The 2,607 Years of Jewish Experience In and Out Throughout Europe as the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

Jews didn't know about Europe but came into contact with the culture around the period of the destruction of the 1st Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE when various references to "the isles of the sea", which were the Greek coastlands, appeared in the Bible.  It was the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great that brought the mass of the Jewish people into the European orbit  

In the Maccabean Period of Chanukah, before the middle of the 2nd century BCE, the presence of Jews in Greece is proved by inscriptions as well as literary sources, and there were Jews in Rome as early as 139 BCE.      Mattathias Antigonus, whose defeat and death brought Hasmonean rule to an end (40 BCE), and the Land became a province of the Roman Empire.       

                 Occupation in Judah of  Roman soldiers  :  The name "Judea" was derived from the Kingdom of Judah of the 6th century BCE. Following the deposition of Herod Archelaus in 6 CE, Judea came under direct Roman rule, during which time the Roman procurator was given authority from Rome to punish by execution.

         The Arch of Titus, Roman Emperor who after a 5 month siege of  Jerusalem,, destroyed it and its 2nd Temple of Solomon.  The arch was erected in Rome by the Senate in honor of Vespasian and Titus., built from 81-96 CE.  The destruction of Jerusalem was done deliberately, so historians feel, to eliminate the national religious center of the Jews.  

                                                     

The 70 CE march of Jewish captives to Rome from Jerusalem bearing all the loot out of the Temple for the Romans, who will then be sold to circuses and such as slaves. Though some Jews remained in Judah and never left, most were killed or taken into slavery, sold in Rome .  

From 57 BCE, Palestine was under Roman control, and as the result of political intercourse, trade, war, and captivity there was an increasing tendency for the people to become scattered throughout the Roman Empire.  They were in Spain and Gaul even before the destruction of the 2nd Temple of 70 CE, and on the Rhineland at least as early as the 4th century.  Jews were kept out of Jerusalem and could not enter Jerusalem until General Bar Kokhba took the capital back in 132 and kept it until 135, killed in war with Rome.  

That must have killed the incentive to return, and take their chances in Europe after this episode. Once they saw the European continent and its weather and people, they remained until forced out because they were of a different religion, the Jews spoken of in the New Testament that did not put their reputation in a positive light.  People were suspicious of them on the most part.  It would have been a dangerous endeavor to try to return on one's own.  

European Jewry of this period left few traces of cultural life, save what may be deducted from the inscriptions in the catacombs of Rome and elsewhere.  After the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, their position greatly deteriorated, and it appears that large numbers were driven into baptism;  in the 7th century, attempts were made to enforce wholesale conversion in Byzantium, Northern Italy, Gaul and especially, in Spain.  So for well over 700 years, Judaism was on the verge of being wiped out by Christianity.  

115 CE saw expulsion of the Jews from Cyprus

640, 721, 873 saw Jews in the Byzantine Empire forcibly converted to Christianity.  

 Thereafter, communities reestablished themselves partly through the advance of Islam, which brought the Jewish reservoirs of population in Mesopotamia into intimate contact with the West, partly through the encouragement of the Carolingian rulers in France, and partly through the fact that the new political circumstances had made the Jews the most important international trading element with contacts both in the Islamic and Christian worlds.  

By about the year 1000, the center of gravity of the Jewish people had been removed into the European region.  great independent cultural centers now emerged there-humanistic in Spain, Talmudic in France and Germany.  This was in spite of the comprehensive anti-Jewish code which was elaborated at this time by the Church.

In Northern Europe and to a far less degree in the South, the force of circumstances drove a great part of the Jewish community ultimately into the profession of moneylending.  The 1st Crusade of 1096 was initiated by a wave of massacres on the Rhineland, and henceforth, the record of European Jewry was punctuated by such outbreaks.                      

                                          Crusaders taking Jerusalem

1096  German Crusade massacres Jews in European towns,  while in 1099 the Jewish community in Jerusalem was massacred by the Crusaders. 

