An interactive historical atlas
The Jewish Diaspora
Europe · the Middle East · North Africa — 1200 BCE to the present
Drawing the atlas…
About this atlas
Three thousand years of a people’s geography — the communities of the diaspora, the languages they spoke, and the migrations and expulsions that moved them, each grounded in academic sources and, where the evidence exists, in population genetics.
Communities 18
- Ashkenazi Jews
- Babylonian & Iraqi Jews
- Bukharan Jews
- Egyptian Jews
- Georgian Jews
- Israelites & Judahites
- Italian Jews (Italkim)
- Karaite Jews
- Krymchaks
- Kurdish Jews
- Maghrebi Jews
- Mountain Jews (Juhuro)
- Musta'arabi Jews
- Persian Jews
- Romaniote Jews
- Sephardi Jews
- Western Sephardim (the 'Portuguese Nation')
- Yemenite Jews (Teimanim)
Migrations & expulsions 50
- Assyrian deportation of Israel · 722 BCE
- Yahwist military settlement at Elephantine · 600 BCE
- Babylonian exile of Judah · 597 BCE
- Return from Babylon under Cyrus · 538 BCE
- Ancient settlement in Persia · 500 BCE
- Settlement in Cyrenaica · 300 BCE
- Settlement in Hellenistic Alexandria · 300 BCE
- Settlement across Asia Minor · 200 BCE
- Captives to Rome under Pompey · 63 BCE
- Dispersion after the fall of Jerusalem · 70
- Settlement in Byzantine Greece · 100
- Rise of the Babylonian academies · 200
- Persian Jews to the Caucasus · 500
- Settlement of the Rhineland from Italy · 800
- Rhineland to northern France · 900
- Flight from the Almohads · 1148
- Maimonides' family to Egypt · 1165
- Expulsion from England · 1290
- German-Jewish settlement in Poland · 1300
- Expulsion from France (Philip IV) · 1306
- Flight eastward after the Black Death massacres · 1348
- Final expulsion from France · 1394
- Expulsion from Austria (the Wiener Gesera) · 1421
- Expulsion from Sicily · 1492
- Expulsion from Spain · 1492
- Sephardim to Italy · 1492
- Sephardim to the Ottoman Empire · 1492
- Ottoman welcome of the exiles · 1500
- Flight from Provence to the Comtat · 1501
- Kabbalists gather in Safed · 1520
- Expulsion from the Kingdom of Naples · 1541
- Conversos return to Judaism in Amsterdam · 1590
- Portuguese New Christians to Amsterdam · 1590
- Western Sephardim to Hamburg · 1600
- The Khmelnytsky massacres · 1648
- First Jews to New Amsterdam · 1654
- Readmission to England · 1656
- Mass emigration from the Pale · 1881
- From the Pale to the New World · 1881
- Ladino-speaking Sephardim to South America · 1890
- The Second and Third Aliyah · 1904
- Deportations of the Holocaust · 1941
- Exodus from Libya · 1948
- Exodus from Morocco · 1948
- Operation Magic Carpet (Yemen) · 1949
- Operation Ezra & Nehemiah (Iraq) · 1950
- Expulsion from Egypt · 1956
- Algerian Jews to France · 1962
- Iranian Jews after the Revolution · 1979
- The great Soviet aliyah · 1989
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