Timeline of Jewish History.
Excavation at the City of David (Givati Parking Lot), Jerusalem. Photo: Daniel Ventura · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0.The biblical period.
From the early biblical era to the destruction of the First Temple, the story told by the Hebrew Bible alongside the archaeological record of ancient Israel and its neighbors.
The patriarchal period
The Hebrew Bible tells of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the founding generations of the Israelite family, in roughly the early second millennium BCE.
Chapter: Sacred Texts →The Israelites emerge as a distinct people in the hill country of Canaan
By the late 1200s BCE, a distinct Israelite people had settled in the hill country of Canaan. The Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian monument from about 1208 BCE, carries the oldest known mention of "Israel" outside the Bible.
Chapter: The Land of Israel →The kingdom of David and Solomon
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Israelite kingdom takes shape around 1000 BCE. David makes Jerusalem his capital, and his son Solomon builds the First Temple there.
Chapter: The Temples →The division of the kingdom
The kingdom splits in two: the northern Kingdom of Israel (ten tribes) and the southern Kingdom of Judah, which keeps Jerusalem and the Temple. The two go their separate ways for the next several centuries.
Assyrian conquest of the Kingdom of Israel
The Assyrian Empire conquers Samaria, besieged under Shalmaneser V, claimed by his successor Sargon II, the capital of the northern Kingdom. Much of its population is scattered across the empire, the root of the legend of the "Lost Tribes."
Destruction of the First Temple
The Babylonian Empire, under Nebuchadnezzar II, conquers Jerusalem and destroys the First Temple. Many Judeans are taken to Babylonia, beginning a Jewish community that would thrive there for more than a thousand years.
Chapter: The Temples →The Second Temple period.
From the return after Persia conquered Babylonia to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple. In these years, Greek-speaking Judaism, the rival religious movements of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the early roots of rabbinic Judaism took shape.
Cyrus the Great's edict permitting Jewish return to Judah
Cyrus II (the Great), the Persian king who had conquered Babylonia, issues an edict allowing Jewish exiles to return to Judah and rebuild the Temple. The edict appears in the Hebrew Bible (Ezra 1); the Cyrus Cylinder, which does not mention the Jews, records the same royal policy of restoring exiled peoples and their sanctuaries. The return marks the start of the Second Temple period.
Completion of the Second Temple
The Second Temple is finished in Jerusalem under the leadership of Zerubbabel. The rebuilding is described in the biblical books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zechariah.
Chapter: The Temples →Alexander the Great conquers the Levant
Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire brings Judea into the Greek world. Greek-speaking Judaism grows quickly afterward, above all the Jewish community of Alexandria, which becomes the largest Jewish city in the ancient Mediterranean.
Chapter: Diaspora →The first anti-Jewish literature, written in Greek
In Egypt, a Greek-language history attributed to the priest Manetho retells the Exodus in reverse: the Jews’ ancestors are cast as a colony of lepers expelled for disease and impiety. The fragments survive because the historian Josephus later quoted them in order to answer them. The counter-story circulates for centuries.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →The Septuagint translation begins at Alexandria
The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible begins in Alexandria during the third century BCE. Known as the Septuagint, it became the version through which much of the Western world first read the Hebrew Bible; the early Christian churches used it as their text.
Chapter: Sacred Texts →The Maccabean Revolt
The Hasmonean family revolts against the Seleucid Empire, which had banned Jewish religious practice. The revolt leads to the rededication of the Temple in 164 BCE, remembered in the festival of Hanukkah, and to the rule of the Hasmonean dynasty.
Roman conquest of Judea
The Roman general Pompey's capture of Jerusalem brings Judea under Roman power. Over the next century, Rome governs partly through local client kings, most famously Herod the Great (37 BCE–4 BCE), who greatly rebuilt and expanded the Second Temple.
Anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria
A dispute over Jewish civic status under a hostile Roman governor, Flaccus, breaks into mob violence in Alexandria: synagogues desecrated, homes and shops looted, Jews driven into a single quarter, community elders flogged in the public theater. The philosopher Philo, an eyewitness, writes the earliest surviving firsthand account of mob violence against a Jewish community.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →Destruction of the Second Temple
Roman forces under Titus capture Jerusalem during the Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE) and destroy the Second Temple. Jewish religious life then reorganizes around the synagogue, the rabbinic academies, and the study of law and text that becomes rabbinic Judaism.
Chapter: The Temples → Chapter: The Synagogue →The Talmudic period.
In the centuries after the Temple fell, rabbinic Judaism took shape. The Mishnah and the two Talmuds, Jerusalem and Babylonian, were written in this period. The academies in the Galilee and Babylonia became the centers of Jewish religious and intellectual life.
The Yavneh academy and the early rabbinic period
The academy at Yavneh, founded by Yohanan ben Zakkai right after 70 CE, becomes the center of early rabbinic Judaism. These academies (Yavneh and Lod, and later the Galilean schools at Usha, Beit She'arim, Sepphoris, and Tiberias) build up the body of teaching that becomes the Mishnah.
Chapter: Continuous Presence in the Land →The Epistle of Barnabas: earliest surviving Adversus Judaeos text
The earliest surviving Christian text to argue that the church had replaced Judaism (a view known as supersessionism). It is an early example of the "Against the Jews" writings that continued among the Church Fathers.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →The Bar Kochba Revolt
Led by Simon Bar Kochba, the Jewish revolt against Rome is the last major Jewish military uprising of the ancient world. Hadrian crushes it, leaving much of Judea emptied, and Rome renames the province Syria Palaestina. The center of Jewish life shifts to the Galilee.
Compilation of the Mishnah
Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi compiles the Mishnah, the founding text of rabbinic Judaism, at Sepphoris and Beit She'arim in the Galilee. The Mishnah becomes the core around which the later Talmud is built.
Chapter: Sacred Texts →John Chrysostom's Eight Homilies Against the Judaizers
Chrysostom preaches these homilies at Antioch. They are the harshest of the early Christian anti-Jewish sermons and shaped Christian attitudes toward Jews for centuries afterward.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →Completion of the Jerusalem (Palestinian) Talmud
The Talmud of the Land of Israel is completed at the Galilean academies around the late fourth or early fifth century CE. It is shorter and less elaborated than the Babylonian Talmud, but it is a key source for Jewish life in the Land during this period.
