A Brief Timeline of the History of the Jewish People
From Earliest Times to 1948

By Steve Migden

Note: In the modern era, this timeline gives primacy to Jewish history in the USA. Some dates, especially early ones, are approximate.

1700’s BCE: The Patriarchs and Matriarchs are thought to have lived.

1300 BCE: The revelation at Mount Sinai and the giving of the Torah are thought to have occurred.

1200 BCE: First independently recorded evidence of Hebrew people in the land of Canaan, documented by reference to Israelites on Merneptah Stele, circa 1208 BCE.

1000 BCE: Temple is built by King Solomon.  Shortly afterward, the united kingdom splits into the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel.

721 BCE: Kingdom of Assyria conquers Kingdom of Israel and exiles most inhabitants.

586 BCE: Kingdom of Judah succumbs to Babylonian Empire; Jerusalem and the Temple are destroyed, and the Jewish inhabitants dispersed.

538 BCE: After longing for their land while in exile (see Psalm 137 and, much more recently, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” sung by The Melodians and other artists), the exiled Jews begin to return to their homeland, following the defeat of the Babylonian Empire by Persia.

516 BCE: Second Temple is constructed.  Following this, Ezra (approximately 460 BCE) leads the re-establishment of Torah observance in Jerusalem and, shortly afterward, Nehemiah (approximately 445 BCE) spearheads the rebuilding of the Temple’s and the city’s physical infrastructure.

330 BCE: Alexander the Great captures Jerusalem and surrounding lands. Beginning of Hellenistic influence over Israel.

165 BCE: Hasmonean Revolt against Hellenistic rulers, successfully re-establishing Jewish independence in the area.

63 BCE: Romans established dominion over the Levant.

30 BCE: Hillel, one of the most influential rabbis in Jewish history, is born. Known for both his scholarship and his compassion, Hillel will lead one of the major schools of Torah study in the period just prior to the destruction of the Second Temple. Rabbi Akiva (born 50 CE) is an equally influential rabbinic sage from the next century whose work will play a major role in defining the next 2,000 years of Rabbinic Judaism. He is eventually imprisoned by the Romans, and he dies a martyr early in the second century.

66-70 CE: Jewish revolt against Roman rule, siege of Jerusalem, destruction of the Second Temple, Jews again dispersed from their homeland. However, a solid and consistent Jewish presence remains, especially in the Galilee. In fact, Jewish presence in the land of Israel continues through the next two millennia, up to the present time.

400’s: Jerusalem Talmud is compiled.

500’s: Babylonian Talmud is compiled.

635-40 CE: Arab Muslim conquest of the Levant. This is followed, for about the next 1000 years, by further imperial conquests in Africa and Iberia to the west, and as far as India, the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia to the east. Treatment of Jews in the Muslim lands varies over time and place. Jews (and Christians) are generally considered Peoples of the Book (i.e. Abrahamic monotheists with a holy scripture); as such, they have a lower but somewhat protected status in the Muslim world.

400’s-1400’s: Middle Ages in Europe. Period of continuing marginalization and harassment of Jewish people, including disputations, autos de fe, forced conversions, forced expulsions (France 1182,1306, 1394; England 1290; Austria 1421; et al.), limitations on property ownership and occupations, ghettoization, etc. The Crusades (1096-1291), a series of attempts by European Christians to reclaim the Holy Land from Arab Muslim conquerors, also often result in the pillaging of many Jewish communities and mass murder of many Jews.

1040-1105: Rashi writes extremely important commentaries on the Tanach (Hebrew Bible) and Talmud.

1135-1204: Maimonides, eminent physician, philosopher and Torah scholar, publishes Mishneh Torah, extremely influential codification of Jewish law, Guide of the Perplexed, major philosophical work addressing Torah and Aristotelian logic, and other works. In 1148, the young Maimonides and his family fled their home in Spain to escape persecution by the Almohads. They live in North Africa, Israel, and then Egypt, where Maimonides eventually becomes physician to the Sultan.

