Sicily and the Lost Jewish Communities of the South

Jews had lived on the island for some fifteen centuries. A tombstone from Catania dated 383 CE commemorates a man named Aurelius Samohil in Latin, with a Hebrew greeting. In the 590s Pope Gregory the Great ordered that the Jews of Palermo be compensated after their synagogue was seized.

Arab rule left the deepest mark. Sicilian Jews adopted Arabic and kept it long after the Normans and the Aragonese arrived, writing it in Hebrew letters. As late as 1474, a lament for the murdered Jews of Noto and Modica was composed in Sicilian Judeo-Arabic. Their word for a synagogue was meschita, from the Arabic masjid, and it survives in street names today.

By the fifteenth century more than fifty Sicilian towns had a Jewish community, each known as a giudecca. Historians' estimates of the total range from about 20,000 to 50,000, with most between 30,000 and 40,000. Palermo had around five thousand Jews. Syracuse, Messina, Catania and Trapani were major centers, while a hill town like Salemi counted perhaps 150. Each community elected its own officers. The crown taxed the Jews as a single body that legally belonged to the royal treasury.

This was not a merchant caste. The documents show dyers and silk weavers, coppersmiths, coral craftsmen in Trapani, physicians, grain and cheese dealers, horse traders and farmers, along with a smaller number of moneylenders.

The final decades were not calm. Preaching friars stirred up hostility, and on 15 August 1474 crowds attacked the Jewish quarters of Modica and Noto and killed several hundred people. In 2024 the Union of Italian Jewish Communities placed memorial plaques in both towns.

Sicily was not independent in 1492. It belonged to the Crown of Aragon, and its king was Ferdinand. The edict he and Isabella signed in Granada on 31 March 1492 therefore applied to the island in full.

The edict was proclaimed in Sicily that June. Local officials and much of the nobility protested, and their reasons were practical: Jews made up a significant share of the island's taxpayers and skilled trades. The protests bought time, but not a reprieve.
The orders that followed over the summer were methodical. Jews could not sell property or leave in secret, and royal officials inventoried their valuables. Departing families could take little beyond clothing, bedding, food and a few coins for the road. The deadline moved from September to December. After the communities paid for a further delay, it moved again, to 12 January 1493.

The choice was the one offered in Spain: leave or be baptized. Most left. Several thousand converted and stayed. Their story, and that of the Inquisition that pursued them, is told in our article on the Anusim of southern Italy. This article follows the people who departed and the world that left with them.

The nearest refuge lay across the Strait of Messina. Many exiles, especially from Messina and Syracuse, settled in Calabria or went on to Naples, whose king, Ferrante, let them in. Others reached Rome, where a Scola Siciliana became one of the five congregations of the later ghetto. The largest share ended up in the Ottoman Empire, and Istanbul registers from the early 1600s still list congregations named for Sicily and for Messina. Malta was then part of the Kingdom of Sicily, and it expelled its Jews at the same time.

The mainland refuge did not last. Spain took the Kingdom of Naples in 1503 and brought its policy with it: a general expulsion in 1510, an order against converts in 1515, and a final expulsion in 1541. Families who had crossed from Palermo or Syracuse and rebuilt their lives in Reggio or the towns of Puglia were uprooted again within two generations. By 1541, open Jewish life had ended across the whole south, from Trapani to the heel of Italy.

A population figure hides most of the damage.

The language went first. Sicilian Judeo-Arabic did not survive the dispersal, and within a few generations the exiles' descendants spoke the languages of wherever they had landed. Sicilian congregations abroad kept their own customs for a time, then merged into the Sephardic majority around them.

Buildings changed hands. Synagogues were sold or converted into churches: in Salemi the synagogue became Santa Maria della Catena, and local scholars identify Syracuse's synagogue with the church of San Giovanni Battista. Cemeteries disappeared under later construction. The Inquisition, eventually seated in Palermo's Palazzo Steri, went on prosecuting suspected judaizers among the converts into the eighteenth century. When the tribunal was abolished, its archive was burned.

Memory went last. For centuries the Jewish past was rarely part of how Sicilian towns told their own history. This leaves anyone researching today with a paradox. Because royal and notarial archives survived, and because Shlomo Simonsohn gathered them into the eighteen volumes of The Jews in Sicily, the island's pre-1492 Jews are among the best-documented medieval Jewish populations in Europe. Their descendants after 1493 are among the hardest to trace.

The most visible remains are names. The old quarters survive in several spellings: Via della Giudecca in Syracuse, Via Giudecca in Trapani, Via Iudeca in Caltagirone, Jureca in Mazara del Vallo, Via Giudaica in Erice, Vicolo Meschita in Palermo. Many similar streets were renamed over the centuries. Where a sign does survive, it marks a neighborhood, not a particular building.

