Persecution & Antisemitism

The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II captured Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon's Temple, and deported much of the population of Judah to Babylon.

Source: Wikipedia

During the First Jewish–Roman War, Roman forces under Titus besieged Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, a turning point in Jewish history.

Source: Wikipedia

After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, Emperor Hadrian renamed the province Syria Palaestina and barred Jews from Jerusalem, causing heavy loss of life.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

As the First Crusade set out, mobs and Crusader bands attacked Jewish communities in Rhineland cities such as Worms, Speyer, and Mainz, killing thousands.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

The death of a boy in Norwich, England, produced one of the first blood-libel accusations, the false charge that Jews murder Christian children for ritual purposes, which spread across Europe.

Source: Wikipedia

About 150 Jews who had taken refuge in Clifford's Tower in York, England, died in a mob assault, many by mass suicide, in one of medieval England's worst anti-Jewish attacks.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

The Church council convened by Pope Innocent III ordered Jews to wear distinguishing dress and restricted their public life, entrenching legal discrimination across Christendom.

Source: Wikipedia

King Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion, forcing the entire Jewish community out of England; Jews were not readmitted until the seventeenth century.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

King Philip IV expelled the Jews from the French royal domain in 1306 and confiscated their property; after partial returns, King Charles VI ordered a final expulsion in 1394.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

As the plague swept Europe, Jews were falsely accused of poisoning wells, and hundreds of communities in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond were massacred or destroyed.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

Waves of anti-Jewish violence beginning in Seville swept the Iberian kingdoms, killing thousands and forcing mass conversions that created the class of conversos.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

Ferdinand and Isabella established the Inquisition to root out Jews who had converted to Christianity but were suspected of secretly practicing Judaism, leading to trials, torture, and executions.

Source: Wikipedia

Ferdinand and Isabella ordered all Jews who refused baptism to leave Spain, expelling a community of tens of thousands and ending centuries of Jewish life on the peninsula.

Source: Wikipedia

King Manuel I ordered the forced conversion of Portugal's Jews and expelled those who resisted, ending the open Jewish presence that had grown after the Spanish expulsion.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

Venice confined its Jews to a walled, gated quarter that gave the word 'ghetto' to history, a model of enforced residential segregation later copied across Europe.

Source: Wikipedia

During the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Ukraine, tens of thousands of Jews were killed and hundreds of communities destroyed.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

Imperial Russia confined most of its Jews to a western border region known as the Pale of Settlement, restricting where they could live and work for over a century.

Source: Wikipedia

A blood-libel accusation in Damascus led to the arrest and torture of local Jewish leaders, drawing international attention to anti-Jewish persecution in the Middle East.

Source: Wikipedia

Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a wave of anti-Jewish riots swept the Russian Empire, destroying homes and businesses and spurring mass Jewish emigration.

Source: USHMM

Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer, was wrongly convicted of treason in a case driven by antisemitism; it divided France and exposed deep anti-Jewish prejudice in Europe.

Source: Wikipedia

In Kishinev (then Russian Empire, now Moldova), a pogrom killed dozens of Jews and injured hundreds, shocking world opinion and accelerating Jewish emigration and Zionism.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

After Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazi regime enacted the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, stripping German Jews of citizenship and codifying racial persecution.

Source: USHMM

On 9–10 November 1938, Nazi-orchestrated attacks across Germany and Austria burned synagogues, looted Jewish businesses, and sent some 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps.

Source: USHMM

During the Farhud in Baghdad, a violent pogrom killed around 180 Jews and injured hundreds, marking a turning point for the ancient Jewish community of Iraq.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered about six million European Jews, roughly two-thirds of the continent's Jewish population, in the genocide known as the Holocaust.

Source: USHMM

From 1948 to the 1970s, amid persecution, violence and expulsions, some 850,000 Jews left or were forced out of the Arab countries and Iran, ending communities that were thousands of years old; in 2014 the Knesset made 30 November their day of remembrance.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library ; loi de la Knesset du 23 juin 2014 (Harif, « It's official: Jewish Refugee Day becomes law »)

A car bomb destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds, the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina's history.

Source: Wikipedia

A gunman murdered a teacher and three children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; in 2015 an attacker killed four Jewish hostages at the Hypercacher kosher supermarket in Paris.

Source: Wikipedia

A gunman opened fire during Shabbat services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 worshippers in the deadliest antisemitic attack in United States history.

Source: Wikipedia

On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led attackers killed 1,183 people in Israel and took 251 hostages, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, followed by a global surge in antisemitic incidents.

Source: 7 October Parliamentary Commission (APPG UK-Israël), 2e édition, mars 2026