Jewish History Timeline

There and Back Again: A “Condensed” History of the Jewish People From Tanach Times to Before Zionist Migration

Compiled by Arlington Informed

1. 2000 BCE – 1200 BCE — Early Jewish History According to the Torah. The earliest chapters of Jewish history, for many traditional Jews, begins with the narrative recounted in Judaism’s most sacred book; the Torah which also forms the first five books of the Tanach (Hebrew Bible). Genesis recounts the migration of Abraham of Ur from Mesopotamia to the area of modern day Israel, his covenant with the formless Jewish deity, and the eventual migration of his descendents into Egypt where they are eventually enslaved to start the Exodus Narrative. 

Today, there is no widely accepted archeological evidence directly corroborating the events of the Genesis or Exodus narratives. However, these narratives that would become the core of the ideology and culture of the first archaeologically documented Jews in the coming centuries (Schama 2014). 

Jewish religious tradition holds that the Torah narrative was delivered by G-d  to Moses and the Jewish people at mount Sinai.  Many historians hold that these narratives came together from multiple authors which were eventually compiled by a redactor likely in the 8th century BCE (McDermott 2002). Academic historians contend that the singular formless deity of Judaism likely arose from the beliefs of several different Canaanite societies that worshipped various deities such as Baal, Ashera, YHWH, and El, some of these names are used to refer to the Hebrew deity in the Tanach narrative (Bellows 2017)

2. 1200 BCE – 990 BCE — First mention of Israel in the Archeological Record. The earliest, external to the Tanach evidence of Israeli settlement indicated by the Merneptah stele commissioned by the pharaoh Merneptah in Egypt indicates the existence of the Jews living within Caanaan and identifying as the people of Israel (Shanks 1992): 

“Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe; Ashkelon has been overcome; Gezer has been captured. Yanoam was made nonexistent; Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” 

The Merneptah stele is dated at roughly the same time period as the Exodus narrative. It may also be the first documented instance of someone trying to destroy the Jewish people.

According to the Tanach narrative, the Israelites conquered Canaan after escaping slavery in Egypt though most academic historians do not believe that the genocidal conquest described in the book of Joshua (or the Exodus narrative before it) actually occurred, and Jewish settlement more likely occurred through gradual infiltration or from evolution of the pre-existing culture within Canaan itself (Shanks 1992). According to the Tanach, King David captures Jerusalem and forms a united kingdom. Five generations later, a civil war splits this united kingdom into the northern kingdom of Israel and a southern kingdom of Judah. The nature of David’s kingdom and the historicity of the biblical narrative that describes it is still hotly debated by academic historians and archeologists. The Meshe stele from the 9th century BCE serves as widely accepted archeological evidence for the existence of a king David. However, it is unclear from the archeological record what the nature or extent of his kingdom was (i.e., whether it was a centralized “United Kingdom” based in Jerusalem described in the Tanach) (Freeman 2025). According to the Tanach, in 960 BCE king Solomon built the first temple. The general arch of Jewish history described in the Tanach tends to corroborate with significant archeological evidence after the formation of Israel and Judah (Kitchen 2006; Schama 2014; Johnson 1988; Freeman 2025). There is significant archeological evidence that Jerusalem was the capital of the kingdom of Judah (as narrated in the Tanach) with significant western expansion and demographic growth observed in the 9th century BCE. Archeological evidence suggests that Israel dominated Judah politically and economically until its conquest by the Assyrians (described below) (Freeman 2025).

3. 732 BCE - Assyrian Captivity: The neo assyrian empire conquers the northern kingdom of Israel. Sargon II deports tens of thousands to the region that is modern Iraq today. This deportation is corroborated by Assyrian cuneiform records of Sargon-II which read (Luckenbill 1989).

According to the Tanach narrative, ten tribes are deported forming the “test lost tribes” of Israel. They were never permitted to return and so their fate is not entirely known. Many centuries later, during the Talmudic era, Rabbis would continue to debate the role of the ten tribes in Jewish theology (“Mishneh Sanhedrin 10.2”; Mishneh Sanhedrin 110b). Archeological evidence suggests that Galilee and Transjordan were depopulated (Tobolowsky 2022). In Samaria, archeologists believe that most Israelites fled to the southern kingdom or intermarried with populations transplanted by the Assyrians from Elam, Syria, and Babylonia, to form the Samaritans (Grabbe 2007; Cline 2008). While it was not directly conquered, Judah became a client state of the Assyrian empire. 

