make the city his new capital, he decreed its rebuilding.Inalcik, Halil. "The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City." ''Dumbarton Oaks Papers'' 23 (1969): 229–249, specifically 236. And in order to revivify Constantinople he ordered that Muslims, Christians and Jews from all over his empire be resettled in the new capital. Within months most of the Empire's Romaniote Jews, from the Balkans and Anatolia, were concentrated in Constantinople, where they made up 10% of the city's population.Avigdor Levy; The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, New Jersey, (1994) The forced resettlement, though not intended as an anti-Jewish measure, was perceived as an "expulsion" by the Jews. Nevertheless, the Romaniotes would remain the most influential Jewish community in the Empire for decades to come, determining the Chief Rabbis of the towns and the Hakham Bashi of the Ottoman Empire until their leading position was lost to a wave of new Jewish arrivals. These events initiated the first great numerical decline of the Romaniote community.

The number of Jews was soon bolstered by small groups of Ashkenazi Jews that immigrated to the Ottoman Empire between 1421 and 1453. Waves of Sephardi Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492; many settled in Ottoman-ruled Greece. They spoke a separate language, Ladino. Thessaloniki had one of the largest (mostly Sephardi) Jewish communities in the world and a solid rabbinical tradition. On the island of Crete, the Jews historically played an important part in the transport trade. In the centuries following 1492 most of the Romaniote communities were assimilated by the more numerous Sephardim.

The status of Jewry in the Ottoman Empire often hinged on the whims of the sultan. Murad III for example ordered that the attitude of all non-Muslims should be one of "humility and abjection" and should not "live near Mosques or in tall buildings" or own slaves.

After the liberation of Ioannina on February 21, 1913, the Rabbi and the Romaniote community of Ioannina welcomed at the New Synagogue of Ioannina the liberator of the city, Crown Prince Constantine, the future King of the Hellenes Constantine I.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Romaniote community of Ioannina numbered about 4,000 people, mostly lower-class tradesmen and craftsmen. Their numbers dwindled after that due to economic emigration; after the Holocaust and in the wake of World War II, there were approximately 1,950 Romaniotes left in Ioannina. Centered around the old fortified part of the city (or Kastro), where the community had been living for centuries, they maintained two synagogues, one of which, the Kehila Kedosha Yashan Synagogue still remains today.

A strong Romaniote community was present in Corfu until the late 19th century, when a pogrom sparked by blood libel charges forced most of the Jewish community to leave the island.

Nusach and Minhag

The Romaniote prayer rite ( Nusach) as seen in the original ''Mahzor Romania'' and the Romaniote commentaries ( Minhag) on Jewish exegesis and Jewish law, vary from those of the Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews, and are closer to those of the Italian Jews: some of these are thought to have been based on the Jerusalem Talmud instead of the Babylonian Talmud (see Eretz-Yisrael minhag). This Minhag was once widespread in Southern Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Anatolia and the Crimea.

The Romaniotes spoke Judaeo-Greek for a long time, and many of them still use the Greek language today. Tobiah ben Eliezer (טוביה בר אליעזר), a Greek-speaking Talmudist and poet of the 11th century, worked and lived in the city of Kastoria. He is the author of the ''Lekach Tov'', a midrashic commentary on the Pentateuch and the Five Megillot and also of some poems. Romaniote scholars translated the Tanakh

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