Chapter: Sacred Texts →Augustine's witness-people doctrine
Augustine of Hippo, drawing on Psalm 59:11, argues that Jews should be protected, not killed or forced to convert, so that they remain living witnesses to the Hebrew Bible. This idea stayed the Catholic position for about a thousand years.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →Completion of the Babylonian Talmud
The Babylonian Talmud is completed at the academies of Sura and Pumbedita during the fifth and sixth centuries CE. It becomes the central text of rabbinic Judaism, and through the medieval period and after, it is the main reference for nearly every Jewish community in the diaspora.
Chapter: Sacred Texts →The medieval period.
The medieval centuries: the Geonic academies of Babylonia, the golden age of Jewish life in Muslim Spain, the rise of the Ashkenazi communities of Northern Europe, and great figures like Rashi and Maimonides. The Cairo Geniza, a synagogue storeroom that preserved a thousand years of everyday papers, a window into Mediterranean Jewish life. And the slow hardening of Christian anti-Jewish teaching into the laws of European life.
The Geonic period
The Babylonian academies of Sura and Pumbedita serve as the leading legal and religious authority for Jewish communities across the Islamic world. Through the responsa system, communities sent questions of Jewish law to the academies and received written answers, often across great distances.
Chapter: Diaspora →Muslim conquest of Iberia begins
The Umayyad conquest of the Visigothic kingdom brings Spain and Portugal under Muslim rule, setting the stage for the golden age of Jewish life in Muslim Spain.
Rabbeinu Gershom and the Mainz academy
Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz founds the first major Ashkenazi academy. His takkanot (legal rulings): banning polygamy among Ashkenazi Jews, requiring both partners' consent for divorce, and forbidding the reading of other people's mail, shaped Ashkenazi Jewish life for centuries.
Chapter: Rashi →Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi) of Troyes
The most widely read Jewish commentator of all time. His commentary on the Five Books of Moses is traditionally the first text Jewish children study; his Talmud commentary runs along the inner margin of every standard printed Talmud page.
Chapter: Rashi →The Granada massacre
A mob storms the Jewish quarter of Granada, kills Joseph ibn Naghrela, the Jewish vizier of the city, and destroys the Jewish community in a single day. Medieval accounts put the dead in the thousands.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →The First Crusade Rhineland massacres
Mobs tied to the Crusade destroy the Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, killing about 4,000 to 5,000 Jews. Rashi lived through these years at Troyes; his rulings received the forced converts back without reproach, and the surviving laments for 1096 are by Kalonymos ben Judah and others. Three Hebrew chronicles of the time (the Mainz Anonymous, Solomon bar Samson, and Eliezer bar Nathan) record what happened.
Chapter: Rashi →Moses Maimonides
Born in Córdoba in 1138, died in Fustat in 1204. He was a physician in Saladin's court circle and a leader of Egypt's Jews, and he wrote the Commentary on the Mishnah (1168), the Mishneh Torah (1180), and the Guide of the Perplexed (c. 1190). Christian thinkers studied him closely, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas (who cited him about 80 times as "Rabbi Moyses Aegyptius"), and Meister Eckhart.
Chapter: Maimonides →The Almohad persecutions
The Almohad conquest of Morocco and Muslim Spain brings a policy rare in Islamic history: Jews must convert to Islam, flee, or die, and synagogues close across the Maghreb. Maimonides’ family flees Córdoba and lives years in hiding; his father writes a letter of consolation from Fez, in Morocco, around 1160, to the communities forced into outward conversion.
Chapter: The Jews of North Africa →Fourth Lateran Council, canons 67–70
Under Pope Innocent III, the Catholic Church requires Jews to be distinguishable by their dress, a rule local rulers turned into badges, bars them from public office, and builds up the wider system of laws that kept medieval Jews legally second-class.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →The Paris Disputation
Held under King Louis IX, the disputation ends with the Church condemning the Talmud as blasphemous. About 12,000 handwritten copies are burned in Paris in 1242, setting the example for later medieval Talmud-burnings.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →The Barcelona Disputation
Nahmanides (Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman) defends Judaism before King James I of Aragon. His Hebrew account of the debate is one of the fullest surviving records of any medieval disputation written from the Jewish side.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →Edward I expels the Jews from England
The first permanent expulsion of the Jews from an entire European kingdom. Roughly 2,000 to 3,000 Jews, by current scholarly estimates, are forced out of England, which has no organized Jewish community again until Jews begin living openly in England again under Cromwell in 1656.
Philip IV expels the Jews from France
The French crown expels about 100,000 Jews from the royal lands. More expulsions and partial readmissions follow throughout the fourteenth century.
The Black Death and the pogroms
As the plague sweeps Christian Europe, Jews are falsely accused of poisoning wells, and whole communities across the Rhineland and Central Europe are massacred. The violence wipes out much of medieval Europe's Jewish population.
First Hebrew book printed with movable type
Avraham ben Garton prints Rashi's commentary on the Five Books of Moses at Reggio di Calabria, Italy, the first dated Hebrew book. That this was the book chosen shows how central Rashi already was at the dawn of Hebrew printing.
Chapter: Rashi →The Alhambra Decree
Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile order the Jews expelled from Spain. Estimates of how many left over the summer of 1492 range widely in modern scholarship, from about 40,000 to well over 100,000; many others converted and stayed. These Sephardic refugees reshaped Jewish life across the Mediterranean and beyond; Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire welcomed them.
Chapter: Joseph Karo →Portuguese forced conversion edict
King Manuel I turns his 1496 expulsion decree into forced conversion, ordering Portuguese Jews baptized, closing the refuge Portugal had briefly given to Jews expelled from Spain. This created a large population of Portuguese Conversos, or New Christians, whose later history runs through the early-modern period.
The early-modern period.
The Hebrew printing revolution, the flowering of mysticism at Safed, the ghetto system, the Court Jews, and the Sabbatean movement, the shape of Jewish life until emancipation began.
The Venetian Ghetto established
The Republic of Venice creates the first compulsory Jewish quarter to bear the name ghetto on March 29, 1516. Other European cities copied the idea over the next century, building the "ghetto system" that lasted until the age of emancipation.
Chapter: The Ghetto System →The Bomberg Talmud at Venice
Daniel Bomberg prints the first complete Babylonian Talmud at Venice, standardizing the page layout still used five centuries later. Rashi in the inner margin, Tosafot in the outer margin, the Talmud text in the center.
Chapter: Rashi →Joseph Karo's Safed period
Rabbi Joseph Karo lives and works in Safed during its great flowering of Jewish mysticism, alongside Cordovero, Luria, Alkabetz, and Vital. He finishes the Beit Yosef in 1542 and the Shulchan Aruch in 1563; the latter is first published in 1565.