4. 550 BCE - Babylonian Exile: The babylonian empire swallows the assyrian empire and conquers Judah. Nebuchadnezzar II captures Jerusalem, destroys the first temple, and sends approximately 15,000-20,000 religious and political elites into exile.
   Archeological evidence suggests that the entire city of Jerusalem was burnt to rubble (Finkelstein 2001) and other Archeologists suggest that the exile combined with famines and epidemics may have reduced the Jewish population to as little as 10% of its pre-Babylonian conquest level of roughly 80,000 (Faust and Faust 2012). In Babylon, the exiled Jews would form a significant Jewish presence that would last for over 2000 years until the 1940s/50s when nearly 850,000 Jews were expelled or intimidated into leaving the Arab world in response to the existence of the modern state of Israel (Julius 2018). The kingdom of Judah becomes the Babylonian (and later Persian) province of Yehuda  and the Jews begin to refer to themselves as “yehudim” or “Jews” which remains the word for “Jew” to this day in Arabic.

5. 600 BCE Persian Restoration Fifty years after the exile, Persia conquers Babylon and allows Jews to return to Jerusalem. Many Jews remain in Babylon and grow into a significant diaspora community while others return in what is considered by many historians to be a gradual process (Grabbe 2006). The former kingdom of Judah became the Persion province of Judah. Throughout the 4th and 5th centuries the population of Judah remained significantly below the pre-Babylonian level at 30000.

6. 5th/4th Century BCE – Early Jewish Liturgy and the first Synagogues: During the time of the Babylonian exile, the “synagogue” as a center of communal worship developed as a replacement for the destroyed temple with the earliest archeological finds dating to the third century BCE in present day Syria and Egypt (Schama 2014). The oldest archaeological synagogue in Israel is located in the Galilee from the 1st century BCE (“Early Synagogues in the Galilee” 2000). The earliest versions of the “shimonah Israel” or “amidah” which is the central prayer in Jewish liturgy, recited three times a day by observant jews in the present, is also composed in the 4th or 5th century BCE in Israel (Antian, 2017). The optimistic notion of a messiah also arose during the babylonian captivity and the lingua franca of the Jewish people shifted from ancient Hebrew to aramaic.

7. 332 BCE-63 BCE – Greek Occupation: Judah is conquered by Alexander the Great and becomes part of the Greek empire which splits into the ptolemaic, seleucid (containing israel), and the pergamon. Over this time period, jews established communities across the middle east including in Alexandria where they invented the term “diaspora” to refer to Jews living outside of the land of Israel (Schiffman, n.d.). Fissures arise within the Jewish community over the adaption of hellenistic culture and eventually give rise to two major competing factions; the “Sadacees”, who occupy the priesthood and encourage the adoption of hellenism and the “Pharisees” who would eventually give rise to the rabinnic tradition (Telushkin 1991). In the 3rd century BCE the Torah was translated into ancient Greek. In response to hellenistic bans of jewish religious practices, the Jews successfully revolt against Antiochus IV in one of the first successful rebellions in the name of religious liberties in recorded history and celebrated during the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Descending from the Maccabean leaders of this revolt, the Hasmonean dynasty ruled Judea after the Maccabean revolt and gradually recovers autonomy from the declining seleucids (Josephus, 73; Telushkin 1991). 

8. 63 BCE - 70 CE  – Roman Occupation, the First Jewish War, and the First Yeshiva: Pompey conquered Judah and Jerusalem for Rome and made it the “province of Judea". Major renovations on the temple mount instituted by the controversial king Herod yield the above-ground sections of the present day “wailing wall” or “kotel” which is the holiest site in Judaism, the only remaining exposed section of the temple mount complex and the closest area to the temple mount that Jews are generally permitted to pray due to both out of religious sensitivity to muslims and because there is a halachic restriction against Jews walking on the temple mount in mainstream Judaism (“What to Know About Jerusalem's Temple Mount and the Status Quo Agreement” 2023). Under Roman rule, deep fissures developed within the  Jewish community over the adoption of Hellenistic culture and how to respond to Roman/Greek religious persecution and desecration of Jewish holy places. These tensions eventually precipitate in the “first jewish-roman war” which is famously chronicled by Roman-Jewish historian Josephus (Josephus 73). While initially expelling the Romans from Jerusalem and several other areas, internal tensions lead to civil war and the rebellion is suppressed by a brutal Roman counter insurgency campaign that precipitates in the massacre and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians and the destruction of the second temple. Johanan Ben Zakkai establishes the first Yeshiva in Yavene ("Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 4”, n.d.) which begins the tradition of judaic scholarship in the diaspora which is intensely practiced to this day. 

