Abstract
Following the Reconquista, Isabella the Catholic expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. They were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the Balkans and Salonika.
By the 18th century, they accounted for half the city's population and, until the 1920s, were in the majority compared with the Greek and Turkish communities. In this context, the Jews of Salonika were able to preserve their language: Judeo-Spanish or Ladino.
Thessaloniki's Jewish cemetery was the largest in Europe at the time. It is estimated to have contained around 300,000 graves.
Many of the Hebrew inscriptions on these stelae, in Ladino and Hebrew, are difficult to decipher today. In 1942, having controlled the city for a year, the Nazis expropriated the cemetery in exchange for the release of 6,000 Jewish prisoner-laborers.
The gravestones were used as building material by the Germans and later by the Greeks, notably for the new railway station and a host of other construction sites. Today, they can be found throughout the city and beyond.
Around 54,000 Jews from Thessaloniki were deported and exterminated, representing 96% of the city's Jewish population. Photographer Martin Barzilai, himself the grandson of a Jew who fled Thessaloniki in 1940, has visited the city several times since 2018, in search of those fragments of graves scattered around the city, of what has been rendered invisible, those traces that have withstood the test of time to produce a book with historical introduction of Kateřina Králová.