Survey Response Confirmation

Survey Response Confirmation

Western Greece, especially Epirus, was home to a community of Romaniotes who settled along the area's trading routes, especially the Via Egnatia, during the early centuries CE.[13][14] Emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth century of the Jewish community of Ioannina left it with a few thousand Jews. Western Greece remained under Ottoman rule until the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913, when it was captured by Greece.[15] Forced resettlement in Constantinople in 1455 by Sultan Mehmet II almost erased the Romaniote communities of Thrace, Macedonia, and Central Greece.[16] At the end of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire allowed Sephardim to resettle on the Aegean coast from Larissa west; Ashkenazi migrants joined them later, but the Sephardim remained dominant.[17] Prior to World War II, around 50,000 Jews lived in Salonica (Thessaloniki),[18] a center of Sephardic learning that historically had a Jewish majority[19] and was termed the "Jerusalem of the Balkans".[20] The city was heavily Hellenized as a result of the Great Fire of 1917,[21] but the Jewish demographic plurality persisted until many Greek refugees from Eastern Thrace and Anatolia arrived in 1922.[22][23] The Greek islands, especially Corfu, Rhodes, and Crete, were home to both Sephardic and Romaniote communities that had spent many years under Venetian rule or influence such that many Jews from these islands spoke Italian.[24][25] Before the Balkan Wars, no more than 10,000 Jews lived in Greece; this number would increase eightfold as a result of territorial acquisitions.[26] Jews occasionally faced antisemitic violence such as the 1891 riots in Corfu and the 1931 Campbell pogrom [el], carried out by the National Union of Greece (EEE) in a suburb of Salonica.[27][28] As a result of economic decline, many Jews left Greece after World War I.[29] At first, wealthy merchants left for Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In the 1930s, many poorer Je