ABSTRACT
The presence of Jews in Greece is attested by inscriptions dating from as early as the first half of the second century b.c. Spreading out from the Greek areas in the wake of Greek colonization, the Jews settled on the shores of the Bosporus and on the northern coast of the Black Sea, on the estuaries of the Dniester, Dnieper and Bug, in the Crimea and the Caucasus. Certainly, the Jews' proselytizing was not nearly as active and organized a missionary activity as to make it comparable with that of the Christians. New immigrants from Asia and Africa, fugitives and traders alike, kept streaming into the completely accessible Mediterranean Basin, for Europe was the America of the declining world of antiquity. The process which led from there to the ghetto and ultimately to Hitler was, of course, a very gradual and complex one, subject to many fluctuations and more than one interruption.
