When the Jews expelled from Spain began arriving in Greece after 1492, they found other Jews already living there. Not a small group of recent arrivals, either. Jewish communities in the Greek world went back more than a thousand years before the expulsion from Spain.
The earliest evidence dates to the third century BCE, while the Second Temple was still standing in Jerusalem. This was the world that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great, when Judea was tied into a much larger Greek-speaking Mediterranean. Ships moved between Judea, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Greek islands, and the mainland. People moved with them, including Jews.
There isn’t a record of when the first Jewish family arrived in Greece. Some Jews probably came to trade. Others may have arrived as soldiers or captives, and there were likely different migrations at different times. What survives instead are pieces of the story. On Delos, inscriptions show a Jewish presence during the last centuries BCE. By the first century CE, Jewish communities were also established in places including Thessaloniki and Corinth.
The Jews living in Greece at this point weren’t Sephardic. That part of the story wouldn’t begin until much later, when the expulsions from Spain sent another Jewish population east across the Mediterranean. The older Greek Jews were Romaniotes, and they had already spent centuries building a Jewish life of their own.
The Romaniotes spoke Greek and eventually developed Yevanic, a Jewish form of Greek with Hebrew and Aramaic mixed into it. They had their own prayer traditions and synagogue customs, different from both the Ashkenazi traditions developing farther north and the Sephardic traditions that would arrive much later from Spain. Their Torah scrolls were often kept upright in cylindrical cases.
When Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jewish life everywhere changed. More Jews were displaced from Judea, and communities around the Mediterranean had to survive without the Temple at their center. The Bar Kokhba revolt ended in another Roman victory in 135 CE, followed by more death and displacement. The Jewish communities of Greece remained.
Rome divided, Christianity became the religion of the empire, and Constantinople became the center of the eastern Roman world. Byzantine emperors imposed restrictions on Jews at different times, including limits on synagogue construction and public office, but Jewish communities continued in Thebes, Corinth, Arta, Chalkis, Ioannina, Thessaloniki, and elsewhere. Jews worked as merchants and artisans, with textile and silk production especially important in some places.
We know something about those communities because in the twelfth century a Jewish traveler sojourned through Greece and documented what he saw.
