Jewish History Quotes

“different kind of uprooting took place in eastern Europe, where enlightenment and emancipation advanced more slowly. There, in the sprawling Russian Empire, the significant movement at hand was not from one religion to another, but rather physical movement in the form of mass exodus. The conventionally assumed trigger point was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, in the wake of which a wave of violent pogroms directed against Jews broke out in Russia. It was at this time that the first of the huge waves of Jewish emigration from eastern Europe occurred, laying the ground for yet another rebalancing of the global Jewish population. It is estimated that almost 4 million Jews left Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Romania between 1880 and 1929, nearly two-thirds of whom came to the United States, which was now transformed”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“fashion, the pace of conversion from Judaism to Christianity picked up in Europe during the nineteenth century. The German poet Heinrich Heine, himself a Jew who converted to Christianity, declared that baptism was the Jew’s “ticket of admission” to European society. More than 200,000 Jews followed Heine’s path, principally in central and western Europe, over the course of the nineteenth century; they were a small, but clearly identifiable, stream within the”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“intermarriage and conversion. In the very urban settings in which Jews were so prominently represented, rates of intermarriage rose throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reaching 30 percent or more in Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and Trieste. By comparison, in the United States, which has been as hospitable a setting for Jews as any in their history, intermarriage rates among Jews were very low throughout the twentieth century—7 percent in 1957—but have since grown many times over, reaching 58 percent in 2013.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“As a result, by the early twentieth century, large Jewish concentrations could be found in cities across the globe, including Baghdad (one-third of the population), Salonika (50 percent), Warsaw, Łódź, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and Buenos Aires. Indeed, 25 percent of the world’s Jewish population lived in a mere fourteen”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“especially demographic growth. The world Jewish population more than doubled from 1700 to 1800, reaching 2.7 million. The next one hundred years witnessed a more than threefold increase, as the world Jewish population reached 8.7 million in 1900—and then doubled again by 1939. What can explain this staggering growth?”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“suggested a link between the anti-establishment nature of Shabtai Zevi’s movement and the displacement and murder of tens of thousands of eastern European Jews in Ukraine less than twenty years earlier, during the Chmielnicki massacres (1648–1649). Jews had been sent by Polish Catholic authorities to settle and establish commercial outposts in Ukraine. They were received with hostility by local Ukrainian Orthodox tribesmen, who resented both their presence as Jews and the intrusion of Catholic Poland onto their lands. The Cossack leader, Bogdan Chmielnicki, led an uprising directed against Poland that unleashed massive violence against nearby Jews, as powerfully described by a contemporaneous Jew, Nathan Hanover, in Yeven metsulah (Abyss of despair). Estimates are that between 20,000 to 100,000 Jews were murdered, a stunning loss that concluded the centuries-long period of growth and tranquility for Jews in eastern Europe.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“In 1700, the largest number of Jews in the world, more than a half million out of 1.1 million, lived in eastern Europe. From this point forward, the Jewish population in eastern Europe would grow exponentially over the next two and a third centuries until the Holocaust.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“One such Protestant setting was the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. It was there that Spanish exiles made their way in the sixteenth century, creating a rich cultural and commercial center. In fact, it was from Amsterdam that Jewish representatives of the Dutch West Indies”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Ottoman lands became the center of a new eastern Sephardi diaspora, Christian Europe became the home of a western dispersion. Spanish exiles, as well as conversos who wanted to end the duplicity of their existence as outward Christians, made their way in the fifteenth century to Italy, France, England, Germany, and the Low Countries. Insofar as some of these countries had previously expelled their Jews, the new arrivals set about gingerly, revealing very gradually their Jewish origins and customs in cities from Venice to London. Some of these settings proved more tolerant than others, especially those that had fallen under the arc of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, whose guiding motto of Sola Scriptura indicated a renewed appreciation for the Bible, the Hebrew language, and, in some cases, Jews themselves.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Spanish exiles also made their way to the northern Palestinian city of Safed, which they transformed into the most populous city in Palestine (with some 7,000 Jews). It was in Safed”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Propelled to search for pockets of religious freedom, the Spanish exiles made their way to various corners of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, including Constantinople, Salonika, and Sarajevo. By the mid-sixteenth century, Constantinople had 50,000 Jews, a mix of Spanish exiles, native Jews known as Romaniot, Italians, and Ashkenazim who were organized into scores of religious communities”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“yet, the sense of despair did not prevent a large number of Jews from taking leave and creating a new Sephardic diaspora. Initially, the largest group of exiles, perhaps 25,000, made their way to neighboring Portugal, where they stayed until the Portuguese king, son-in-law of Ferdinand and Isabella”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Spanish Expulsion and its ripples One of the great disruptions experienced by Jews prior to the modern age occurred in Spain with the Edict of Expulsion in 1492.