Timeline of Jewish History.
Excavation at the City of David (Givati Parking Lot), Jerusalem. Photo: Daniel Ventura · 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
After Solomon’s death, 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, the capital of the northern Kingdom. The siege began under Shalmaneser V, and his successor Sargon II claimed the victory. Assyria deports part of the population and settles others in their place. The deportees became the “ten lost tribes” of later tradition.
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 in Alexandria, which comes to hold one of the largest Jewish communities in the ancient world.
Chapter: Diaspora →The earliest surviving anti-Jewish writing, 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.
The Alexandria pogrom
Under a hostile Roman governor, Flaccus, mobs in Alexandria turn a dispute over Jewish civic status into an attack on the city’s Jews. They desecrate synagogues, loot homes and shops, and drive Jews into a single quarter. Whole families are burned alive, and community elders are flogged in the public theater. The philosopher Philo, an eyewitness, writes one of the earliest surviving firsthand accounts 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
Possibly written at Alexandria, it is the earliest surviving Christian treatise built wholly on the argument against Judaism. It argues that Israel lost the covenant at Sinai and that the church had taken its place, 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 Kokhba Revolt
Led by Simon bar Kokhba, this is the last great Jewish revolt against Rome. 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, aimed at Christians who joined in Jewish practice (“Judaizers”) and at the Jews themselves. Historians count them among the harshest of the early Christian anti-Jewish sermons, and they 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 in the academies of the Galilee and Caesarea, most of it around 400 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. For roughly the next thousand years, the Church’s official position operated within this framework.
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 such as Rashi and Maimonides. The Cairo Geniza, a synagogue storeroom, preserved a thousand years of everyday papers from Mediterranean Jewish life. Over the same centuries, Christian anti-Jewish teaching slowly hardened 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 responsa (Latin for “answers”), 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 most of the Iberian Peninsula (today’s Spain and Portugal) under Muslim rule, setting the stage for the golden age of Jewish life in Muslim Spain.
Chapter: The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World →Al-Mutawakkil orders Jews and Christians to dress apart
The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil orders Jews and Christians across his empire to wear honey-colored clothing that marks them out. Rules requiring non-Muslims to dress differently had first appeared in the eighth century. More than three centuries later, in 1215, the Catholic Church’s Fourth Lateran Council rules that Jews and Muslims in Christian lands must be distinguished from Christians by their dress.
Chapter: The Dhimma →Rabbeinu Gershom and the Mainz academy
Rabbi Gershom ben Judah leads the academy at Mainz, the forerunner of the schools where Rashi would study. Later Ashkenazi tradition credits him with takkanot (communal ordinances) that shaped Ashkenazi Jewish life for centuries: a ban on polygamy, a rule that both partners must consent to a divorce, and a ban on reading other people’s mail.
Chapter: Rashi →Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi) of Troyes
Rashi is the most-read commentator in Jewish tradition. 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, a Muslim kingdom in Spain, kills Joseph ibn Naghrela, the Jewish vizier (chief minister) of the city, and destroys the Jewish community in a single day. Medieval accounts put the dead in the thousands. Jewish Granada was rebuilt within a generation.
Chapter: The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World → Chapter: The Departure from MENA → Chapter: The Dhimma →The First Crusade Rhineland massacres
Crusading bands all but destroy the Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. Estimates of the dead vary widely, and even the lowest run into the thousands. Rashi lived through these years at Troyes. His rulings received Jews who had been forced into baptism back into the community without reproach. 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 (Old Cairo), Egypt, 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 (c. 1178), and the Guide of the Perplexed (c. 1190). Christian thinkers studied him closely: Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas (who cited him repeatedly as “Rabbi Moyses”), and Meister Eckhart.
Chapter: Maimonides →The Norwich ritual-murder charge
A twelve-year-old apprentice named William is found dead in a wood outside Norwich, England, around Easter. Local Christians accuse the town’s Jews of killing him in mockery of the Crucifixion. It is the first known case in medieval Europe of the blood libel, the false charge that Jews murder Christians for religious rituals.