9. 130 CE - Bar Kokhba’s Revolt and Expulsion from Judah: Responding to Emperor Hadrian's decision to establish a Roman city on the ruins of Jerusalem and possibly a ban on circumcision, the Jews revolt against Rome under the leadership of Simeon Bar Kokhba. Rome decisively suppresses the revolt. According to the account by Roman historian Cassius Dio, nearly six hundred thousand (likely a significant majority of) the Jewish population are slaughtered or die from disease or famine. Archeological evidence indicates significant depopulation throughout the land of Israel at this time. Rome precipitates the enslavement and mass exportation of hundreds of thousands of survivors. Many of the enslaved end up in Rome and eventually intermarry to become the seeds of the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish population. Jewish observances such as sabbath study, circumcision, and Torah study are banned. Jews are banned from entering Jerusalem except on the 9th of Av to mourn the destruction.
   In an attempt to erase any memory of Judea and ancient Israel, the Romans renamed the area Syria Palestine. The Romans colonize their new depopulated province with immigrants from Syria, Phoenicia, and Arabia.
   A punishment that they never used for any other revolt. For hundreds of subsequent years, Roman and later Byzantine authorities try to reappropriate this land by constructing estate farms and monasteries on the lands of depopulated villages. A significant Jewish population remains in the Galilee region (northwest present day Israel) which the Romans named “Palaestina Secunda. 

10. 200 CE: Formation of Rabbinical Judaism and Transcription of Oral Torah. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi of the Galilee in modern day israel compiles the first transcription of the Mishna: a systematically organized version of the “Midrash” (“Midrash”, n.d.) or the oral torah which provides a critical interpretation and interpolation of the Jewish bible or Tanakh and forms the core of modern rabbinic judaical practice. Mainstream jewish theology holds that the oral Torah was passed to the Jewish people at mount sinai along with the written Torah. Until the second and fourth century Jews remained a majority in the Galilee gradually became a minority by the fifth century CE as many pagans and likely some Jews converted to christianity. The pagan immigrant majority throughout the rest of Eretz Yisrael undergoes widespread conversion to Christianity under the Byzantine empire. The precise demographic history in the region up to the Muslim conquest remains a subject of debate. Diaspora Jews during this time spread throughout the Roman empire where they seed the Ashkenazic, Sefardic, and Mizrahi populations recognized today in western Europe, Spain, and throughout the middle east (respectively). 

11. 400 CE – Compilation of the Talmud: The Talmud, which is the central text of rabbinic Judaism and is the primary source of Jewish religious law, is compiled in the Galilee in modern day Israel. A 1.8 million word compilation of Mishnah (oral toral), commentary, legal opinions, and debates spanning centuries  (versus the 80,000 of the Torah), this text would serve as the centerpiece of Jewish cultural life up to modernity and is the foundation for a vast majority of Jewish thought and aspirations. A second Talmud was later compiled within the Babylonian community by Rav Ashi and Ravina II. Because it includes the opinions of both Israel and babylonian rabbis, the Babylonian Talmud is generally considered more authoritative. A daily regime of Talmud study called Daf Yoni is practiced by hundreds of thousands worldwide. It takes seven years to complete. 

12. 400-500 CE – Increasing Discrimination in the Byzantine Empire. Jews throughout the Byzantine empire became increasingly marginalized by edicts such as the Theodosian code which barred Jews from public positions through the empire and the Justinian code which ordered that all synagogues be converted to Churches and prohibited the reading of the Mishna. Jewish scholars write “piyutim” which are poetic works that refer strongly to the Mishnah to circumvent the prohibition.

13. 637 CE –  Muslim Conquest of Eretz Yisrael: Abu Ubayda of the Rashidun caliphate conquers Jerusalem from the Byzantine empire. Eretz Yisrael, (Roman/Byzantine province of Palestine) falls under Muslim rule. At the time, the population of Palestine was roughly 700,000 of which approximately 100,000 were Jewish. While several Arabian-Jewish tribes clashed with early Islam and were either expelled or massacred (Abdel Haleem 2008) during its expansion through conquest, most Jews within the conquered lands are allowed to retain their way of life outside of Hijaz as “dhimmi” whose second class status is outlined in the pact of Umar. Umar which nominally guaranteed religious liberty in exchange for accepting the authority of Islam and payment of a Jizya tax. Unfortunately, Jews in Muslim lands generally faced a great number of restrictions such as a prohibition on riding horses and constructing new places of worship or repairing old ones (“Pact of Umar”, n.d.). Dhimmi also had to wear distinctive clothing which often served to ridicule them (such as Yemeni jews who were prohibited from wearing the ancient traditional Jewish Sudra — a traditional Jewish headdress similar in form to the Keffiyeh (Klorman 1993). These laws remained in widespread effect within the Islamic world until their disbandment under the Ottomans in the 19th century. 

