Romaniotes

The Romaniotes or Romaniots (Greek: Ρωμανιῶτες, Rōmaniōtes) are a Jewish population who have lived in the territory of today's Greece and neighboring areas with large Greek populations for more than 2,000 years. Their languages were Yevanic, a Greek dialect, and Greek. They derived their name from the old name for the people of the Byzantine Empire, Romaioi. Large communities were located in Thebes, Ioannina, Chalcis, Corfu, Arta, Corinth and on the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes and Cyprus, among others. The Romaniotes are historically distinct from the Sephardim, who settled in Greece after the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

A majority of the Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust after Axis powers occupied Greece during World War II. They deported most of the Jews to concentration camps, where they were killed. After the war, a majority of the few surviving Jews emigrated to Israel, the United States and western Europe. Today a total of only 4,500 to 6,000 Jews, of both Romaniotes and Sephardic descent, remain in Greece.