Chapter: The Blood Libel →The Almohad persecutions
The Almohad conquest of Morocco and Muslim Spain brings a new policy: Jews must convert to Islam, flee, or die, and synagogues close across the Maghreb (northwest Africa). Maimonides’ family leaves Córdoba and spends years on the move, living for a time in Fez, in Morocco, in the early 1160s. In his Letter on Apostasy, Maimonides holds that Jews forced into outward conversion keep their Jewish identity.
Chapter: The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World → Chapter: The Jews of North Africa → Chapter: The Dhimma →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. The canons also restrict Jewish moneylending and bar Jews from public office over Christians. They became part of 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. In June 1242 an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 handwritten volumes, twenty-four cartloads by contemporary count, are burned in Paris. It is the first Christian condemnation and burning of the Talmud, and later burnings followed its example.
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
England becomes the first European kingdom to expel its entire Jewish population by royal decree. The Edict of Expulsion of July 18, 1290 orders a community of perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 people out of the country by November 1. No openly practicing Jewish community lives legally in England again until the 1650s.
Chapter: The Expulsions →Philip IV expels the Jews from France
In July 1306, King Philip IV has the Jews of France arrested on a single day, seizes their property and the debts owed to them, and expels the community. Estimates of its size run from 50,000 to 100,000 people. Partial readmissions follow, until the final French expulsion of 1394.
Chapter: The Expulsions →The Black Death and the pogroms
As the plague sweeps Europe, Jews in town after town are falsely accused of poisoning the wells. Massacres follow at Strasbourg, Basel, Mainz, Erfurt, and Cologne. In all, the killings and expulsions reach about 300 Jewish communities. In 1348 Pope Clement VI condemns the charge, noting that Jews were dying of the plague alongside Christians, but the local massacres continue.
Chapter: The Blood Libel →The massacres of 1391 in Spain
Anti-Jewish riots break out in Seville on June 4, 1391, and sweep the towns of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. Thousands are killed, thousands flee, and thousands are baptized by force. These converts and their descendants, the conversos or “New Christians,” stand at the center of the century that leads to the expulsion of 1492.
Chapter: The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World → Chapter: The Expulsions →The first mellah, at Fez
The Jews of Fez, in Morocco, are confined to a walled quarter beside the royal palace. The quarter is called the mellah, and the word becomes the name for Jewish quarters across Morocco. Communities live inside them for five centuries. When the exiles from Spain reach Fez after 1492, they find its Jews already living behind the wall.
Chapter: The Dhimma → Chapter: The Jews of North Africa →The first dated Hebrew printed book
Avraham ben Garton prints Rashi’s commentary on the Five Books of Moses at Reggio di Calabria, Italy. It is the first Hebrew book set in movable type to carry a date.
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, Jews of Spanish origin, reshaped Jewish life across the Mediterranean and beyond. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire welcomed them.
Chapter: The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World → Chapter: Joseph Karo → Chapter: The Expulsions →Portuguese forced conversion edict
King Manuel I turns his 1496 expulsion decree into forced conversion. Jewish children are seized for baptism, the ports are closed, and the adult community is driven into mass baptism. The refuge Portugal had briefly given to Jews expelled from Spain is gone. This created a large population of Portuguese Conversos, or New Christians, whose later history runs through the early-modern period.
Chapter: The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World → Chapter: The Expulsions →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. The Talmud text sits in the center, Rashi’s commentary in the inner margin, and the Tosafot (later medieval commentaries) in the outer margin.
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 his Shulchan Aruch 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 Luther’s antisemitic writings.
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”). Printings with it begin at Kraków in 1570, and the complete combined work appears there in 1578–1580.
Chapter: Joseph Karo →Twenty-three Jewish refugees arrive at New Amsterdam
In September 1654, 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. Their arrival 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. The Robles case of 1656, however, establishes a right of residence in practice, and Jews begin living openly in England again, more than 350 years after the 1290 expulsion. This is the foundation of the modern Anglo-Jewish community.
