Jewish Diaspora - Post-Roman Period Jewish Populations

Post-Roman Period Jewish Populations

Main article: Jewish ethnic divisions

During the Middle Ages, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings: the Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe and Sephardic Jews of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), North Africa and the Middle East. These groups have parallel histories sharing many series of persecutions and forced expulsions.

By 1764 there were about 750,000 Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The worldwide Jewish population was estimated at 1.2 million.

Read more about this topic:  Jewish Diaspora

Famous quotes containing the words period, jewish and/or populations:

    Intellectual life is international. Only a period of discouragement, an age that has given up on itself, that wants to “preserve,” that has been driven onto the defensive, can be intellectually nationalist. Such a period is essentially “conservative.” A person who has progress in his heart is international.
    Robert Musil (1880–1942)

    For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
    Stephanie Coontz (20th century)

    The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
    Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
    Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them
    First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,
    Robert Graves (1895–1985)