The first Jews arrived in Slovenia during Roman times, vanished in the 7th century, and reappeared three hundred years later in Carinthia, the first truly stable Slavic state ever created. Over the next four hundred years they spread themselves around, especially in Maribor, and, disregarding the usual conflicts with the natives, prospered, taking on professions as diverse as bankers to cattle farmers.

The first recorded Jews in Ljubljana arrived in 1213, surviving for just over three hundred years in the area around today's Židovska Steza over the river from the old town before Maximilian I had them thrown out of the city in 1515, just three years before he himself shuffled off the planet forever. It wasn't until as late as 1867 that the Jews returned to the city when the ban was lifted, although very few did actually arrive, most opting for lives in neighbouring Gorica (now the Italian town of Gorizia) and Trst (now Trieste in Italy).

Prior to the break out of WWII, there were only some 1,500 self-declared Jews in all of Slovenia. By 1944, Ljubljana’s remaining 100 or so Jews, most of them Ashkenazim were rounded up by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz where almost none survived. In 1954 a small Jewish Community was established in Ljubljana by the survivors of the Holocaust. Independence brought about a reorganisation of the community, and until 2003, Ljubljana was the only European capital without a synagogue.

Today an estimated 400-600 Jews live in Slovenia, most of them in the capital. There's little to see in the way of Jewish sites in Ljubljana, the exceptions being the area around Židovska Steza and the small Jewish section inside Žale Cemetery.