Timelines in Jewish History 1000 BCE - 1925 CE with Parallel Timelines in Relevant General History

Introduction

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In the 3000 year history of the Jewish people, with the exception of a few relatively brief periods, Jews have been the often-persecuted minority in nations ruled by others. Despite these tenuous circumstances, Jews have survived as a people longer than empires and regimes that in their time were thought to be eternal––Egyptian, Persian, and Roman empires, Arab Caliphates, and Czarist Russia, to name a few. Even more remarkable, in the years 900 BCE to 250 BCE this small people, remote from the centers of civilization of that era and barely mentioned in contemporary accounts, produced a body of literature unsurpassed in its era or in any subsequent era––and then preserved it intact to this day.

From 500 CE to the independence of Israel in 1948, Jews have been a politically unimportant minority wherever they have lived. Therefore, standard history texts rarely mention Jews, and then only in the few times of conflict or major upheaval which have an impact on general history––for example, the emigration of more than 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe to the U.S. between 1881 and 1900, and Zionism/Israel in the 20th century. On the other hand, to compensate for the near invisibility of Jews in general history, texts devoted specifically to Jewish history concentrate on the major set pieces––First and Second Temples, revolts and exile, Babylonian Talmud, the “Golden Age” in Spain, etc.––with little continuity between the segments (how did we get from Babylonia to Spain, or did we?), and little description of the events in the host countries which greatly affected the scattered Jewish minority communities––for example, the move of the Arab Caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad in 762, the disarray in the Roman Catholic Church in the 15th and 16th centuries, the rise and decline of the Kingdom of Poland and the Ottoman Empire.

Jewish communities have grown and thrived or disappeared throughout the Middle East, North Africa, most of Europe, and finally in America. The objective of this report is to trace the histories of the major Jewish communities to 1925 CE, with close attention to the events in the host countries which shaped the fortunes of the Jewish minorities. This is my attempt to answer the question, “How did we get from Canaan in 1000 BCE to where we are today?”

FORMAT OF TIMELINE SEGMENTS
The period 1000 BCE to 1925 CE is divided into seven segments:
   1000 BCE – 500 BCE
   500 BCE – 0
   0 – 500 CE
   500 CE – 1000 CE
   1000 – 1500
   1500 – 1800
   1800 – 1925
Each time segment has a summary spreadsheet covering the period plus a brief narrative section. Each timeline spreadsheet includes the Jewish World and the land of Israel. The Christian World is added with the 0 – 500 CE and all subsequent segments. The Moslem World starts with the 500 CE – 1000 segment. In addition, all regions with significant Jewish populations, or countries that impact the Jewish populations, appear in the appropriate timelines and narrative sections.

1000 BCE – 500 BCE

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• The Hebrew-speaking Israelites controlled most of the area equivalent to modern Israel plus the West Bank from approximately 950 BCE. Following the death of Solomon (about 930), two kingdoms developed: the northern kingdom, Israel, dominated by the Ephraimite (Joseph) tribe, and the southern kingdom, Judah. The Temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon, was located in the southern kingdom.
• The Israelite kingdoms were in the paths of the land trade routes between the two major powers of the era, Egypt to the south and the dominant empire in Mesopotamia to the northeast. Depending upon the relative strengths of the two superpowers, the Israelites aligned themselves with (i.e., paid tribute to) either Egypt or the current Mesopotamian power. The Israelite land was regarded as fringe or frontier territory by the major powers, useful principally as an outpost to guard against invasion from either direction.
• The northern Israelite kingdom lay squarely across the main trade route, The Way of the Sea, while the southern kingdom, including Jerusalem, occupied mainly hill country east of the trade route. The location of the northern kingdom was both an advantage and a disadvantage; an advantage in that it became more prosperous during relatively peaceful times, and a disadvantage because it became an invasion target from either the south or the north during superpower wars. The only significant economic advantage of the southern kingdom was the Temple, to which Israelites from both kingdoms made pilgrimages and paid for sacrifices.
• The strategic location of the northern kingdom proved its undoing when it was captured and destroyed by Assyria in 722. The Assyrian siege of Jerusalem two years later was suddenly abandoned, miraculously according to the Book of Kings, or possibly as a result of a revolt in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. To guard their new southern frontier, the Assyrians deported much of the population from the conquered northern kingdom and established a garrison in Samaria with troops from regions of Assyria. The deported Israelites (the “Ten Lost Tribes”) were scattered in Assyria where they probably adopted local gods in addition to YHVH. The Assyrian garrison in Samaria, assimilating with the remaining Israelites, adopted the “god of the land,” YHVH. Their descendants are the Samaritans of history and the present.
• The southern kingdom, Judah, maintained an increasingly precarious independence for another 130 years, surrendering hostages and tribute as demanded by the prevailing Mesopotamian power. After many years of popular practice of the abominations described in Kings and in Deuteronomy, Hezekiah (729-686) made some progress in restoring the religious allegiance to YHVH. The most significant reforms, which included the absolute rejection of idolatry and centralization of sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem, occurred during the reign of Josiah (639-608), following the appearance of the book of Deuteronomy in 622. Much to the regret of the author of Kings, in 608 Josiah attempted to intercept the Pharaoh Necho at Megiddo as he was marching toward Babylonia. Josiah was killed and his army defeated. In the next 20 years, Babylonia, which had taken control of Mesopotamia from Assyria, made increasing demands on Judah, culminating in 586 with the exiling to Babylonia of the last king of Judah plus most of the ruling class. The exiled Judahites were settled in a relatively comfortable area near Babylon, and they formed the nucleus of a continuous Jewish community in Mesopotamia which prospered until 1948 CE. For the most part, the Jews of Babylonia retained their allegiance to YHVH, rather than adopting any of the gods of the land.
• Because of the existence of a garrison in Samaria, the Babylonians and subsequently the Persians were able to maintain control of Jerusalem without establishing a garrison there. In 539 Persia conquered Babylonia. The Persian policy for securing subject territories was to restore the original inhabitants and encourage worship of the god of each land, YHVH in the case of Judah. In 538 Cyrus said to go back (the last lines in Tanakh). A portion of the Babylonian community returned, and the Temple was rededicated by the priests in 516. Cyrus did not permit the Davidic king to return.
• All that remains to be considered for this time period is how this insignificant community far from the centers of civilization produced a body of literature unsurpassed in its era, or in any era since. Note that the J & E authors and the early prophets predated Homer, and Deuteronomy and the prophets of exile predated the classic Greek authors. A theory by Jacques Berlinerblau is that, in contrast to the prevailing practice of scribes extolling the deeds of god-like rulers, the Hebrew Bible “…is anything but the voice of official religion. It is the religion of an embattled minority endowed with sublime literary imagination and an uncompromising commitment to one God, the God of Israel.”

500 BCE - 0

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• The Jewish community that returned to Jerusalem was vulnerable because the city walls had been destroyed in 586, and the neighboring tribes, including the Samaritans, were hostile to the idea of a rival power arising again in Jerusalem. The situation was stabilized with the arrival of Nehemiah, who supervised construction of the new city wall in 437. For the balance of the Persian period (to 332), the restored community in Judah remained relatively peaceful. During this time, the late books of Tanakh were written, including Job, Jonah, Ecclesiastes, and Chronicles. The redaction of Tanakh was completed about 330 BCE. The date of final standardization of the contents and order of the canon is estimated to be 140 CE.
• Zoroastrianism was the major religion of the Persian Empire, which ruled both Judah and the Jewish community in Babylonia to 332. While the Persian emperors professed belief, Zoroastrianism was not the state religion, and Cyrus was able to deal leniently with the Jews without resistance from the priestly caste. Many languages were spoken within the Persian Empire, but the official language was Aramaic.
• The Greek city-states on the mainland came into prominence from about 800. In contrast to the Israelites, the Greeks were by necessity maritime-oriented. With limited agricultural land and a growing population, the Greek cities, particularly Athens, were dependent upon imports for food supplies. Approximately 2/3 of the grain supply for Athens came from overseas, principally via the Black Sea. The Greek economy was very much slave-based; probably more than half the inhabitants of Athens during the “Golden Age” were slaves, mainly from Asia Minor. Athens established colonies from Sicily to the Dardanelles. Through trading, the Greeks were in frequent contact with all lands bordering the Mediterranean, including Phoenicia and the Philistine coast.
• The Greek city-states fought off invasions by Persia with victories at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480). Under the dominance of Athens, Greek arts and literature flourished in the height of the Classical Age. However, the Greek cities were then weakened by in-fighting, particularly between Athens and Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (431-404). The independence of the Greek city-states was ended by Philip of Macedon in 338.
• Philip’s son, Alexander, in a few years shattered the centuries-old pattern of dominance of the eastern Mediterranean by superpowers in Egypt and Mesopotamia.. Alexander invaded Asia Minor and defeated the Persian army in 333. He then marched down the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and conquered Syria, Judah, and Egypt in 332. Next he turned east and subdued the entire Persian Empire to the border of India. Alexander died in Babylon in 323 at age 32, and his vast empire fragmented after his death. The two major successor states were Egypt under the Ptolemys; and the Seleucid Empire, which included Judah (captured from Egypt in 200), Syria, Babylonia, and Persia. In 247 a renewed Persian empire, the Parthians, defeated the Seleucids and drove them west of the Euphrates River. The Jewish community in Babylon, east of the Euphrates, was returned to Persian control.
• The lasting result of the conquests of Alexander was the spread of Hellenism, the Greek language and culture, throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The Seleucids actively engaged in Hellenizing their territory to unite the various ethnic communities. Hundreds of new cities, including Antioch, were established for trade and garrison purposes. The new cities adopted the Greek language, philosophic ideas, religious sentiments (including polytheism), and politics. In Egypt, Hellenizing centered on the new city of Alexandria. Alexandria became probably the largest Jewish city in the world. Although Greek-speaking, the Jewish community in Alexandria retained their allegiance to YHVH, made annual contributions to the Temple, and recognized Jerusalem as “the metropolis.” The translation of Tanakh into Greek, the Septuagint, was completed in Alexandria about 200 BCE.
• An additional result of Hellenizing was the opening of the Mediterranean world to previously insulated peoples, including the Judeans. Jews emigrated and established communities in seaports in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, North Africa, and later in Rome. In common with the community in Alexandria, the Diaspora communities maintained their distinctive customs and rituals, and made contributions and frequent festival pilgrimages to the Temple.
• The Hellenizing activities of the Seleucids provoked increasing resistance in Judah, finally resulting in the successful Maccabean revolt (165). The Hasmonean dynasty ruled independent Judah for about 100 years, with increasing internal strife. The Hasmoneans greatly extended their territory by conquering and forcibly converting neighboring states, probably the only instance in history of forcible conversion by Jews. During this period Rome became the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean. In 63, warring Hasmonean factions invited Rome to annex Judah. Under Roman control and with Diaspora contributions, Jerusalem prospered and expanded, particularly with the total rebuilding of the Temple and Temple Mount by Herod (39-4). At the same time, the Pharisees were developing a Judaism based principally on study and prayer, independent of the Temple sacrificial cult.