Chapter: The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World → Chapter: The Expulsions →New Amsterdam admits Jews as burghers
Refused the burgher right, the citizenship of the town, Asser Levy appeals to the governor and council, citing his service in the town watch. On April 21, 1657, the council orders that Jews be admitted as burghers. In 1655 the town’s court had refused Levy and Jacob Barsimson the right to stand guard.
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.
Chapter: The Jews of Poland and Lithuania →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
Hasidism (from the Hebrew hasid, “pious”), a movement of religious revival, was founded by the Baal Shem Tov (c. 1700–1760) and built up under Dov Ber of Mezeritch (d. 1772). It 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 →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 he destroys the synagogues, orders the Jewish quarter plundered, and expels its people. Moroccan Jewish chronicles remember his reign as the worst since the Almohads.
Chapter: The Jews of North Africa → Chapter: The Departure from MENA →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 is one of the earliest presidential statements of American religious liberty. It promises that the government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Chapter: American Jewry →French Revolution grants Jews full citizenship
The French National Assembly grants full citizenship to all French Jews. France becomes the first European state to grant equal citizenship to all its Jews. Over the next two decades, Napoleon’s conquests spread the same idea across much of the continent.
Ghetto gates fall in Napoleonic Italy
As French revolutionary armies under Napoleon advance through Italy, ghetto gates come down. French forces take Venice in May 1797, and its ghetto gates are torn down on July 11, 1797. The Roman Ghetto lasts until papal Rome falls to the army of unified Italy in 1870.
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.
Chapter: Moses Mendelssohn →The Allahdad at Mashhad
A mob attacks the Jewish quarter of Mashhad, Iran, kills some 35 Jews, and offers the rest 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 some of the accused die under interrogation, before an Ottoman decree repudiates the charge as a calumny, a false and malicious accusation. In the same months, the same charge is made against the Jews of 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, the eastern half of today’s Budapest. He grows up in a well-off, German-speaking Jewish family of the Habsburg Empire, religiously Jewish but not strict.
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 on May 20, 1873, to Jacob Davis, a Jewish tailor in Reno, and held jointly with Levi Strauss & Company. Davis could not afford the filing fee, and Levi Strauss, the Bavarian-born San Francisco merchant who supplied his cloth, paid it. Their riveted “waist overalls” in blue denim began the blue jean.
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 joins the new League of Antisemites, and his pamphlets carry the word “antisemitism” (Antisemitismus) into politics as the name of the movement.
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: The Russian Pogroms → Chapter: American Jewry →The First Aliyah
In the First Aliyah (from the Hebrew for “ascent,” a wave of Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel), about 25,000 Jewish immigrants arrive, mostly from the Russian Empire, with smaller numbers from Yemen. They found early farming villages (moshavot) such as Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya’akov, and Rosh Pinah.
Chapter: Modern State of Israel →Emma Lazarus writes “The New Colossus”
The American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, who had taught English to refugees of the 1881 pogroms in New York, writes a sonnet for the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor.” In 1903 it is mounted on a bronze plaque inside the statue’s pedestal.
Chapter: Emma Lazarus →Samuel Gompers helps found 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 writes: “At Basel I founded the Jewish State.” He adds: “Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.”
Chapter: Theodor Herzl →The Bund is founded in Vilna
Five weeks after the Basel congress, delegates meeting in secret in Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania) found the General Jewish Workers’ Union, known as the Bund. A Jewish socialist party, it organizes Jewish workers across the Russian Empire, champions Yiddish, and opposes Zionism. In interwar Poland it backs schools taught in Yiddish while the Zionist parties run schools taught in Hebrew.
Chapter: The Jews of Poland and Lithuania →The Kishinev pogrom
At Easter, rioters attack the Jews of Kishinev in the Russian Empire (today Chișinău, Moldova). Over two days they kill 49 Jews and injure 586. They loot and destroy some 700 Jewish homes and loot some 600 shops and businesses. Newspapers around the world report it.
Chapter: The Russian Pogroms →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 serialized in Pavel Krushevan’s Znamya newspaper. It claims to reveal a secret Jewish plan to rule the world. Exposed as a forgery in 1921, it still circulates worldwide.