Chapter: Joseph Karo →Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies
Luther's treatise sets out harsh anti-Jewish views, drawing on the long Christian "Against the Jews" tradition. In 1984 the Lutheran World Federation formally repudiated this legacy.
Chapter: Adversus Judaeos →Pope Paul IV's Cum Nimis Absurdum
This papal bull creates the Roman Ghetto and tightens the ghetto system across the Papal States and Catholic Europe. The Roman Ghetto lasted from 1555 to 1870, more than three centuries.
Chapter: The Ghetto System →The Shulchan Aruch first published at Venice
Karo's code of practical Jewish law (halakhah) is published. Moses Isserles soon adds an Ashkenazi companion, the Mappah ("Tablecloth"); the first combined edition appears at Krakow in 1578.
Chapter: Joseph Karo →Twenty-three Jewish refugees arrive at New Amsterdam
The start of Jewish life in North America: twenty-three Sephardic refugees from Recife, Brazil, arrive at New Amsterdam (later New York). Jacob Barsimson, an Ashkenazi Jew from Amsterdam, had landed alone about two weeks earlier. It marks the beginning of the American Jewish community, traced in the American Jewry Chapter.
Chapter: American Jewry →Jews return openly to England under Cromwell
The Whitehall Conference of 1655 reaches no formal decision, but the Robles case of 1656 establishes a de facto right of residence, and Jews begin living openly in England again, more than 350 years after the 1290 expulsion, the foundation of the modern Anglo-Jewish community.
New Amsterdam admits Jews as burghers
After Asser Levy petitions the court, citing his guard service, the governor and council order that Jews be admitted as burghers, the town citizenship. The first Jewish civil-rights victories in America are won in the same courts that had first said no.
Chapter: American Jewry →The Sabbatean movement
The messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) reaches its height in 1665–1666 and shakes the Jewish world. When Zevi converts to Islam under Ottoman pressure in 1666, the movement collapses, though small Sabbatean groups lingered for generations.
The Mawza Exile in Yemen
Yemen’s ruler, the Imam al-Mahdi Ahmad, orders the Jews of the country, and only the Jews, expelled to Mawza, a barren strip near the Red Sea coast, after they refuse conversion to Islam. By some scholarly estimates as many as two-thirds die of hunger and disease before the survivors are permitted back a year later.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →The founding and consolidation of Hasidism
Founded by the Baal Shem Tov (c. 1700–1760) and built up under Dov Ber of Mezeritch (d. 1772), Hasidism reshaped Jewish religious life in Eastern Europe for the next two centuries.
Touro Synagogue dedicated at Newport, Rhode Island
Dedicated on December 2, 1763, it is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States. The Sephardic community at Newport was a leading center of Jewish life in colonial America.
Chapter: American Jewry →The emancipation period.
One European state after another grants Jews full citizenship. Jewish life shifts from self-governing communities toward joining the modern nation-state. Reform Judaism takes shape, and traditional Judaism responds.
Mendelssohn's Torah translation and Jerusalem
Moses Mendelssohn, the leading figure of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), publishes his German translation of the Torah printed in Hebrew letters. In 1783 he publishes Jerusalem, arguing for freedom of conscience. Europe's debates over Jewish emancipation open in the same years.
Chapter: Moses Mendelssohn →Washington's letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport
President George Washington's August 1790 letter to Moses Seixas and the Hebrew Congregation at Newport gives one of America's earliest and clearest statements of religious liberty. It promises that the government "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."
Chapter: American Jewry →Moulay Yazid turns on Morocco’s Jews
On taking the throne, Sultan Moulay Yazid orders two years of attacks on the Jewish quarters of Tetouan, Meknes, Fez, and Marrakesh. He is punishing the Jews who had refused him a loan when he was a rebel prince. In Fez the community is expelled from its quarter and a mosque is raised on the site of the main synagogue. Moroccan Jewish chronicles remember his reign as the worst since the Almohads.
Chapter: The Jews of North Africa →French Revolution grants Jews full citizenship
The French National Assembly grants full citizenship to all French Jews, the first emancipation of a Jewish population in Europe. Over the next two decades, Napoleon's conquests spread the same idea across much of the continent.
Napoleonic-era ghetto walls fall across Italy
French revolutionary armies under Napoleon tear down the ghetto walls across Italy. The Roman Ghetto's walls outlast the rest; the Roman Ghetto itself is not abolished until 1870, under unified Italy.
Chapter: The Ghetto System →The emergence of Reform Judaism
Reform Judaism takes shape in Germany: Israel Jacobson's Seesen Temple (1810), the Hamburg Temple (1818), and the wider reform movement. The aim is to fit traditional Jewish religious life to the new world of citizenship and emancipation.
The Allahdad at Mashhad
A mob attacks the Jewish quarter of Mashhad, Iran, and the community is offered Islam or death, an event remembered as the Allahdad, “God’s justice.” The Jews of Mashhad convert outwardly and keep Judaism in secret for generations, a hidden community inside Iran into the twentieth century.
Chapter: The Jews of Iran →The Damascus Affair
The medieval European blood libel arrives in the Middle East: after a friar disappears in Damascus, the French consul promotes the accusation that the city’s Jews ritually murdered him. Leading Jews are tortured, and one dies under torture, before an Ottoman decree repudiates the charge as a calumny. The same months carry the same accusation to the island of Rhodes. The libel entered the region from Europe, and with European sponsorship.
Chapter: The Blood Libel →Theodor Herzl is born at Budapest
The founder of modern political Zionism is born on May 2, 1860 in Pest. His upbringing in a liberal Jewish family of the Habsburg Empire would deeply shape the Zionist movement he later led.
Chapter: Theodor Herzl →Habsburg emancipation
The December Constitution grants full citizenship to Jews in the Austrian half of the new Austria-Hungary; Hungary emancipates its Jews the same year by its own statute. Over the next half-century, Habsburg Jewish life was transformed, until the Empire itself collapsed in 1918.
German imperial emancipation
Full citizenship for Jews across the German Empire completes the main emancipations in Central Europe. German-Jewish civic and intellectual life flourished over the next six decades.
Strauss and Davis patent the riveted work pant
United States Patent No. 139,121 is granted to Jacob Davis, a Jewish tailor in Reno, and held jointly with Levi Strauss, the Bavarian-born San Francisco merchant who paid the filing fee. Their riveted "waist overalls" in blue denim are the first blue jeans.