0 – 500 CE

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• During the first half of the 1st Century, Jewish Diaspora communities throughout the Roman Empire grew, prospered, and proselytized. The availability of the Bible in Greek (the Septuagint) was a major factor in the influence of Judaism among the pagans, as well as maintaining the cohesion of the Jewish Diaspora, since most of the Jews in the Mediterranean area were not conversant in Hebrew. It is variously estimated that 10% to 20% of the population of the Roman Empire at this time were Jews or “God Fearers.” Contributions and pilgrimages to the Temple from the Diaspora helped make Jerusalem one of the richest cities in the Empire. Pharisees, represented by Hillel, emphasized individual prayer and study as the foundations of Jewish life, while the Sadducees, represented by Shammai, constituted the Temple cult. In later rabbinic literature on the disputes between Hillel and Shammai, Hillel always wins. The Essenes, an ascetic fundamentalist group centered near the Dead Sea, rejected both the Pharisees and Sadducees and preached that the “end time” was near. Examples of apocalyptic literature from many authors date from this period. Precursors of synagogues––prayer, study, and discussion groups––are also believed to date from this period.
• Although the Romans had been invited by feuding Jewish leaders to rule Judah in 63 BCE, the kings and procurators installed by Rome were cruel and incompetent, most notably the prefect Pontius Pilate (26-36). The completion in about 60 of the vast Temple area building project that had been started by Herod left Judea with two major problems––very high taxes and unemployment of 18,000 laborers who had worked on the Temple project. The society split between the wealthy aristocrats, who were allied with the Romans, and the very poor, many of whom resorted to pillaging in the countryside. During the 20 years prior to 66, the violent acts of class warfare began to be directed specifically at the incompetent Roman appointed authorities. In 66, the Roman garrison in Jerusalem was massacred in a riot that originated when the procurator stole money from the Temple treasury to make up for unpaid taxes. The governor of Syria attempted to retake Jerusalem, but his troops were defeated and slaughtered when retreating. Judea was then in open revolt against Rome. Vespasian was sent with two new legions to conquer Judea. The Romans methodically advanced from the north, secured the Galilee and seacoast, and besieged Jerusalem. Many Jewish leaders were prepared to surrender Jerusalem but were prevented from doing so by arch-patriots, Siicari and Zealots. Later rabbinic literature refers to these groups as “thugs.” Titus, the son of Vespasian, besieged and captured Jerusalem, massacred the inhabitants, and destroyed the Temple. The annual contributions to the Temple formerly made by all Jews were then taxed by the Romans to support the temple of Jupiter.
• Before the fall of Jerusalem, a group of Pharisees led by Yohanan ben Zakkai was permitted by the Romans to leave the city. They established a religious academy at Yavneh, in the former Philistine territory, marking the beginning of Rabbinic Judaism. Gamaliel II, who became head of the academy about 100, achieved standing as the Patriarch, the representative of the Jewish community in dealings with the Romans. The Patriarchate maintained its role until 429, when it was abolished by the Romans. In 140, Simon bar Kochba led an ill-advised revolt against Rome. The revolt, centered primarily in the south, was crushed, and Jews were forbidden from living in Jerusalem. The academy moved north to the Galilee, where under the direction of Judah ha-Nasi, they completed the Mishnah (about 220), a compilation of rabbinic legal decisions and commentary. Following the bar Kochba revolt, the Jewish population in the Galilee increased significantly, Tiberias became a major Jewish center, and a number of monumental synagogues were constructed in the Galilee. The Diaspora from Judea to Babylonia and to the Roman Empire also increased at this time. One effect of the revolts in Judea was a large increase in the city of Rome of Jewish captive slaves who were eventually redeemed by the Jewish community, with the result that the city of Rome had one of the largest Jewish populations in the empire. Synagogues evolved into all-purpose communal institutions in the Diaspora in the Roman Empire.
• The Euphrates River was accepted as the boundary between the Roman Empire and Persia when Hadrian decreed a halt to Roman expansion (114). The Jewish community east of the Euphrates, never under continuous Roman control, was augmented by the Diaspora from Judea, following the revolts. Academies which developed in Babylonia after about 200 became the pre-eminent Jewish institutions in the world. The Babylonian Talmud was the product of discussions at these academies, compiled from about 220 to 600. The Sassanids, a tribe which came into power in Persia about 250, fought Rome to a standstill at the Euphrates River and established strong ties to the Jewish community. The fabled Sassanian ruler Barham V, cited as the great hunter in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, was the grandson of a Sassanid emperor and the daughter of the Exilarch, the head of the Jewish community.
• The Jewish-Christian community, which maintained Mosaic law while accepting Jesus as the Messiah, formed in Judea following the death of Jesus (30). However, following the destruction of the Temple in 70, the influence of this group diminished rapidly. Paul (d. 64) and others proselytized in the Roman Empire, particularly in Asia Minor, and found major success in converting pagans to early Christianity by emphasizing faith and the promise of afterlife, rather than adherence to Mosaic law. Major Christian centers grew in Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. As the Church hierarchy developed, the Episcopate of Rome emerged as a primary center. Doctrinal disputes between “orthodoxy” and Gnosticism, Arianism, Manichaeism, and Nestorianism (among others) provoked fierce conflict among Christian sects. One doctrine that united all factions was “the perfidy of the Jews,” refusing to accept Jesus as the Messiah and maintaining adherence to the ancient law. The charge of Jews as deicides dates from 190.
• The Roman Empire was weakened by civil wars 245 to 263. Even when order was restored, it was recognized that the empire had grown too large and diverse to be ruled by one central authority in Rome. In 286 Diocletian divided the empire into the eastern (Greek speaking) and western (Latin speaking) parts. With the building of Constantinople by Constantine in 330––and partly because of the drain on western resources to establish the city––the eastern, or Byzantine, portion of the empire was the richer and more powerful half.
• By 300 Christian converts had permeated the empire, although Gibbon puts the total at no more than 5% of the population at the start of Constantine’s reign. The Christians were a particularly troublesome minority because of their public rejection of the local gods, the ancient foundation of municipal allegiance and stability. Regarding the traditional Roman pagan religion Gibbon says: “The various modes of worship were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrates as equally useful.” Diocletian recognized that the Christians were a growing threat to authority and tried unsuccessfully to suppress the group by persecution, from 303 to 311. When Constantine became emperor in 312 he reversed the strategy and embraced the Christians as allies in maintaining and extending his power. In 313 he proclaimed religious freedom for Christians, and in 324 he made Christianity the preferred religion of the empire. The next task was to define which of the many competing forms of Christianity was the official Roman Christianity. The Council of Nicea in 325 defined the official dogma, the Nicene Creed. However, alternative or heretical forms of Christianity which did not conform to the Nicene Creed remained strong in Western Europe, North Africa, and Persia for hundreds of years. In addition, the Eastern Orthodox Church adopted a different dogma, leading eventually to the final schism of the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches in 1054.
• In 392 Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and Rome was established as the site of the pope. With the resources of the empire behind it, exemption from taxation and military service, and an internal legal system that paralleled the Roman law, the Church became a secular power within the Western Empire which rivaled the strength of the Roman government. In the Eastern Empire the Church was always subservient to the emperor. The condition of the Jewish communities in the empire deteriorated drastically. In Judea, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built in 326, residence of Jews in Jerusalem was severely restricted, and the Patriarchate was abolished in 429. The Jerusalem Talmud was completed in 400, but the community in Judea recognized that the community in Babylonia, thriving under the Sassanids, was now the center of Jewish scholarship. In 414 the first charge of ritual murder (blood libel) was leveled against the Jews, and an organized assault was made on the Jews in Alexandria. In 429 building of new synagogues was forbidden throughout the Roman Empire. By 500 Christians became the majority in Judea.
• As the power of the Church increased in the Western Roman Empire, the power of the empire itself decayed. For several hundred years the empire had been increasing the use of favored barbarian mercenaries for defense against other barbarian tribes. From 378 to 500, large numbers of Germanic tribes, under pressure from Huns and other tribes further east, settled in and gradually assumed control of much of the western empire. During this period, most of the leaders of the Germanic tribes were converted to Christianity (usually Arianism), partly by captive Roman Christians and partly by proselytizing bishops. In 378 the Goths destroyed the last western Roman army at the Battle of Adrianople. Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and by the Vandals in 455. Finally in 493 the Western Empire fell to the Ostrogoths. At the same time, the Visigothic Kingdom was established in Iberia. Long settled Spanish Jews in the Visigothic Kingdom were increasingly persecuted, including periods of forced conversion, particularly after the conversion of the Visigoth royal family from Arianism to Roman Catholicism in 587. Tension and conflict in the Christian community were followed by serious problems for the Jewish community, a pattern to be repeated in history.

500 – 1000

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• In Babylonia under the Sassanid Empire, the Talmud was completed about 600, the academies were flourishing, and the Exilarch was recognized as governor of the semi-autonomous Jewish community. A Yemenite tribe adopted Judaism. From 502 to 630 the Sassanid Empire fought a series of mutually devastating wars with the Byzantine Empire. One effect of the prolonged hostility was that virtually all continuous communication (including acquaintance with the Talmud) was cut off between the Aramaic-speaking Jewish community in Babylonia and the Greek and Latin-speaking Jewish communities in the Mediterranean area. When the Sassanids captured Judea from the Byzantines (614-629), presumably opening the possibility of return to Jerusalem, the rabbis in Babylonia took little notice of the event. With the Talmud, the rabbis had created a self-contained portable world that functioned wherever Jews lived, with no reference to events in the host countries.
• Mohammed (571-632), living in Mecca, began about 610 to declare himself a prophet of God. He was forced by local authorities to flee from Mecca to Medina (the Hegira) in 622. With a growing force of followers he returned to capture Mecca in 630, and in 631 he united all Arabia under Islam. Loyal followers of Mohammed established the Rashidun Caliphate in Medina (632-661). The Arabs were able fighters, having served both the Romans and the Persians as mercenaries. With both the Byzantine and Sassanid empires weakened by their wars over more than 100 years, the Arabs were able to capture Judea, Syria, and Egypt from the Byzantines from 633 to 639 and Iraq (Babylonia) from the Sassanids in 648. In 651, the Arabs overthrew the Sassanids and captured Persia. The new rulers continued to recognize the Exilarch as the head of the Jewish community. Zoroastrianism, previously the majority religion in Persia but primarily limited to Persia, declined rapidly after the Arab conquest. Nestorian Christianity continued to expand in Persia, and from the 8th century to the 14th century was one of the largest Christian denominations in the world.
• By 661, the entire Mediterranean coast of North Africa was captured by Islam. The Rashidun Caliphate was succeeded by the Damascus-based Umayyad Caliphate, which maintained power from 661 to 750, despite a series of Arab civil wars. The Dome of the Rock (691) and Al Aqsa Mosque (715) were built in Jerusalem by the Umayyads. In 711 Muslims (Moors) captured Spain from the Visigoths, with active assistance from the Jewish community who understandably were happy to see the defeat of the Visigoths. The expansion of the Arab territories ended with defeats by the Byzantines at Constantinople in 718 and by the Franks at Tours (central France) in 732. The effect of the Arab conquests was to split the Mediterranean world north and south, with Arab dominance of Spain and the southern and eastern shores, and the Roman Empire successor countries the northern shore.
• Following the third Arab civil war (744-746), the Abbasid Caliphate gained control (the origin of the Sunni/Shiite split) and established their capital in the new city of Baghdad (founded 762). The Abbasids initiated what has been referred to as “The Golden Age of Islam,” for example with translations of Greek works and the Hebrew Bible into Arabic. Great Jewish banking houses were established in Baghdad. With Baghdad as the intellectual and trading capital of the south Mediterranean world, the influence of the Babylonian Jewish academies and the Talmud spread throughout North Africa and Spain. Jewish communities prospered in Egypt and in Tunis, and via these communities the Talmud was transmitted to Italy and then to the Rhineland. By the middle of the 10th century, the caliph in Baghdad began to lose effective power, and independent caliphates arose in Spain (Cordoba Caliphate), and Tunis/Egypt/Israel (Fatimid Caliphate). In parallel with the changes in the relative influence of the caliphates, the influence of the Babylonian Jewish academies and the Gaonim (heads of academies) peaked with Saadia Gaon (928-942), and thereafter academies in Egypt, Tunis, Spain, and Tiberias asserted their independence. The Masoretes in Tiberias completed editing the Hebrew Bible about 1000.
• In western Europe, Clovis I (466-511) assumed leadership of the Franks, a Germanic tribe based in the area of modern Belgium. In successive campaigns against the remnant Roman Empire, the Visigoths, and other tribes, he extended the power of the Franks to include essentially all of present day France. Although his kingdom fragmented after his death, his lasting legacy was his conversion in 500 from Arianism to Roman Catholicism, which with the Visigoth conversion in 587 greatly enhanced the position and power of the Roman Church in western Europe. The conversion of most of the other North German tribes to Roman Catholicism was accomplished from 700 to 900. In 800, the Frankish king, Charlemagne, whose territory included most of western Europe except Spain, was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III. Charlemagne’s empire split after his death. In 962, a descendant of Charlemagne, Otto the Great of Germany, was crowned by the pope Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which later historians characterized as “not holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” In eastern Europe, the prevailing powers, Poland and Hungary, adopted Roman Catholicism, Poland in 966 and Hungary in 1001.
• The Khazar Empire, roughly in the location of the present Ukraine, rose to prominence as a power in the 7th century. Its capital, Atil, was a great trading and commercial center. Situated between Arab Persia and the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, the Khazar Empire adopted Judaism in 740, possibly to avoid aligning too closely with either of its neighbors. In addition to the rulers and nobility, a significant portion of the general population adopted Judaism. Frequent contacts with Jews in Spain and with Saadia Gaon in Babylonia are recorded. The Khazar Empire was conquered by the Orthodox Kievan Rus State in 968. The subsequent fate of the Khazar Jews is a matter of dispute.

1000 – 1500

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• From 1000 to about 1100 the Jewish Diaspora communities in Moslem lands and in western Europe were relatively peaceful and prosperous. In Spain under the Cordova Caliphate (929-1031), the Jewish, Moslem, and Christian communities coexisted peacefully, with fruitful cultural exchanges. This brief period was later called, “The Jewish Golden Age in Spain.” With the rise of the Fatimid Caliphate in North Africa, Egypt became the center of Moslem power in the Middle East, and similarly the Jewish communities in Egypt and Tunisia grew in influence. Although Jewish academies had been established in Spain, Egypt, and Tunisia, the academies in Babylonia remained the ultimate authorities on questions of law, and the accumulated responsa from Babylonia formed the basis for systematizing Halakha. The Jewish community in Italy was an important conduit for transmission of the Talmud throughout Europe. Jewish communities expanded in the Rhineland and eastern France. Rashi (1040-1105) in eastern France produced commentaries on Talmud and Torah which continue to be considered authoritative.
• The tranquility of the Jewish community in Spain was short-lived. In 1066, Jews in Granada were massacred by Moslem neighbors. The Christian reconquest of Spain began to meet success with the capture of Toledo in 1085 and Valencia in 1094. In 1090, the Almoravids, a fundamentalist Moslem sect from Morocco, conquered Moslem Spain and destroyed the Jewish community of Granada. In 1147, the Almoravids were supplanted by the Almohads, an even stricter sect, which initiated persecution and even massacres of the Jews. Maimonides (1134-1204) emigrated from Spain to Egypt in 1168, where “Mishneh Torah” (1180) and “Guide to the Perplexed” (1190) were written.
• With the position of the Roman Catholic Church in western Europe solidified by prevailing over Arianism, the situation of the Jewish communities began to deteriorate. Church policy, which became common practice in much of western Europe, was to place the Jews in a position of social and legal inferiority. Jews were forbidden to convert Christians, to intermarry with Christians, to own slaves or to own land, to improve old synagogues or to build new ones. On the other hand, Church doctrine and numerous papal edicts stipulated protection of Jews from physical harm, forced conversion, and loss of any of their remaining rights. While the Church as dominator of the Jews was a position clearly understood and acted upon by the populace, the Church as protector of the Jews seemed to many Christians (including clergy) to be contradictory or merely theoretical. Since decrees of the pope were not universally honored, protection of Jewish communities depended upon the benevolence of individual princes and bishops, who, in effect, thought of themselves as owning “their Jews.” Jews fared better in lands without strong central authority, such as Italy and Germany, rather than in France and (later) Spain, where nationwide laws could be more readily enforced.
• In the Middle East, the Seljuk Turks, a warlike Asian tribe that converted to Islam in the 10th century, captured Baghdad in 1054 and Israel in 1071 from the Abbasid Caliphate, and defeated the Byzantine Empire in 1077 to control most of Anatolia. The Byzantine Emperor appealed to the pope for assistance in fighting the Seljuks, and the pope used as a rallying cry the Seljuk control of the Holy Land, citing the desecration of Christian sites and harassment of Christian pilgrims. In 1095, Pope Urban II issued a challenge to western Christian kings and nobles to join in a war to liberate the Holy Land from the infidels. The pope’s challenge was amazingly successful, as many of the powerful and adventurous knights in western Christendom accepted the pope’s call. In addition to the promise of eternal salvation, the incentive for the Crusaders was the possibility of plunder or even a kingdom in the rich East. It was the first and probably last time that all western European nations were united in one enterprise.
• The first response to the pope’s call for a Holy War was not by the flower of knightly Christendom but by an undisciplined rabble of vagrants and dispossessed common people from all of west Europe, who decided that the infidels at hand, the Jews, should be the first targets of a Crusade. Without warning, they attacked and ravaged many of the Jewish communities in the Rhineland, massacring the inhabitants wherever they could. The results of the unprovoked attacks illustrated the futility of reliance by the Jews on their local “protectors.” The Rhineland Jewish communities were essentially rebuilt in about 20 years, but the permanent damage was the recognition by the Jews of their precarious situation in Christian territories, and the recognition by Christians that an attack on local Jews under the banner of a “Crusade” was likely to be tacitly permitted by local Church or ruling authorities. Since additional Crusades were proclaimed almost continuously for about 150 years, the opportunities for attack on the local Jews multiplied. In addition, Church councils in 1179 and 1215 increased official hostility to Jews and prescribed distinctive dress for Jews. One of the last Crusades, against the Albigensians (1208-1224), a heretic Christian sect (Cathars) in southern France, stamped out the heresy with great loss of life, but left the Church with the uneasy feeling that there might be remaining secret Cathars who were posing as Catholics. As a result, the Inquisition was initiated in 1231 to root out secret Cathars. The Office of Inquisition remained in force and was subsequently directed at Jewish conversos in Spain starting in 1478.
• The first Crusade (1096-1099) was the most successful of the several Crusades against the Moslems. Anatolia was restored to the Byzantine Empire in 1096, and the Holy Land was captured from the Seljuks in 1099, with extraordinary massacres of Moslems and Jews. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was established by the Crusaders. In 1187 Saladin, a highly cultivated Moslem Kurd, defeated the Crusaders and restored Moslem control of Israel. The Saladin dynasty ruled Egypt and Israel until 1250, when the Mamluks achieved power in Egypt and established a sultanate. The Mamluks, who adopted Islam, were descended from slaves imported into Egypt from the Balkan area to serve in the army. Noted for fighting prowess but not for interest in civilized arts, the Mamluks defeated the Mongols at Nazareth in 1250 and in 1291 captured Acre, the last remaining Crusader outpost in the Holy Land. The Mamluks instituted particularly harsh treatment of Jews and Christians and virtually eliminated all Jewish presence in Israel.
• The situation of Jews in western Europe deteriorated in the 13th and 14th centuries. Jews were massacred in York, England, in 1190 (“the rebellion of the debtors”) and expelled from England in 1290. A public disputation organized in 1240 by the king of France in which Jews were compelled to defend against the charge of blasphemy, was followed in 1242 by burning of Talmudim in Paris. Blood libel accusations surfaced frequently. The Black Death of 1348, which killed about one-third of the population, was universally blamed on poisoning of the wells by the Jews and followed by devastation of Jewish communities in Germany and elsewhere. [A recent study showed that those German communities which attacked the Jews as responsible for the plague of 1348 were most likely to commit violent anti-Semitic acts in the 1920’s and to embrace actively the Nazi anti-Semitic program after 1933.] The Jews were expelled from France in 1394, with confiscation of their property by the king. Merchant activity was closed to the Jews in western Europe, resulting in increase in credit activity (money lending). Jewish living quarters became segregated throughout Europe, and the Jewish population in western Europe was greatly reduced. Despite the setbacks, the scattered Jewish communities remained in frequent contact with each other, assisted by their high level of literacy. The standard of scholarship remained high as exemplified by the Tosafists, several of whom were grandchildren of Rashi. A compilation of laws by Jacob ben Asher became the basis for “Shulhan Arukh” of Joseph Karo (1570).
• The authority of the Roman Pope was severely compromised during the 14th century, eliminating any effective intercession by the pope on behalf of the safety of the Jews. From 1305 to 1378, a schism in the Church resulted in one pope in Avignon, France, and a rival pope in Rome (“the Babylonian captivity of the Papacy”). From 1378 to 1416, the “Great Schism of Western Christianity,” there were several rival claimants to the Papacy. Translations of the Bible appeared, leading to challenges of the monopoly claimed by the Church on doctrinal matters. In 1419, Jan Hus, an early reformer, was burned at the stake. His execution led to the Hussite Wars in Bohemia (1419-1434), in which the reformist Hussites were defeated. The disarray in the papacy followed by the menace of the Hussite movement resulted in a reactionary movement within the Church which proved to be dangerous to Jewish life throughout Europe.
• In the midst of the unrelenting attacks on the European Jewish communities, one positive event occurred: In 1343 Casimir the Great of Poland invited Jews to emigrate to Poland. At that time and for several hundred years, Poland was the most powerful country in eastern Europe. Jews principally from Germany began to migrate to Poland, eventually establishing Poland as the center of Jewish civilization in Europe and propagating the German Jewish spoken language, Yiddish, throughout Jewish communities in central and eastern Europe.
• Ottoman Turks supplanted the Seljuks in leadership of the Turks in the 13th century. In 1299 the Ottoman Turks captured much of Anatolia from the Byzantines. They crossed the Hellespont and dominated the Balkans after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The Byzantine Empire was reduced to a small territory surrounding Constantinople. In 1453 the Ottomans captured Constantinople, eliminating the last remnant of the Roman Empire. Moscow, proclaimed “The Third Rome,” became the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
• In Spain from the 12th century Jews began to migrate north to Christian territories to escape the deadly Almoravid and Almohad regimes. Christian sovereigns initially welcomed Jews for their skills as merchants, financial experts, and craftsmen, plus the fact that they had no foreign allegiance. The situation of the Jews in Christian Spain during the 12th century was better than in any other area of Europe. In the 13th century, as the Christians captured more territory, clerics, particularly Dominicans, applied the restrictive measures of the Church Council of 1215 to the Spanish Jews. Starting in 1242 Jews were forced to listen to conversion sermons in synagogues. In 1263, a public dispute was arranged between Nachmanides and the Dominicans, in which Nachmanides held his own but was then forced to emigrate to Israel. By 1264 all Spain except Granada was under Catholic rule. As in the rest of Europe, the Black Death of 1348 was blamed on well poisoning by the Jews. In 1390 a cleric-inspired riot ended in a massacre of Jews in Seville and many other locations in Iberia, despite attempts by civil authorities to maintain order. Then a phenomenon occurred, unique in Jewish history to that point. Large numbers of Spanish Jews, estimated at 30% to 50% of the Jewish population, saved their lives and livelihoods by converting to Catholicism (“conversos”). Many conversos remained in positions of authority, and many were suspected of maintaining Judaism in secret. In 1449 an ordinance in Toledo specified that no conversos could hold public office, the first instance of discrimination against Jews by race rather than by religion. In 1478 the Inquisition was instituted in Spain to root out secret Jews among the conversos. In 1492, with the capture of Granada, the last Moslem city in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella were persuaded by the Grand Inquisitor to expel all Jews from Spain as the only way to prevent backsliding by conversos (and as an opportunity for confiscating Jewish wealth). Most of the expelled Jews went to Portugal, but under pressure from Spain many converted in a mass ceremony and the remainder were expelled from Portugal in 1497.