Chapter: The Protocols →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 lynching of Leo Frank
In 1913 Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of an Atlanta pencil factory, was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old employee. Georgia’s governor, John Slaton, concluded that Frank was innocent and commuted his death sentence to life in prison. On the night of August 16, 1915, a group of prominent men from Marietta took Frank from a prison farm and hanged him from an oak tree. In 1986 Georgia pardoned him, citing the state’s failure to protect him.
Chapter: American Jewry →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. It largely closes the route that had brought more than two million Jewish immigrants to the United States since about 1880.
Chapter: American Jewry →Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany
Hitler is named Chancellor by legal means, and the Nazi seizure of power begins. About 525,000 Jews live in Germany at the time.
Chapter: The Years Before the Killing → 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: The Years Before the Killing →Dachau concentration camp opens
Dachau, the first regular Nazi concentration camp, opens near Munich, run by the SS. At first it holds political prisoners, Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. Jews are among them from the first weeks, and the camp’s first four murdered prisoners, in April 1933, are Jews. It became the model for the wider Nazi camp system.
Chapter: The Years Before the Killing →The Enabling Act
The Reichstag passes the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich (the Enabling Act) by a vote of 444–94. 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: The Years Before the Killing →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: The Years Before the Killing →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: The Years Before the Killing →The book burnings
Pro-Nazi students of the German Student Union stage book burnings in more than 20 university towns, with the Nazi government’s support. 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,” is widely quoted in response.
Chapter: The Years Before the Killing →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 → Chapter: The Departure from MENA →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. Racial antisemitism, organized as a political movement from 1879, had become law.
Chapter: The Years Before the Killing →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). Nazi propaganda later exploited the world’s refusal here.
Chapter: The Years Before the Killing →The Polenaktion
The Nazis expel about 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship 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: The Years Before the Killing →Kristallnacht
A Nazi-organized pogrom sweeps Germany and annexed Austria. More than 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms are burned, destroyed, or damaged, and around 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses are wrecked. At least 91 Jews are killed outright, by the Nazi Party’s own count, and hundreds more die in the aftermath. Some 26,000 to 30,000 Jewish men are arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps (Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen). On November 12, 1938, the German Jewish community is forced to pay a fine of 1 billion Reichsmarks. It marked a turning point in Nazi policy toward Jews.
Chapter: The Years Before the Killing →The voyage of the St. Louis
The German ocean liner St. Louis leaves Hamburg on May 13, 1939 carrying 937 passengers, most of them 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: The Years Before the Killing →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 →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 about 400,000 Jews. In Algeria, the Crémieux Decree of 1870 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. In Algeria, the Crémieux Decree is not restored until October 1943.
Chapter: The Holocaust in MENA →The Warsaw Ghetto sealed
The Nazis seal the Warsaw Ghetto in mid-November 1940, confining more than 400,000 Jews in about 1.3 square miles. The ghetto lasted until the deportations of 1942 and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943.
Chapter: The Nazi Ghettos → Chapter: The Ghetto System →The Farhud at Baghdad
On the Jewish festival of Shavuot, a pogrom strikes the Jewish community of Baghdad. It was Nazi-influenced but carried out by Iraqis: soldiers from disbanded units of the pro-Axis Rashid Ali army, members of the pro-Nazi Futuwwa youth movement, and crowds that joined in. Between 150 and 180 Iraqi Jews are killed, between 600 and 800 are injured, by different counts, and some 1,500 Jewish stores and homes are looted. Its name, the Farhud, is an Iraqi-Arabic word for violent dispossession.
Chapter: The Holocaust in MENA →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. Some 1.5 to 2 million Jews were murdered in these shooting operations by the end of the German occupation.
Chapter: The Einsatzgruppen → Unit 4: The Holocaust Era →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 at least 70,273 disabled Germans between January 1940 and August 1941, by the program’s own count (the “Hartheim Statistics”). Killing went on in psychiatric hospitals through 1945. In this “wild euthanasia,” staff killed patients by starvation, overdose, and lethal injection, taking 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 massacre at Babyn Yar
At Babyn Yar, a ravine on the edge of Kyiv in German-occupied Ukraine, SS and police units shoot at least 33,771 Jews from the city over two days, according to the killers’ own report to Berlin.
