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PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS, THEIR EXPULSION FROM SPAIN AND
POGROMS IN RUSSIA
PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS
Persecution of the Jews in England and Spain
Expulsion of Jews from Spain and Italy
Ottoman Empire and Sephardic Jews
Jews, Poverty and Money
Early History of Jews in Russia
Jews in Eastern Europe
Later History of Jews in Russia
Orthodoxy and Reforms of Judaism
Later Persecution of the Jews
Pogroms in Russia
Russian Pogroms in the Early 1900s
Pogrom in Salonika Greece
Pogrom in Ekaterinoslav in 1905
PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS
Jews were harshly persecuted, denied
entrance into certain professions, prohibited
from owning land, forced to pay extra taxes
and excluded from the normal education
system. They were gradually expelled from
Europe: from England in 1290, from France
in 1306 and from Spain and Portugal in
1492. They were also expelled from
Hungary in 1376, from Sicily in the 15th
century, from Bavaria in 1470, from Bohemia
in 1542, and suffered pogroms in Russia in
1881, 1891, 1897 and 1903.
The Jews lived in constant threat of
violence. They were persecuted in Spanish
Inquisition and the Crusades. The Black
Death of 1348 was blamed on them.
Cannibalism was regarded with such horror that only werewolves, witches, vampires and Jews were deemed
capable of it. Martin Luther was one of many zealous anti-Semites. According to a 16th century British medical
historian the Russian cure for drunkenness consisted "in taking a piece of pork, putting it secretly into a jew's
bed for 9 days and then giving it to the drunkard in pulverized form." They had a reputation for drinking less
than the Catholics.
In the early 16th century, anti-Semitism was at its peak in Europe. In 1517 Jews in Venice were confined to
neighborhoods around the cannon foundry, or ghetto . The word ghetto came from this move. In other places
Jews were forced to wear special clothes or badges. Through it all the Jews kept their culture and communities
alive in their synagogues and schools, with the help of their rabbis, and for the part steadfastly refused to
assimilate. The German-Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem wrote: the Jews have had a relationship with
Europe only to the degree that Europe has acted upon us as a destructive stimulation.
Websites and Resources: Judaism101 jewfaq.org
(http://www.jewfaq.org/index.htm) ; Judaism and
Jewish Resources shamash.org/trb/judaism
(http://www.shamash.org/trb/judaism.html) ;
Aish.com aish.com (http://www.aish.com/)
;Wikipedia article Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org
/wiki/Judaism) ; torah?org torah.org
(http://www.torah.org/#) ; Chabad,org
chabad.org/library/bible (http://www.chabad.org
/library/bible_cdo/aid/63255/jewish/The-Bible-
with-Rashi.htm) ; Religious Tolerance
religioustolerance.org/judaism
(http://www.religioustolerance.org/judaism.htm) ; Judaism.com judaism.com (http://www.judaism.com/) ; ;
Jewish History: Jewish History Timeline jewishhistory.org.il/history (http://www.jewishhistory.org.il/history.php)
Pogrom in Barcelona in 1391
Tobias Stimmer, Strasburg, 1574
; Wikipedia article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_history) ; Jewish History Resource Center
dinur.org (http://www.dinur.org/1.html?rsID=219) ; Origin of Judaism adath-shalom.ca (http://www.adath-
shalom.ca/israelite_religion.htm) ;Center for Jewish History cjh.org (http://www.cjh.org/) ; Jewish Culture and
History Resources ddickerson.igc.org/judaica (http://ddickerson.igc.org/judaica.html) ;
Books: A Short History of Judaism by I. And D. Cohn-Sherlok (1994); The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill;
Ancient Biblical History Books: Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times by Donald Redford; Oxford
Companion to the Bible ; Palestine Bible as History by Werner Keller; The Bible Unearthed by I. Finkelstein &
N. Asher Silberman ; Historical Atlas of the Holy Lands by K. Farrington
Websites and Resources with Images from Jewish History: Center for Jewish History cjh.org
(http://www.cjh.org/) ; Judaism Pictures sami119.tripod.com/shemaisrael (http://sami119.tripod.com
/shemaisrael/id5.html) ; Art.com art.com/ (http://www.art.com/gallery/id--b12116/judaism-posters_p4.htm) ;
butterfunk.com (http://www.butterfunk.com/pictures-11/judaism.htm) ; allposters.com (http://www.allposters.com
/-st/Judaism-Posters_c14067_p6_.htm) ; Virtual Jewish Library jewishvirtuallibrary.org/index
(http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/index.html) ; Jewish in eastern Europe yivoinstitute.org
(http://www.yivoinstitute.org/exhibits/eepix_fr.htm) ; Holocaust Museum Photos ushmm.org/research/collections
/photo (http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/photo/) ; Jerusalem Collection jerusalemcollection.com
(http://www.jerusalemcollection.com/Jerusalem_Gallery_Tradition.htm) ; Andrew Atchison Photos
andrewaitchison.photoshelter.com/gallery/Orthodox-Jewish-Life (http://andrewaitchison.photoshelter.com
/gallery/Orthodox-Jewish-Life-London/G0000Twr6oldr_Kg/P0000w7lMleBUgfc) ; Jewish Museum London
jewishmuseum.org.uk (http://www.jewishmuseum.org.uk/Picture%20library) ;
Persecution of the Jews in England and Spain
Jews in medieval Britain were treated as chattel of the
British crown. According to English law synagogues had
to be placed in the back of buildings. A large Jewish
community lived around Guildford, a wool trading center.