14.  800 CE – The rise of the Jews of Ashkenaz in Western Europe: Ashkenazi jews emerge as a distinct subgroup of the Jewish diaspora from descendents of intermarriage between European converts and Jews who either immigrated voluntarily before the Roman conquest or were imported to Europe as slaves by the Romans. Yiddish became the primary language of Ashkenazim in the 9th century. Jews increasingly leave the Byzantine empire in response to anti-Jewish restrictions and migrate to the Frankish empire where Charlemagne grants them a similar degree of tolerance that they enjoyed in the late Roman/early Byzantine empires before the Justinian codes and are permitted to practice commerce and money lending. Jews migrate throughout Western Europe, typically at the invitation of kings seeking revenue through taxes on Jewish earnings on money-lending to Christians (which Christians were prohibited from by the Catholic Church). The extensive dispersion of the Jewish community throughout both Muslim and Christian domains gives Jews an edge on overland merchant ventures. A number of historians also contend that the literacy and numeracy rates amongst lay Jews significantly exceeded the general populations due to Judaism's emphasis on intensive Torah study, allowing them to dominate commerce.

15. 1033 CE – Outbreaks of Violent Antisemitism in the Muslim World: A myth propagated by anti-zionists is that muslims and jews got along peacefully before Zionism and the state of Israel. Unfortunately this is not the case as we will see frequently below. While violence targeting Jews was not as prevalent in the Muslim world as in Christendom, there were still periodic outbreaks of mass violence which would occur with regularity up to the present day and well before the advent of Zionism. 

In 1033 Abu’l Kamal Tamim led the massacre of six thousand Jews in Fez Morocco and enslaved the surviving women (Gilbert, Banks, and Bicknell 1976). 

In 1066, a muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada responding to false accusations that the Jewish vizier had poisoned the son of the king. A poem by Abu Ishaq, accusing Jews of overstepping their second-class status stipulated by the pact of Umar was said to be instrumental in provoking the 1066 massacre (Lewis, 1984). The mob killed and crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph Ibn Naghrela and massacred most of the city's Jewish population (Gubbay 2000). Roughly 4000 innocent civilians were killed. 

Intermittent violence and expulsions and much more common petty discrimination was faced by many Jews  in muslim areas throughout the middle ages and early modern period. Pogroms reoccurred in Fez in 1276 and 1465. The latter resulted in nearly eradicating the Jewish community. In 1679, all jews in Yemen were given the choice between converting to Islam or death by the king acting on false rumors that the Jews were helping Ottoman Turks stage uprisings. Local Arab tribes petitioned on the Jews’ behalf and the king agreed to expel them instead in the “Mawza Exile”. Large numbers of exiled Jews died from thirst and exposure (Solomon 2017). Other notable massacres before the 20th century occurred in Tetouan in 1790 and Baghdad in 1828 (Morris 1999)

Generally, the discrimination against Jews in the muslim world was “contemptuous” rather than demonizing (as it was in Christendom) and as a result not as deadly (Lewis, 1984). Nonetheless, the experience of many Jews in the muslim world throughout the centuries was one of legally sanctioned discrimination and inferiority.

16. 1096 CE – Outbreaks of anti-Semitic Massacres in Western Europe During the first Crusade: The first crusade is declared in Germany. While the catholic church does not sanction violence against Jews, widespread pogroms (massacres) are carried out and the Ashkenazi communities in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz are destroyed by “unofficial” christian crusaders who could not necessarily afford the journey to the “holy land” and saw Jews as equal enemies of Christ to Muslims. After the crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 they massacred Jews taking refuge in their synagogues by burning them down while massacring muslims taking refuge inside of Al Aqsa.
    
    

17. 1180 CE – Maimonides: In Egypt, sephardic Torah scholar Moses Maimonides (Rambam), writes “The guide to the perplexed” which sought to harmonize Jewish and Aristotelian philosophy (based on his conception of G-d described below). Mamonides’s “Mishneh Torah” seeks to make Jewish law easier for Jews to understand and becomes the basis for later Jewish law codes. 

Sephardic Jews at the time were facing forced conversion to Islam by the Alohads in the Iberian peninsula and Maimonides advocated for the adoption of crypto-Judaism as a response in which Jews would feign conversion to Islam or Christianity while practicing Judaism in secret (Gerber 1994).

