No people on earth has been recorded for so long, scattered so far, or survived so much. The Jews begin in bronze-age Mesopotamia, cross nearly four millennia of empires that rose and fell around them, and today — some 15.7 million strong — live on six continents. This is the story of how.
The people in images
Origins
The story opens, in Jewish tradition, c. 1800 BCE, with Abraham’s journey from Ur of the Chaldees — a city in southern Mesopotamia, in what is today Iraq — toward a promised land. The patriarchs who follow, the sojourn in Egypt, and the Exodus under Moses form the founding memory of the people: less a documented history than the charter every later generation carried. And then the archaeology begins to rhyme with the tradition. By the 10th century BCE there are kings in Jerusalem; a stone fragment found at Tel Dan, carved around 850 BCE, boasts of the “House of David” — the first non-biblical evidence of the dynasty the scriptures describe.
The united kingdom split into Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Assyria erased the northern kingdom in 722 BCE — its people, the “lost tribes,” vanished into history and legend. Judah survived until 586 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon destroyed Solomon’s Temple and dragged the elite into exile. The catastrophe became the engine of the religion: in Babylon, without a Temple, Judaism became a religion of the book and the Sabbath. When Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and let the exiles return in 538 BCE — the decree recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder — the returnees rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, and the people reconstituted themselves around it.
Under Persian, then Greek, rule, the Jews of Judea kept their identity intact. When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV tried to crush the religion in 167 BCE, the Maccabean revolt won back independence — and for roughly a century the Hasmoneans ruled an independent Jewish kingdom (c. 140–63 BCE), until Rome arrived. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE and crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, renaming Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and barring Jews from the city. Stateless, the people made a portable homeland: the synagogue, the Sabbath, and the law.
Golden ages
Exile, paradoxically, became the workshop. In Babylon, the academies of Sura and Pumbedita produced the Babylonian Talmud (completed around 500 CE) — the vast commentary that made Judaism studyable anywhere on earth. A rabbi in France, Rashi (1040–1105), wrote commentaries still studied daily. The diaspora learned to carry its civilization in books.
The brightest of the golden ages came in Muslim Spain (c. 900–1200). Under the caliphs of Córdoba, Jews rose to vizierships — Samuel ibn Naghrela (993–c. 1056) commanded armies for Granada — and produced philosophy that still shapes thought: Maimonides (1135–1204), born in Córdoba, wrote the Guide for the Perplexed in Fostat, Egypt, reconciling Aristotle with the Torah. Hebrew poetry flowered in Arabic meters. It was, for three centuries, the closest the medieval world came to a shared civilization.
The other great shelter was Morocco. Jews had lived there since Roman times — and after the Catholic Monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree in 1492, expelling Spain’s Jews, tens of thousands crossed the strait. Morocco received them: the sultans granted them the mellahs — the first, in Fez, was founded in 1438 — protected quarters that became workshops of a unique Sephardic culture, where rabbis, merchants, and royal advisors wrote in Hebrew, Arabic, and Spanish. In the twentieth century, when the Vichy regime pressed for anti-Jewish measures, Sultan Mohammed V is remembered for shielding his Jewish subjects — a stance the monarchy still honors today.
Trials
No history of the Jews can skip the trials — and no people has been tried like this one. Medieval Europe expelled them from England (1290), France (1306), and Spain (1492); the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648–49 killed tens of thousands in Ukraine; the Russian Empire’s pogroms drove some two million Jews across the Atlantic between 1881 and 1914.
Then came the Shoah. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews — two-thirds of European Jewry — in ghettos, shooting pits, and extermination camps. It remains the most documented genocide in history, and its memory reshaped everything: the world’s conscience, international law, and the Jewish people’s own resolve that “never again” would be a policy, not a prayer.
Even Morocco, the old shelter, emptied. In 1948 roughly 250,000 Jews lived in the kingdom; drawn by Zionism and pushed by the new Arab-Israeli conflict, they left in waves — some 100,000 in a single secret airlift, Operation Yachin (1961–1964), negotiated with the young King Hassan II. By the end of the 1960s around 30,000 remained; today about 2,500 keep the synagogues of Casablanca and the mellahs of Fez alive — still the largest Jewish community in North Africa, still protected by the king, still praying in a country their ancestors entered two thousand years ago.
Today
In 1948 the State of Israel was proclaimed — the first Jewish state in nearly two thousand years — and absorbed survivors from Europe and refugees from the Arab world. Roughly a million Israelis today claim Moroccan descent, one of the largest diaspora roots in the country: Moroccan music, Moroccan food, and Moroccan rabbis are woven into Israel’s fabric. The circle closed: the exiles’ exiles came home speaking French and Arabic.
World Jewry today numbers about 15.7 million — roughly 7.2 million in Israel, about 6 million in the United States, the rest scattered from Paris to New York to Buenos Aires. A people making up 0.2 percent of humanity has won roughly one in five Nobel Prizes — a statistic that says less about talent than about a 3,000-year-old habit: when you cannot own land, you own books.
The story still has open questions — and honest history says so. In 2024, forensic researchers at the University of Granada proposed, on the basis of DNA analysis, that Christopher Columbus may have had Sephardic Jewish roots; the claim remains contested and unproven — a live research question, not a settled fact. What is settled is the Sephardic thread itself: when Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, it was a converso interpreter, Luis de Torres, who sailed with Columbus and became one of the first Europeans to set foot in the Americas. Morocco sheltered the exiles for centuries; the exiles carried Morocco into the New World. Nearly four thousand years on, the pattern holds: the Jews survive by becoming portable — and the portable, in the end, outlasts the empires.