Izmir איזמיר

Jews lived in Smyrna under the Greeks and the Romans, but the great community took shape at the end of the sixteenth century, when Sephardim from Salonika and Constantinople began to settle here; in the seventeenth century Izmir was one of the chief ports of the empire, and its community one of the chief communities.

Here Shabbetai Tzvi was born in 1626, here in 1665 he declared himself the Messiah, and from here his tidings went out to all Jewry. Here too lived the rabbis who stood against him, and here two centuries later Rabbi Chaim Palagi wrote his seventy books.

The community held out into the twentieth century; after the fire of 1922 and the emigration to the Land of Israel it grew small, but the synagogues of the old Jewish quarter stand to this day.