by Michael Waas
Kehila Kedosha Janina, the Romaniote Synagogue of New York City. Photo taken by author in May 2022.
Jews have been living in what is now Greece for over 2,200 years, since the time of the Second Temple. The Romaniote (Ρωμανιώτες, רומניוטים) community claims this ancient Diasporic community as their ancestors. The name “Romaniote” originates with the period of the Roman Empire when Jewish diasporic settlement expanded in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean region, particularly during the time of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) in what is now Greece, Turkey, the southern Balkans, and parts of Southern Italy.
Of course, the story of Jews in Greece doesn’t end with Romaniote Jews. During the later years of the Eastern Roman Empire, small communities of Ashkenazi Jews also settled in the region, joining the rich tapestry of Jewish communities in the Empire. By the last century of the Eastern Roman Empire, significant changes in the political and socioeconomic landscape were occurring with the emergence of the Ottoman Empire. By 1451, the Ottomans had taken control of almost all of the Romaniote and Ashkenazi communities that had settled in the Aegean region.
A depiction of the Ottoman Empire and its dependencies in 1451 (map: Chamboz, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons, cropped in order to magnify the region.)
The 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople under Sultan Mehmet al-Fatih (the Conqueror, who ruled from 1444-1446 and again from 1451-1481) left a profound impact on Jewish history and genealogy in the region. As I explain in my presentation In the Lands of Osman: Jewish Genealogy in the Former Ottoman Empire, this marked a pivotal moment. The Sultan ordered much of the Jewish community in his realm to relocate to Constantinople, making Istanbul the largest community of Romaniote Jews in the Empire.
In the generations that followed, while the Romaniote population remained centered in Constantinople, many individuals and families returned to Greece, re-establishing communities in places such as Arta, Chalkida, Ioannina, Larissa, Trikkala, and Volos, and rejoining existing communities like Chania and Corfu.
The most dramatic demographic shift was still on the horizon: the arrival of the Sepharadim, the Jews of Iberia. While it is widely believed that Sultan Bayezit II (1481-1512), who succeeded his father Mehmet al-Fatih, supposedly stated upon the issuance of the Alhambra Decree:
“You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler,” he said to his courtiers, “he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”
in actuality, there is no evidence of this and the story likely originated in the mythmaking of the 400th anniversary of the Decree. In 1892, the Jews of the Empire marked the anniversary by honoring the ancestors of Sultan Abdulhamit II (who reigned from 1876 to 1909) for their role in providing sanctuary to the refugees during their time of desperation.
The truth, as reality often is, is far more complex. It was shaped by a period of cultural development during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Many diverse Jewish communities either migrated or were absorbed into the growing Ottoman Empire. These groups included Italian Jews (Italkim), Sepharadim (1492 refugees), Portuguese/New Christians, Jews from Sicily and Calabria, Jews from the Eastern or Arab world (Mustarabim), as well as the aforementioned Romaniote and Ashkenazi communities. Later, Jews of the Caucasus (Kavkazim), Yemenite Jews (Temanim), and Persian Jews (Parsim) would also be absorbed or emigrate to the Empire. During this time, these disparate communities would come to form a Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, speaking community in the Ottoman heartland (Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, and the Holy Land) with a shared origin story of 1492.
Jewish Genealogy in Greece
Pursuing Jewish Genealogy in Greece is rewarding but difficult. Unlike in Christian Europe where a modern civil registration dates to the early 19th century in most cases, civil registration in the Ottoman Empire really only dates to the Hamidian period (1876-1909), with standardization achieved more or less in the early 20th century. In modern Greece, outside of some exceptions, civil registration generally dates from 1925 onward (as per Gregory Kontos of Greek Ancestry). Prior to civil registration, the responsibility of maintaining any records fell on the Jewish community. Unfortunately, many of these archives were lost, destroyed, or fragmented during the Nazi Occupation or, in the case of Salonika, heavily damaged in the Great Fire of 1917.
Jewish genealogy in Greece can appear positively daunting. However, a lot more exists and is just waiting to be uncovered in your journey. Many communities have manuscripts or archives that have survived in places like the Jewish Museum in Athens, the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Yad Ben Zvi, or countless libraries and private archives globally. Additionally there are the Ottoman Archives in Turkey and the State Archives System of Greece, both of which hold extensive documentation of Jewish history in Greece, spanning from the 15th century to the present day. There are also secondary archives like the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, diplomatic archives all across Europe, and, of course, records and documents produced by individuals from the communities globally that record names and information seemingly lost over time. Finally, DNA testing for genealogy (Y-DNA, Mitochondrial DNA, and Autosomal DNA) which can reconnect families and strengthen construction of family trees where the documentation no longer exists or is heavily fragmented.
