As of 2019[update] the Jewish community in Greece amounts to about 6,000 people out of a population of 10.8 million,[5] concentrated mainly in Athens, Thessaloniki (or Salonika in Judeo-Spanish), Larissa, Volos, Chalkis, Ioannina, Trikala, Corfu and a functioning synagogue on Crete, while very few remain in Kavala and Rhodes.

Besides the Sephardim and the Romaniotes, some Northern-Italian, Sicilian, Apulian, Provençal, Mizrahi and small Ashkenazi communities have existed as well, in Thessaloniki and elsewhere.

Large communities were located in Ioannina, Thebes, Chalcis, Corfu, Arta, Corinth and on the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes, and Cyprus, among others.

The traditional language of Greek Sephardim was Judeo-Spanish, and, until the Holocaust, the community "was a unique blend of Ottoman, Balkan and Hispanic influences",[12] well known for its level of education.

The Jews of Thessaloniki, speaking a dialect of Greek, and living a Hellenized existence, were joined by a new Jewish colony in the 1st century AD.

Some Byzantine emperors were anxious to exploit the wealth of the Jews of Greece, and imposed special taxes on them, while others attempted forced conversions to Christianity.

Judah Leon ben Moses Mosconi, a Romaniote Jew from Achrida edited and expanded the Sefer Josippon later.

[17][18] Tobiah ben Eliezer (טוביה בן אליעזר), a Talmudist and poet of the 11th century, worked and lived in the city of Kastoria.

After leaving southern Italy and sailing through the Adriatic Sea, he visited Corfu, Thebes, Almyros, and Thessaloniki, before moving on to Constantinople.

The Jews were at that time economically powerful though small in number, comprised a community of their own, separately from the Christians, and dealt in money lending.

After the Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelled the Jewish community from Spain, between fifteen and twenty thousand Sephardic Jews settled in Thessaloniki (then Salonica).

According to the Jewish Virtual Library: "Greece became a haven of religious tolerance for Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and other persecution in Europe.

Joseph Nasi, a Portuguese Marrano Jew, was appointed by the Sultan as Duke of the Archipelago, encompassing the Cyclades islands in Greece, for the years 1566–1579.

The Sephardic population of Thessaloniki had risen to between twenty-five and thirty thousand members, leading to scarcity of resources, fires and hygiene problems.

The end of the century saw great improvements, as the mercantile leadership of the Sephardic community, particularly the Allatini family, took advantage of new trade opportunities with the rest of Europe.

With the importation of modern anti-Semitism with immigrants from the West later in the century, moreover, some of Thessaloniki's Jews soon became the target of Greek and Armenian pogroms, and antisemitic incidents elsewhere in Greece such as the Rhodes blood libel of 1840 reflected tensions between the empire's Greek and Jewish communities.Thessaloniki's Jewish community comprised more than half of the city's population until the early 1900s.

"[25] In general loyal to the Ottoman Empire, the Jews of southern Greece did not have a positive stance towards the Greek War of Independence; so often they became also targets by the revolutionaries.

[27] After liberation, however, the Greek government won the support of the city's Jewish community,[3] and Greece under Eleftherios Venizelos was one of the first countries to accept the Balfour Declaration.

[28] Later, with the establishment in 1936 of the Metaxas regime, which was not typically hostile to Jews in general despite its fascist character, the stance of the Greek State towards the Jewish community was further improved.

Corfu's mayor at the time, Kollas, was a known collaborator and various anti-Semitic laws were passed by the Nazis that now formed the occupation government of the island.

[38] When the island was almost levelled by the great earthquake of 1953, the first relief came from Israel, with a message that read "The Jews of Zakynthos have never forgotten their Mayor or their beloved Bishop and what they did for us.

"[4] The city of Volos, which was in the Italian zone of occupation, had a Jewish population of 882, and many Thessaloniki Jews fleeing the Nazis sought sanctuary there.

In September 1943, when the Nazis took over, head rabbi Moses Pesach worked with Archbishop Ioakeim and the EAM resistance movement to find sanctuary for the Jews in Mount Pelion.

On 7 October 1944, during the uprising in Auschwitz, they attacked German forces with other Greek Jews, storming the crematoria and killing about twenty guards.

Primo Levi describes the group thus: "those Greeks, motionless and silent as the Sphinx, crouched on the ground behind their thick pot of soup.

He described a strong patriotic sense among them, writing that their ability to survive in the camps was partly explained by the fact that "they are among the cohesive of the national groups, and from this point of view the most advanced."

[45] The Greek Jews that moved to Israel established several villages, including Tsur Moshe, and many settled in the Florentine, Tel Aviv and the area around Jaffa Harbor.

The European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia 2002–2003 report on anti-Semitism in Greece mentioned several incidents over the two-year period making note that there were no instances of physical or verbal assaults on Jews, along with examples of "good practices" for countering prejudice.

[60] Partly to head off any new-found threat from extremism, thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish Greeks attended Thessaloniki's Holocaust Commemoration in March 2013.

[61] The meeting was personally addressed by Greece's prime minister, Antonis Samaras, who delivered a speech to Monastir Synagogue in Thessaloniki.