Chapter: The Einsatzgruppen →The Wannsee Conference
At this meeting in Berlin, convened by the SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, senior Nazi officials coordinate how to carry out the “Final Solution,” the murder of Europe’s Jews, across the German government. Minutes drafted by Adolf Eichmann survive.
Chapter: The Einsatzgruppen → Chapter: The Camp System →The Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup in Paris
French police arrest about 13,000 Jews in Paris. The families among them, more than 8,000 people including more than 4,000 children, are held for days at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor cycling stadium, before deportation. The operation runs under René Bousquet, secretary general of the Vichy police. In all, about 76,000 Jews are deported from France, 11,000 of them children, most to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the great majority by way of the Drancy transit camp outside Paris.
Chapter: The Camp System →The Giado camp, Libya
In Italian-ruled Libya, about 2,600 Jews from the Cyrenaica region are deported, most of them to a forced-labor camp at Giado, south of Tripoli. Overcrowding, hunger, and a typhus epidemic kill about 562 of them by Robert Satloff’s count, about 500 by Yad Vashem’s, before British forces reach the camp in early 1943.
Chapter: The Holocaust in MENA →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 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 Nazi Ghettos → Chapter: Jewish Resistance & Rescue →The deportation of Hungary’s Jews
After Germany occupies its ally Hungary in March 1944, about 437,000 Jews are deported from Hungary on 147 trains, nearly all to Auschwitz-Birkenau. An estimated 330,000 are murdered on arrival, the most concentrated killing operation in the camp’s history.
Chapter: The Camp System →Soviet forces liberate Majdanek
The Soviet Red Army enters Majdanek, on the outskirts of Lublin in German-occupied Poland, the first major Nazi camp to be liberated. The guards had tried to destroy the evidence of the killings but retreated before they finished, and the camp is found largely intact. A Polish-Soviet commission documents it. In August 1944 the Soviet war correspondent Konstantin Simonov publishes the first major account of a Nazi killing center.
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
A subcamp of Buchenwald, Ohrdruf is the first camp with surviving prisoners that U.S. forces liberate. Natzweiler-Struthof had been found abandoned in late 1944. 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. On April 15, the day British troops reached Belsen, General Eisenhower wrote to General Marshall about his visit to Ohrdruf. He had gone, he wrote, to be able to give first-hand evidence “if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.” He ordered the camps documented. The U.S. Army Signal Corps produced thousands of still photographs and some 80,000 feet of film.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →U.S. forces liberate Dachau
About 32,000 surviving prisoners are freed at Dachau, the first regular Nazi concentration camp. 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. Jewish communities across Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and much of the rest of Europe were destroyed or devastated.
The Harrison Report
Earl G. Harrison’s report on the condition of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs, survivors and refugees with nowhere to go) in the American zone reaches President Truman. Its most-quoted line: “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.” Truman sent it to General Eisenhower, who ordered separate Jewish DP centers and better conditions. On December 22, 1945, the Truman Directive gave displaced persons preference within existing U.S. immigration quotas.
Chapter: Liberation and the Displaced Persons →The Tripoli pogrom
Rioters attack the Jews of Tripoli and the surrounding towns. By different counts, between 121 and 187 Libyan Jews are killed. Five synagogues are burned in Tripoli, nine in all by one count. It is the deadliest anti-Jewish event in modern Libyan history. Two days earlier, on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, rioters in Cairo had burned the city’s Ashkenazi synagogue. 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 full trial transcript fills 42 published volumes and became a foundational source for later study of the Holocaust.
Chapter: The Postwar Trials →The Kielce pogrom
A false blood-libel rumor sets off a pogrom in Kielce, Poland. Polish soldiers, police, and townspeople kill 42 Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors, and injure about forty. 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 Exodus 1947, a ship of the Aliyah Bet (clandestine immigration to Palestine), leaves Sète, France, on July 11, 1947, carrying roughly 4,500 Jewish DPs. The British Royal Navy seizes it on July 18. The passengers are shipped back to Europe and, on September 8, forced ashore at Hamburg, in Germany. The return played out under intense international press coverage. Later research treats the affair as one of the turning points in the international debate over Palestine.
