In 1492, the same year Columbus sailed for the New World, Spain expelled its Jews. They were given a choice: convert to Christianity or leave. Most left. Some went to Portugal, some to North Africa, and a great many settled across the Balkans.
Five centuries later, that history drew me there.
I wanted to understand the story of the Sephardic Jews—how they found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, how they built thriving communities across the Balkans, and how that remarkable chapter of history ultimately came to such a devastating end.
The Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid II, welcomed them. Legend has it he looked at what Spain had just done and called Ferdinand a fool. The Ottomans opened the door, and Sephardic Jews poured into cities across the empire: Sarajevo. Skopje. Bitola, which they called Monastir. Istanbul. Thessaloniki.
Bayezid II wasn’t just being compassionate. He understood what Spain had lost. The Sephardic Jews arrived with centuries of experience in commerce, banking, medicine, craftsmanship, and international trade. They spoke multiple languages, maintained business connections across Europe and the Mediterranean, and quickly became an important part of the Ottoman economy. Spain had expelled some of its most productive citizens. The Ottomans welcomed them.
What happened next is the rest of the story.
Four distinct religions—Judaism, Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and Catholicism—ended up living in the same cities, on the same streets, for five hundred years. Not merged, not blended. Distinct. Each kept its own faith, its own calendar, and its own traditions. The Sephardic Jews brought Ladino, the Spanish they’d spoken for generations, and kept speaking it for centuries. Around them were Turkish, Greek, Albanian, and the Slavic languages of the Balkans.
It wasn’t always peaceful. There were tensions, inequalities, and periods of conflict. But for five hundred years, four religions coexisted under the Ottoman Empire in a way that, frankly, most of the world still hasn’t figured out.
I felt that history under my feet in Sarajevo, standing inside the old synagogue that’s now a museum. It’s a quiet building—the kind of quiet that makes you lower your voice without being told to. Glass cases, old photographs, prayer books, the everyday objects of a community that had been there since the 1500s—grocers, tailors, musicians, neighbors. Sarajevo’s Jewish community was part of the fabric of the city.
Then World War II ripped that fabric apart.
In Skopje, I walked through the Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia, and it hit me harder than I expected. On March 11, 1943, Bulgarian occupation forces—acting on Nazi orders—rounded up the entire Jewish population of Skopje, Bitola, and Štip in a single morning. More than 7,000 people were crammed into a converted tobacco warehouse in Skopje before being loaded onto trains bound for Treblinka.
Almost none came back.
The museum doesn’t soften the story.
A cattle car sits inside the building.
But what stayed with me was a wall of faces. Hundreds of them. Men, women, children, each holding a photograph above their heads. Some are faded black-and-white portraits. Others glow softly from digital screens. They are no longer a statistic. They become neighbors. Shopkeepers. Tailors. Musicians. Parents. Children. People who expected to wake up the next morning and simply live their lives.
I stood there for a long time.
What gets me most is the arithmetic of it.
Five hundred years of four religions figuring out how to coexist…
…undone in about three weeks.
The few who survived scattered. Many rebuilt their lives in Israel after 1948. Today, the Jewish community of North Macedonia numbers only a couple hundred people, nearly all in Skopje.
That’s the story I wanted to tell. Not just the tragedy at the end of it, but the five hundred years that came before—four religions, one region, coexisting.