Jews suffered from the same kind of persecution in
England that they did elsewhere in Europe. In 1144, after
a 12-year-old tanner's apprentice in Norwich was found
tortured, raped and murdered, a group of townspeople
accused Jews living in the town of committing ritual
sacrifice and king's representative had to sent to rescue
them. This and other incidents set of massacres of Jews
across England that finally led to their expulsion in 1290
on the orders of the Catholic monarchs.
The Spanish Inquisition was used primarily as an instrument to control Coversos (Jews who were forced to
convert to Catholicism). The Inquisition was most out of control in the 1480s when it was used against
conervsos. Torquemada ordered 2,000 Jews to be burned alive.
In The Spanish Inquisition, A Historical Revision Henry Kamen wrote, "There is no evidence that the
converso as a group were secret Jews." It is known that anti-Semitism was very prevalent but it is not clear how
much racism had to do with persecution or how many converso had returned to Judaism. Kamen blames part
of the converso troubles on their unwillingness to assimilate and their calls for a separate "nation."
Expulsion of Jews from Spain and Italy
The victory of the Catholic monarchs over the
Muslims in Spain set off a wave of religious intolerance
that lead to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. In
1492, the same year Columbus discovered America,
150,000 Jews known as Sephardim were stripped of
their possessions during the Spanish Inquisition and
kicked out of the Spain.
In 1492, the Spanish inquisitor general Torquemada
gave the Jews three months to convert to Christianity,
leave the country, or face execution. Many Jews sought
refuge in the Netherlands or the Islamic empires of the
Moors, Arabs and Turks, where there was more
religious toleration.
Some Jews lived on quietly as Catholics in Toledo
and other Spanish cities. One Toledo resident told Journalist Louise E. Levathes, "I have a friend. He is
Catholic and goes to mass every Sunday. But for some reason his grandfather and father told him not to eat
pork, and every Friday night he lights a Sabbath candle."
The Jews were expelled from southern Italy, then known as the Kingdom of Naples, is the 16th century. Few
returned even after the ban was lifted in the 18th century.
Book: Farwell Espaa, The World of Sephardism Remembered by Howard M. Sachar (Alfred A. Knopf).
Ottoman Empire and Sephardic Jews
< About 100,000 of the 150,000 Sephardic Jews kicked out of the Spain were welcomed to Istanbul by the
Ottoman Sultan Bayazit II, who dispatched the Ottoman navy to rescue many Jews. "The exiled Sephardim,"
wrote journalist Melanie Menagh, "brought with them the glories of Spain's golden age and made major
contributions to Turkish life. Many were physicians and they introduced modern European medical techniques
to the court.
By the the 16th century a large portion of the population of Istanbul was made up of Spanish-speaking Jews.
The first printing press in the Ottoman empire was established by two Spanish-Jewish refugees. Sephardim
circumspection was so highly regarded by the sultans that many Ottoman diplomats were Jews. The
Sephardim language, Judeo-Spanish or Ladino , was thought to be especially melodic and lent itself to poetry
and sacred and secular songs. Ancestors of the Sephardim still live in Istanbul and Ladino is still spoken in
some neighborhoods.
Jews expelled from Hungary in 1376, from Sicily in the the 15th century, from Bavaria in 1470, from Bohemia
in 1542, and from Russia in 1881, 1891, 1897 and 1903 also were provided with sanctuary by the Ottomans.
During World War II, Turkey accepted some Jews who were fleeing Nazism.