Trapani has an ironic landmark. The Palazzo della Giudecca, with its diamond-point stone façade, was built in the sixteenth century, after the Jews had gone, and simply took its name from the quarter.

Syracuse holds the most striking physical evidence. Under Casa Bianca on Via Alagona, 58 steps cut into the rock descend to a vaulted chamber with spring-fed pools, found during renovation in the late 1980s. It is often called Byzantine, though the dating is debated. A second chamber, beneath the church of San Filippo Apostolo, had long been identified as a mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath, until some scholars disputed the identification. Then a Hebrew inscription carved into its stairwell was found and published by Yonatan Adler, Nadia Zeldes and Edna Engel. A claim, a challenge, then evidence: that is how this field should work.

Objects turn up in unexpected places. In Agira, a stone Torah ark from the Aragonese period was reassembled in 1987 inside the church of Santissimo Salvatore. In Siculiana, near Agrigento, a priest cleaning the baptismal font in 1966 noticed Hebrew letters on it. The basin carried a donor's inscription dated 1478 and most likely once stood at the entrance to Agrigento's synagogue.

Palermo's Jewish quarter covered two districts, the Guzzetta and the Meschita. They lay around today's Via Calderai, near the church of San Nicolò da Tolentino, where the Great Synagogue that Obadiah described once stood. Little of it is visible above ground.

In 2017 Archbishop Corrado Lorefice granted the Jewish community the seventeenth-century Oratory of Santa Maria del Sabato, on Vicolo Meschita, for use as a synagogue. Progress after that was slow. The community is tiny, formally a section of the Jewish Community of Naples, and it could not fund the restoration, so the building stayed closed for years. Evelyne Aouate, founder of the Sicilian Institute of Jewish Studies and the project's most persistent advocate, died in 2022. In December 2024 the city, the Archdiocese, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities and the Naples community signed an agreement. Restoration, paid for by the city, began in April 2025.

Check the current status before you visit. For this story the direction matters more than the opening date: for the first time in more than five centuries, a Sicilian city is rebuilding a place of Jewish worship in its old Jewish quarter.

Most Sicilian-Americans descend from emigrants who left between the 1880s and the 1920s, four centuries after the expulsion.

Two things are true at once. Thousands of Sicilian Jews converted and remained, and some Sicilian families today almost certainly descend from them. But the fact that Sicily once had a large Jewish population says nothing about any particular family. The only question that can actually be answered is whether a specific line can be documented.
Suspicion usually rests on family customs, a surname, or a DNA result. We cover all three in [The Hidden Jews of Southern Italy]. In brief, none of them settles the question on its own. A Near Eastern percentage in a Sicilian DNA result is expected, and it has nothing to do with Jewish ancestry.

What is particular to Sicily is the shape of the record. Before 1492 it is rich. After 1493 it thins sharply, and the hardest stretch is usually the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

The work runs backward, from records that certainly exist toward records that may not.

Pin down the comune. You need the town itself, not just the province. Look for it in naturalization papers, passenger manifests or family documents. Everything else depends on it.

Check whether that town had a giudecca. Historians have mapped Sicily's Jewish communities before 1492. If your town is among them, a local converso origin is historically possible. If it is not, the question stays open, since people moved, but the path is less direct.

Work through the civil records. Civil registration in Sicily began in 1820, and many registers can be viewed online through the Italian state's Antenati portal. The ages recorded at marriage and death usually carry a line back into the late 1700s.

Move into parish registers. Parish and diocesan archives are the bridge to earlier centuries, though survival varies from town to town. Some sixteenth-century entries mark a family as neofita, newly converted.

Use notarial archives. Notarial acts in the Archivi di Stato are the richest Sicilian source for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jews appear in them by name before 1492. After the expulsion, converts sometimes appear with both their Christian name and their former one.

Read the published record. Simonsohn's volumes and Nadia Zeldes's "The Former Jews of This Kingdom": Sicilian Converts after the Expulsion, 1492–1516 are the starting points.

Many searches end without an answer. The gap after 1493 is real, and sometimes it cannot be crossed.

If your family's town once had a giudecca, you have a question worth asking. You do not yet have an answer.

La Ricerca is our preliminary archival assessment. We establish which records survive for your family's comune, whether the town had a Jewish community before 1492, and whether a full investigation has a realistic chance of reaching the sixteenth century. It costs $950 and is credited in full toward a research project within ninety days. If the records are not there, we will tell you.