Today, 736 years ago, on July 18, 1290, a date that symbolically fell that year on Tisha B’Av, King Edward I of England issued orders to every town and city in the kingdom stating that all Jews were required to leave the country by the first day of November 1290. The decree further stated that any Jew who remained after that date would be executed.
Following the king’s order, thousands of England’s Jews were expelled that year. Although the Jews, who emigrated primarily to the nearby Netherlands, France, and Spain, were permitted to take their movable possessions with them, their homes, along with all property and assets they could not carry, became Crown property by royal decree.
After 1290, there is no official record of the existence of Jews in the Kingdom of England. The only formal way to remain in England was to reside in the House of Converts, an institution in London that, at the time of the expulsion, housed approximately 80 Jewish converts, who lived there free of charge under communal conditions.
England’s status as an island with no land borders enabled relatively strict control over immigration and prevented Jews from returning for approximately 350 years.
England thus became the first state in recorded history to expel its entire Jewish population completely, opening the floodgates to a historical wave of expulsions across the continent. France expelled its Jews twice, in 1306 and 1394. Hungary followed between 1349 and 1360. Austria joined in 1421, while various regions in Germany implemented similar expulsion policies throughout the 14th and 16th centuries. The pattern later spread eastward and southward with the expulsions of Jews from Lithuania in 1445 and 1495, culminating in the well-known expulsions from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497.
This pattern did not end in the Middle Ages or remain confined to Christian Europe. For centuries, from the 15th century until 1772, Jews were entirely forbidden from entering the territories of Russia. When they were finally permitted to enter, their movement was restricted to a closed and supervised geographical area known as the Pale of Settlement. In the modern era, between 1948 and 1967, this mechanism was recreated throughout the Islamic world. Nearly all the Jews of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen were forced to dismantle their ancient communities, flee, or be expelled from those countries out of genuine fear for their lives.
The most striking fact is that antisemitism has never required the physical presence of Jews in order to flourish. Hatred and fear of Jews became so deeply rooted in Western culture that they continued to exist as an independent ideology even in spaces “cleansed of Jews.” Approximately one hundred years after the complete expulsion from England, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. In “The Prioress’s Tale,” he presents Jews through a venomously antisemitic depiction as ritual murderers of young Christian children. Two hundred years later, when no Jew had set foot on English soil for three centuries, William Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, introducing the world to the figure of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender obsessed with collecting his debt through a pound of human flesh. These canonical works demonstrate that antisemitism is not a reaction to Jewish behavior but rather a cultural construct that sustains itself even after the object of its hatred has disappeared.
Breaking the Familiar Patterns of Persecution
When examining persecuted minorities throughout history, familiar patterns of hostility emerge: hatred arising from war, territorial conflict, ethnic origin, skin color, or clashes between religions and customs. Antisemitism, however, breaks every familiar pattern. Hatred toward the Jews has been the greatest and deepest hatred in human history. It is a historical phenomenon unique to the Jewish people, with no true parallel in the history of any other nation. While hatred toward other groups has always been limited by time, geography, or specific causes, no other form of hatred has ever been so universal, so profound, and so consistent as antisemitism.
The Past, the Present, and Eternity
Even today, we are witnessing a disturbing resurgence of antisemitism on the streets of modern England, on its university campuses, and within its political institutions. Violent demonstrations, expressions of hatred, and diplomatic efforts aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish state and its representatives are not isolated incidents. They serve as a painful reminder that the political, legal, and cultural instruments used to stigmatize the Jewish people have a tendency to reappear under modern guises. Today’s international campaigns of boycotts and isolation are, to a significant extent, the modern political incarnation of the historical expulsion decrees imposed upon the Jewish people by the family of nations.
Yet there is one fundamental and decisive difference between the Jews of 1290 and the Jews of today: the existence of a sovereign homeland with a Jewish army under an independent Jewish state. History demonstrates that the empires and kingdoms that persecuted, expelled, and sought to isolate the Jews, from medieval England to Spain, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, ultimately declined, weakened, or disappeared altogether. By contrast, the Jewish people, defying virtually every law of history and sociology, transformed themselves from a persecuted object into an independent political subject that continues to exist, create, and flourish in its ancestral homeland.
Antisemitism may have remained consistent, profound, and universal, but the Jewish people continue to sing their unique melody upon the stage of history. Throughout thousands of years of exile and persecution, they not only survived, they continued to offer the world a moral and cultural voice wherever they lived, leaving an enduring imprint upon human civilization. Today, the continuation of that Jewish melody no longer depends upon the goodwill of foreign rulers or royal decrees, but upon the strength and stability of the State of Israel.