Physical World, The

On February 4, 1657, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, issued the first residence permit to a Jew, Luis Carvajal, since the expulsion of all Jews from England by King Edward I in the year 1290. The edict of expulsion had been officially overturn...

The Spanish cabinet approved a bill which granted religious freedom to Spain's Jews as well as other religious minorities. Since 1492 it had been officially forbidden to practice Judaism in Spain -- though this law had not been enforced for many years bef...

In 1509, Emperor Maximilian of Germany ordered that all Jewish books in the cities of Cologne and Frankfurt am Main be destroyed. This followed the request of Pfefferkorn, a baptized Jew, who claimed that Jewish literature was insulting to Christianity. T...

A few months after its creation, Napoleon's "Sanhedrin" (rabbinical supreme court) was dissolved. The Sanhedrin was created to approve certain religious regulations requested by the French "Assembly of Notables." The regulations were designed to blur the ...

The sexton of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, wrote a heart warming letter to George Washington, on behalf of the Jewish community welcoming the President on his visit to Newport. In his letter, he expressed a vision of an American gover...

When Governor of Georgia James Jackson resigned his post to serve as a US senator, the president of the Georgia Senate, David Emanuel, who was said to be Jewish, was sworn in as governor. If he was indeed Jewish, March 3, 1801, was the first time that a J...

The Inquisition was created in the twelfth century to find "Christian heretics" who would be punished or killed. Eventually, Jews too were open to such charges of heresy, simply for being Jewish; and torture was routinely used to extract "confessions." Ov...

Pope Sixtus IV instructed his local bishops that all Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition (see "Today in Jewish History" for Adar 7) should be sent back to Spain.

At the end of a week in which a group Jews took refuge in a local castle in Worms, Germany, the crusaders massacred them during their morning prayers. (see "Today in Jewish History" for Iyar 8.)