A deserted Jewish Cemetery of Akhisar

Abstract

In the town of Akhisar, a Western Anatolian town, there lie some tombstones with inscriptions in Hebrew on them. It is clear that the place was once a Jewish cemetery. The place no longer looks like a cemetery for it is not only surrounded with buildings, but the land is ploughed for cultivation. Lately the cemetery had been taken into an enclosure and the tombstones have been aligned at certain intervals and the field has been patched with grass. The tombs can no longer be identified. There are twenty-six tombstones lying on the ground here and there. The number of tombstones is not enough so as to claim whether more than one person is buried in one tomb or to draw out family ties. In any case I observed that the field is big enough to encompass twenty-six tombstones. They all belong to the Ottoman period dating from 1884 to 1918. Today there is no longer a Jewish community in this town. The Jews in almost none of the Anatolian towns have been in majority and therefore it is difficult to say whether they ever had a lack of space for burial ground. In this paper I will compare these Jewish tombstones at Akhisar with a number of Ottoman tombstones, particularly the ones in Western Anatolia. I will also try to establish through archival documents and some other sources the historical background to the Jewish community that once existed in this small town of Anatolia.