In the 15th-century, the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula began a diaspora after the Edict of Expulsion enforced by the Catholic Monarchs. Beyazid, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, offered hospitality to these Sephardic Jews, who settled in cities such as Thessaloniki, Izmir and Istanbul. Thessaloniki thus became a very important trading and cultural port, a unique place of exchange promoted especially by the networks of trust established by these Sephardic Jews. The golden era in the city continued with the emergence of printing and lasted until the 19th-century, with the arrival of a privileged group of Livorno Jews who acted as transmitters of western trade. After the Greek invasion of Thessaloniki in 1912, a new diaspora began towards the West that meant the end of Sephardism as such. However, its fruits, from Marranism to the Turkish Donhem, survive in the origin of the great currents of modernity that we currently find in the Mediterranean and that make up its plural identity.

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