Chapter: Levi Strauss →Wilhelm Marr's Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum
This German pamphlet frames hatred of Jews in racial terms, a shift away from the older religious hostility. Within the year Marr founds the League of Antisemites and, in a follow-up pamphlet, coins the word "antisemitism" (Antisemitismus) for the new politics. Unit 3 traces this racial turn in detail.
Chapter: The Racial Turn →The modern period.
The Russian pogroms, the mass migration to America and beyond, the founding of modern political Zionism, the First World War and its aftermath, and the growth of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine.
The Russian pogrom wave following Alexander II's assassination
A wave of anti-Jewish violence breaks out across the Russian Empire after Tsar Alexander II is assassinated in March 1881. The pogroms set off a mass migration of Russian Jews, mostly to the United States, but also to Argentina, Palestine (the First Aliyah), and elsewhere.
Chapter: American Jewry →Emma Lazarus writes "The New Colossus"
Two years into the Russian pogroms, the American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, then teaching and aiding refugees arriving in New York, writes the sonnet that will give the Statue of Liberty its voice: "Give me your tired, your poor." It is mounted inside the statue's pedestal in 1903.
Chapter: Emma Lazarus →The First Aliyah
About 25,000 Jewish immigrants come to the Land of Israel and found early farming villages (moshavot) such as Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya'akov, and Rosh Pinah.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →Samuel Gompers founds the American Federation of Labor
In Columbus, Ohio, American craft unions join into a federation and elect Samuel Gompers, a Jewish cigar maker from New York's Lower East Side, their first president. He leads the AFL for thirty-seven of its first thirty-eight years, and the eight-hour day becomes its signature demand.
Chapter: Samuel Gompers →The Dreyfus Affair begins
Captain Alfred Dreyfus is convicted of treason on fabricated evidence. Theodor Herzl covers the case as Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, and the experience leaves a deep mark on him.
Chapter: Theodor Herzl →Herzl publishes Der Judenstaat
The founding manifesto of modern political Zionism is published in Vienna and Leipzig. Reactions are sharply divided, and the book turns Herzl into a public political figure.
Chapter: Theodor Herzl →The First Zionist Congress at Basel
About 200 delegates from 17 countries gather and adopt the Basel Program: "Zionism strives to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law." They found the World Zionist Organization with Herzl as president. In his diary on September 3, 1897, Herzl predicts a Jewish state within "five years, certainly in fifty."
Chapter: Theodor Herzl →The Russian publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
This forged Russian text, pieced together from Maurice Joly's 1864 French satire and Hermann Goedsche's 1868 German novel, is published in Pavel Krushevan's Znamya newspaper. It went on to circulate worldwide and became a cornerstone of modern antisemitism.
Chapter: The Protocols →The Kishinev pogrom
A vicious pogrom strikes Kishinev in the Russian Empire, 49 Jews killed and widespread property destroyed. Press coverage in the West speeds the migration of Russian Jews to America and other English-speaking countries.
Herzl dies at Edlach an der Rax
Theodor Herzl dies of heart failure at age 44. About 6,000 mourners attend his funeral in Vienna. In 1949, some fifteen months after Israel was founded, his remains are reburied at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Chapter: Theodor Herzl →The Tritel at Fez
Weeks after the treaty that made Morocco a French protectorate, mutinying soldiers and crowds sack the Jewish quarter of Fez for three days. The community remembers the pogrom in its own word as the Tritel, “the pillaging.” More than forty Jews are killed, most Jewish homes are looted or burned, and some 12,000 Jews take refuge on the grounds of the sultan’s palace.
Chapter: The Jews of North Africa →The Balfour Declaration
British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour writes to Lord Walter Rothschild voicing his government's support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." These words later shaped the terms of the British Mandate.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →The British Mandate for Palestine formally established
The League of Nations makes the British Mandate official, writing the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate's preamble.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →Johnson-Reed Immigration Act
This American law sharply limits immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, including Jews. The route that had brought about 2.5 million Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1924 closes just as European Jews would soon need it most.
Chapter: American Jewry →Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany
The Nazi seizure of power begins. About 525,000 Jews live in Germany at the time, and the twelve years that follow would change European Jewish life forever.
Unit 4: The Holocaust Era →Reichstag Fire Decree
Issued the day after the Reichstag Fire of February 27, the decree uses Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to suspend German civil liberties: freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and protection from arbitrary arrest. It stays in force until May 8, 1945 and becomes the legal basis of the Nazi police state. The first arrests of Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists begin within hours of the fire.
Chapter: 1933–1939 · The Architecture of Persecution →Dachau concentration camp opens
The first Nazi concentration camp opens at Dachau, near Munich, run by the SS. At first it holds political prisoners, Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. It became the model for the wider Nazi camp system.
The Enabling Act
The Reichstag passes the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich (the Enabling Act) by a vote of 441-94. The 94 votes against are all cast by Social Democrats; the Communist deputies have already been arrested or driven into hiding. The law lets Hitler's cabinet make laws without the Reichstag, marking the constitutional end of the Weimar Republic.
Chapter: 1933–1939 →The boycott of Jewish businesses
The first nationwide Nazi action against Jews: a one-day boycott of Jewish-owned businesses across Germany. SA men stand guard outside Jewish shops, hospitals, law offices, and doctors' practices. It was a public test of the Nazi anti-Jewish program to come.
Chapter: 1933–1939 →Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service
The first major Nazi anti-Jewish law. It orders the firing of Jewish and politically suspect civil servants from government jobs, including university professors, judges, and teachers. This is the law that introduced the "Aryan paragraph."
Chapter: 1933–1939 →The book burnings
Nazi-organized book burnings take place in about 34 German university towns. Public ceremonies consign to the flames works by Jewish authors (Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein), socialist and Communist writers, and others branded "un-German." Heine's 1821 line, "Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people", circulates widely in response.
Chapter: 1933–1939 →Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring
The Nazi sterilization law allows the forced sterilization of people labeled as carrying "hereditary" diseases, among them "feeblemindedness," schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness, and hereditary epilepsy. About 400,000 Germans were forcibly sterilized under this law between 1934 and 1945. It was the forerunner of Aktion T-4.
Chapter: Aktion T-4 →The Constantine pogrom
A rumor of an insult to a mosque becomes days of anti-Jewish rioting in Constantine, Algeria. Mobs attack the Jewish quarter and twenty-five Jews are killed, whole families among them, while French colonial authorities fail to intervene.