Antisemitic political cartoon in Sound Money
Jews, Poverty and Money
Jews were poor people until the 20th century. In Europe, they lived predominantly is shtetls (ghettos). In
Europe, moneylending and trading were about the only professions that were open to them. Although many
own shops and leant money for a profit, and some were rich, one said villager, "many were poor and sold
goods from baskets in the streets." In North Africa there we nomadic Bedouin peddlers who were unable to
own land.
In Eastern Europe, they were best known as moneychangers. Russians and other Slavic people have
traditionally believed that buying and selling goods to make a profit or charging interest on loans was "cheating
one's neighbor." This belief arises in part from the tsarist institution of mir , the periodic redistribution of land in
accordance with family size. Russian ant-Semitism stems partly from the fact that Jews were the only ones low
to lend money and trade goods.
Early History of Jews in Russia
Jewish settlers are believed to have arrived in the Crimea and the Black Sea area as early as last centuries
B.C.
In the 9th century the Khazars, a Turkic tribe in Russia, converted en masse to Judaism. The Khazar Khan
Turk Bulan underwent a ritual circumcision. Some say the conversion was as much of political move by the
Khazars---to distance themselves from the Christian Byzantines and Muslim Arabs---as a religious one. Some
attribute the Khazars conversion to the influence of the people that became known as Mountain Jews of the
Caucasus. There were many Jewish aristocrats, merchants and advisors from the Caucasus in the Khazar
court before the Khazars converted.
Recent genetic studies indicate that Levites, an ancient caste of heredity Jewish priests, of Ashkenazi
descent originated in Central Asia not the Middle East. Ashkenazim is one of the two main branches of Jews
Mountain Jews
Jews of Khorostkiv, Ukraine, 1917
Armenian Jew in Georgia
(the other is Sephardism). Most American Jews are of
Ashkenazi descent. The genetic studies found that 52
percent of the Levites of Ashkenazi have a particular
genetic marker that originated in Central Asia. Some
scholars have theorized that the markers were
introduced by the Khazars and the Jews that descended
from the Khazars became integrated and influential in
the worldwide Jewish community. This has great
implication on the belief that Jewish priests are the
descendants of the Chosen People tribes from Israel.
Between the 14th and 18th century a large number of
Jews moved to the Crimean and the Black Sea region
from the Spain and the Mediterranean countries, eastern
Europe and to a lesser extent the Caucasus and Persia.
Jews in Eastern Europe
By
the
16th century, most of the worlds Jews were concentrated in
Poland, then the largest kingdom in Europe and one that
included what is now Lithuania, Belarus and western
Ukraine.
Jews first arrived in Poland in large numbers during the
Crusades to escape persecution in Germany. They were
welcomed in the 14th century by Poland's King Kazimierz III
who hoped they would bring urban skills to his largely
peasant kingdom. For two centuries the Jews were members
of the privileged class and many Poles married off their
daughter to Jewish merchants to move up in the world.
Prague was famous for its Jewish theologians,
philosophers, mystics, sorcerers and alchemists. The
"terrible" Rabbi Judah Lowe ben Bezalel was a 16th century
astrologer who reputedly created a golem, a creature
brought to life from clay with a magic inscription called a shem. A sort Jewish version of Aladdins genie, golem
served anyone who awakened it and was supposed to come the rescue of the Jewish people in their hour of
need.
This period of Jewish tolerance and enlightenment came to an end during the Counter-Reformation of the
16th century when Jews were so badly persecuted many of them converted to Catholicism.
Later History of Jews in Russia
When Poland was broken up and absorbed by its
neighbors in the 18th century most Jews ended up in
the Russian Empire. About a half million Jews arrived
after the partition of Poland in 1772-95. Most were
restricted and forced by law to live in the so called
Pale of Settlement, or the Western Pale, on the
western fringes of the Russian empire.
The Pale of Settlement was huge ghetto that
occupied former Polish territories in in present-day
Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and eastern Poland.
Jews were prohibited from living in cities such as
Moscow and St. Petersburg. The were required to
pay a double tax. In the 19th century, many Jews
adopted Russian-sounding names to avoid prejudice.
When Jews arrived in the Western Pale, Christian
peasants still made of the bulk of the population
there. They lived in agricultural villages as serfs
(essentially slaves that could be bought and sold)
until they were liberated in 1861. Jews made up only about 1 percent of the population of villages, where they
made flour mills, ran taverns, and peddled merchandise and crafts. They prospered in towns and constituted
the majority in hundreds of towns that spread and grew over a large territory. Fiddler on the Roof is in this part
of Russia. .