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.
The uprooting of the Jews of Arab lands
About 850,000 Jews leave or are forced out of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa: Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Aden, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Across the region, governments strip Jews of citizenship, seize their property, make mass arrests, and order expulsions, and mobs attack Jewish neighborhoods. Communities more than two thousand years old are almost entirely gone. Most of Iran’s Jews, outside this count, leave after the 1979 revolution.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →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 Aleppo (December 1, 1947) and Aden (December 2–4, 1947) in the wake of the UN partition vote. In Aden at least 82 Jews are killed. In Aleppo rioters damage or destroy about 150 Jewish buildings and at least ten synagogues and set fire to the Great Synagogue, which held the Aleppo Codex. When the Codex resurfaces years later, pages are missing.
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, and the Soviet Union three days later. The fighting that began after the partition vote widens into war as the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq enter the former Mandate territory. The war ends with the 1949 Armistice Agreements. Historians’ estimates of the Palestinian Arabs who flee or are expelled from their homes during the war run from under 600,000 to more than 750,000. Palestinians call it al-Nakba (“the Catastrophe”).
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. More than forty Jews are killed, 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. “It is with very great reluctance that I have signed S. 2242,” he states, because the bill “discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith.” Amendments in 1950 removed those provisions. About 80,000 Jewish DPs entered the United States under the act, and about 137,000 by all routes between 1945 and 1952. In the same years, far more survivors went 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 →Operation Magic Carpet
From June 1949 to September 1950, American and British charter aircraft fly about 49,000 Yemenite Jews from Aden to Israel. The Yemenite community is documented in Yemen continuously from late antiquity.
Chapter: The Departure from MENA →Operation Ezra and Nehemiah
The Israeli-organized airlift carries to Israel most of the roughly 120,000 to 130,000 Iraqi Jews who leave in these years. 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, Israel’s parliament, passes a resolution establishing Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), marked on 27 Nisan in the Hebrew calendar (April or May). The date recalls the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The day was anchored in law in 1959.
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 Jewish survivors and communities outside Israel in postwar negotiations with the West German government. As a result of its negotiations, the German government has paid more than $90 billion to individual victims since 1952. The Conference reports direct compensation payments to more than 115,000 survivors in 84 countries and territories.
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 barred from the Knesset plenum for three months.
Chapter: Postwar Restitution →The Luxembourg Agreement
The agreement is 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: “In the name of the German people, unspeakable crimes have been committed which call for moral and material compensation.”
Chapter: Postwar Restitution →The Doctors’ Plot
Pravda and Radio Moscow announce the arrest of nine prominent Soviet doctors, six of them Jews, accused of plotting to murder Soviet leaders. On April 3, 1953, a month after Stalin’s death, Pravda announces that the doctors were not guilty and have been freed.
Chapter: Soviet Jewry →The Yad Vashem Law
The Knesset passes the Yad Vashem Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Law, establishing Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Its mandate covers documentation, commemoration, research, education, and the Righteous Among the Nations, non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. As of 2025, about 28,000 Righteous 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 more than 100 witnesses, most of them survivors. Eichmann is hanged at Ramla Prison on the night of May 31 to June 1, 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 the Jewish people were collectively guilty of the death of Jesus, and the teaching that God had rejected or cursed them. 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 1979 peace treaty), and East Jerusalem. The questions raised by the 1967 war have shaped the region’s history for nearly six decades since.
Chapter: The Modern State of Israel →Soviet Jewish emigration
About 1.6 million Jews and their family members leave the Soviet Union and the states that replace it, most of them after the door opens in 1989. Before then, many who ask to leave are refused and punished, the “refuseniks.” About one million go to Israel, 325,000 to 400,000 to the United States, and 150,000 to 220,000 to Germany.
Chapter: Soviet Jewry → Chapter: American Jewry →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
Terrorists of Black September, a group with secret links to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO, 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 at first disapproves, and in 1978 he greets Ethiopian immigrants as “true Jews.” This opened the way for Israel’s later airlifts of the community.
