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.
Jerusalem ★ Babylon Córdoba Fez New York Heartland and diaspora — stylized map c. 1800 BCE Abraham 586 BCE Babylonian exile 70 CE Second Temple destroyed c. 900 Golden age in Spain 1492 Expulsion from Spain 1948 State of Israel Origins · exile · return Moroccan Jews, 1948 to today Morocco · 1948 250,000 Morocco · late 1960s 30,000 Morocco · today 2,500 From a quarter-million to a few thousand — the Moroccan exodus 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.
