İzmir

Overview

İzmir is a city on the Aegean coast of western Anatolia in Turkey. Known in antiquity as Smyrna, it grew into one of the leading commercial centers of the Levant under the Ottoman Empire. Its position brought merchants and migrants from across the Mediterranean and inland Anatolia. Among them were Jews who built congregations, schools and charitable institutions that made İzmir a major center of Ottoman Jewish life. The city’s history also includes the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, which devastated its Christian communities. In recent decades, İzmir has figured in disputes over religious freedom, investigations of suspected Islamic State activity and an attack on a Jewish synagogue.

İzmir’s Jewish history extends far beyond the Ottoman period. Greek inscriptions from the second and third centuries record a flourishing community in ancient Smyrna. That community dwindled during the Middle Ages, then expanded as commerce drew Jewish settlers to the Ottoman port. An organized community took shape in 1605. By 1648, İzmir ranked among the empire’s three major Jewish centers. Its rabbis, congregations and merchants maintained connections with Jewish communities throughout the Ottoman world, while later schools and newspapers connected local Jews with European languages and ideas.

Geography

İzmir stands on western Anatolia’s Aegean coast. Its coastal setting helped turn Smyrna into a trading center linking inland producers and Mediterranean markets. That commercial role explains much of the city’s early modern growth: merchants arrived from other Ottoman cities, nearby towns and overseas ports, bringing goods, languages and religious traditions. Jewish settlement concentrated chiefly around the Kemeralti bazaar, placing communal life near the city’s commercial heart. Karatas was another Jewish quarter associated with the community’s later institutions.

The city’s maritime position also tied it to developments well beyond its immediate surroundings. In the Ottoman period, Jews arrived from Istanbul, Safed, Ankara, Salonika, Mediterranean islands, Italy and Holland, as well as the nearby towns of Manisa and Tire. Portuguese converts who had left the Iberian Peninsula and returned to Judaism joined them. These movements made İzmir’s Jewish population part of a wider network of trade, family ties and religious learning. In the present day, the same coastal location places İzmir among Turkey’s major urban centers and connects its airport to international routes.

Ancient and biblical history

The ancient Greek name of İzmir was Smyrna. Jewish settlement in the Aegean region preceded the Ottoman Empire by many centuries: Jews lived and traded in ancient cities including Smyrna, Ephesus, Sardis and Pergamon. Greek inscriptions dating to the second and third centuries CE attest to a flourishing Jewish community in Smyrna itself. They provide direct evidence of Jewish life in the city during antiquity, rather than treating its later Ottoman community as the beginning of its history.

Smyrna belonged to a broader landscape of ancient Jewish communities in Asia Minor. Archaeological remains at nearby Sardis and traces of settlement elsewhere along the Aegean coast place the city within a regional network. Smyrna was a trading town, and its Jewish residents took part in an area where commerce connected coastal cities with inland Anatolia. The ancient community diminished during the Middle Ages. Its later revival followed the city’s rise as a major Ottoman port, creating a new communal structure in a place with a much older Jewish past.

Jewish history

As Ottoman Smyrna became a major trading center of the Levant, it attracted Jewish merchants and settlers. An organized Jewish community emerged in 1605. By the early seventeenth century, its members had established synagogues and leadership institutions and maintained ties with other Jewish communities across the Ottoman Empire. The settlers’ varied origins shaped communal life, but Sephardic culture became dominant. Jews lived chiefly around the Kemeralti bazaar, where residence, worship and trade were closely connected.

Under Islamic rule, İzmir’s Jews held dhimmi status: Jews and Christians could maintain religious communities but occupied a subordinate legal position and paid jizya, a special personal tax. Those conditions formed the setting in which İzmir’s congregations governed their internal affairs. Sephardic customs and the languages brought by migrants remained central to communal life. Portuguese Jews established the Portugal-Neve Shalom synagogue in the 1620s or 1630s; it later divided into the Portugali and Neve Shalom congregations. The growth of separate congregations reflected both the size and the varied origins of the city’s Jewish population.

Rabbinic leadership helped make İzmir a center of Jewish learning and communal organization. Rabbi Isaac HaLevi Dayan came from Istanbul in 1609 and became the city’s first rabbi. Rabbi Yosef Ishkapa arrived around 1620, while Rabbi Isaac De Alba was among other figures who shaped local Jewish life. The community appointed a Chief Rabbinate over its congregations in 1631. In 1648, Joseph Escapa of Salonika became rabbi over all the congregations. By then, İzmir ranked among the three major Jewish centers of the Ottoman world. Rabbi Yosef Ishkapa in the 1650s and Rabbi Haim Benbenishti in the 1660s continued to influence its religious and communal life.

İzmir was also the birthplace of Shabbatei Zvi, born in 1626. He proclaimed himself the Messiah and founded the Sabbatean messianic movement, attracting followers while provoking opposition from established rabbis. İzmir’s rabbis expelled him after his proclamation. Under Ottoman pressure, he converted to Islam in 1666, alienating many followers and creating a rupture in a movement that had reached well beyond his native city. His career remains one of the most consequential episodes associated with seventeenth-century İzmir. The Tu B’Shevat seder also developed in the city during that century, illustrating its place in the development of Jewish religious practice.