Maimonides conceived of G-d as a perfect eternal deity who is separate from the world and completely unlike human beings and is beyond description by the traditional categories used to describe human beings. In his words (Hurwitz 2019; Seeskin 1991):

“We do not say this heat is similar to that colour, or this voice is similar to that sweetness” 

Maimonides thus claimed that human beings cannot make any statements about what G-d is at all but only attempt to emulate G-d by knowing, loving, and emulating the positive effects that we attribute to G-d in the world (Hurwitz 2019). The goal according to Seeskin is not to understand G-d but to imitate the qualities that flow from Gd. From this conception,” Maimonides urged the pursuit of secular learning in science and philosophy which he believed helped us appreciate Gd’s workings in the world which leads us to more deeply love Gd” (Hurwitz 2019).

18. 1200-1492 CE – Jewish Persecution in Western Europe and Flight to Eastern Europe: The doctrine of transubstantiation leads to widespread false accusations of Jews performing “host desecration” (abuse of the wafers host wafers representing Jesus’s body) alongside baseless accusations of deicide (responsibility for the death of Jesus) and blood libel (fabricated accusations that Jews murder and abuse children as part of their religious practice and imbibe the blood of christian children). Lies have consequences and these libel led to  widespread and routine massacres, arrests, torture, executions, and expulsions of Jews throughout medieval Western Europe.

During the black death in the 14th century, routine massacres and persecution also arose from Jews being blamed for poisoning wells causing the plague. Perhaps ironically, the bodies of some massacred Jews had at times been thrown into wells, effectively poisoning them (such as a well in Norwich England in the 12th century in which the bodies of 11 murdered jewish children (along with six adults) were discovered in 2021). 

These waves of  persecution in Western Europe drove Ashkenazi Jews to migrate into Eastern Europe. Because of their disproportionate involvement in commerce and money-lending, Eastern European kings sought to attract Jewish communities as revenue sources and middle-men between the peasantry and nobility (such as tax collectors) in a similar way that Western European leaders had initially done in the early middle ages. 

19. 1263 CE – Disputation of Barcelona: Nachmanides (Ramban) debates with Dominican friar and converted Jew Pablo Christiani as to whether the Talmud holds Jesus to be the messiah of the Jews. James I awarded Nachmanides 300 gold coins and declared that never before had he heard “an unjust cause so nobly defended”. When the Dominicans claim victory, Nachmanides publishes the manuscript and is forced out of Spain and moves to Jerusalem where he founded the “Ramban synagogue”, the second oldest synagogue that is still active in Jerusalem to this day.
    
    

20. 1492 CE – Expulsion of Spanish Jews: Thomas Torquemada, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, persuades Ferdinand and Isabella to expel all jews from Spain (approximately 160,000). The expulsion caps decades of expulsions, forced conversions, and burnings by the inquisition. The Turkish sultan Bayazid II makes a special point of welcoming expelled Jews. The phenomenon of “crypto-Jews” or Jews that outwardly practice another religion (in this case Christianity but also sometimes Islam [see above]) arises in the sephardic world.
    
    

21. 16th Century CE — Kabbalat Shabbat Liturgy: Kabbalist mystics including Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi establish the Kabbalat Shabbat service in the city of Safed in the land of Israel. A product of Jews in Israel within the last several hundred years Kabbalat Shabbat is a major component of mainstream Jewish religious practice. Like the Amida and other major elements of jewish liturgy which were established earlier, it is a living example of the continuous interplay between the religious and cultural practices of Jews in the diaspora and Jews in their indigenous homeland of Eretz Yisrael that has continued for thousands of years up to the present day. 

22. 1648 CE – Khmelnitsky Pogroms: During the Khmelnytsky peasant rebellion, Ukrainian Cossacks scapegoat Jews for oppression by the Polish nobility and carry out widespread massacres, murdering tens to hundreds of thousands of Jews with the ultimate goal of eradicating Jews from Ukraine. Nathan Ben Moses of Hannover records the events in his “abyss of despair”. Jews now face tremendous violence within the Eastern European lands that they fled Western Europe for in a cycle that would precipitate in the holocaust nearly four hundred years later. The leader of this rebellion and pogroms, Bogdan Khmelnytsky, continues to be widely regarded as a national hero to this day.

23. 1654 CE – First Openly Jewish Community in the Area of the Modern Day United States: The first openly practicing Jewish community in the Americas is founded in New Amsterdam by 23 sephardic jews fleeing Recife Brazil which had just been conquered by the Spanish.
    