Chapter: The Jews of North Africa →The Nuremberg Laws
The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor are passed at the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. The First Supplementary Decree of November 14, 1935 defines who counts as a "Jew" by counting grandparents, the racial rule on which the rest of the Nazi anti-Jewish program rested. It put into practice the racial idea of antisemitism born in 1879.
Chapter: 1933–1939 →The Evian Conference
Thirty-two nations meet at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the Jewish refugee crisis from Nazi Germany. Thirty-one refuse to raise their refugee quotas; only the Dominican Republic offers to take in Jewish refugees (up to 100,000, of whom about 800 finally arrive at the Sosúa settlement). The world's refusal here was something Nazi propaganda later exploited.
Chapter: 1933–1939 →The Polenaktion
The Nazis expel about 17,000 Polish-born Jews from Germany to the Polish border at Zbąszyń. Among them are the parents of Herschel Grynszpan. On November 7, 1938, Grynszpan shoots German embassy official Ernst vom Rath in Paris, the act the Nazis used as their excuse for Kristallnacht.
Chapter: 1933–1939 →Kristallnacht
A Nazi-organized pogrom sweeps Germany and annexed Austria. About 267 synagogues are destroyed or badly damaged, around 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses are wrecked, roughly 91 Jews are killed outright, and some 30,000 Jewish men are arrested and sent to concentration camps (Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen). On November 12, 1938, the German Jewish community is forced to pay a fine of 1 billion Reichsmarks. It was the turning point in Nazi policy toward Jews.
Chapter: 1933–1939 →The voyage of the St. Louis
The German ocean liner St. Louis leaves Hamburg on May 13, 1939 carrying 937 Jewish refugees bound for Cuba. Cuba turns them away on May 27, the United States refuses them too, and the ship sails back to Europe. The United Kingdom admits 288 of the returning passengers; Belgium, the Netherlands, and France take in the remaining 619. Of those 619, about 254 were later killed in the Holocaust.
Chapter: 1933–1939 →The British White Paper
This British policy caps Jewish immigration to Palestine at 75,000 over the next five years and limits Jewish land purchase. In force just before and during the war, it cut off a route of escape for Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →The Holocaust era.
The Nazi years and the destruction of European Jewry, and the persecution that reached Jews across North Africa and the Middle East.
German invasion of Poland
The start of the Second World War. Poland's roughly 3.3 million Jews are the largest Jewish community in any country in Europe.
Hitler authorizes the T-4 euthanasia program
Hitler signs a one-paragraph order authorizing the adult "euthanasia" program, addressed to Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt. He backdates it to September 1, 1939 to tie the killings to the start of the war. It became the basis of the Nazi euthanasia killing operation.
Chapter: Aktion T-4 →The Brandenburg killing center opens
The first T-4 killing center opens at Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, in a former prison. Here the gas-chamber method, sealed rooms filled with carbon monoxide from steel cylinders, is developed and tested. About 9,700 disabled Germans are killed at Brandenburg through October 1940. It was the forerunner of the Operation Reinhard killing centers.
Chapter: Aktion T-4 →Bishop Galen's sermon at St. Lambert's, Münster
Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Münster ("the Lion of Münster"), preaches a public sermon condemning the T-4 program by name. The sermon is printed in thousands of copies and even dropped over Germany by the RAF as propaganda. The public outcry helped lead to the program's official halt three weeks later, one of the rare times the Nazi regime changed course in the face of public protest.
Chapter: Aktion T-4 →The official halt of Aktion T-4
Hitler gives a verbal order halting the T-4 program. The formal program killed about 70,273 disabled Germans between January 1940 and August 1941 (the figure known as the "Hartheim Statistics"). But the killing did not stop: "wild euthanasia" (scattered killings at psychiatric hospitals through starvation, overdose, and lethal injection) continued through 1945, claiming roughly 100,000 to 200,000 more lives. T-4 staff (Wirth, Stangl, Reichleitner, and about 90 others) moved on to Operation Reinhard to run Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.
Chapter: Aktion T-4 →The Farhud at Baghdad
A pogrom strikes the Jewish community of Baghdad, Nazi-influenced but carried out by Iraqis (the disbanded Rashid Ali army and the Futuwwa youth movement). About 180 Iraqi Jews are killed and much property destroyed. The community’s name for it, the Farhud, means lawless plunder. The plunder had one target. It marks how the Holocaust era reached the Middle East and North Africa.
Chapter: The Holocaust in MENA →Vichy antisemitic laws reach French North Africa
Vichy France, the regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany, extends its antisemitic laws to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, home to more than 400,000 Jews. In Algeria, the Crémieux Decree is revoked, stripping the territory's Jews of the French citizenship they had held for seventy years. The laws stay in force until the Allied liberation; full rights are not restored in Algeria until October 1943.
Chapter: The Holocaust in MENA →The Warsaw Ghetto sealed
The Nazis seal the Warsaw Ghetto on November 16, 1940, confining about 400,000 Jews in roughly 1.3 square miles. The ghetto lasted until the deportations of 1942 and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943.
Chapter: The Ghetto System →Operation Barbarossa
Germany invades the Soviet Union. Behind the advancing army, the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units carry out mass shootings of Jews across Soviet territory. About 1.5 million Jews were murdered in these shooting operations between 1941 and 1943.
Unit 4: The Holocaust Era →The Wannsee Conference
At this meeting in Berlin, senior Nazi officials coordinate how to carry out the "Final Solution" across the occupied territories. The minutes of the meeting still survive.
German occupation of Tunisia
German forces occupy Tunisia from November 1942 to May 1943. During the six-month occupation, Tunisian Jews are put to forced labor, taken hostage, and stripped of much of their property. Here the Holocaust reached North African soil under direct German occupation.
Chapter: The Holocaust in MENA →The Giado camp, Libya
In Italian-ruled Libya, about 2,600 Jews from the Cyrenaica region are deported to a forced-labor and internment camp at Giado. Overcrowding, hunger, and a typhus epidemic kill roughly 562 of them before British forces reach the camp in early 1943.
Chapter: The Holocaust in MENA →The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The Jews still in the Warsaw Ghetto rise up in armed resistance against the German deportations. The uprising lasts about four weeks; by mid-May 1943, nearly all of the remaining residents have been killed or deported.