Chapter: Ethiopian 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 Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia, from Sudanese refugee camps to Israel, between about 6,500 and 8,000 of them by different counts. The operation is exposed on January 5, 1985, after public comments by Israeli officials, and Sudan halts it, leaving about 1,000 Beta Israel stranded. Operation Joshua, run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in March 1985, flies out roughly 500 to 800 more.
Chapter: Ethiopian Jewry →France makes Holocaust denial a crime
France’s Gayssot Act makes denying the crimes judged at Nuremberg a criminal offense. Germany (1985) and Israel (1986) had already acted against denial. Austria amends its Prohibition Act to the same effect in 1992, and Germany strengthens its incitement law in 1994. Free-speech scholars still debate these laws.
Chapter: Holocaust Denial → The Legal Record →Operation Solomon
Israel evacuates 14,325 Beta Israel from Addis Ababa to Israel in about 36 hours. Thirty-four 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 rebel forces enter Addis Ababa on May 28, 1991. The departing military government had agreed to let the Beta Israel leave in exchange for about $35 million, paid by the Israeli government and American Jewish organizations.
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 50 million people have visited since it opened.
Chapter: The Memory Architecture →The Vatican-Israel Fundamental Agreement
The Holy See and the State of Israel sign the Fundamental Agreement, which opened the way to full diplomatic relations, completed in June 1994.
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
Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty, the second 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 made 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)
Germany sets up a federal foundation 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
In the Second Intifada (intifada is Arabic for “shaking off”), Palestinian attackers carry out roughly 140 suicide bombings on buses, restaurants, and celebrations. Between September 2000 and the end of 2005, in bombings, shootings, and other attacks, they kill 996 Israelis, 683 of them civilians, by the count of B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organization. Among the dead: 21 people, most of them teenagers, at the Dolphinarium discotheque (2001), 16 people at the Sbarro pizzeria (2001), and 30 at a Passover seder in Netanya (2002).
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, with an exhibition designed 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. Iranian state media had spread denial since the 1990s. Now it was the declared position of a head of state.
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, endorsed, or referenced by more than forty national governments and by many hundreds of other bodies. In March 2021 a group of about 200 scholars published the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism as an alternative, drawing the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism differently.
Chapter: Contemporary Antisemitism →Unite the Right, Charlottesville
White nationalist groups hold a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. On the night of August 11, hundreds of marchers carry lit torches across the University of Virginia, chanting, in the account of the judge who later presided over the civil trial, “Jews will not replace us.” The next day a rally participant drives his car into a crowd of counterprotesters and kills Heather Heyer. In November 2021 a federal jury in Sines v. Kessler finds the organizers and groups liable for a civil conspiracy.
Chapter: Contemporary Antisemitism → The Legal Record →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 followed in December 2020. Sudan agreed in principle, but full relations were never completed.
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.
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 and sentence
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 on June 16, 2023. On August 3, 2023, he is sentenced to death.
The Legal Record →The October 7 attack
On the holiday of Simchat Torah, thousands of attackers led by Hamas broke through the Gaza border fence into southern Israel and attacked more than twenty communities, army posts, and an outdoor music festival. About 1,200 people were murdered, most of them civilians, and 251 were taken hostage into Gaza. It was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas’s founding charter of 1988, which quotes a religious text calling for the killing of Jews, has never been annulled. Seventeen days after the attack, a member of its political bureau said on television that it would be repeated “again and again.” In the months that followed, antisemitic incidents rose sharply in the United States and Europe.
Chapter: The Terror Record → Chapter: The Eastward Turn → Chapter: Contemporary Antisemitism →The contemporary moment
Today the world’s Jewish population is about 15.8 million, spread across roughly 100 countries, still below its prewar peak of about 16.5 million in 1939. The largest communities: Israel, with about 7.3 million Jewish residents out of a total population of about 10.2 million, some 2.2 million of them Arab. 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 313,000).
Chapter: Modern State of Israel → Chapter: American Jewry →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?
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Last updated: November 2026.