Later communal institutions served education, health and public discussion. İzmir maintained an elementary school for 140 children, and its 22-bed Karatas Hospital served the Jewish community. An Alliance school educated students in French; its graduates adopted Western dress and became leaders of local Jewish life. Jewish newspapers broadened the city’s intellectual sphere. La Buena Esperansa and La Puerta dew Oriente began publication in 1843, giving İzmir a Jewish press alongside its synagogues and schools. These institutions show how the community adapted to nineteenth-century change while preserving congregational life.

İzmir’s Jewish population declined sharply after the Great Depression of 1929. By the 1940s, it had fallen to nearly 10,000. Migration peaked in the 1950s, when almost all of the remaining Jews left for the newly established State of Israel. Their departure greatly reduced a community whose institutions had once made İzmir a leading center of Ottoman Jewry. Synagogues and other communal sites nevertheless remained part of the city’s Jewish history and, as the 2019 attack on Beth Israel Synagogue showed, part of its living religious landscape.

Modern history

The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire placed Smyrna at the center of a struggle over western Anatolia. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres assigned Greece territory around the city, though the treaty’s settlement did not endure. During the Greco-Turkish War, Smyrna suffered catastrophic destruction in 1922. Fire devastated much of the city, and its Greek and Armenian Christian communities were destroyed or driven from their homes. The disaster transformed the population and marked a rupture in the history of a port long shaped by multiple religious and linguistic communities. İzmir subsequently developed within the Turkish republic.

The city remained important in national politics. In the 2009 local elections, the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, retained İzmir and increased its vote share from 47 percent in 2004 to 55 percent. The governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP, received 31 percent, two percentage points below its 2004 result. İzmir thus stood apart from some other major Turkish cities where the AKP remained in control. Opposition candidates also retained the city in the 2024 municipal elections, when the governing party lost ground across Turkey amid economic discontent.

İzmir was also drawn into national disputes over the rule of law. On January 7, amid a corruption investigation, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replaced police chiefs in the city because he suspected ties to the Gülen movement. The newly appointed chiefs opened another graft investigation days later. The episode showed how the struggle between Erdoğan’s government and its perceived opponents reached İzmir’s police leadership. It placed a city-level institution within a wider confrontation over corruption inquiries and political control of law enforcement.

Migration has added another dimension to the province’s recent history. A reported count placed 137,612 Syrian refugees in İzmir province, equivalent to 3.1 percent of its population at the time of the count. The figure describes the province rather than the city alone. İzmir was among several large Turkish provinces hosting substantial numbers of Syrians, although their share of its population was lower than in some provinces closer to the Syrian border.

Security

Turkish police conducted two operations involving suspected Islamic State affiliates in the İzmir area in July 2015. In one, police detained seven people suspected of having fought for the terrorist organization in Kobani before returning to Turkey. Officers found pistols and shotguns in their possession. In another operation across five Turkish cities, including İzmir, authorities detained 29 people suspected of financing the organization and recruiting people for it. These were arrests of suspects; the reported detentions alone did not establish individual guilt.

The detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson brought İzmir into an international religious-freedom dispute. Brunson worked at İzmir Resurrection Church and had lived in Turkey for more than 20 years. On October 7, 2016, local police summoned him and his wife, Norine, over their residence permit renewal applications. Turkish authorities kept him isolated for 13 days without access to an attorney or consular services before formally detaining him; Norine was released. Brunson was then held in İzmir and did not appear before a judge for nearly two months. On December 9, a judge accused him of membership in an armed terrorist organization and authorities transferred him to İzmir’s maximum-security prison. That hearing was his first meeting with a lawyer.

In 2019, an attacker threw a firebomb at İzmir’s Beth Israel Synagogue and told police that he had attacked it to protest Israel. The target was a Jewish house of worship, not an Israeli institution. The firebombing was an act of Jew hatred, and the attacker’s stated hostility toward Israel showed how such hostility could be directed against Jews in İzmir. The incident underscored the continuing need to protect the city’s Jewish institutions.

Present day

İzmir remains a major Aegean city with a history extending from ancient Smyrna through Ottoman trade and the Turkish republic. Its surviving Jewish institutions recall a community that once stood among the Ottoman Empire’s leading centers of Jewish life. The record of Greek inscriptions, Sephardic congregations, rabbis, schools and newspapers gives the city a place in both ancient and modern Jewish history. The destruction of 1922 and the departure of most local Jews in the mid-twentieth century also show how profoundly its population changed.

The city continues to appear in wider political and commercial developments. From September 23 through 27, 2026, İzmir was among three Turkish cities where flights by U.S.-sanctioned Iranian carriers made confirmed landings. As of September 28, 2026, FUGO Ground Services held agreements to provide passenger and ramp services to eight such carriers at Turkish airports including İzmir. Those arrangements placed the city within an air network connecting Turkey with Iran. Together with its electoral role, migration and security concerns, they illustrate İzmir’s continuing connections beyond the Aegean coast.