In the 18th and 19th centuries the Jewish population in the Pale grew rapidly: four or five fold. Jews
constituted two-thirds of the population and made up a half to two thirds of the residents in the cities. From the
cities Jews dominated much of the economy in western Russia. Even though they were denied basic rights
such owning land and holding government jobs, Jews prospered by developing local light industriessuch as
paper, wood and things like hog bristle brushes exported to England---artisan crafts, banking and trade. They
had their own education systems, hospitals, charities and professional organizations, literature, publishers and
newspapers. Intellectual life was divided between Talmudic scholarship and the Haskalah, influenced by
secularism, liberalism and the enlightenment. A typical 19th century Jewish town was called a schetelt .
Orthodoxy and Reforms of Judaism
The Enlightenment in 17th and 18th century Europe helped free the Jews from their ghettos and opened
them to the outside world and exposed them to ideas such liberalism and social equality and justice. This was a
period in which Jews went through many changes and modern Judaism took shape, coalescing into it rather
rigid orthodox form on the 16th to 18th centuries and reformed forms in the 19th century. It as also a time when
many Jews escaped being Jews.
See Sects
There were a number of Messiah movements in this period. Perhaps the most famous was led by Sabbarai
Sevi, a 17th century figure who raised the hope of the Jewish diaspora of a return to Jerusalem.
Later Persecution of the Jews
With the rise of democratization in the late 18th and 19th century the Jews were granted more freedoms. By
1870 all western and central European nations had granted the Jews the same rights as other citizens under
the law.
See Anti-Semitism
However, persecution continued particularly in Russia, Poland and Romania, where Jews endured pogroms,
ritual murders, continued confinement in ghettos and humiliations. During the pogroms of the mid 19th-century
the Jewish population of some towns in central Europe and eastern Europe declined by a third.
In the 19th century prejudice against Jews was based more on ethnic and racial superiority and inferiority.
Anti-Semitism was justified by racist theories.
Ukraine, Black Hundred 1907
Citizenship for Jews in the Austria-Hungary empire had strings attached and Jews were not allowed to
become citizens in the North German Confederation until 1869. In Hungary, many professional Jews had
assimilated. Between 1870 and World War I, many university professors in eastern Europe who were Jewish
chose to hide the fact by changing their names or even getting baptized.
Pogroms in Russia
In 1882, the Russian government passed its notorious anti-Semitic May laws that drove Jews off their farms
and forced them to live in town ghettos. Violent pogroms against the Jews erupted in the late 19th and early
20th centuries as a way of dealing with the "Jewish problem."
The pogroms began in during a period of repression and discontent when many people blamed their
problems on the Jews. Local authorities fanned these sentiments as the Jews made convenient scapegoats.
Among the peasantry Jews were regarded as money-hungry shopkeepers and capitalists. Authorities viewed
them as political agitators.
Many Jews fled overseas. Others joined revolutionary organizations such as the Bolsheviks. Pogroms in
tsarist Russia forced more than 2 million Jews to seek asylum in the United States between 1881 and 1914. In
1900, nearly a quarter of the new Jewish Russian arrivals in the U.S. were employed in the garment business.
Russian Pogroms in the Early 1900s
There were severe anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1903 and 1905-6. Vowing to "drown the revolution in
Jewish blood," Russian Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve sent police and gangs of anti-Semites on a
three-day pogrom through the town of Kishinev. Over 60 Jews were killed or injured and 500 Jewish homes
were looted or destroyed.
About half the 8,000 residents of the small Ukrainian town of Ster Yelesavetsky were Jews before the
Bolshevik Revolution. Most fled during the pogroms of 1918-21 and only about 99 remained when the Nazi
captured the town in July, 1941. All of them are believed to have been killed. After the war 80 returned.
Describing a pogrom in 1917 during the October Revolution, One Russian Jew told the New York Times,
This gang, they hanged my uncle by his rib, from a hook, and then they beheaded him. He said his mother
survived by hiding in a barrel. The fellow who rented this place, he was a honey trader, a very good Ukrainian
guy. So he hid her in a big honey barrel and put some trash on top of it so they wouldnt find her. I was born in
that barrel. Thank God, I started crying after the gangsters left.
Between the pogroms and World War II many Jews in Russia and the Ukraine said life was fairly normal and
they got along with the other ethnic groups that lived around them.
Pogrom Ukraine
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: World Religions edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York);
Encyclopedia of the Worlds Religions edited by R.C. Zaehner (Barnes & Noble Books, 1959); Encyclopedia of
the World Cultures edited by David Levinson (G.K. Hall & Company, New York, 1994); National Geographic,
the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Times of London, The New
Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Comptons Encyclopedia and various books
and other publications.
2009 Jeffrey Hays
Last updated March 2011
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