1500 – 1800

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• Major trends at the start of the 16th century that influenced the development of modern Europe and the course of Jewish history:
• The Renaissance was spreading rapidly from Italy to the rest of Europe, bringing new ideas of Humanism and man’s place in the universe.
• The fall of Constantinople spurred the opening of new trade routes to the East (and the incidental discovery of the Western Hemisphere), with the economic benefit initially to Spain and Portugal and later to England, France, and Holland. The trading cities of Venice and Genoa began a long decline.
• As demonstrated by the Turkish artillery at Constantinople, castles had become obsolete, accelerating the demise of the feudal system in western Europe.
• The disarray in the Catholic Church followed by the Reformation shattered the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe. By 1648 nationalism replaced religion as the major driving force in European power politics and wars.
• The majority of the Jews expelled from Iberia settled in the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed the Jews for their skills in crafts, languages, medical knowledge, their international trading connections, and their wealth. The Ottoman sultan said, “How can Ferdinand be considered wise and intelligent? He is impoverishing his country and enriching mine.” Jews were permitted to live in virtually independent communities. Major settlements were in Anatolia and Greece. Salonika became a large Sephardic city, closely resembling in lifestyle former Jewish communities in Spain. At the time of the expulsions, Israel was unfortunately still controlled by the Mamluks and therefore unavailable as a destination. The Ottomans conquered the Mamluk Empire in 1517 and built the present Old City wall in Jerusalem in 1540. After the fall of the Mamluks, the existing Jewish community in Egypt was augmented by Sephardim, and a small but important Jewish presence was established in Israel, primarily in Safed. In Safed in 1570 Isaac Luria taught Kabbalah, an elaboration of the mystical ideas in “Zohar,” written in Spain by Moses de Leon in 1280. Joseph Karo in Safed at the same time produced “Shulchan Arukh.” In 1577 a Hebrew printing press was established in Safed, believed to be the first printing press in the Ottoman Empire.
• Another destination for the expelled Iberian Jews was the Papal States, particularly Rome, where during the early 16th century a worldly pope acted with vigor in asserting the long-standing Church responsibility to protect Jews from further harm. In 1517 Martin Luther traumatized the Church by initiating the Protestant Reformation. While Luther at first sided with the Jews as fellow protesters against the established Church, he swung violently in the anti-Jewish direction when it became clear that Jews were not going to convert to Protestantism any more than to Catholicism. In the Peasants’ War of 1524-1525, a large segment of peasants in Germany revolted against various privileged classes, including “priests, lords, and Jews.” As is repeatedly the case, any conflict within the dominant religion results in trouble for the Jews. When the Catholic Church reacted to the Reformation with the Counter-Reformation (1545-1618), the consequences for the Jews were particularly disastrous. At the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the Church condemned Protestantism as heresy, redefined Catholic dogma in contrast to Protestantism, and instituted harsh new restrictions on Jews, apparently with the intention of finally removing the long-standing embarrassing “Jewish heresy” from Europe by conversion or by economic strangulation. A new distinctive dress code was imposed on Jews. In 1555 walled ghettos were enforced by papal decree in all Catholic territories, including in Rome, virtually within eyesight of the pope. Ghettos were also generally adopted by most Protestant German duchies.
• Jews had been freely admitted to Poland-Lithuania since the 14th century. The opportunity was embraced by many German Jews during periodic expulsions and also by voluntary emigrants. In the relatively backward Polish economy, Jews formed the new middle class between the landed proprietors and the peasantry. The power of the landed nobility increased relative to the Church-supported royalty, and the opportunities for the Jews in commerce developed in parallel. The Jews acted as export agents for the landlords, import agents for textiles and luxury items, and distributors of merchandise in the villages and towns. Their widespread personal and commercial connections abroad gave new vitality to the economic life of Poland. German Jews expanding their reach in Poland encountered a well-established much larger population of Jews in the south (the present Ukraine). A Jewish quarter had existed in Kiev since the 11th century. The descendants of the Khazar Jews very likely contributed substantially to the numbers. The superior learning and culture of the German Jews was assimilated by the indigenous Jews, as was the Yiddish language. In 1503 the Chief Rabbinate was established in Poland, and in 1534 the first Yiddish book was published in Krakow. Moshe Isserles (Krakow, 1525-1572) produced a version of “Shulchan Arukh” adapted for Polish Ashkenazim. The first Yeshiva was founded in 1567. The learning was strongly influenced by Talmud and Kabbalah. The Council of the Four Lands was established in 1580 to administer issues affecting the Jewish community, which functioned as a semi-autonomous community throughout Poland-Lithuania. With a strong Polish government and a prosperous Jewish community, the period to 1648 was termed “The Golden Age of Polish Jewry.” In 1648 the population of Jews in Poland was 450,000, 60% of the total worldwide Jewish population of 750,000.
• The Ottoman Empire continued to expand in Europe and North Africa in the 16th century, attacking Vienna without success in 1529 and 1532, but in 1535 capturing Baghdad from the Persians and Tunis and Algeria from Spain. In 1571 Spain defeated the Ottomans in the naval battle of Lepanto, marking the beginning of the centuries-long decline of the Ottoman Empire. As the administrative efficiency of the empire declined, the Jewish and other non-Moslem communities suffered from religious persecution and poverty.
• During the 16th century Catholic Spain was the dominant power in western Europe, primarily as a result of extracting wealth from the Western Hemisphere. Spain adopted the mission of defending the Catholic faith everywhere against Moslems, Protestants, and Jews. The first defeat of Spanish power came from the Protestant Netherlands, which in a long war (1568-1609) achieved independence from Spain. To augment their banking and trading capabilities, the Dutch, who were already active traders with northern European countries, welcomed the immigration of prosperous Portuguese Sephardim, who for the most part resumed practice of Judaism. In 1588, attempting to restore a Catholic monarch to England, Spain launched the disastrous Armada and subsequently declined to a second class power. It is interesting to note that the continuing impulse to “purify” Spain resulted in 1609 in the expulsion of the Moriscos, descendants of Moslems who had converted to Christianity in 1502––an equal-opportunity expulsion.
• In Germany, from the start of the Counter-Reformation in 1545, a series of small conflicts broke out between Catholic-leaning and Protestant-leaning duchies of the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) divided Germany into Lutheran and Catholic states. However, the agreement did not in fact achieve peace. By 1609 Catholic and Protestant leagues were formed. The conflict was ignited in 1618 when the Bohemian (Protestant) ruler literally threw the Austrian (Catholic) ambassadors out of a tall tower (the defenestration of Prague). The war continued with occasional lulls for 30 years, initially as a religious war between the major Catholic and Protestant states, and finally as a nationalistic war, with combinations of Catholic and Protestant states on both sides attempting to gain pieces of German territory. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) restored the Catholic/Lutheran division which had been stipulated by the Peace of Augsburg. [Jacob Riis, interviewing Bohemian immigrants in New York City in the 1880’s, found that they were still conflicted by the fact that during the Thirty Years War they had been forced to accept Catholicism despite their Protestant leanings.] The entire Thirty Years War had been fought on German territory by armies of outside powers and mercenaries who lived off the land. Germany was devastated, its population reduced by half. There were 360 principalities in the (virtually defunct) Holy Roman Empire, and the leaders of many of them now competed for advantage in restoring the economies of their realms. One way to accomplish this was to permit “selected” Jews to resettle in or near the major cities to bolster finances and trading relations. Permission for Jews to settle varied from principality to principality, and also could be withdrawn and then restored in a given principality. A major continuous Jewish presence was established at Hamburg and later at Berlin. Jewish banking in Germany was initiated in the period after 1648. With the deterioration of the situation for Jews in Poland after 1648 and the marginal improvement in Germany, the Jewish population in Germany rose to 300,000 by 1700.
• During the first half of the 16th century, Muscovite Russia expanded into the Volga and Caspian regions, The Russian state was still relatively weak, and Moscow was sacked by the Crimean Tatars (Mongols) in 1571 and by the Poles in 1603. The Romanov dynasty was established in 1613 (it continued until 1917), and the Poles were expelled from the Moscow territory. Jews were not permitted to settle in territories controlled by Muscovite Russia. In 1648 a series of disasters struck Poland and especially the Jewish community. From 1648 to 1655 Cossacks in the Polish Ukraine massacred 65,000 Jews. In 1665 the Cossacks switched their allegiance from Poland to Russia, giving control of the Ukraine to Russia. From 1655 to 1658 Poland was invaded by Russia in the east and by Sweden in the west (“the Deluge”). The central governmental authority in Poland was fatally weakened, and the landholding nobles became the functional governing authorities. Most Jews were dispersed among the isolated rural villages controlled by the landholders and gradually became impoverished. The Jewish communities in the small rural villages could not maintain the schools or in many cases even the rabbis.
• In 1665 Shabbatai Sevi proclaimed himself the Messiah. A large portion of the Jewish communities in eastern Europe and the Middle East were swept up in the messianic fervor. Even after he converted to Islam his followers refused to give up hope. The gradual disillusionment was psychologically devastating.
• By 1700 in western Europe the Age of Enlightenment was taking hold, with the rise of Rationalism and Deism. New ideas entered the Jewish community, particularly in Germany, in the form of Haskalah. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was the exemplar of the new Jewish worldly learning, as he moved from the ghetto of Dessau to Berlin and became one of the foremost German philosophers, while still maintaining his Jewish roots. A different path was taken by the Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760), founder of Hasidism, a charismatic faith which emphasized piety rather than learning and appealed particularly to the poor and culturally disadvantaged Jews in eastern Europe. In Lithuania, in opposition to Hasidism, the Vilna Gaon (1720-1797) created a new center of Jewish learning.
• In 1772 Catherine of Russia established the Pale of Settlement, the area of western Russia and Ukraine in which Jews were allowed to live. No Jews were permitted to live permanently in the remaining areas of Russia. From 1772 to 1795, the weakened country of Poland was partitioned among its three powerful neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Poland lost its independence. Most of the Polish Jews were living in the area acquired by Russia.