    

24. 1740 CE – Baal Shem Tov and The Hasidic Movement: Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, originally a Jewish faith healer who wrote amulets and prescribed cures (known since ancient times as a “Baal Shem” Hebrew for  ‘master of the name’). Israel adopted the name “Baal Shem Tov”; adding “Tov” which means “good” in Hebrew so that he was the “master of the good name”! Israel became sufficiently learned and to marry into the rabbinic elite. Settling in Ukraine, Besht founded a revivalist movement based on Kabbalah and focusing on spiritual joy and mysticism which was accessible to even the simplest Jew. The movement met opposition from the traditional haredi community which focused on rigorous mundane torah study. Over his lifetime, Besht made a number of attempts to reach Israel (at the time split between several Ottoman Vilyets) (“Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov”, n.d.)

Besht’s view of G-d is described by Sarah Hurwitz as “non-dualist” meaning that everything is G-d including all physical objects and events that exist and unfold in the Universe. Referencing the Exodus quote from G-d communicating to Moses through a burning bush “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehye” or “I will be what I will be”, many non-dualists believe that G-d is the “process of being” and that connecting with this deity is not so much about petitioning/addressing a divine being but instead being present in what is (Hurwitz 2019).

25. 1827 CE – Forced conscription and conversion in the Russian Empire 

26. 1791 CE – The Beginning of “Jewish Emancipation”: Jews in France are granted equal citizenship rights under Napoleon in exchange for the dissolution of their semi-autonomous political institutions and the subordination of “Halachic” law to common law. Many countries follow over the next fifty to sixty years in “Jewish emancipation”. While this process freed Jews from political discrimination from the rest of society, it also led to the erosion of the close (though for many also oppressive) Jewish social institutions and raised the notion of assimilation as a threat to Jewish peoplehood for many Jews. The contemporaneous “Haskalah” movement reacted to emancipation by encouraging integration with surrounding societies and the adoption of modern values along with the revival of Hebrew in secular life. Radical assimilationist Jews also emerge who wish to eliminate or minimize the existence of Jews as a defined collective. While emancipation occurred in France in 1791, Jews would still face significant deJuror discrimination throughout Europe into the 20th century and in much of  the Muslim world up to the 21st century and today.

27. Early 19th Century CE – The Beginnings of the Reform and Conservative Movements: After emancipation, many Jews adopted the lifestyles of the gentile European world from which they’d once been isolated and falling away from strict observance though not giving up Judaism itself. A number of rabbis attempted to pioneer a way of being Jewish that adapted to the prevailing social customs of the gentile world into which many emancipated central European Jews were now drifting. At the time, liturgical reforms included vernacular (German) liturgy rather than Hebrew, the introduction of a Sermon, choirs, and organ accompaniment.  Some reformers also sought to create a synagogue service that would appear respectable to the broader non-Jewish community (protestant christianity) which is an aspect of the reform movement that has garnered significant debate. Certain rabbis amongst the reformers such as Zacharias Frankel wanted to accept an evolutionary/adaptive character in Judaism while also better preserving “positive” dimensions of Jewish tradition (such as Hebrew liturgy). This school of thought would eventually evolve into “conservative” or “masorti” Judaism which is widely perceived to fall between reform and Orthodox in terms of halachic observance. Reform would become the first Jewish movement to ordain female (1972) and LGBQT+ Rabbis and continues to undergo a vibrant evolution along with conservatism and more observant Jewish sects to this very day and is the largest branch of Judaism in the United States today (“Reform Judaism: History and Overview”, n.d.).

28. 1840 CE – The Damascus Blood Libel: An Italian monk and his servant disappear in Damascus. The Jewish community is accused by Christians of murdering them both and using their blood to bake Matzah in a modern iteration of the medieval blood libel. Supported by the French consul and the Ottoman governor of Syria, authorities detain and torture several Jewish notables leading to the deaths of several. Authorities seize sixty-three Jewish children as hostages until their mothers reveal the location of the allegedly harvested blood and widespread Christian and Muslim mob violence eventually breaks out against the Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) community. Jews in the United States organize protests and for one of the first times become involved in the politics of US foreign policy on behalf of Jews in another country. The Damascus blood libel is an example of how demonizing European antisemitism was picked up in the Arab world. In this transformation, tropes of inferiority and contempt towards Jews as dhimmi began to transform into tropes of demonization and blood libel which were until this point were much more common in European anti-semitism. The specific 1840 accusations have arisen periodically in Arab media to this day including in the Egyptian daily newspaper “Al Akhbar” in 2000 and 2001 in an article titled “The Last Scene in the Life of Father Toma” (Al-Kurdi 2001). And the Syrian defense minister’s 1983 book “The Matzah of Zion” (Tlass 2017). 

29. 1800s CE – The emergence of Zionism: While Jews have daily prayed for the ingathering of exiles for millenia, modern zionism, the belief in the Jewish right of political self determination in their ancestral homeland as a reaction to the oppressive socio-economic conditions facing world Jewry (rather than religious messianism), emerges from the writings of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, Moses Hess, and Rabbi Yehuda Alkali who are influenced by the plight of Jews in Europe, the rise of modern anti-semitism, and the rise of various nationalist movements in the 19th century (Hertzberg 1997). 

30. 1856 CE – Khatt-i Humayun Firman (Edict): The Sublime Porte declares all Ottoman subjects equal regardless of religion and repeals all restrictions on dhimmi that had relegated Jews to second class status for centuries. As with many emancipated minorities throughout history; while Jewish legal status within Ottoman lands improved they remained second-class citizens (Morris, 1999). 

31. 1839 CE – Allahabad Pogrom in Iran: Persian Muslims carry out a mass killing/forced conversion of Jews in the city of Mashhad Iran. Mobs burn down the synagogue, loot homes, abduct girls, and kill between 30-40 people. The Jewish patriarchs outwardly declare their “allegiance” to Islam and the entire community of roughly 2400 converts. British Jewry, headed by Moses Montefiore advocates for the community and several years later the Iranian Shah allows Jews to legally return to Judaism. However, many remain as crypto-Jews out of fear of violence from their neighbors (Tsadik 2007). Throughout the 19th century, there were many additional instances of violence and forced conversions of Jews including the massacre of 18 Jews in Barfoush in 1866, the chopping off of noses and ears of Jews accused of mocking an Imam (Littman, 1979), and a 1910 blood libel accusation in Shiraz in which Jews were accused of ritually murdering a Muslim girl which lead to the destruction the Jewish quarter and the death of 12 Jews. Wrote J.J. Benjamin of the life of Persion Jews: 

"they are obliged to live in a separate part of town … for they are considered as unclean creatures. … Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mobs with stones and dirt. … For the same reason, they are prohibited to go out when it rains; for it is said the rain would wash dirt off them, which would sully the feet of the Mussulmans. … If a Jew is recognized as such in the streets, he is subjected to the greatest insults. The passers-by spit in his face, and sometimes beat him … unmercifully. … If a Jew enters a shop for anything, he is forbidden to inspect the goods. … Should his hand incautiously touch the goods, he must take them at any price the seller chooses to ask for them. ... Sometimes the Persians intrude into the dwellings of the Jews and take possession of whatever pleases them. Should the owner make the least opposition in defense of his property, he incurs the danger of atoning for it with his life. ... If ... a Jew shows himself in the street during the three days of the Katel… he is sure to be murdered." (Lewis, 1984)

32. 1881 CE – Pogroms and Anti-Semitic Laws in Russia: Waves of anti-Jewish riots sweep the Russian empire after the assasination of Nicholas II is falsely blamed on the Jews.  Authorities stand by as hundreds are murdered by anti-semitic mobs. Discriminatory May laws which re-introduce institutionalized discrimination including restrictions on Jewish entry into schools and Universities and bars on Jews practicing law or having movement of freedom and residence. In 1891-1892 twenty thousand Jews were expelled from Moscow (Vital 1975). These waves of new and unprecedented anti-semisim lead to broad disillusionment with the prospect of assimilation amongst Eastern European Jewry who until this point had thought anti-semitism to be on the decline. Waves of pogroms continue through the early 20th century and Hebrew zionist poet Nahman Bialik reacts to the particularly brutal kishinev pogrom in 1903 “In the city of slaughter” (Bejger 2018) (Here Translated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky). 

“…Get up and walk through the city of the massacre,

And with your hand touch and lock your eyes

On the cooled brain and clots of blood

Dried on tree trunks, rocks, and fences; it is they.”

The violent outbreaks and new discriminatory laws lead to three major shifts in world Jewry. First; they triggered mass migration to the United states and nearly 2 million jews migrated between 1880 and 1920. Most of the 7.5 million Jews in the United States today are the descendents from these migrants. This migration was shut off in the 1920s due to the US adopting immigration quotas and would prevent many fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany and unprecedented levels of anti semitic violence in Ukraine eastern Europe (where casualties would begin to to run into the ten of thousands per event) from seeking asylum in the US in the 1930s. Secondly, the pogroms triggered the embrace of Zionism amongst Russian jews and the establishment of the first zionist collectives in Eretz Yisrael on land purchased from Ottoman land owners. These would become the seeds of the modern state of Israel. Thirdly, the pogroms drove many Jews into political/revolutionary activism within the Bund and Bolshevik movements. 