1144: First known Blood Libel, the oft repeated claim that Jews kill non-Jews, particularly children, to use their blood for religious rituals and the making of matzah. These absurdly untrue but painfully fatal fantasies continue into the 1900’s and even the 2000’s; one of the most notorious is the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840.

1516: First ghetto established, in Venice.

1648-1657: Chmielnicki Massacres, a series of particularly vicious pogroms, led by Bogdan Chmielnicki, against the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. The massacres result in annihilation of hundreds of Jewish communities and the murder of probably about 6,000 Jews.

Early 1700’s: The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, provides healing and support to the poor, unlettered Jews of East Central Europe. He emphasizes the value of the passionate prayer and humble belief of the impoverished Jew, the person whose straitened circumstances distance him not only from material wealth but also from the opportunities for Torah study that are available to the well-to-do. He emphasizes that the prayers of the former are no less than those of the latter.

Late 1700’s: Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, later interpretations of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, First Amendment of the US Constitution are late 1700’s laws and statements of principle that establish freedom of religion, and thereby support basic rights for Jews in France and, most enduringly, the USA.

1813-1815: Napoleonic Emancipation of Jews in much of Europe, including rights of citizenship, religious worship, property ownership, movement and domicile outside ghettos.

Early 1800’s: Reform Jewish movement begins in Germany, and later in the century spreads to the US, where, by the late 1900’s, it becomes the largest of the four major religious denominations in American Judaism.

Late 1800’s: Orthodox Judaism, extant since at least the earliest days of Rabbinic Judaism, develops defined organizations, partly in response to the secularizing and modernizing trends of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), including the newly defined Reform movement.  Orthodox Judaism emphasizes the continued centrality of Torah, Talmud and Halacha in the lives of Jewish people. Among the organizations associated with Orthodox Judaism are Yeshiva University (later developing from Etz Chaim Yeshiva, which was founded in 1886), the Orthodox Union (1898), the Union of Orthodox Rabbis (1901), the Rabbinical Council of America (1923), and many other organizations, including organizations and schools associated with the Hasidic movement.

Late 1800’s: Conservative Jewish movement begins in the USA and, into the early 1900’s, grows under the leadership of Rabbi Solomon Schechter and others. The Jewish Theological Seminary, the movement’s major rabbinical school, is founded in 1886.

1791-1920: Systematic persecution of Jews in Russian Empire, including: restriction of Jewish settlement to Pale of Settlement, a small area in the western part of the empire; limits on land ownership and occupations; forced and long-term conscription of Jewish males so that their culture, religion and peoplehood are torn from them; numerous pogroms, including a torrent of particularly large and bloody ones (Odessa, Kiev, Warsaw, Kishinev, et al.) in the last decades of the 1800’s and the first years of the 1900’s.

1870’s: Beginnings of “racial antisemitism,” i.e. the pseudo-scientific notion that Jews, as a distinct race, are inherently inferior to the white people of Europe. Later, this racialized form of Jew-hatred becomes central to Nazi ideology and practice in the first half of the1900’s.  (Please note the painful irony here: in the latter 1800’s and the first half of the 1900’s, Jews are targeted for being non-white, but more recently, and barely 100 years later, they are now targeted as being “white oppressors.”)

1881: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, born in Lithuania, makes aliyah to Jerusalem and begins his ultimately successful quest to make Hebrew – the ancient liturgical language of the Jewish people – into a modern, fully functional spoken and written language.