1146 and 1391 saw Jews of Spain forcibly converted to Christianity.                                                                          

The 4th Lateran Council of 1215 intensified the ecclesiastical campaign against the Jews, the enforcement of which was pressed for by the friars of the newly-established Dominican order.  The ultimate result was a series of expulsions from England in 1290 to 1655, from France in 1306, 1322, 1394, from Spain in 1355 when 12,000 Jews were massacred by the mob in Toledo, and the continuing Spanish Inquisition in 1492 of expulsion of 180,000 Jews from Spain and the 50,000 Jews converted to Christianity that remained in Spain, from  the spreading Spanish Inquisition in Portugal in 1497;  while in Germany local expulsions were reinforced by wholesale massacres, especially at the time of the BLACK DEATH of 1348 and 1349and in 1421 Jews were expelled from Austria.  The only country where the record was generally somewhat better was Italy--in the South before, in the North after, the 13th century.                                                 

1495 saw Jews expelled from Lithuania and 1497 the expulsion of Jews from Sicily and Sardinia and expulsion of Jews from Portugal, 1502 when all Jews of Rhodes were forcibly converted, expelled or taken into slavery, and 1541 when Jews were expelled from the Kingdom of Naples.

Here, the Jews, to some extent were protected b the Popes from the worst excesses of fanaticism, played a consistent part in cultural life.  Both there and in Spain, the Jewish medieval participation in the re-awakening of intellectual life by the transmission of Greco-Arab culture in translation was of the utmost significance.                                              

1648-1656 were when 100,000 Jews were murdered in the Chmielnicki massacres in Poland, and by 1727 and 1747, Jews were expelled from Russia.  

The 16th century found the mass of European Jewry driven eastward to Poland and Turkey.  From that time, however, Jewish life in the newly-dominant countries of Western Europe began to reassert itself partly because of the vitality of the remaining communities of Germany and Italy, and partly through the pioneering colonies established by the crypto-Jews or Marranos of Spain and Portugal in the countries of the Atlantic seaboard, especially Holland and England.  

These new communities, Europeanized culturally, linguistically, and socially through the circumstances of their past history, formed the nucleus of important new settlement of the same type.  These were constantly recruited from Central Europe and later from Poland where, after the Chmielnicki massacres in 1648-1649, the Jewish position, though culturally advanced, was politically and economically miserable.  .                                                  

                                           Karl Marx (1818-1883)  German Jewish social philosopher-father of Communism.  Karl's parents were Jewish, but they abandoned Judaism before his birth and had him baptized at the age of 6. He failed to get a teaching position because of his radical views, so turned to journalism and moved to Paris, later expelled from France because of his attacks on the Prussian government and moved on to Brussels and became "stateless."  He had no expert knowledge of any Jewish problems because he  studied none of them.  His attitude toward the Jews was characterized by antipathy and contempt and he described Judaism and the Jews in terms similar to those used by many anti-Semites.  From 1848 on, Marx envisaged the Jews chiefly as a financial reactionary group.  

Meanwhile in Persia in 1838, the entire Jewish community in Meshed was forcibly converted to Islam, so  there should be many Iranians today carrying DNA from Jewish ancestors. 

        PERIOD of DISCRIMINATION:  From the 4th century onward, the Christian Empire enacted an elaborate system of discrimination against the Jews which was adopted and intensified in medieval Europe as well as in the Islamic world.  It was brought to its climax by the GHETTO system which aimed at the complete expulsion of the Jews from gentile society. Ghettos first started in Venice, Italy, locking Jews in at night.                                           

                                                Albert Einstein (b1879 d 1955)

The French Revolution and its aftermath brought EMANCIPATION to those European Jewries and those who desired to follow their example;  except in Russia.  this was the keynote of Jewish history in the age of European economic and geographical expansion in the 19th century.  The Jewish communities of Western Europe, constantly recruited from the East , especially after the pogroms of 1881, now began to take a leading part in European social, literary, cultural, and even political life, providing the occidental countries with writers, statesmen, scientists, physicians, pioneers, explorers,,,, and humanitarians in disproportionate numbers.                                 