1800 – 1925

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• The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic wars (1789-1815) completely changed the political organization of Europe, while the social landscape was shaken by the revolutionary appeal of the Rights of Man. Although the Congress of Vienna (1815) attempted to restore the Old Order, a series of uprisings culminating in a wave of revolts in 1848 ensured that in the second half of the 19th century the western and central European monarchies shared power with elected legislatures to a greater or lesser extent, Prussia being among the lesser extent. Russia remained the major bastion of absolute monarchy. In the industrializing nations in the second half of the 19th century, the growth of large scale enterprises for manufacture of textiles, chemicals, iron and steel, and railroad equipment, for example, initiated major population shifts from rural areas to newly industrialized cities and created requirements for investment capital beyond what could be provided by private bankers, such as the Rothschilds.
• The Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French Revolution in 1789 was applied by logic, not by sentiment, to French Jewish communities in 1791. The result was emancipation of the Jews from all civil disabilities. The principle of Jewish equality was accepted in Holland in 1796, and subsequently enforced by the Armies of the Republic in the Rhineland, Italy, and Prussia. The ghetto walls were destroyed in these latter regions (there never were ghettos in Holland), and Jews began to participate in public life, including being conscripted or enlisting in the armies. The forces of reaction following 1815 tried to reestablish the Jewish legal disabilities, with no success in France or Holland, varying success in the German states, and complete success in Austria and the Papal States, where the ghettos and all other restrictions were restored. The ghetto in Rome, the last remaining ghetto in Europe, was finally abolished by force in 1870 when Italy was united and the Papal territory was reduced to the Vatican.
• In 1807 Napoleon convened a Jewish “Sanhedrin,” an assembly of lay and rabbinic representatives. The government reiterated the elimination of civil disabilities for the Jews, and in turn the assembly agreed the primacy of French citizenship over Jewish laws and renounced Jewish national aspirations. Although the assembly had no legal or religious authority, the view of Napoleon’s government was that henceforth the Jews were no longer a nation and that Judaism was simply a religion. This view was also eagerly adopted by many Jews in western Europe and later in America, who aspired to assimilate into the general culture without necessarily losing their religious identity.
• The Jewish community in Germany, by far the largest Jewish community in western Europe, faced a variety of conflicting forces during the first half of the 19th century. On the one hand, the tide of political liberalization from autocratic rule seemed destined to prevail in a future united Germany. Even in autocratic and militarized Prussia reform of the government following defeat by Napoleon resulted in emancipation of the Jews, at the same time as the Prussian peasants were liberated from serfdom. On the other hand, a variety of bureaucratic and social restrictions hampered the participation of Jews in normal German life. For example, despite the fact that the percentage of Jews who attended universities was far greater than their percentage in the population as a whole, there were no Jewish professors. Jews were banned from public office, could not become officers in the military, and were barred from certification as lawyers. Overt anti-Semitism was a constant fact of life in the streets where even urchins insulted dignified Jews, in schools and universities, and in social life, as attested without exception in the reminiscences of notable German Jews of the period. Not surprisingly, baptism was one response by educated Jews who simply wanted to become normal members of German society. Highly visible examples of conversion to Christianity were the children and grandchildren of Moses Mendelssohn and the poet Heinrich Heine, who dealt with guilt over his decision for the rest of his life. Many ordinary middle class Jews quietly let their religious observances lapse and gradually assimilated or intermarried into Christian society. Descendants of these converted Jews were later trapped by the Nazi racial laws.
• Two positive responses to the situation of German Jewry were: 1) The initiation of the study of Judaism as a serious cultural, philosophical, and historical topic in its own right, not simply as a precursor to Christianity. The Society of Jewish Culture and Learning, founded by Leopold Zunz in 1819, systematized the study of post-Biblical Jewish literature, history, and liturgy. One important contribution was that Zunz established that rabbinic sermons had been common in Jewish religious services throughout post-Biblical times, an important finding at a time when Prussian authorities attempted to ban sermons by rabbis as a dangerous innovation. 2) The reform of Jewish worship services and religious studies was started in 1810 and gained rapid momentum. The traditional synagogue service, regarded as an embarrassment by educated Jews, was characterized by total lack of decorum, the sale of prayers, gossiping of women in the gallery, and was led by rabbis who had little or no education beyond Talmud and who barely spoke German. The first venture to reform the worship service was in 1810 by Israel Jacobsohn, who built a temple in Seesen, Germany, on the site of his highly regarded school for Jewish and Christian children. The temple service featured dignified quiet and order, prayers in German and Hebrew, and––in emulation of Protestant services––an organ. The Seesen temple was shut down by the Prussian government, which opposed any form of liberalization, even in Judaism. Jacobsohn then established Reform temples in the free city of Hamburg and in Berlin in 1815. Other Reform temples were soon established in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and other German cities. Reformers continued to modify the liturgy, particularly by eliminating the Zion-oriented prayers to emphasize loyalty to the German state. Abraham Geiger, who became rabbi of the Reform temple in Breslau in 1840, was a major force in the evolution of Reform liturgy. By 1845 Reform had split between the radicals and conservatives, who felt that the changes in liturgy had gone too far. Modern Orthodoxy and Conservative Judaism, first led by Samson Raphael Hirsch and Zechariah Frankel respectively, date from this period. All three new strains of Judaism, which really incorporated a continuous spectrum of liturgy and practices rather than totally unique systems, emphasized the value of good secular education and were led by men of broad modern learning. By the second half of the 19th century, most of the practicing Jews in Germany were congregants of one of the new Judaisms.
• In 1848 a wave of revolutions swept across Europe, initiated by overthrow of the monarchy and reestablishment of a republic in France, the home of revolutions. Liberals in Germany took this as a sign that a new era in democracy was dawning and that the long desired unification of the many German states as a constitutional republic patterned on the U.S. model was at hand. A constitutional convention was convened in Frankfurt, the seat of the loose Confederation of German-Speaking States. At the same time, a rather low key uprising in Berlin forced the King of Prussia, to his great distaste, to call a constitutional convention in Berlin. Since the unrest in Berlin was not supported by the middle class, who preferred order to liberty, the king waited until he was able to disband the convention. In Frankfurt, a viable constitutional document was actually produced, but the Confederation had no power to implement it. The convention offered the King of Prussia the crown of emperor of a constitutional monarchy, and the king promptly rejected the offer. The constitutional convention then disbanded. An American observer remarked, “In 1848 both Germany and Italy could have won either unification or liberalism, but because they tried for both they did not win either.” Jews had been prominent in the leadership of the Frankfurt convention, and the collapse of the effort convinced them and other progressives that liberalism was not likely to succeed in Germany in their lifetime. About 300,000 Jews emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in the period 1848-1870, bringing with them the new German Jewish ideas.
• Following the partitions of Poland and the defeat of Napoleon, about 1.6 million Jews, 50% of the world Jewish population, lived in the Russian portion of Poland plus the original Pale of Settlement. Most lived in small settlements (shtetls) in rural areas scattered across the vast Pale, which stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. A growing portion of the Jews in the western, or formerly Polish, area of the Pale were beginning to concentrate in urban areas, such as Vilna, Warsaw, and Krakow. Although the Jews lived among ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and others, they spoke a different language (Yiddish) and had strangely different customs. They had little contact with the majority populations other than in the marketplace. The dominant religion in the Russian area of the Pale was Russian Orthodoxy. There were sporadic, largely unsuccessful efforts by Russians and by Jews to start integrating Jews into the Russian society. In the formerly Polish area, the dominant religion was Roman Catholicism, and here the Catholic Church continued its medieval implacable hatred and attempted subjugation of the Jews, possibly in retaliation for the period before 1648 when the Jewish community was actually more powerful than the Church (my speculation). In contrast to the Jews in Germany, there was no temptation (or opportunity) for the Polish Jews to assimilate into Polish society. By the second half of the 19th century, the Haskalah (enlightenment) movement had made inroads into Jewish life in the Pale, particularly in the cities, with the beginning of a “Golden Age” of Yiddish literature and a vibrant Yiddish theater, especially in Warsaw. The Hasidic movement moderated its anti-intellectual approach, and the intellectual religious movement centered in Vilna began to recognize the value of incorporating simple piety into its rituals.
• In the U.S.A. at the end of the 18th century, in a total population of 3 million there were about 3 thousand Jews, mostly located in the Atlantic coast cities, roughly one half Sephardim (mainly Portuguese) and one half Ashkenazim. A large percentage of these earliest Jewish families intermarried and converted to Christianity. German immigrants, including Ashkenazi Jews, began to arrive in significant numbers starting in 1810, as a result of industrialization and the consequent rapid growth in population in central Europe. The main influx of German Jews occurred after the failed attempts in 1848 to form a unified democratic Germany. Between 1848 and 1870 about 300,000 Jews emigrated from Germany to the U.S. Additional thousands of Jews emigrated from reactionary Austria-Hungary, particularly from non-German speaking provinces, such as Bohemia and Galicia, where Yiddish speaking Jews were regarded unfavorably as possible precursors for German expansion. The German Jews in the U.S. at first concentrated near the ports of entry and then spread out to the newly developing cities of the Midwest and the Far West. The German Jews typically were “retailers,” a description which could cover backpack peddlers, horse and wagon peddlers, and small store owners. Within one or two generations, a few families had risen to found large department stores, garment manufacturing enterprises, and metal trading empires. Even average German Jewish families soon regarded themselves as middle class Americans. Spreading across the developing U.S., they found in contrast to Europe there was no compulsion to identify with an existing Jewish community. In many areas there was no organized Jewish community or any individual who was qualified to lead a local community. In the prevailing atmosphere of a new start in a free new country, the idea grew in the German Jewish community that Reform Judaism, which many had known from Germany, was more suited to the American Jewish experience than traditional Judaism. Several Reform congregations were established, starting in Charleston in 1824, and later in Baltimore, New York, and other east coast cities. Among the new immigrants from Germany were well educated Reform leaders, who found that the non-repressive atmosphere in the U.S. invited even more innovation than was prudent in Germany. The individual who had the greatest role in shaping Reform Judaism in the U.S. was Isaac M. Wise, born in Bohemia, who became rabbi of a congregation in Albany in 1846. Wise was scholarly, energetic, a skilled organizer, and personally aggressive. In 1854 he was invited to a prominent pulpit in Cincinnati, where he remained to his death in 1900. There he quickly became the most renowned rabbi in America. He published a new Reform prayer book and in 1873 was instrumental in organizing the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Two years later he organized Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. By the end of the 1880’s, Reform Judaism had been accepted by the majority of American German Jews.
• Industrialized and militarized Prussia instigated and won wars with Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870-1871). Following the annihilating victory over France, Bismarck finally united Germany under the domination of Prussia. The unified structure was actually a patchwork affair, with the predominantly Catholic last holdout states joining predominantly Protestant Prussia. As is repeatedly the case, tension in the Christian community resulted in trouble for the Jewish community. To promote a German ethnic unity after centuries of Protestant/Catholic conflict, German philosophers invented the idea of a superior Aryan race, the ancestors of all true Germans. Non-Aryans living in Germany, i.e., Jews, could never become true Germans. Anti-Semitism became a respectable and popular position across the entire political spectrum. Jews were reviled as an alien people who could never successfully assimilate into German society, and (alternatively and simultaneously) as clever assimilationists who were gaining superior positions within German society with the ultimate objective of ruling it from within. Jewish innovators and leaders in the manufacturing, transportation, and retail industries simply reinforced the latter position by insisting on their loyalty to Germany. Political parties whose sole program was anti-Semitism gained 16 seats in the Reichstag in 1893.
• During the Franco-Prussian War, after the destruction of all the French armies and the flight of the new republican government from Paris, the city of Paris held out against the besiegers for two months in 1871. The defense of the city was directed by a popularly elected government, the Paris Commune. After the fact, this government was cited as the first “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as predicted by Karl Marx, although Marx himself criticized the Commune on the grounds that the leaders were democratically elected rather than dictatorially appointed. During the brief period of the Commune, a botched hostage exchange resulted in the execution of the Archbishop of Paris by the Commune. The Church, which by nature was opposed to any form of liberalism, blamed this event on the theories of “that Jew Marx,” and later habitually referred to communism as “Jewish Bolshevism.” Following the disastrous war with Prussia, the French society was split between a strong liberal socialist movement and a reactionary anti-Semitic movement supported by the military and the Catholic Church. One manifestation of this split was the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1898), which convinced Theodor Herzl, who was writing from Paris for a Viennese periodical, that if Jews could not escape anti-Semitism in France, the home of liberalism, they could not escape it anywhere in Europe.
• During the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, “the sick man of Europe,” continued its long decline in administrative efficiency and central government control. Almost all the European and African possessions were lost to colonial powers or local independence movements, starting with the independence of Greece in 1829. Algeria was occupied by France in 1830, all Balkan countries gained independence in 1870, Tunisia was occupied by France in 1881, Egypt/Sudan/Cyprus by Britain in 1882, Libya by Italy in 1912, and Morocco by France in 1912. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the only territories remaining to the Ottoman Empire were a small area in Europe surrounding Constantinople, Anatolia, and the ancient Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine). Constantinople was coveted by Russia, Britain, and Germany, and the Fertile Crescent territories were subject to European colonial rivalries and awakening Arab nationalism. Palestine was very loosely administered from Constantinople, and most of the formal land titles were in the hands of a few old families. Britain was active in establishing its influence in Palestine primarily to enhance protection of the Suez Canal but also because of strong emotional ties to the Holy Land. Late in 1917, as the British army was slowly advancing against the Turks in Palestine, Prime Minister Lloyd George asked General Allenby to deliver Jerusalem to him “as a Christmas present.” Allenby did, with significant cost in lives of British soldiers.
• The Russian government in the 19th century was pure autocracy, with the Czar as absolute ruler, no parliament, a large group of imperial favorites who tried to influence the Czar with competing pro- or anti-Western enlightenment philosophies, and about one-third of the population enslaved as serfs. Nicholas I, who reigned from 1825 to 1855, was by nature a Slavophile reactionary. Immediately after assuming the throne, he ruthlessly put down a revolt of liberal-leaning aristocrats who advocated a constitutional monarchy (the Decembrist Revolt), and in 1832 he defeated an attempt by Poland to regain independence. During the 1848 revolts, he suppressed an independence movement in Hungary on behalf of Austria, acting as “the policeman of Europe.” His objective was to impose Orthodoxy throughout Russia and eliminate separatist or nationalistic tendencies in the many non-Russian minorities. His attitude toward the Jews was, very simply, convert or die. Restrictions were increased on activities permitted to Jews in the 1835 “Charter of Disabilities,” and a 25 year army conscription for Jews was initiated, effectively a sentence of conversion or death. The quota of Jewish conscripts had to be provided by the Jewish community leaderships (Kahals). In 1844, in an attempt to “amalgamate” the Jews, essentially a separate state, into the Russian nation, the vestiges of the Kahals were eliminated. A state sponsored school system was initiated whose announced purpose was secularization of the Jews on the German model, but whose covert purpose was conversion to Orthodoxy. Despite the fact that enrollees in the new school system were exempt from military service, few students enrolled, and the scheme was abandoned when secret correspondence surfaced that confirmed the objective was conversion. Nicholas died in 1855, shortly after the Crimean War exposed the Russian military inefficiency and corruption.
• Despite all repressive measures and later emigration, the Jewish population in the Pale increased from about 1 million in 1800 to about 5.5 million in 1900. While a few Russian Jewish families with access to western capital dominated railroad construction and initiated modern banking in Russia, the vast majority of Jews in the Pale existed on marginal trades, such as peddling. Despite the poverty, there was virtually no illiteracy in the Jewish community, primarily as a result of the emphasis on religious schooling. In addition, Haskalah (enlightenment) spread among the intellectuals, mainly in the western-oriented provinces (Galicia, Poland, Lithuania), resulting in an intense interest in western (particularly German) culture and the revival of Hebrew as a literary language. Later in the 19th century, in parallel with the intellectualism of the Haskalah, Yiddish literature, using the vernacular and describing daily life in the Pale, developed in quality and popularity. In contrast to the situation in Germany in the 18th century when the “Jewish problem” dealt with the question of whether Jews could ever be brought to the same level of civilization as ethnic Germans, the Jews in the Pale in the 19th century with good reason considered themselves superior to the surrounding majority peoples in learning and culture.
• In 1855, the new czar, Alexander II, announced a policy of “equal justice and tolerance,” which was welcomed by the entire population. In 1861 he liberated the serfs (although under unfavorable terms) and reduced compulsory military service from 25 years to 6 years. Restrictions on “favored” Jews were relaxed, permitting them to live outside the Pale and engage in previously forbidden occupations, such as law and medicine. As a result, the Jewish community began to look favorably on Russification. A large number of students enteried the Russian school system, without pressure to convert, and many Jews learned the Russian language. However, in 1863 another Polish rebellion was brutally extinguished, and Alexander decided that the revolt had resulted from his liberalizing and Westernizing initiatives. All reforms were halted, and the dreaded secret police were ordered to hunt down “liberals” in the many ethnic minority communities. The Jewish community in particular, always suspected of disloyalty, suffered in the reaction. Jews were suspected of forming a separate Jewish state in Russia, and accusations of ritual murder were revived.
• The brief period of reforms followed by repression set Russia on a course that would eventually overthrow the czar. A large fraction of the liberated serfs, although freed from bondage to landholders, lost their farm subsistences in the resulting rationalization of agriculture. Leaving the rural areas, they migrated to the cities and formed the core of the unskilled labor force in the vast new factories of Russia’s belated industrialization—the new Russian proletariat. The intellectuals, recognizing that peaceful reform was not going to happen, went underground and organized a myriad of clandestine societies promoting a constitutional monarchy, organizing labor to control the means of production, peaceful overthrow of the czar to establish a republic or a socialistic/communistic state, violent elimination of authority, or all of these objectives within factions of any single secret society. As the repression became more severe, the opposition gravitated toward violence. Several attempts were made by the People’s Will terrorist organization to assassinate Alexander II, finally succeeding in 1881.
• Although Jews had not been prominent in the People’s Will society, popular opinion, ready to blame the Jews for anything, decided they had somehow been involved. This view was encouraged by local authorities, with the objective of diverting anti-government resentment against the Jews—the Jews as lightning rods. In addition, the displacement of a large portion of the Russian rural population to the cities, which already contained concentrations of Jews, exacerbated the centuries-old enmity to the Jewish “capitalists.” During Easter 1881, a wave of pogroms started in the Ukraine and swept across the Pale, finally subsiding after one year. Although Czar Alexander III was not personally responsible for or sympathetic to the pogroms, the fact that the local authorities stood by and allowed the violence to continue suggested that the government had been complicit. In May 1882 the government issued new restrictions on the Jews in order to “calm” the Russian population. The May Laws forced Jews in the rural communities, even within the Pale, to move to the cities (actually to urban ghettos), expelled the small communities of Jews who had lived legally outside the Pale, severely restricted occupations permitted to Jews, and greatly reduced the number of Jews allowed in the universities. Many Jews then entered universities in Central and Western Europe and later returned to Russia as revolutionaries or Zionists. When asked what would happen to the Jews, a Russian official said, “One third emigrate, one third convert, and one third die.” In fact, thousands of Jews attempted to flee to the West immediately following the pogroms and May Laws. Jewish organizations in Western Europe initially tried to stem the flow and then began to facilitate transport to the U.S., rather than encouraging settling in Europe. The mostly-German Jews in the U.S. at first resisted the influx of the “uncivilized” East European Jews. Nevertheless, with the Russian government adopting anti-Semitism as an official policy and the violence continuing, the flood of emigrants bound for the U.S. increased rapidly. Between 1881 and 1890, 161,000 Jews entered the U.S. from Russia. As the process continued, later emigrants were able to obtain funds for passage on their own and to ease settlement in the U.S. by joining family or fellow villagers from Russia. Jewish charitable organizations in the U.S., bowing to the inevitable, set up numerous programs to ameliorate the situation of the new arrivals. In 1903, a particularly ghastly government-organized pogrom in Kishinev (southern Russia) brought international condemnation, accelerated the Zionist movement in Russia, and gave further impetus to emigration. By 1914, about 2.4 million Jews had entered the U.S. from Eastern Europe.
• Most of the Jewish immigrants to the U.S. from Eastern Europe settled in compact densely populated areas of major cities, particularly on the east coast. The Lower East Side of Manhattan (known as Jewtown to the outsiders and the Ghetto to the residents), received about half of the newcomers and was believed to be the most densely populated area of the world. Yiddish was the common language. The tenement housing conditions were appalling. The congestion in the living space was exacerbated by the presence of fabric workshops (“sweatshops”) in virtually every tenement building. The sweatshops were engaged in finishing garments—cutting, sewing, and pressing. All operations required hand labor. A typical sweatshop consisted of a boss with three to six sewing machines and perhaps a dozen women and men paid on piecework. During the busy seasons the work could be 12 to 16 hours per day, and the pay was barely at the subsistence level. Initial attempts to raise the pay failed because of the continuing arrival of new immigrants ready to take work at any pay. The other major occupation in the Ghetto was street peddling, characteristically from pushcarts. Jacob Riis describes the poverty, near starvation, chaos, and the toll on human lives in the Ghetto, but also notes––compared to other New York immigrant communities––the sobriety, level of literacy, and the universal desire for an American education for themselves and their children. Many adults attended night school classes after their hours in the sweatshops, and almost all the children attended public schools, rather than Old World style cheders, and generally were very good students. By 1898, Russian Jews constituted one-third of the students at CCNY, a free college. The Jewish Daily Forward, edited by Abraham Cahan, was the most influential of the scores of Yiddish publications. By 1905, a small but growing middle class were engaged in clothing and jewelry (manufacture and sale); liquor and drugstore managers; medicine and teaching. First and second generation immigrant song writers, often sons of cantors—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and others—and lyricists (whose first language remarkably was Yiddish)—Berlin, Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg—made a lasting impact on the American musical theatre.
• Pure Marxism and socialism, imported from Russia with the Jewish intellectuals, did not thrive in America. After failing to gain traction with revolutionary slogans, labor organizers turned to practical matters of wages, hours, and working conditions. Samuel Gompers, a Sephardic Jew from London, pioneered in organizing trade unions and was a major figure in founding the AFL. A parallel effort by seamstresses resulted, after numerous strikes and police confrontations, in an agreement with the employers (the Protocol of Peace), negotiated by Louis Brandeis. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, basically an all-Russian Jewish organization, became one of the most powerful unions in the country. The increasing influence of the unions had an unfortunate side effect. Although composed almost entirely of first and second generation immigrants, the unions began to support limiting further immigration. The growing national anti-immigration movement was directed specifically at immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, plus all Asians. The “scientific” basis for selective immigration restriction was the theory of the superiority of the Nordic race, as popularized by Madison Grant in his book, “The Passing of the Great Race” (1916). Even Samuel Gompers supported the effort despite the fact that Madison Grant was a dedicated and vocal anti-Semite, and any contemplated restrictions would be aimed specifically at Eastern European Jews. The post-World War I immigration restrictions, which stemmed directly from this movement, had the disastrous effect of trapping most of the Jews in Europe in the Nazi era.
• While one-third of Eastern European Jews were emigrating, mostly to the U.S., in the late 1800’s, those remaining in the Pale developed two competing avenues of resistance to the intolerable conditions: the Socialist Revolutionary movement and Zionism. As in the U.S., the socialist revolutionary theorists at first gained little support among the mass of Jewish workers, who were more interested in wages and working conditions than in bloody revolution. After a series of successful worker-directed strikes, the Jewish leaders decided to change direction, concentrate on strike organization, and adopt Yiddish rather than Russian as the working language. Although many Jews, such as Trotsky, were leaders in the Russian revolutionary parties and were violently opposed a separate Jewish socialist party, the majority of Jewish labor gravitated toward the Jewish organization, the Bund, formed in 1897. In addition to conducting numerous strikes, the Bund leaders began to advocate Jewish national autonomy within Russia, including recognition of Yiddish as a legal language and state funding of a Yiddish school system. Marxist agitation against the government, accompanied by numerous assassinations, accelerated during the early 1900’s. In 1902, the czar appointed von Plehve Minister of the Interior. He announced his strategy for containing the threatened revolution, “We must drown the revolution in Jewish blood”––i.e., a Jewish conspiracy is the enemy, not the czar. Von Plehve orchestrated the notorious Kishinev pogrom in 1903, followed by additional pogroms in Ukraine and White Russia. Shortly after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, von Plehve was assassinated. With the bulk of the Russian army in Manchuria, protest strikes, including several massive strikes organized by the Bund, broke out throughout Russia, threatening to topple the czar. The government made hasty concessions to the strikers, including promises of a constitution, civil rights, and an elected parliament (Duma). However, with the return of the army following the defeat by Japan, the promised reforms were systematically withdrawn, and an even more repressive regime was inaugurated by the new Minister of the Interior, Stolypin. By 1914 the Bund had ceased to be an effective organization. During the brief period of liberalization, there was little support by Socialist Revolutionaries for the specific Jewish objectives advanced by the Bund, despite the fact that the strikes led by the Bund had provided crucial assistance to the revolutionary cause. The basic premise of international socialism, the worldwide solidarity of the proletariat, was proven illusory by the ethnic divide in Russia in 1905 and the nationalistic divides in western Europe in 1914 at the beginning of World War I.
• Zionism, the establishment of a Jewish national state in Palestine, was always present as a distant, almost Messianic, idea among East European Jews, particularly in times of trouble. The idea began to take more realistic shape with publications by Zvi Kalischer and Moses Hess (1862) and Perez Smolenskin (1875) urging Jews to assert their own nationality among the nations of the world, specifically by establishing a new nation in Palestine. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, from Lithuania, put his Zionist ideas into practice by moving his family to Jerusalem in 1881 and establishing the first household in which only modern Hebrew was spoken. His lifelong work on the Hebrew language resulted in the publication of his monumental modern Hebrew dictionary. Prior to 1881, while the goals of Zionism gained increasing support in Russia, there was little actual emigration to Palestine. However, with the pogroms of 1881 and May Laws of 1882, Jewish nationalism began to be perceived as a practical objective, and Jewish self-defense units were established in many cities in the Pale. In 1882, a pamphlet by Leo Pinsker, “Self-Emancipation,” emphasized that nationhood in Palestine must be achieved by Jewish efforts, rather than by largesse of other nations. A major problem was that the land of Palestine, after centuries of Ottoman rule, was eroded and deforested. Previously fertile valleys were now malarial swamps. Emigration to Palestine, in contrast to emigration to the U.S., required first establishing a viable economy virtually from scratch, and therefore required a different type of emigrant. A pioneer group of seven thousand young Russian Jews of the Hoveve Zion (Lovers of Zion) party emigrated to Palestine in 1881, the First Aliyah. Without independent resources, most drifted into cities and lived as artisans and shopkeepers. A few moved into agricultural settlements, mostly financed by a Paris Rothschild, and survived by hiring Arab labor to do the heavy work. For the next ten years, a trickle of immigrants from Russia continued to arrive in Jaffa with the intention of establishing agricultural settlements. Some succeeded but barely survived, with the help of sporadic financial assistance from Hoveve Zion in Odessa and from west Europe. At this point, it appeared that the pioneers of the First Aliyah had exchanged alien status in Russia for alien status in Turkish Palestine. The course of Zionism was then improbably transformed by Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Hungarian Jew with apparently minimal Jewish commitment. Trained in law, he was a successful playwright and a columnist for a fashionable Viennese periodical. He had continuously encountered the pervasive Austrian anti-Semitism and may have vaguely considered the need for a Jewish homeland. As a correspondent in Paris in 1894, Herzl witnessed the Dreyfus Affair and the violent anti-Semitism it unleashed even in France, the home of the Rights of Man. This experience apparently initiated a self-imposed decision to create the Jewish state, principally as a refuge from anti-Semitism. In 1895, he met with Baron de Hirsch to solicit financial backing for his idea and was rejected. Later in the year he met Max Nordau, a German physician and novelist, who warmly embraced the idea and became Herzl’s leading supporter. In 1896 he published the book, “The Jewish State.” As summarized in an article in The Jewish Chronicle (London), published 4 weeks before “The Jewish State,” Herzl’s vision of the new nation was:
  The new nation would be established by the peaceful emigration of emancipated (i.e., West European) Jews to the new land. The actual territory would be granted to the Jews by “the concert of nations.” These Jews would bring with them their skills, resources, and their many languages, and they would remain patriotic supporters of their previous homelands. This emigration would occur only after initial colonization by the poorest (i.e., East European) Jews, who first must be introduced to the concept of the new nation. [Herzl seems completely unaware of the practical Zionist writings and efforts of the Russian Jews in the previous 15 years.] Herzl speculates that the new land might be in the territory of Argentina, which is sparsely populated, with fertile soil and moderate climate. He acknowledges that Palestine has the appeal of centuries of prayer and devotion, and suggests that the Ottoman Sultan might give Palestine to the Jews in return for a pledge by the Jews to regulate the entire finances of Turkey.
  If this peculiarly naïve vision of the new nation had been the entire content of “The Jewish State,” Herzl would have been regarded as a foolish dreamer and quickly forgotten. However, Herzl also included in “The Jewish State” a practical program for getting started: a congress of Jewish representatives, the establishment of a national fund, and the need for engineers and technicians. This part of his message, the concept of a central international representative organization to direct and finance the Zionist effort, was received with great interest by the Russian Jews. The fact that Herzl personally was an imposing, authoritative figure well known to European intellectuals immediately brought international prestige (and condemnation) to Zionism. Herzl made additional futile efforts for support and financial backing from de Hirsch and the Rothschilds, as well as attempting without success to obtain a charter of settlement in Palestine from the Ottoman sultan in return for promised future Jewish financial assistance. While Herzl was traveling across Europe in pursuit of high level financial and political backing, he became aware to his surprise that his book had been widely circulated and enthusiastically received among East European Jews. At all railroad stations in areas with large Jewish populations he was greeted by cheering crowds. He then decided that, rather than wait for some initiating financial or political breakthrough, he would convene an international Zionist conference to demonstrate to the world the strength of the Zionist movement. His announcement was received with violent opposition by West European Jewish leaders, who continued to profess their allegiance to the Napoleonic pact of 1807, in which Jewish nationalism was abandoned in favor of loyalty to the nation of residence. Despite this expected opposition, Herzl proceeded with his plans for the congress. With his legal background, his skill in public relations and self-promotion, and his personal energy and magnetism, he was able to organize and convene the first Zionist Congress in Basle in August, 1897. About 200 delegates arrived from all corners of the Jewish world, including 80 from Russia. Also in attendance were newspaper reporters from most major European cities. Herzl required all delegates to wear formal clothes, and he conducted the meeting with dignity and strict adherence to the published agenda. The World Zionist Organization was established with Herzl as president, and an Actions Committee was set up in Vienna. After meeting the Russian delegates, Herzl became aware of the level of education (mostly in western European universities, since Russian universities were closed to Jews) and professional accomplishments of the leaders of the Jews in the Pale. It also would become clear that most of the energy and manpower for the Zionist movement would come from Russia. Following the first Congress, Herzl used his contacts to meet the German Kaiser, with the hope that the Kaiser would persuade the Ottoman sultan to grant the Jews a charter in Palestine. The incentive for the sultan would be promises of Jewish financial aid, and the implied incentive for the Kaiser would be to rid Germany of undesirable Jews. After about a year, which included a joint visit to Palestine by the Kaiser and Herzl, it appeared that this initiative would produce nothing. In 1899 and 1901, Herzl made direct contact with the sultan, again with no result. In the meantime, since the Congress of 1897, the Zionist Organization executives established the Jewish Colonial Trust to provide assistance to settlers in Palestine and the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to purchase land in Palestine for Jewish agricultural settlements. Each of the succeeding annual Congresses attracted more delegates, and membership increased dramatically in Zionist societies throughout the world. The JNF received modest financial backing, mostly via contribution boxes in synagogues. While the foundations were being laid for slow, practical progress, Herzl continued to pursue a dramatic political success. In 1903, Herzl was called to London to meet Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary. Having just returned from a trip to Africa, Chamberlain suggested to Herzl that Uganda, a fertile land with moderate climate and few European settlers, might be a favorable place for the Jewish national home. News of the Kishinev pogrom had just been received in the west, and Herzl in his own travels had seen the desperate conditions in the Pale. He decided to present Uganda to the 1903 Congress as a “temporary asylum.” The announcement was met with tumultuous dissent by the Russian delegates, who then walked out of the auditorium to meet on their own in Kharkov. The passions abated when it appeared the exercise had been futile––Chamberlain withdrew the offer under pressure from English settlers. The Uganda controversy imposed a fatal strain on Herzl. Within a year he died of a heart attack at age 44 and was buried in Vienna. His instructions were that his body should be moved and reburied when the Jewish State was created. Crowds of mourners gathered in Jewish communities as far away as Vilna and Odessa. The new president of the Zionist Organization, David Wolffsohn, born in Lithuania and living in Germany, benefited from the proto-national structures that had been established during Herzl’s presidency. Wolffsohn achieved a merging of the “political” and “practical” Zionists at the 1907 Congress. Arthur Ruppin was placed in charge of colonization, based in Jaffa. Starting in 1904, a new wave of immigrants from Russia, the Second Aliyah, had begun arriving in Palestine with the objective of joining or founding agricultural colonies. With the resources and borrowing capacity of the JNF, Ruppin purchased extensive land holdings in the Galilee and Judea. He also encouraged new farm communities to organize as collectives (kibbutzim). The first successful kibbutz, Degania, was founded in 1909 on the shore of Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). Many others followed. The city of Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 on the outskirts of Jaffa. Hebrew was adopted as the official language of the settlers. By 1914, at the start of the war, there were 90,000 Jews in Palestine, and the organization of the future Jewish state had been established.
• One positive result of the Uganda affair was a meeting in Manchester, England, in 1906 between Arthur Balfour, then Prime Minister of England, and Chaim Weizmann, Zionist leader from Russia and professor at the university. Balfour, a descendant of the Cecil family and godson of the Duke of Wellington, had long admired the Jewish civilization and felt that Christianity owed an unacknowledged debt to the Jews. He took an hour out of an election campaign specifically to meet Weizmann and to discuss the rejection of Uganda. Balfour was impressed by Weizmann’s religious conviction expressed in political terms––Palestine and Zionism were inseparable. At one point, Weizmann said, “Supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?” Balfour said, “But Dr. Weizmann, we have London.” Weizmann said, “But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.” Although the two did not meet again until 1914, Balfour frequently remarked on the impression the conversation made on him. In 1917, as Allenby’s army invaded Palestine, Balfour, then Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister Lloyd George, and Herbert Samuel, the only Jewish Cabinet minister, invited Weizmann to summarize for the Cabinet his ideas for the post-war structure of the Jewish community in Palestine. The primary political motives for considering the matter varied among the Cabinet members, including pressuring Turkey, excluding the French from the post-war division of the area, minimizing the influence of restive Egypt, and even demonstrating to Arabs the British support for nationalistic movements in the Middle East. In their memoirs, both Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, who knew less about the geography of France, where his troops were fighting, than the geography of the Holy Land (“The British Mandate in Palestine must run from Dan to BeerSheva”), said they supported the idea of Palestine as Jewish homeland primarily because it was the right thing to do. There was no question of the reasons for Balfour’s support. The text of the Balfour Declaration, issued in November 1917, stated in part, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” Although post-war British policy tilted toward Arab interests, leading to repudiation of the Balfour Declaration in 1939, we should recognize this moment in history when powerful statesmen took an action at least in part because they thought it was the right thing to do. Balfour later remarked that being able to assist the cause of the Jews gave him the most satisfaction of anything he had done in public life. In 1930, when he lay dying, he requested a final visit from Weizmann, who was the only person outside the family circle admitted to see him.
  
  
  
  
  WORLD WAR I (1914-1918) AND POST-WAR
  
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  Russia – The war on the Eastern Front was fought primarily within the Pale. The overthrow of the czar, the Bolshevik Revolution, and a peace treaty in early 1918 which for a short period ceded most of the Pale to Germany effectively ended the Pale and its restrictions. For two years after the war, until the Bolsheviks gained full control of Russia and the borders of the new country of Poland were established, confused four-way wars between the Red Russians, the White Russians, the Poles, and the Ukrainians devastated the former Pale area again. Each participant in these wars savaged the Jews at will. In particular, the Poles when invading the Ukraine treated each Jewish village as an enemy fort, shelling it and then invading and destroying it. Until 1921, British troops occupied Archangel and the Caucuses, and Japanese and American troops occupied Vladivostok, attempting to assist the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. At the same time, the Bolsheviks were trying to incite the proletariats to revolt in the “capitalist” western countries (including the U.S.), leading to recurrent Red Scares in these countries. By 1920, the Bolsheviks had consolidated their control, the Allied troops were withdrawn, and the borders of the USSR were virtually sealed. The Soviet regime implemented its economic theories by imposing collectivization on agriculture and manufacturing. The result was famine and the death of hundreds of thousands in 1921-1922. A New Economic Plan, which incorporated some capitalism, somewhat alleviated the situation. About 2.5 million Jews lived in the USSR, two thirds in the old Pale area and one third in the interior of Russia. Economically, the Jews fared about as well or as poorly as the general population. There was no official anti-Semitism, but all formal religions and minority nationalization initiatives were discouraged or banned. All religious schools were closed, and celebration of Jewish holidays was forbidden. Jewish communists emphasized their contempt for the ancient “superstitious” Jewish practices. Starting with the next generation, the Russian Jewish civilization, with its centuries-old beliefs, traditions, and strong community bonds, began to disintegrate.
  Poland – In November 1918 the Republic of Poland reconstituted itself from the Polish territory formerly in Russia, plus portions of Germany and the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The ambition of the Polish leaders was to restore Poland to its borders prior to the first partition of 1772, or even to the greater Poland of pre-1648, despite the fact that Poles were a minority in the eastern regions, which were populated primarily by Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and others. The Poles referred to these majority populations as “guests.” According to the Polish far-right party, anyone at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference who objected to Polish claims for territories that were not ethnically Polish was “in league with the Jews.” After several wars with Ukraine and Russia in which the battle lines swung wildly from Kiev to Warsaw, an international boundary line between Poland and Russia was proposed by a commission established by the Peace Conference. However, the final agreement between Russia and Poland in 1920 included in Poland a large area east of the line proposed by the international commission. The population of this territory was only 30% Polish. In Poland as a whole, Poles were 69%, Ukrainians 14%, Jews 8%, and the balance Russians, Germans, and others. In the new, insecure Poland, the presence of large, hostile minorities which resulted from territorial overextension, particularly the Ukrainians on the eastern border and the Germans on the western border, proved to be a major obstacle to developing a strong nation. In contrast to Russia, there was no attempt by the majority ethnic Poles to encourage minorities to develop a sense of national identity. Polish political parties competed for the honor of being the most antagonistic to minorities, especially the Jews. The largest party in the parliament in 1919 made anti-Semitism a major plank in its platform. The 3 million Jews in Poland, which included several hundred thousand Russian Jews who fled to Poland after the 1920 treaty, had exchanged the rather inefficient Russian government-sponsored anti-Semitism for the virulent Church-abetted traditional Polish anti-Semitism. With no interest in assimilation into the majority society, the Jews lived as a separate nation within Poland, almost 90% speaking Yiddish as their “native” language, with their own schools, publications, literature, and theatre. Another Golden Age of Yiddish culture flourished for a brief period. I. B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, was a product of this culture. By the mid-1930’s, Polish official anti-Semitic laws were following the lead of Nazi Germany, and the government was expressing its admiration for the “achievements” of Hitler’s Germany. During the 1930’s, about 200,000 Jews emigrated from Poland to Palestine, until Palestine was closed to further Jewish immigration by the British Mandatory authority in 1939.
  Germany – During the war, in which Jews participated in the military in excess of their proportion in the population, the German high command very publicly sent a questionnaire to field commanders asking for reports on how Jews were shirking duties, exhibiting cowardice, or deserting. The results of the survey showed that Jews in service were not less loyal in any way than other German soldiers. This result was not publicized, but the fact that the survey was conducted at all indicated the prevailing majority opinion that the Jews were somehow “non-German.” The defeat in the war, the ineffective Weimar Republic in which Jews had prominent leadership roles, inflation (which resulted in large part from the reparations demanded by the Allies), and then the worldwide depression were all blamed by a majority of Germans on the Jews, less than 1% of the German population. Nevertheless, during the early post-war period, Jews played a major role in the cultural life of Germany and western Europe. Jews were prominent, even dominant, in the fields of literature, classical music, sciences and mathematics, medical research, and psychiatry (universally regarded for better or worse as a Jewish science). Rather than evoking grudging admiration, Jewish prominence in European intellectual life was reviled by the Nazis as evidence of the “international Jew,” the debaser of true German culture. In 1933, the Nazi party gained a plurality in the Reichstag, and Hitler was appointed Chancellor.
  Palestine – At the conclusion of World War I, the League of Nations awarded Britain the mandate for Palestine. While the Balfour Declaration of 1917 committed Britain to support the establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine, publication of conflicting British secret wartime understandings with Arab leaders seemed to undercut that commitment. Emir Faisal, son of Sherif Husein to whom the British had made promises of Arab independence after the war, began agitation against the British and the Jewish settlers, whom he regarded as agents of Britain. To attempt to appease the Arab nationalists, Britain made Faisal puppet king of Iraq and carved Transjordan out of Palestine to provide a kingship for Faisal’s brother. Arab leaders then demanded annulment of the Balfour Declaration, with the objective of ensuring that the now reduced Palestine would not become a Jewish nation. The British installed efficient postal, railroad, and telephone systems, but their attempts to create a representative legislature for the Mandate were boycotted by the Arabs. The Mandate authority was then forced to deal independently with the Arab and Jewish communities. In 1922, the Jewish Agency and the Supreme Moslem Council were established by the Mandate. The Jewish Agency was initially staffed at the top levels primarily by World Zionist Organization leaders. The Agency conducted diplomatic discussions with Britain and the League of Nations, and administered the Jewish National Fund (JNF), immigration, education, and the self-defense force (Haganah). Most of the day-to-day operating positions in the Agency were staffed by the settlers (Yishuv). The Agency was in effect a national government in waiting. From 1922 to 1936, 300,000 immigrants entered from Europe to escape anti-Semitism, mostly from Poland at first and later from central Europe. The JNF continued to purchase land as it became available, and the number of Jewish agricultural settlements steadily expanded. With the growth of Tel Aviv to 150,000, the formation of the Palestine Electric Corporation, and cement and fertilizer works, a modern economy was being established by the Jews. The Arabs benefitted to some extent from the Jewish economic activity, but the Arab oligarchy resented and feared the Jewish expansion. Most of the Arab population were illiterate poor farmers or herders on land owned primarily by a few old families. The Supreme Moslem Council developed into an anti-Jewish, anti-British ultra-nationalist organization. Throughout the Middle East Arab nationalism was forcing concessions from France and Britain, and it was clear that in Palestine also the political power was swinging to the Arabs. In 1929 the Moslem Council orchestrated a series of riots against Jewish settlements. To the shock of the Yishuv, two British investigations ascribed most of the blame to the Jews. For the next 8 years, the Yishuv redoubled efforts to purchase and develop land as the additional immigrants arrived from Europe. In 1937, following another series of Arab attacks, a British commission recommended partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. The Jewish Agency agreed to pursue partition, but the Arabs completely rejected it. In 1939, with the Arabs showing support for the Axis powers, the British complied with Arab demands to limit Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next 5 years and none after that. Combined with immigration restrictions in the U.S., the closure of Palestine was a disaster for European Jews attempting to escape destruction.
  U.S.A. – The nativist anti-”undesirable” immigrant factions which had become influential, particularly in the Democratic party before World War I, strengthened as a result of the socialist/communist upheavals in Europe which followed the war. Bolshevism or international communism, linked in the public mind to Eastern European Jews, was regarded as an imminent threat to the American way of life. The racist theories that became widely accepted were those promoted by the 1916 Madison Grant book, which glorified Northern European races as opposed to Southern Europeans (particularly Italians), Eastern European Slavs and Jews, and all Asians. The legislative products of this racism were the Immigration Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924. Under the 1924 act, total immigration into the U.S. was limited to 165,000 per year, of which 131,000 were allowed to enter from Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia. The quota from Italy was 3845 per year, compared to about 200,000 immigrants per year from Italy in the years 1900-1910. The quotas from East Europe and Asia were minimal. The quotas were strictly applied to Jews throughout the 1930’s and even during World War II, when Jews attempting to escape Europe were literally turned away. In 1930 the population of Jews in the U.S. was about 5 million, of which about 2.3 million were in the New York City area. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, strict (although informal) internal quotas on Jews were applied to admission to universities, medical and law schools, employment in large corporations and law firms, and the purchase of homes in “restricted” areas. The result was the establishment of “Jewish” law firms, medical and dental practices, investment banks, brokerage houses, real estate agents, resort hotels, and (of course) country clubs. Following World War II the formal immigration quotas were eliminated, and the informal internal quotas were very gradually relaxed.

