The Romaniote Jews or the Romaniotes are a Greek-speaking ethnic Jewish community native to the Eastern Mediterranean. They are one of the oldest Jewish communities in existence and the oldest Jewish community in Europe. The Romaniotes have been, and remain, historically distinct from the Sephardim, some of whom settled in Ottoman Greece after the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal after 1492.
Members of the Romaniote Greek Jewish community of Volos: Rabbi Moshe Pesach (front left) with his sons (back). Prior to 1940.
Mosaic floor of a Jewish synagogue in Greece, built 300 AD, Aegina.
Colonel Mordechai Frizis (1893–1940) from the ancient Romaniote Greek Jewish community of Chalkis with his wife Victoria.
View on the Torah Ark of the Kehila Kedosha Yashan Synagogue of Ioannina with the typical Romaniote Shadayot (Votive offerings similar to the Byzantine Christian tradition) hanging on the Parochet and a Romaniote "Aleph" on the right side (a circumcision certificate with Berachot (mostly the Shiviti) and ancestral details).
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.
Idealised portrayal of the author Homer
Greek inscription in Cypriot syllabic script
