Jewish Izmir is often read through two broad urban chapters.
The first is the old Juderia around Kemeraltı and Havra Street. This area gathered synagogues, study spaces, communal welfare structures, shops and everyday neighbourhood life into a dense urban setting.
The second is Karataş, where parts of the community moved from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This later quarter reflected changing social patterns, new homes, new institutions and a different relationship with the bay and the modern city.
- First Juderia: İkiçeşmelik and Kemeraltı, around Havra Street
- Second Juderia: Karataş, above the bay
- Landmarks: synagogues, the Rabbinate, the kortijos, the Historical Elevator
The first Juderia: İkiçeşmelik and Kemeraltı
Havra Street takes its name from the many synagogues along it. It grew into a busy market for kosher food, where the community bought much of its meat, fish, chicken, yoghurt, cheese and eggs, and where kosher wine was also produced.
Nearby stood the Rabbinate building, constructed in 1840 with support from the Rothschild family of Vienna and set in a walled garden on what was then Hahambaşı Street. It served as the seat of the Chief Rabbinate of Izmir, held the community’s central library and yeshiva, and had its own bakery for unleavened bread at Passover. The building was vacated in 1997 and has since fallen into disrepair.
The Sephardi families who settled in İkiçeşmelik built courtyard houses known in Spanish as kortijos, and locally as yahudhane. Each had a central courtyard with a fountain or well, surrounded by rooms, giving privacy and a shared life within a minority community. The kortijos became tied to the city’s food culture, associated with local favourites such as boyoz and şubiye. Of twenty-seven kortijos recorded in 1982, only a handful survive today.
The second Juderia: Karataş
From the mid-nineteenth century, families moved to the southern coast and hills of the bay, in what became Karataş. The neighbourhood was multicultural, home to Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Turks, each with their own schools and places of worship, and was sometimes compared to Istanbul’s Galata.
Karataş also carried the community’s public institutions. The Jewish Hospital was founded in 1914 through a donation by Nesim Levi (Bayraklı), continuing an earlier hospital that had begun in the old quarter in 1827. Levi also built the Historical Elevator in 1907 to connect Mithatpaşa Street at sea level with Halil Rıfat Paşa Street on the hill above, a public lift that remains one of the landmarks of Karataş.
How to read these quarters
These quarters are not simply heritage scenery. They are places where religious life, family memory, class change, migration and urban redevelopment overlap.