33. 1885 CE – Reform Movement Struggles with “Jewish Peoplehood”: The Pittsburgh platform of reform Judaism rejects the notion of Jewish peoplehood in exchange for the more common notion of religion as a faith rather than a collective identity as had commonly been recognized prior to this by mainstream Judaism. For example the central Amida prayer which had been recited three times daily by observant jews for thousands of years contains a number of verses focused on the collective Israelite nation such as the ingathering of exiles in the land of Israel. All subsequent major platforms of reform Judaism back off from this statement until 1976 when the central conference of American Rabbis affirms Jewish “peoplehood”.
    
    

34. 1895 CE – Dreyfus Affair and the Rise of Political Zionism in Western Europe: Alfred Dreyfus, an assimilated French Jew  is wrongfully convicted of treason and communicating French secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Anti-semitic riots break out throughout France in which people with Jewish features are assaulted and anti-semitic posters are put up accusing Jews of “underhanded attacks” against the nation. The anti-semic reactions to Dreyfuss’s trial, retrial and acquittal were cited by Austrian born Journalist and founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, as evidence that it was impossible for Jews to exist for the long term in Europe. In, “Der Judenstaat, Herzl writes (Herzl 1896) : 

“[I]f France – bastion of emancipation, progress and universal socialism – [can] get caught up in a maelstrom of antisemitism and let the Parisian crowd chant 'Kill the Jews!' Where can they be safe once again – if not in their own country? Assimilation does not solve the problem because the Gentile world will not allow it as the Dreyfus affair has so clearly demonstrated.” 

35. End of 19th Century CE - Eretz Yisrael Before Zionist Immigration: On the eve of the Zionist return to Eretz Yisrael, the land is ruled by a foreign colonial power; the Ottoman empire, and divided between three different provinces or “vilayet” (Morris 1999). The population had slowly been declining throughout the 19th century as a result of a recent earthquake in 1837, diseases such as Malaria, and warfare between Egypt and the Ottomans which saw the region change hands between the two during the 1830s and 1840s. Thousands also frequently migrated to and from neighboring Syria and Egypt also occurred (Avneri 2017). During the 19th century, the Ottomans also transferred tens of thousands of Muslims from the north Balkans into the area of modern day Israel/Palestine and Syria/Lebanon to further “Islamicize” the area (Ye'or 1985). 

In 1880, Palestine’s population consisted of roughly 450,000 Arabs (primarily Muslim and Christian) and roughly 13,000-20,000 Jews (Avneri 2017) – A tiny fraction of the Jewish and Arab populations of present day Israel and the occupied territories. Jews tended to be concentrated in Urban centers and comprised half of Jerusalem's population in 1881 (Morris 1999). The rural inhabitants had mostly been deprived of direct land ownership through exploitative purchases of absentee aristocrats typically residing in urban centers inside and outside of the modern borders of Israel (the Ayan). 

Arab nationalism was beginning to emerge throughout the middle east in response to anti-Arab discrimination by the ruling Turkish Ottoman empire. This nationalism was initially pan-Arab in nature rather than specific to the region of Palestine though it would steadily evolve into a nationalism specific to the area of modern day Israel/Palestine in the 1920s (Morris, 1999) and be officially codified as an official “Palestinian national” movement in the 1960s as conventional Pan-Arab military confrontations failed to dismantle Israel. 

Up to the eve of Zionist immigration, the status of Jews in the Muslim world varied greatly with time and place. Though de jour discrimination had been eliminated within the Ottoman empire, most Jews still existed as second-class citizens (Morris, 1999) and pogroms were a regular occurrence throughout the middle east (though infrequent relative to Europe) including the numerous events in Iran (recounted above) and regular outbreaks in Algeria and Libya (Harbord, 2021). 

Within Europe Jews were increasingly facing the prospect that the continent was about to become uninhabitable. Two ideologies were emerging that would radically challenge the status quo; Fascism and Communism. To the fascists at the time, Jews were Bolsheviks and racial inferiors/polluters and to the Communists the Jewish identity represented the capitalist enemy and/or backward religious reactionism. 

In his work “Auto-Emancipation: A warning to his kinsfolk by a Russian Jew”, Leo Pinsker summed up the experience of European Jews in the late 19th century: 

“When we are ill-used, robbed, plundered, and dishonoured we dare not defend ourselves, and, worse still, we take it almost as a matter of course… Though you prove patriots a thousand times… Some fine morning you find yourself cross the border and you are reminded by the mob that you are, after all, nothing but vagrants and parasites, outside the protection of the law.”

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