In the next section, I'll dive into a fascinating case study utilizing my own family history to demonstrate the incredible potential of working with diverse archives, languages, and data sources in Greece.
The Mijan Family of Larissa
In order to grasp the full scope of this research journey, we must begin at the beginning. As a teenager, my great-uncle Morris told me that his mother, my great-grandmother Rebecca Angel, was born in Larissa, Greece. She was the only daughter of her mother, Mazaltov Mijan, and third child of her father, Moise Angel (whose family I will discuss in a future article about Jewish Genealogy in Greece). Rebecca, as I would come to discover, was named for her father’s first wife, Rebecca Sami, who had passed away. Mazaltov and Rebecca arrived in America on August 21, 1910 aboard the Martha Washington. Their arrival contact was their brother-in-law and uncle, respectively, Moise Kabeli.
Source: The National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, D.C.; Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at and Departing from Ogdensburg, New York, 5/27/1948 - 11/28/1972; Microfilm Serial or NAID: T715, 1897-1957, last accessed on Ancestry.com October 8, 2023.
Visiting her grave in November 2022.
My great-uncle also told me that his grandmother’s family originally came from Sicily, before settling in Greece (more on that later). He shared some hazy memories of his grandmother, who had passed away in 1926 when he was only three and a half years old. He also told stories about his parents, my great-grandparents, and how they, along with his brothers, Jacob and Alfred, my grandfather, would go picnic at her grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens and eat cucumbers.
Her grave, in the typical Sephardic style of a horizontal grave reads as follows:
Translation
Here lies
The honored woman
My mother, Mrs.
Mazaltov Angel
She died 2 Adar 5686
May her soul be bound in the bonds of life
Transcription
פ״נ
האשה הכבודה
מרת אמי
מזל טוב אנג׳יל
נפ׳ ב׳ אדר תרפו
ת נ צ ב ה
Source: Death Certificate of Mazeltov Angel, no. 6815, borough of Manhattan, New York City Municipal Archives.
The English text on the bottom reads “Mazaltov Angel, My Beloved Mother, Died March 6, 1926, aged 62 years”. While her grave does not reveal her parents’ names, her Manhattan death certificate does.
According to the death certificate, her father was Eliezer Mijan, and her mother was Bachora Cohen, both born in Greece. The informant was my great-grandmother, her daughter.
Additionally, my great-uncle introduced me to some cousins from this side of the family, and through them, I learned that her brother was a certain Samuel Mijan married to Mazaltov Zini Gatenio, and that they were survivors of the Shoah.
One piece of evidence that further confirmed Eliezer as their father’s name came from a list of contributors from Larissa to the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in 1894. In this list, he is identified as “Mijian [sic], Sam-Eliez.”
Source: Bulletin de l'Alliance Israélite Universelle, January 1, 1894, p. 158. Accessed through Historical Jewish Press database, National Library of Israel, last accessed October 8, 1894.
For many years, the only further information I could find about this family confirmed my great-uncle’s oral history. It turned out that her family did indeed migrate from Sicily to Greece. Rabbi Michael Molho of Salonika, a scholar and historian of the community, played a significant role in this revelation. He and Rabbi Isaac Emmanuel compiled a register of families associated with various synagogues in Salonika, organized mostly by their place of origin before settling in Salonika, where they maintained their own minhagim.
The Mijan family (also Mizan/Μιζάν and משען, מיזאן, מיז׳אן) belonged to the Sicilia Yashan (Old Sicily) synagogue in Salonika. Later in my research, I discovered that the family also had a presence in typically Romaniote communities like Ioannina and Arta, as well as in mixed Italian/Romaniote communities such as Corfu, Greece. This was due to the closely related approaches to halakha between Sicilian Jews and the Romaniote communities. Intriguingly, the name also appears among Syrian Jews, spelled as Mishan in English, and the Italian Jews, who write it in Italian as Misan or Misano.
Death Certificate of Abraham Eliezer Mijan, born in Larissa. Thanks to Gregory Kontos of Greek Ancestry for his assistance.
Earlier this year, I made a significant breakthrough through autosomal testing on FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage: I discovered an older brother of Mazaltov and Samuel named Abraham/Avraham. Subsequent research spanning diplomatic archives in Spain, naturalization records in France, and Avraham's death certificate in Greece confirmed his identity. Avraham Mijan was born in 1848 in Larissa, and it appears he may have been married twice. He was a merchant and died 1917 in Salonika.