Chapter: The Ghetto System →Soviet forces liberate Majdanek
The first major Nazi camp liberated by Allied forces, near Lublin in eastern Poland, with a few hundred surviving prisoners, most having been marched out days before. The gas chambers are captured intact; the SS burned the crematorium as they fled. A Soviet commission produces the first photographs and film of a Nazi camp to reach Western audiences, picked up by the British and American press.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →Soviet forces liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau
About 7,000 surviving prisoners are freed at the largest of the Nazi death camps, where roughly 1.1 million people were murdered, about one million of them Jews. Most prisoners had already been marched westward on death marches starting January 17, 1945. This date later became International Holocaust Remembrance Day under UN General Assembly Resolution 60/7 of November 1, 2005.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →U.S. forces liberate Ohrdruf
The first Nazi camp liberated by American forces, a subcamp of Buchenwald. General Eisenhower visits on April 12, 1945 with Generals Patton and Bradley. What he saw led him, three days later, to order the camps thoroughly documented.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →U.S. forces liberate Buchenwald
About 21,000 surviving prisoners are freed at Buchenwald, near Weimar. Edward R. Murrow's CBS radio broadcast from the site on April 15, 1945 did much to bring the reality of the Nazi camps home to the American public.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →British forces liberate Bergen-Belsen · Eisenhower's documentation order
British forces find about 60,000 surviving prisoners and roughly 13,000 unburied corpses at Bergen-Belsen. Richard Dimbleby's BBC broadcast of April 19, 1945 brought the horror home to the British public. Four days earlier, on April 15, General Eisenhower had cabled General Marshall ordering the camps photographed and recorded, already anticipating future denial: "if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda." About 80,000 photographs and 80,000 feet of film were produced.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →U.S. forces liberate Dachau
About 32,000 surviving prisoners are freed at Dachau, the first of the Nazi concentration camps. The site later became the Dachau Memorial Site (1965).
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →V-E Day · German surrender
The Second World War ends in Europe. The Holocaust took about six million Jewish lives, roughly two-thirds of Europe's prewar Jewish population. The Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and beyond, were destroyed.
The Harrison Report
Earl G. Harrison's report to President Truman on the condition of Jewish Displaced Persons in the American zone contains the line: "we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them." The report led to Truman's directive of December 22, 1945 giving Jewish DPs priority for U.S. immigration, and to the separate Jewish DP camps set up under General Eisenhower.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →The Tripoli pogrom
Rioters attack the Jews of Tripoli and the surrounding towns for three days. More than 130 Libyan Jews are killed, entire families among them, and synagogues are burned. It is the deadliest anti-Jewish violence in twentieth-century North Africa. The Cairo riots fall the same week. The departure of Libyan Jewry begins here.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
The International Military Tribunal indicts 24 of the major surviving Nazi officials and tries 22 of them. The verdicts: twelve death sentences, three life sentences, four prison terms, and three acquittals (Schacht, Papen, Fritzsche). The Nuremberg record (about 8 million pages of testimony, exhibits, and findings) became a foundational source for later study of the Holocaust.
Chapter: The Postwar Trials →The Kielce pogrom
A postwar pogrom against Jewish survivors who had returned to Kielce, Poland. About 42 Jews are killed and around 40 wounded. The attack sped up the Bricha, the organized movement of some 250,000 Jewish survivors out of Eastern Europe toward DP camps and Palestine between 1945 and 1948.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →The Exodus 1947
The Aliyah Bet ship Exodus 1947 leaves Sète, France on July 11, 1947 carrying 4,515 Jewish DPs bound for Palestine. The British Royal Navy seizes it on July 18 and sends the passengers back to Hamburg on September 8. Britain's decision to return survivors to Germany caused an international outcry that helped turn world opinion toward UN Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →The contemporary period.
The founding of the State of Israel, the departure of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, the postwar Catholic reckoning, and the growth of modern American and Israeli Jewish life, across nearly eight decades.
UN General Assembly adopts Resolution 181 (Partition Plan)
The UN resolution recommending that the Mandate territory be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state passes by a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions. The Jewish Agency accepts it; the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League states reject it.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →The Aden and Aleppo pogroms
Anti-Jewish violence breaks out at Aden (December 2–4, 1947) and Aleppo (December 1, 1947) in the wake of the UN partition vote. The Aleppo pogrom badly damages the Aleppo Codex.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →The State of Israel founded
David Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum at 4:00 pm. The United States recognizes the new state eleven minutes after independence takes effect at midnight; the Soviet Union recognizes it three days after that. The Arab-Israeli War follows, ending with the 1949 Armistice Agreements.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →Oujda and Jerada
Weeks after Israel’s declaration of independence, mobs attack the Jews of two towns in eastern Morocco. About forty-four people are killed in a day, most of them in the small mining town of Jerada. The departure of Moroccan Jewry accelerates from this point.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →The Displaced Persons Act
Truman signs the Displaced Persons Act, saying he had "signed this bill with very great reluctance" because its provisions favored farm workers and Baltic refugees over Jewish survivors. About 80,000 Jewish survivors entered the United States under the act, roughly 137,000 by all routes between 1945 and 1952; survivors in the same years went in even greater numbers to Israel.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →The Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration
In two days, the United Nations adopts the Genocide Convention, making the destruction of a people a crime in international law, and then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide, and René Cassin, a principal author of the Declaration, were both Jewish jurists who lost family in the Holocaust.
The Legal Record →The MENA Jewish departure
About 850,000 Jews leave the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran, and Aden. The main driver was state policy: stripping Jews of citizenship, seizing property, mass arrests, public hangings, and pogroms. The result reshaped the map of Jewish life across the Mediterranean and the wider region.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →Operation Magic Carpet
The airlift of about 49,000 Yemenite Jews from Aden to Israel. The Yemenite community was one of the oldest in the diaspora, with a recorded history of more than 1,500 years. Today the Yemenite community in Israel numbers around 350,000.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →Operation Ezra and Nehemiah
The airlift of about 120,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel. The Iraqi community was one of the oldest in the diaspora, with a recorded history of more than 2,500 years. Today Iraq's Jewish community has all but vanished.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →Yom HaShoah established
The Knesset passes the law establishing Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), marked on 27 Nisan (which falls in April or May). It was the world's first national day of Holocaust commemoration set by a state.
Chapter: The Memory Architecture →The Claims Conference founded
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany is founded in New York by 23 international Jewish organizations under Nahum Goldmann. It represents the Jewish people in postwar negotiations with the West German government. Since 1952 it has distributed about $90 billion in compensation, and as of the 2020s roughly 300,000 survivors still receive payments.