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“In the wake of the Black Death, Ashkenazic Jews pushed eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. It is this large region that would become the heartland of a pious, Yiddish-speaking population, growing from thousands of Jews in the fourteenth century to more than 6 million in 1900 and making it by that point the largest Jewish community in the world several times”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Related to the trend of expulsion was a third event, the “Black Plague” of the 1340s, the devastating contagion that killed tens of millions of people, diminishing Europe’s population by as much as 50 percent. Jews were not only among the victims of the plague. They were also falsely accused of spreading the plague by various means, including by poisoning wells.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Second, in 1290, the first act of mass expulsion against the Jews of medieval Europe was executed by King Edward I of England, to be followed by expulsions from France in the fourteenth century and culminating in the sweeping expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. This attempt to rid European countries of their Jews took place against a backdrop of intensified anti-Jewish expression and imagery in popular Christianity, even though the wave of expulsions did not succeed in putting an end to Jewish life in Europe.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“in the year 1096, European Christians heeded the call of Pope Urban II to liberate Palestine from the hands of the Muslim infidels. On their way to the Holy Land, the Crusaders encountered Rhineland Jewish communities and, without Church warrant, set about to destroy those whom they held responsible for the crime of deicide (the murder of Jesus). A number of Jewish communities (Speyer, Worms, and Mainz) were destroyed, and perhaps as many as thousands of Jews”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“reputation of Ashkenazic rabbinic culture stood in telling contrast to the low population numbers of the community. Some estimate that at the beginning of the fourteenth century, 450,000 Jews lived in western, central, and eastern Europe out of a total European population of 44 million. A more recent estimate is dramatically lower, suggesting a northern European Jewish population of 25,000. Notwithstanding this sharp divergence, there is no doubt that Jews experienced a significant decline in population in the passage from the ancient to medieval periods. The relative stability of daily life for Jews in Ashkenaz was undone on three notable occasions in the Middle”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“reputation of Ashkenazic rabbinic culture stood in telling contrast to the low population numbers of the community. Some estimate that at the beginning of the fourteenth century, 450,000 Jews lived in western, central, and eastern Europe out of a total European population of 44 million. A more recent estimate is dramatically lower, suggesting a northern European Jewish population of 25,000. Notwithstanding this sharp divergence, there is no doubt that Jews experienced a significant decline in population in the passage from the ancient to medieval periods. The relative stability of daily life for Jews in Ashkenaz”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“genetic researchers have formulated the rather startling thesis that while Ashkenazic males likely derived from the Middle East, Ashkenazi women came from Europe. This suggests that Jewish men migrated to Europe, where they married local women who were not born Jewish but converted and”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“journeying over the course of a millennium through North Africa and Italy before ascending to Germany.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“too is the precise path of Jews to this region of Europe. In all likelihood, the forebears of medieval Ashkenazim began their path in the ancient Middle East, most likely Palestine (but perhaps also Babylonia),”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“northern France and Rhineland Germany that may or may not have reflected an actual encounter. In any event, it was in this part of Europe that, according to most scholars, Ashkenazic Jewry originated. It is somewhat mysterious”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Spain was known in Hebrew as Sepharad, a place name drawn from the biblical Book of Obadiah (1:20); Jews of Spanish origin came to be known as Sephardim, a group that served as a cultural foil to Ashkenazim in the medieval period. In”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“From the seventh century, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish world, some estimates are as high as 90 percent, resided in Muslim lands.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“late 630s ce, building in that city two of Islam’s holiest sites: the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. From this point forward, Jews became—as they would remain throughout the Middle Ages—a small minority subject to the rule”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“The second key event was the rise, in the first third of the seventh century ce, of Islam. Similar to the case of Constantine, the fledgling Islamic movement both married religious and political interests”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Christianity and declare it a tolerated religion in 312–313 ce. At that point, the growing theological animosity with Judaism became official imperial policy. What followed were centuries of tense relationships among Jews, Christian rulers, priests, and the general populace, with real consequences”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“One noteworthy source of distinction is that the Jewish population declined precipitously from around 1 ce to 1500 ce; the decline, which may have reduced the Jewish population from 4.5 million to 1 million people, was due to a mix of factors; disease, war, mass persecution, and forced conversion.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“the Temple’s destruction did not end a Jewish presence in Palestine, neither did it create the Jewish diaspora. Communities had been developing outside of the land of Israel for centuries, especially in the Middle”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction