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JewishHistoryעברית

Jewish massacres in the Greek War of Independence

Date
1821
Location
Peloponnese and Attica (Ottoman Morea)Greece
Then part of
Ottoman Empire
Perpetrators
  • Greek revolutionary insurgents (Militia / auxiliaries)
Killed (estimate)
1,200 – 5,000[1]Jews killed. Yitzchak Kerem, in Sephardic Horizons, states that some 5,000 Jews were killed by Greek insurgents and that 1,200 were killed in Tripolitsa (Tripoli). The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) names congregations in Vrachori (Agrinio), Patras, Tripolitza, Mistra, Thebes and Livadia as communities whose members were mostly killed, but it does not give a death toll.
Country

0.29% – 1.2% of the Jewish population of Ottoman Empire (c. 1915)[39]

Worldwide

0.048% – 0.2% of the worldwide Jewish population (c. 1800)[4]

Category
Massacre
Confidence
DisputedKerem gives about 5,000 Jews killed in the revolt and 1,200 in Tripolitsa. The Jewish Encyclopedia confirms that most members of several named congregations were killed but supplies no numbers. The range uses Kerem's two figures.

Summary

When the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule began in 1821, Jewish communities in the Peloponnese and Attica were attacked together with Muslim townspeople. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that most members of the congregations at Vrachori, Patras, Tripolitza, Mistra, Thebes and Livadia were killed by the insurgents, and that survivors fled to Corfu or Chalcis. Kerem dates the capture of Tripolitsa to September 1821 under Theodoros Kolokotronis and gives 1,200 Jewish dead there. Refugees resettled in Salonika, Corfu, Ioannina and other towns still under Ottoman or Ionian rule.

Sources

  1. Yitzchak Kerem, The Annihilation of the Jews in the Greek Revolution (1821-1834). Sephardic Horizons
  2. Gotthard Deutsch, M. Caimi, Greece. Jewish Encyclopedia (1906)

Jewish population (estimates)

  • Worldwide: 2,500,000[4]c. 1800
  • Ottoman Empire: 420,000[39]c. 1915Davis Trietsch (1915) estimates about 420,000 Jews in the Ottoman Empire then: roughly 100,000 European Turkey, 60,000 Asia Minor, 50,000 Syria, 120,000 Palestine, 60,000 Mesopotamia, 30,000 Arabia. This is a World War I–era empire-wide figure, decades after the site's 1821–1847 Ottoman event window. No successfully opened scholarly page gave a reliable empire-wide Jewish total for the 1820s–1840s; province/city figures (e.g. Istanbul ~42,000 in 1830 on a JVL page) are not substitutes for an empire total.

Sources for population estimates

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