Chapter: Postwar Restitution →The Knesset debate on negotiations with West Germany
The Knesset debates whether to authorize negotiations with West Germany. Menachem Begin's speech against them on January 7 sparks a demonstration of about 15,000 Israelis outside the Knesset. The building's windows are smashed and some 400 demonstrators and police are injured. On January 9, 1952 the Knesset votes 61-50 to authorize negotiations. Begin is later suspended from the Knesset for 15 sessions.
Chapter: Postwar Restitution →The Luxembourg Agreement
Signed in Luxembourg by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, and Nahum Goldmann. It pledges about DM 3 billion (roughly $714 million in 1952 dollars) to Israel and about DM 450 million to the Claims Conference. It was the first time a postwar German government formally accepted the duty to compensate Jewish victims. In his Bundestag speech of September 27, 1951, ahead of the agreement, Adenauer said: "Unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people."
Chapter: Postwar Restitution →The Yad Vashem Law
The Knesset passes the Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Law, establishing Yad Vashem on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Its mandate covers documentation, commemoration, the Righteous Among the Nations, research, and education. It now holds about 209 million pages of records, and some 28,000 Righteous Among the Nations from 51 countries have been recognized. The Holocaust History Museum, designed by Moshe Safdie, opens on March 15, 2005.
Chapter: The Memory Architecture →The Salk polio vaccine announced
The field-trial verdict on Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, "safe, effective, and potent," is announced in Ann Arbor and licensed the same day. Salk, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, never patents it: "Could you patent the sun?"
Chapter: Jonas Salk →Ben-Gurion announces Eichmann's capture
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion tells the Knesset that Mossad agents had captured Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960 and brought him to Israel. The Eichmann Trial (April 11 – August 14, 1961) hears about 100 survivor witnesses. Eichmann is executed at Ramla Prison on May 31, 1962. The trial helped reshape postwar awareness of the Holocaust, as seen in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).
Chapter: Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial →Nostra Aetate
The Second Vatican Council adopts the declaration Nostra Aetate by a vote of 2,221 to 88. The Catholic Church rejects the charge that Jews were collectively guilty of killing Christ and the wider "Against the Jews" teaching. Later church documents, in 1974, 1985, 1998, and the 2015 The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable, built on this postwar stance.
Chapter: Nostra Aetate →The Six-Day War
This Arab-Israeli war reshapes the region. In it, Israel captures the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula (returned to Egypt under the 1978/79 Camp David Accords), and East Jerusalem. The questions raised by the 1967 war have shaped the region's history for the six decades since.
The Baghdad hangings
Iraq’s Ba’athist government publicly hangs nine Iraqi Jews in Baghdad’s Liberation Square on fabricated espionage charges, and broadcasts and celebrates the hangings. The remnant of a 2,500-year-old community leaves in the years that follow.
Chapter: The Jews of Iraq →Golda Meir becomes Prime Minister
Golda Meir, born in Kyiv in 1898 and raised in Milwaukee, becomes Israel's first woman Prime Minister, one of the first women to lead any modern state. She had signed the Declaration of Independence in 1948 and would lead the country through the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →The Munich Olympics attack
Gunmen of Black September, a PLO-linked organization, seize the Israeli team's quarters at the Munich Olympic Games. Eleven Israeli team members are murdered, along with a German policeman. Germany’s official documentation site opened in Munich’s Olympic Park in 2017; a memorial also stands at Fürstenfeldbruck, where the rescue attempt failed.
Chapter: The Terror Record →Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's ruling on Beta Israel
The Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel issues a ruling in Jewish law affirming that the Ethiopian Beta Israel community are Jews, identifying them with the lost tribe of Dan. Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren endorses the ruling in 1975. This opened the way for Israel's later airlifts of the community.
Chapter: Ethiopian Jewry →Soviet Jewish emigration
About 1.6 million Soviet Jews emigrate, through the refusenik years and after the opening of emigration in 1989 and the Soviet collapse of 1991. Roughly 1 million go to Israel and about 350,000 to the United States. Their departure created the large Russian-speaking Jewish communities in both countries.
Chapter: American Jewry →UN Resolution 3379, and its reversal
The UN General Assembly declares Zionism “a form of racism,” 72 to 35. Sixteen years later, in December 1991, the same body revokes it in a single sentence, 111 to 25. The General Assembly had never before revoked one of its own resolutions.
The Legal Record →The Camp David Accords
Egypt and Israel reach the Camp David Accords with US President Jimmy Carter as mediator. The peace treaty that follows on March 26, 1979 is the first between Israel and an Arab state.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →The execution of Habib Elghanian
Months after the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s new government executes Habib Elghanian, the industrialist who led Tehran’s Jewish community, by firing squad, on charges that include “Zionist espionage.” Most of Iran’s Jews leave in the years that follow.
Chapter: The Jews of Iran →Operation Moses
An Israeli airlift brings about 8,000 Beta Israel from Sudanese refugee camps to Israel aboard unmarked Boeing 707 aircraft. The operation stops on January 5, 1985 after the Israeli press reveals it, leaving about 1,000 Beta Israel stranded in Sudan. Operation Joshua (March 1985, using a U.S. CIA C-130) later flies out roughly 800 more.
Chapter: Ethiopian Jewry →Holocaust denial becomes a crime in Europe
France’s Gayssot Act makes denying the crimes judged at Nuremberg a criminal offense. Austria amends its Prohibition Act to the same effect in 1992, and Germany strengthens its incitement law in 1994.
Chapter: Holocaust Denial →Operation Solomon
Israel evacuates 14,325 Beta Israel from Addis Ababa to Israel in about 36 hours. Thirty-five aircraft take part, including El Al Boeing 747s with their seats removed. One flight carried 1,088 passengers, still the Guinness World Record for the most passengers ever flown on a single aircraft. The last flight leaves before EPRDF rebel forces enter Addis Ababa on May 28, 1991. About $35 million was paid to the departing Derg government.
Chapter: Ethiopian Jewry →The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum dedicated
The USHMM (federally chartered on October 7, 1980 under Public Law 96-388, with Elie Wiesel as its founding council chairman) opens at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, Washington, D.C. Its architect was James Ingo Freed (Pei Cobb Freed & Partners). President Bill Clinton and Israeli President Chaim Herzog attend the dedication. About 47 million people have visited since it opened, and its online Holocaust Encyclopedia draws roughly 16 million visits a year.
