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Israel is one of the youngest states in the world, and yet it is among the oldest. Other peoples have recovered their independence after centuries of subjugation, but they existed as a compact entity, living on their own soil, speaking their own language, and enjoying a greater or lesser degree of autonomy. The Jews, on the other hand, had to transplant themselves physically to a land from which they had been estranged for two thousand years. The history of the Jewish state begins in Europe.

After the destruction of Judea by the Romans in the first century A D, Jews fled in all directions, some eastwards towards the ancient Jewish communities of Babylon, others westwards to Egypt, and from there across the Mediterranean to Spain, Italy and France.

Wherever they settled they usually found themselves under the rule of Rome. They preserved their own way of life, their ritual, their exclusiveness, and the very fact that they were an identifiable minority could on occasion expose them to hostile crowds. Yet on the whole they enjoyed freedom of worship, and even privileges, till the rise of Christianity and its spread from the Mediterranean basin northwards along the Rhone and Rhine.

The first pogroms were perpetrated in France and the Rhineland in 1096 by Crusaders en route for the Holy Land. The Jews were gradually reduced to pariahs, their existence became precarious, and in Christian lands continued to be precarious until comparatively recent times.

They enjoyed greater stability under Islam, and in Moorish Spain in particular there was a rich flowering of Jewish culture, but it was stifled by the inquisition, and in 1492 the Jews of Spain were expelled.

Throughout the centuries from the fall of  Jerusalem until our own times the Jew moved from place to place. Tolerance brought an influx, oppression an exodus. Germany offered a refuge through the very fact that it was a patchwork of petty states, and if the situation became intolerable in one principality it was not difficult to transfer to another. Poland for a time, and especially under Casimir the great was particularly attractive  to the Jew. There was virtually no Polish middle class, which gave the Jew entrepreneurial openings, absent elsewhere. The rulers were tolerant, and at times even benign. Polanyah, the Jews called it in Hebrew, ‘Here Dwelleth the Lord’. It was to them what America became to the Jews of the nineteenth century, the golden domain, and a large Jewish settlement grew up. 

Excerpted  from Israel by Chaim Bermant