About

An Atlas in Time

This is an interactive map of the Jewish diaspora across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa — from ancient Israel and Judah to the communities of today.

Scroll through time, century by century, and watch the geography of a people take shape: the Babylonian exile and the return under Cyrus; the Hellenistic settlements of Alexandria and Cyrenaica; the flowering of Sepharad in al-Andalus and its shattering in 1492; the Rhineland communities of Ashkenaz and their long migration eastward into Poland-Lithuania; the ancient Jewries of Yemen, Persia, Kurdistan, and the Caucasus; and the upheavals of the twentieth century.

Click any shaded community to read who lived there, the languages they spoke, the name by which they called themselves, and the figures and events that defined them. Click a migration arrow to read why people moved. Each researched community and migration account carries source-level citations, with priority given to academic scholarship and, where it exists, to genetic evidence relevant to these journeys.

See evidence and limits for a focused account of what the historical and genetic record can establish, the methodology for how the atlas was researched and drawn, the bibliography for its sources, the glossary for cited definitions, and the data page for machine-readable access.