1882 -1890:  750,000 Jews living in Russia were forced to re-settle in the Pale of Settlement (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, White Russia, Ukraine, Besarabia, Crimea-25 provinces in all of Czarist Russia) by order of Catherine the Great.  Practically all of the Russian Jews who entered the USA in the early 1900s came from this area including mine.  1891 saw Jews expelled from Moscow and St. Petersburg.  

 This was, however, in many cases at the expense of Jewish national and religious loyalties, and though Europe produced an occidentalized renewal of Jewish culture in the form of the Judische Wissenchaft,   Jewish, and especially rabbinic, studies declined tragically.  

1871-1921 saw Anti-Jewish pogroms in towns of Russia. which lasted past WWI.   

1917, the end of WWI to the present day, Jews in the Soviet Union were denied the right of national identity.          

In 1980-81, Jews were in prison in Russia for trying to learn to read Hebrew in hopes of moving to Israel.                                 

Following Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Lenin's father had married a lady  that was well educated.  She was the daughter of a wealthy German–Swedish Lutheran mother, and according to some sources a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician.  .According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern, it is likely that Lenin was unaware of his mother's half-Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by his sister Anna after his death. 

Russia became a Communist country.  Everything was owned by the government.  Jews were not allowed to leave.  

In Eastern Europe,, emancipation brought about at last by the Russian Revolution of 1917, was followed by the establishment of the communist system which, in effect, entirely suppressed Jewish national and cultural life.  

                       In Central Europe, the jealousy aroused by Jewish progress after emancipation contributed to the rise of the Nazi movement. 1939-1945 was the period of THE HOLOCAUST, THAT WAS THE MURDER OF 6 MILLION JEWS BY GERMAN NAZIS AND THEIR EUROPEAN COLLABORATORS.  

Connecting the feeling generated in Europe, by 1941 the Jewish community in Baghdad was attacked by mobs.  180 Jews were left dead.   From 1948 to this day, persecution of Jewish communities in Arab countries went on as well as mass expulsions when Israel was created on May 14, 1948.  

 At first re-enforcing certain anti-Jewish restrictions, in the end this movement embarked on a campaign of extermination, in the course of which between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 Jews perished out of some 11,000,000 living in Europe in 1939.  Many Jews left Europe after World War II, especially to Israel and the USA.  

                                  May 14, 1948 and creation of Israel  after 2,000 years of praying

In 1990, there were 2,607,000 Jews in Europe including the 1,435,000 in the USSR, or about 20% of the Jewish population of the world as against 90% only a century ago and 60% in 1939.  Jews make up o.02% of the world population.  There are about 6 million Jews in the USA and 6 million in Israel and about 2 million scattered in other lands.  

Europe has lost almost 60% of its Jewish population over the past 50 years, mainly as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union after which many Jews left eastern Europe as borders opened, a study shows.

Only about 9% of the global Jewish population now lives in Europe, compared with nearly 90% in the late 19th century – but similar to the proportion 1,000 years ago.

                                                                     

As for our male line of DNA (Y haplotype)  For populations of the Jewish diaspora, the genetic composition of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jewish populations show significant amounts of shared Middle Eastern ancestry. According to Behar and colleagues (2010), this is "consistent with a historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelites of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World". Jews living in the North African, Italian, and Iberian regions show variable frequencies of admixture with the historical non-Jewish population along the maternal lines. In the case of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews (in particular Moroccan Jews), who are closely related, the source of non-Jewish admixture is mainly southern European. Behar and colleagues have remarked on an especially close relationship between Ashkenazi Jews and modern Italians.  

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2021/03/how-romans-took-over-judah-changed-it.html

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2021/03/from-70-to-1099-jews-in-germany-france.html

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-great-revolt-66-70-ce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/25/europes-jewish-population-has-dropped-60-in-last-50-years