GLOSSARY

Submitted by admin on Tue, 09/17/2013 - 8:19pm

Ashkenazim
Originally descendants of Medieval Rhineland Jews; later referring to all Central and Eastern European Jews

Blood Libel
The claim that Jews murder Christian children for the purpose of using the blood in baking matzos

Conversos
Spanish Jews who converted to Catholicism

Diaspora
Greek origin word referring to the dispersion of an ethnic people; first used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Septuagint); most commonly refers to Jews living outside of Israel

Gaon, Gaonim (pl)
Title of heads of academies

Halakha
Collective body of Jewish law, including Biblical, Talmudic, and rabbinic law, plus customs and traditions

Haskalah
Hebrew term for “enlightenment”

Pale of Settlement
Area of western Russia where Jews were permitted by Czarist Russia to settle permanently

Pogrom
Violent riot or mob attack on a minority community, particularly attacks on Jewish communities in Russia during the 19th and 20th centuries

Sephardim
Descendants of Iberian Jews

Septuagint
Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, produced in Alexandria about 200 BCE

Shulchan Arukh
Collected table of Jewish laws and customs

Talmud
Compilation of rabbinic discussions and decisions on law, customs, and prayer; most frequently refers to the Babylonian Talmud, produced at the academies in Mesopotamia in the period 220 to 600 CE

Tanakh
The Hebrew Bible. The name is an acronym of the three sections of the Hebrew Bible: Torah (Five Books of Moses), Neviim (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings)

YHVH
Hebrew letters yud-heh-vav-heh. The unpronounced four letter name of God; “Adonai” (my God) is substituted when reading Torah

Yiddish
Language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, a combination of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, and other languages; written in Hebrew alphabet

Bibliography

Submitted by admin on Tue, 09/17/2013 - 8:19pm

Bach, H.I., The German Jew
Berlinerblau, J., “Official Religion and Popular Religion in Pre-Exilic Ancient Israel”
Bickerman, E. J., The Jews in the Greek Age
Blumberg, H.M., Weizmann: His Life and Times
Carroll, J., Constantine’s Sword
Chazan, R., Raphael, M.L. (ed), Modern Jewish History
Cohen, S. J. C., From Maccabees to the Mishnah
Cohen, Y., Small Nations in Times of Crisis and Confrontation
Farrokh, Dr. K., Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War
Finkelstein, L. (ed.), The Jews: Their History
Friedman, R. E., Who Wrote the Bible?
Gibbon, E., Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gilbert, M., Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Gilbert, M., The Jews of Russia
Goodman, M,. Rome and Jerusalem
Hertzberg, A. (ed), The Zionist Idea
Langer, H., The Thirty Years War
Lehman, D., A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs
Levi, P., Atlas of the Greek World
Macmillan, M., Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World
Mendes-Flohr, P., Reinharz, J. (ed), The Jew in the Modern World
Richarz, M. (ed), Jewish Life in Germany
Riis, J.A., How the Other Half Lives
Robertson, P., Revolutions of 1848
Rogerson, B., The Last Crusaders
Sachar, H. M., A History of Israel
Sachar, H. M., The Course of Modern Jewish History
Shanks, H. (ed.), Ancient Israel
Shanks, H. (ed.), Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism
Stillman, N. A., The Jews of Arab Lands
Stow, K.R., Alienated Minority
Strauss, R., “The Thirty Years War”
The Times Atlas of World History
Treece, H., The Crusades
Tuchman, B. W., Bible and Sword
Tuchman, B.W., The Proud Tower
Wawro, G., The Franco-Prussian War
Wickham, C., The Inheritance of Rome
Wikipedia
Woodward, D.R., Hell in the Holy Land
Yerushalmi, Y.H., Zakhor

Maps Sources:

Time Segment	Map Topic	Source
Introduction	Ancient Israel	onlinebibleworld.com
1000 - 500 BCE	Assyrian Empire	University of Texas Library
500 BCE - 0	Persian Empire	payvand.com
0 - 500 CE	Roman Empire	University of Texas Library
500 - 1000 CE	Abbasid Caliphate	medievalislamicgeography.com
1000 - 1500	Europe 1560	University of Texas Library
1500 - 1800	Partitions of Poland	British Library www.bl.uk
1800 - 1925	Pale of Settlement	oshermaps.org

Timelines in Jewish History 1000 BCE - 1925 CE

with Parallel Timelines in Relevant General History

• TIMELINES
• CONTACT

Introduction

In the 3000 year history of the Jewish people, with the exception of a few relatively brief periods, Jews have been the often-persecuted minority in nations ruled by others. Despite these tenuous circumstances, Jews have survived as a people longer than empires and regimes that in their time were thought to be ....

• READ MOREABOUT INTRODUCTION

1000 BCE – 500 BCE

The Hebrew-speaking Israelites controlled most of the area equivalent to modern Israel plus the West Bank from approximately 950 BCE. Following the death of Solomon (about 930), two kingdoms developed: the northern kingdom, Israel, dominated by the Ephraimite (Joseph) tribe, and the southern kingdom, Judah. The Temple in Jerusalem....

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500 BCE - 0

The Jewish community that returned to Jerusalem was vulnerable because the city walls had been destroyed in 586, and the neighboring tribes, including the Samaritans, were hostile to the idea of a rival power arising again in Jerusalem. The situation was stabilized with the arrival of Nehemiah, who supervised construction of the....

• READ MOREABOUT 500 BCE - 0

0 – 500 CE

During the first half of the 1st Century, Jewish Diaspora communities throughout the Roman Empire grew, prospered, and proselytized. The availability of the Bible in Greek (the Septuagint) was a major factor in the influence of Judaism among the pagans, as well as maintaining the cohesion of the Jewish Diaspora, since most of the Jews in the....

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500 – 1000

In Babylonia under the Sassanid Empire, the Talmud was completed about 600, the academies were flourishing, and the Exilarch was recognized as governor of the semi-autonomous Jewish community. A Yemenite tribe adopted Judaism. From 502 to 630 the Sassanid Empire fought a series of mutually devastating wars with....

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1000 – 1500

From 1000 to about 1100 the Jewish Diaspora communities in Moslem lands and in western Europe were relatively peaceful and prosperous. In Spain under the Cordova Caliphate (929-1031), the Jewish, Moslem, and Christian communities coexisted peacefully, with fruitful cultural exchanges. This brief period was....

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1500 – 1800

• Major trends at the start of the 16th century that influenced the development of modern Europe and the course of Jewish history:
• The Renaissance was spreading rapidly from Italy to the rest of....

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1800 – 1925

The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic wars (1789-1815) completely changed the political organization of Europe, while the social landscape was shaken by the revolutionary appeal of the Rights of Man. Although the Congress of Vienna (1815) attempted to restore....

• READ MOREABOUT 1800 – 1925

GLOSSARY

Ashkenazim
Originally descendants of Medieval Rhineland Jews; later referring to all Central and Eastern European Jews

Blood Libel
The claim that Jews murder Christian children for the purpose of using the blood in baking matzos

Conversos
Spanish Jews who converted to Catholicism

Diaspora
Greek origin word referring to the dispersion of an ethnic people....

• READ MOREABOUT GLOSSARY

Bibliography

Bach, H.I., The German Jew
Berlinerblau, J., “Official Religion and Popular Religion in Pre-Exilic Ancient Israel”
Bickerman, E. J., The Jews in the Greek Age
Blumberg, H.M., Weizmann: His Life and Times
Carroll, J., Constantine’s Sword
Chazan, R., Raphael, M.L. (ed), Modern Jewish History
Cohen, S. J. C., From Maccabees to the Mishnah
Cohen, Y., Small Nations in Times of Crisis and Confrontation
Farrokh, Dr. K., Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War

• READ MOREABOUT BIBLIOGRAPHY