Antisemitism in Greece

Greek Jewish history includes Greek-speaking Romaniote communities and Sephardic communities formed after Iberian expulsions. Salonika grew into a major Jewish centre under Ottoman rule.

Explore Greece

Published by WTJPublication updated

A rooted community is recast as foreign

Greek Jewish history includes Greek-speaking Romaniote communities and Sephardic communities formed after Iberian expulsions. Salonika grew into a major Jewish centre under Ottoman rule. Its incorporation into Greece in 1912 changed arguments about national belonging. Nationalist hostility could label local Jews foreign or disloyal, and the 1931 Campbell attack showed how rumours could mobilize violence. German occupation later imposed a different, genocidal racial project.

Before 1912

Long roots · More than one Jewish Greece

Different languages and histories shaped communities that national stereotypes later flattened.

Greek-speaking Jewish life

Romaniote Jewish communities developed in the Greek-speaking world long before the arrival of Sephardic refugees from Spain. Their language and religious traditions were locally rooted. Calling all Jews foreign newcomers erases this history and mistakes religious difference for absence of belonging.

Salonika’s Sephardic world

After the expulsions from Iberia, Sephardic Jews established a large community in Ottoman Salonika. Judeo-Spanish became an important language of everyday life. Jewish residents worked in varied occupations and helped shape the city. Their history was embedded in its port, neighbourhoods and institutions.

A border changes the belonging question

Salonika became part of Greece in 1912. A community established under Ottoman rule now lived within a Greek national state. Debates about language, citizenship and national identity could recast familiar local residents as outsiders. A new border did not erase their earlier lives in the city.

1931

Nationalist violence · A rumour sets a neighbourhood alight

The Campbell attack made claims about national loyalty a pretext for attacking Jewish residents.

The accusation of disloyalty

In 1931, accusations about Jewish disloyalty circulated in Salonika. Nationalist rhetoric portrayed a minority as an internal threat. Such stories did not simply criticize a named person’s conduct. They asked an audience to treat Jewish neighbours as collectively suspect.

The Campbell neighbourhood

Nationalist attackers assaulted the Jewish Campbell neighbourhood and set homes on fire. Families suffered because their community had been made a target. The event translated public agitation into local violence: people who lived in the city were attacked as if they had no rightful place there.

The motive had changed

This was nationalist anti-Jewish violence before the Nazi occupation. Older prejudice could be adapted to arguments about who counted as Greek and who supposedly endangered the nation. The attackers’ claim of collective disloyalty was an accusation, not evidence about the residents they attacked.

1941–1944

Occupation & murder · Salonika loses its Jewish world

German occupation turned a major community into a target for deportation and destruction.

Different occupation zones

Greece came under German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation, and Jewish experiences differed across those zones. In German-occupied Salonika, persecution escalated sharply. Identifying the authority in control explains why a family’s danger could change when the occupation map changed.

The trains of 1943

German authorities deported Salonika’s Jews, predominantly to Auschwitz, in 1943. Registration, forced concentration and dispossession preceded the transports. A community with centuries of local life was stripped of rights and removed through an organized operation. Most of those deported were murdered.

A city’s absence has causes

The destruction was not an unexplained disappearance of a once-flourishing community. Nazi policy, occupation power and participation in persecution produced it. Resistance, hiding and assistance also existed, but could not prevent the devastating losses. The later city inherited both the absence and the responsibility to explain it.

1945 and after

After return · The survivors return to a changed city

The story after occupation concerns destroyed communities, lost property and lives rebuilt.

Return without the old world

Jewish survivors returned to places where relatives, homes and communal institutions had been destroyed or taken. In Salonika the scale of murder transformed the city. Returning to a familiar street did not mean recovering the relationships and security that had once made it home.

Who was allowed to belong?

Prewar nationalists had questioned Jewish belonging in Greece. Nazi authorities then imposed a racial category that overrode citizenship altogether. These accusations had different political settings, but both ignored local lives. Following the change shows how exclusion can acquire new justifications.

Lives beyond the catastrophe

Romaniote and Sephardic traditions continued through survivors and their descendants. The history therefore includes rebuilding as well as loss. A community’s survival does not minimize the persecution; it restores people’s own languages, work and choices to a story often told only through the actions of their enemies.

2023–present

October 7 & today · October 7 & today

Greek nationalist and neo-Nazi hostility met radical-left enemy narratives and particular Islamist threats in the renewed targeting of Jews.

A warning recalls a burned neighbourhood

In 1931, an attack set fire to Thessaloniki’s Campbell Jewish quarter. Decades later, in 2026, Greece’s Central Board of Jewish Communities invoked that history when warning about intimidation patrols in the city.

The comparison was a warning from the community, not a claim that the same organization had survived unchanged. It explained why challenges to Jewish presence carried particular weight. A city whose Jewish life had suffered devastating persecution was again hearing that some people might decide who was welcome in its streets.

The old parasite story finds political cover

Greece’s history includes the 1931 Campbell attack, Nazi destruction of Jewish Salonika and later neo-Nazi hostility. These traditions portrayed Jews as outsiders or an internal threat. Contemporary anti-capitalist language could revive the same image: an analysis of Rouvikonas Thessaloniki’s 2026 statement identified its description of Israeli capital as parasitically entering neighbourhoods.

Calling the enemy Israeli did not settle the question when patrols and threats reached Jews, Hebrew speakers and visitors themselves. A separate threat involved alleged Islamist plots and pro-Hamas incitement, including migrant suspects in specific investigations. These were not shown to form one alliance with the radical left. The country’s mixture lies in the convergence of nationalist exclusion, anti-imperialist demonization and religious militancy on local Jewish targets, with political labels sometimes making the older hostility easier to excuse.

The damage reaches places of remembrance

Jewish community statements described desecration at memorials and cemeteries in Larissa, Thessaloniki and Volos in 2025. Religious-site records captured some of the damage; later warnings also described threats and intimidation against living people.

The two forms of harm belonged together without being identical. An attack on a memorial challenged how Jewish history could be remembered. A threat to a visitor challenged how a Jew could be present now. The community was seeking protection for both its places of memory and the people whose lives continued around them.