Chapter: The Memory Architecture →The Vatican-Israel Fundamental Agreement
The Holy See and the State of Israel sign the Fundamental Agreement, completing full diplomatic relations in June 1994, the high point of Catholic-Jewish engagement since Nostra Aetate.
Chapter: Nostra Aetate →The AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires
A bomb levels the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people: the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in the diaspora since the Second World War. In April 2024, an Argentine federal appeals court rules the attack a crime against humanity, ordered by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah.
Chapter: The Terror Record →Israel-Jordan peace treaty
The second peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah
The Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issues this document on the Catholic Church's reflection on the Holocaust, part of its continuing engagement since Nostra Aetate.
Chapter: Nostra Aetate →The Swiss Banks settlement
Credit Suisse and UBS pay a $1.25 billion settlement to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, reached through a class-action case in the U.S. Eastern District of New York under Judge Edward Korman. Payments to about 458,000 claimants were completed between 2001 and 2014. The Volcker Commission (1996–99) and the Bergier Commission (1996–2002) examined Switzerland's wartime conduct, including dormant accounts, dealings in Nazi gold, and the closing of its borders to refugees in 1942.
Chapter: Postwar Restitution →The Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets
Forty-four nations agree to the eleven Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art on December 3, 1998, led by U.S. negotiator Stuart Eizenstat. These principles set the standard for returning looted art that the later Terezín Declaration (June 2009) and today's restitution efforts build on.
Chapter: Postwar Restitution →IMPACT-se founded
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education is founded to study school textbooks from the Palestinian Authority, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and other countries. It measures them against UNESCO standards. Its reports are archived at impact-se.org/research.
Misconceptions: International textbook treatment →Irving v. Lipstadt judgment
Justice Charles Gray delivers his judgment in the High Court of Justice, London, ruling against David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. He finds that Irving had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" and was "an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist." The expert reports of Richard J. Evans (later published as Lying About Hitler) and Robert Jan van Pelt (The Case for Auschwitz) became standard references on the methods of Holocaust denial.
Chapter: Holocaust Denial →The Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" (EVZ)
A German federal foundation set up with €5.2 billion, funded half by the German government and half by about 6,500 German companies. It paid roughly 1.66 million former forced and slave laborers in about 100 countries between 2001 and 2007.
Chapter: Postwar Restitution →The Second Intifada
The violence kills about 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians. Roughly 140 suicide bombings strike buses, restaurants, and celebrations. Among the dead: 21 teenagers at the Dolphinarium discotheque (2001), 16 people at the Sbarro pizzeria (2001), and 30 at a Passover seder in Netanya (2002). The casualty record is kept by B'Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organization that counts both sides.
Chapter: The Terror Record →Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe dedicated
Germany's national memorial is dedicated in central Berlin, one block south of the Brandenburg Gate. Designed by architect Peter Eisenman, it has 2,711 concrete stelae spread across about 19,000 square meters. The Bundestag had approved Eisenman's design 314-209 on June 25, 1999. Beneath the field of stelae, an underground Information Center by Dagmar von Wilcken tells the stories of individual victims.
Chapter: The Memory Architecture →International Holocaust Remembrance Day established
The UN General Assembly adopts Resolution 60/7, naming January 27, the day Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The resolution also rejects Holocaust denial.
Chapter: The Memory Architecture →Holocaust denial becomes state policy in Iran
Weeks after the United Nations establishes the remembrance day, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calls the Holocaust “a myth” in a televised speech. Within a year, a newspaper owned by the city of Tehran runs a contest for cartoons mocking the Holocaust. Iran’s Foreign Ministry then hosts a conference for Holocaust deniers from thirty countries. For sixty years, denial had been the work of individuals and small institutes. It now has a state behind it.
Chapter: Holocaust Denial and the Response →NYSED Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) takes effect
The New York State Dignity for All Students Act takes effect, setting up the system for reporting and addressing harassment, discrimination, and bullying in K-12 public schools, including antisemitic incidents. DASA's reporting is part of the wider record on K-12 antisemitic incidents tracked by the ADL Audit and by NYSED itself.
Misconceptions: American K-12 schools →The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism
Meeting in Bucharest, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopts its Working Definition of Antisemitism. It has since been adopted by about 45 national governments, the European Parliament, the U.S. State Department, and around 1,200 other bodies, universities, cities, and professional organizations.
Chapter: Contemporary Antisemitism →The Never Again Education Act
President Trump signs Public Law 116-141, authorizing the USHMM to create and distribute Holocaust education resources and to train teachers across the country. It provides $10 million over its first five years. The law works alongside state-level Holocaust education requirements such as New York Education Law §801.
Chapter: The Memory Architecture →The Abraham Accords
Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain sign the Abraham Accords at the White House, establishing formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the two Gulf states. Morocco and Sudan later joined.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →European Parliament Resolution on PA Textbooks
The European Parliament passes a resolution urging that Palestinian Authority school textbooks meet UNESCO standards on how textbooks portray others. It is the same equal-treatment standard the platform applies to any country's curriculum, including across Europe.
Misconceptions: International textbook treatment →The ShUM Sites inscribed on UNESCO World Heritage List
The medieval Rhineland Jewish sites at Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, the three ShUM cities, are added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, recognizing medieval Ashkenazi Jewish life as world heritage.
Chapter: Rashi →The Pittsburgh verdict
The man who murdered eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history, is convicted on all 63 federal counts and sentenced to death.
The Legal Record →The contemporary moment
Today the world's Jewish population is about 15.7 million, spread across roughly 100 countries, still below its prewar peak of about 16.5 million in 1939. The largest communities: Israel, with about 7.2 million Jewish residents out of a total population of about 9.9 million that includes some 2.1 million Arab Israeli citizens. The United States, with about 6.3 million by the same count (broader American surveys reach 7.5 million). Then France (about 440,000), Canada (about 400,000), and the United Kingdom (about 290,000). The history traced across this platform reaches into the present day.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel → Chapter: American Jewry →The Makor Project petitions submitted
The two civic petitions, The Holocaust Needs a Beginning and The Holocaust Needs a Continuation, are sent to education officials at the local, New York State, and federal levels. In a written reply, the New York State Education Department affirms that "school districts also have the flexibility to incorporate instruction on pre-Holocaust historical context."
The Petitions →The legal record continues
The trials, treaties, statutes, and agreements that answered this history, from the Nuremberg verdicts to the cases concluding now, are gathered on one page. Each entry is explained and linked to the document itself.
The Legal Record →Comments?
Write to editor@makorproject.org.
Last updated: September 2026.