Communities Across the World
One people, lived out on four continents, from Baghdad and the Ethiopian highlands to New York, traced as connected worlds rather than isolated outposts.
In Iraq, Jews lived for more than two thousand five hundred years. In Spain, Jewish poets, physicians, and mapmakers served caliphs and kings before the expulsion of 1492. Poland and Lithuania were once home to the largest Jewish community on earth. In the highlands of Ethiopia, a community lived cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for centuries. In the Soviet Union, more than two million Jews were kept from leaving. The United States is now home to one of the two largest Jewish communities on earth.
These communities wrote to one another, traded with one another, and shared the same texts and calendar across thousands of miles.
Chapters in this Unit
These Chapters follow Jewish communities across the wider map. After an opening overview, they begin with Iraq, one of the oldest Jewish communities on earth, then turn to the ancient community of Iran and to North Africa. They trace how nearly all the Jews of the Arab world left or were driven out, then turn to Spain and the Sephardic world its exiles built. They follow Poland and Lithuania, once home to the largest Jewish community on earth, and the long struggle of Soviet Jews to leave. They follow nearly four centuries of Jewish life in America and the Ethiopian community airlifted to Israel within living memory. They end with the modern State of Israel, where many of these threads converge. Full Table of Contents →
A Connected People
One people, lived out across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Jewish communities took root from Baghdad to Cairo to New York, stayed in touch across the distance, and many of them ended within a single lifetime.
Read the Chapter →The Jews of Iraq
For more than 2,500 years, Iraq held one of the oldest and most influential Jewish communities on earth, the home of the great academies where the Talmud was made, and a modern urban world that ended in a single generation.
Read the Chapter →The Jews of Iran
One of the oldest Jewish communities on earth, more than 2,500 years in Persia. Most left after the 1979 revolution, but unlike almost every other ancient community of the region, it did not end: thousands remain today.
Read the Chapter →The Jews of North Africa
From the cities of Morocco to the island of Djerba, Jewish communities lived across the Maghreb for more than two thousand years. By the mid-twentieth century they numbered more than half a million people, with their own languages, music, and traditions, like the Mimouna, the open-house celebration held the night Passover ends. Within a generation, almost all were gone.
Read the Chapter →The Departure from MENA
Across the Middle East and North Africa, from Iraq to Morocco, Jewish communities present for more than two thousand years were driven out, or fled, within a single generation. In 1948 roughly 850,000 Jews lived in the Arab countries of the region.
Read the Chapter →The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World
Under Muslim and then Christian rulers, the Jews of Spain included poets, physicians, royal treasurers, and mapmakers, until the expulsion of 1492. The exiles carried their Spanish, written in Hebrew letters, to Salonika and Istanbul, and the descendants of forced converts rebuilt Jewish life in Amsterdam and London.
Read the Chapter →The Jews of Poland and Lithuania
Poland and Lithuania were once home to the largest Jewish community on earth. Jews lived there under royal charters, ran their own councils, built yeshivas and the Hasidic movement, and by the 1930s Warsaw had more Jews than any other city in Europe.
Read the Chapter →Soviet Jewry
In the Soviet Union, more than two million Jews were forbidden for decades to leave, while the state shut religious schools and suppressed Hebrew. The campaign to free them, under the slogan “Let my people go,” became one of the best-known human-rights movements of its age.
Read the Chapter →American Jewry
It began with twenty-three refugees stepping off a boat in New Amsterdam (today's New York) in 1654. Nearly four centuries later it is the second-largest Jewish community in the world. It grew through five waves of arrival, the last of them the Soviet Jews whose freedom American Jews campaigned for, and Jewish women built many of its institutions along the way.
Read the Chapter →Ethiopian Jewry, Beta Israel
In the mountains of northern Ethiopia, a community called Beta Israel, “House of Israel,” kept Jewish practice in near-isolation for centuries. In airlifts in 1984–85 and 1991, more than 20,000 were flown to Israel.
Read the Chapter →The Modern State of Israel
Founded on May 14, 1948, Israel is now home to nearly half the world's Jews, the country where many of the communities in this Unit now live.
Read the Chapter →Last updated: November 2026.