1896: Publication, by Theodore Herzl, of The Jewish State, which marks the beginning of political Zionism. Herzl, an assimilated, secular Jew who was born in Hungary, is a journalist in Paris at the time of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, which, to Herzl and others, lays bare the injustice and Jew-hatred that inform even the relatively tolerant nation of France. Regarding the birth and development of political Zionism, it is extremely important to note that throughout their 2000-year dispersion from their homeland, and through an unrelenting blizzard of hate and mistreatment, the Jewish people continued to think and dream about their homeland, the Land of Israel, and to yearn for a return to it. (Those of you who have had the privilege of attending a Passover Seder have certainly heard the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” recited toward the end of the Seder service. Similarly, for centuries, the Jewish prayer book has been filled with references to Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, the wish for the return to the Land is expressed in daily and other prayers, Jewish people throughout the world pray facing toward Jerusalem, many Jewish holidays reflect the calendar and agricultural cycle of the Land of Israel, and over the centuries Jews have continuously exhibited many other behaviors and beliefs bespeaking an intensely meaningful tie to their ancient Homeland.)

1903: Publication in Russia of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated account of a supposed international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. This published lie continues to inform worldwide Jew-hatred through the 1900’s and into the 2000’s, particularly in Nazi Germany and among certain militant anti-Zionist groups in the Arab world, though it also briefly has some influence in the US, where, in 1920, the fabrication is published and promoted by Henry Ford.

1917: Balfour Declaration. In this document, the British government, soon to be responsible for overseeing the formerly Ottoman territory that was the ancient Land of Israel, states that it “view(s) with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…”

1922: Reconstructionist Judaism, the newest and smallest of the four major contemporary Jewish denominations in the US, essentially begins with Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s founding of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a synagogue in New York City. Later, in 1934, Kaplan published his highly influential Judaism as a Civilization.

1920-1939: Arab anti-Jewish riots, mainly led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.  Later, during World War II, Al-Husseini is a guest of the Nazis.  He meets with Hitler shortly after his arrival in 1941, is supported by the Nazis with a generous financial allowance, and regularly broadcasts Jew-hating propaganda (e.g., “Kill the Jews wherever you find them…”). With the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, he will return to the Middle East to continue his anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist activities.

1939: British government’s White Paper is issued, largely in response to Arab anti-Zionist pressure. The White Paper effectively nullifies the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a Jewish national home in Israel by, among other measures, severely restricting Jewish land ownership and, even more tragically, immigration. This, of course, occurs just at the time that the Jews of Germany and the rest of Europe are suffering intense persecution and, by the 1940’s, genocidal murder in the death fields and death camps of the Nazis. There is no refuge, no safe haven for the Jewish people of Europe.

1941-1945: The Shoah. While waging World War II, the Nazi German state and its collaborators simultaneously wage all-out war against the defenseless Jews of Europe, murdering some six million innocent men, women and children (in addition to persecution of other vulnerable people such as the Roma, homosexual men, and people with disabilities).

1947: UN General Assembly issues Resolution 181, the Partition Plan, which proposes two independent states, one Jewish and one Arab, in the land of the British Mandate. This plan is accepted by the mainstream of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of the Mandate, but rejected by the Arab world.

1948: David Ben Gurion, leader of the Zionist labor movement in the Yishuv and Israel’s first prime minister, declares the independence of the State of Israel. The independence declaration includes a statement of cooperation with the UN Partition Plan.  However, within days of Ben Gurion’s announcement, the fledgling nation is attacked by the surrounding armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, leading to a war that ends with an armistice and the establishment of borders in 1949. In the armistice agreement, Egypt obtains control over the Gaza area, and Jordan over the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). East Jerusalem, including the ancient Old City and its holy sites, such as the Temple Mount, also falls under Jordanian control. Rather than help build a Palestinian state in the lands of the British Mandate that, under the armistice agreement, do not fall under Israeli control, Egypt obtains control over Gaza, and Jordan over the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and East Jerusalem. Contrary to its commitments in the armistice, Jordan refuses to allow Jewish people access to the holy sites of the Old City, soon desecrating or destroying over fifty synagogues there, and destroying thousands of gravestones in the Jewish Cemetery on the Mount of Olives, using them for road-paving and, allegedly, to build latrines for Jordanian army camps.