Further investigation in the manuscripts of Yad Ben Zvi revealed an additional unnamed daughter of Eliezer Mijan and Bechora Cohen. During Pesach 5639 (April 7-15, 1879), the teacher Haim Shemuel Cohen of Larissa recorded the engagement of an unnamed son of Nissim Iosif to the unnamed daughter of Eliezer Mijan, writing (Hidushim velekutim, 23a, YBZ Ms. 3510):
Pessah [5]639
El ijo de Nisim Iosif kon la ija de Lazeratchi Mijan
פסח 639
איל איז׳ו די ניסים יוסף קון לה איז׳ה די ליזיראג׳י משען
With a combination of DNA analysis and extensive research in a diverse set of global archives, I achieved a groundbreaking revelation: Eliezer, nicknamed “Eliezeratchi”, Mijan and his wife Bechora Cohen had at least four children who survived to adulthood, three of whom who had families, with the fourth almost certainly following suit. Time will reveal whether we can uncover more about this unnamed daughter and her unnamed husband.
The late Ezra Moissis and Rafael Frezis chronicled the histories of the Jewish communities of Larissa and Volos respectively. These books contain invaluable pictures and historical accounts not readily available elsewhere. By the late 19th century, Volos had essentially become a daughter community of Larissa after it was reconstituted in the second half of the 19th century, and the families of both cities were and are deeply interconnected. The Mijan family's presence in both cities during the 19th and 20th centuries is documented in these books. The challenge, however, was in connecting the pieces of the puzzle.
It was during an examination of another close DNA match that the final fragments of the puzzle fell into place.
Autosomal analysis based on the DNA matches to the grandson of Mazaltov Mijan and Moise Angel. The total shared and the length of the longest segments are consistent with 2nd cousins, once removed for the great-grandchildren of Samuel Mijan and Zini Gattegno and Abraham Mijan and Flor Molho respectively, and with a 3rd cousin, once removed for the great-great granddaughter of Isaac Mijan and Sol.
The DNA match was to the descendant of an Eliahu Itzhak Mijan, born in the 1850s, and who passed away in Volos in 1931. For years, Eliahu had been on my radar, as one of his sons eventually made his way to New York. What made this discovery even more compelling was that this son’s naturalization documents contained a photo, and the resemblance to members of my Mijan family was striking.
As it turns out, the Volos Cemetery, which has been well preserved since the early 20th century, with some stones dating back to the 19th century brought over when the previous cemetery was appropriated for development, yielded a treasure trove of information. Not only does the grave of Eliahu survive, but so do the graves of his wife, brothers, sister-in-law, nephew, mother, and father!. This grave showed that Eliahu’s father, Itzhak, was the son of an Avraham Mijan!
Photo by Alexander Ventura, memorial 248056128, FindAGrave, last accessed October 9, 2023.
The epitaph on the grave contains beautiful poetry, but genealogical speaking, the most crucial details are that his name was Itzhak, son of Avraham Mijan; that he lived to be elderly in the Jewish tradition, and that he passed away on the 10th of Kislev, 5642, which corresponds to December 2, 1881.
In a register of the deceased kept by R’ Moise Simeon Pessah, the Grand Rabbi of Volos, Itzhak is recorded as the son of Malka. With the strength of the DNA match, suggesting a likely 3rd-4th cousin relationship to my great-uncle, the question arises: Can we find any other documentary evidence to confirm this hypothesis?"
On the 27th of Muharram 1263 of the Islamic calendar (14th of January, 1847 according to the Gregorian calendar), the male census of Yenişehir-i Fener (the Turkish name of Larissa), was conducted. File NFS.d 5185 specifically captured the census of the Jews of Yenişehir-i Fener, although it is only listed as the reaya defteri, or the book of non-Muslim taxpayers (though it can also be used to refer to the wider class of lower tax paying individuals), in the archives. The census was organized by household, albeit it records no surnames, only occupation, relation to the previous individual, and age.
On the second page of the census, the following household is found:
Household 4
Sarraf [Moneychanger/Banker]…Avram veled [son of] Ishak, age 60
His son Ishak, age 30
The other [son] Lazar, age 26
Grandson Avram [son of] Ishak, age 5
Grandson Raphael, born later that year [and added after the original census]
While surnames are, of course, absent, the names and ages, including those of the grandsons who were alive by 1847, align with the details found for both Eliezer Mijan and Itzhak, son of Avraham Mijan. In a region where cemeteries from this period do not survive, and documentation is highly fragmented, especially before the late 19th century, it is now very likely that the Mijan family of Larissa and Volos can be outlined as follows:
Proposed family tree of the descendants of Itzhak Mijan, who lived during the 18th century as of October 9, 2023.
Through DNA testing, traditional genealogy methods, and a touch of luck, I've uncovered the intricate branches of my family tree in areas of Greece where it appears that little survives prior to the 20th century. This article has focused on the power of autosomal testing in piecing together our genealogical puzzle- but our journey doesn't end here. In an upcoming article, we'll explore the captivating story of the Mijan family's Y-DNA, a journey that stretches from Sicily to Syria, holding the promise of more discoveries and connections on the horizon.