The book of Esther in the Bible describes how 2,500 years ago, when Ahasuerus was king, Prince Haman planned to exterminate the Jews in the Persian Empire. Queen Esther, herself a Jewess, together with Mordecai, saved the Jewish people from annihilation by uncovering the plot.
Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman world powers occupied and subjugated Israel in biblical times.

The Bar Kokhba Revolt from 132 to 135 AD against the Roman occupation led to the expulsion of most of the Jewish population from the region and a Temple of Jupiter was built on the ruins of the destroyed Jewish temple. The Jews, expelled from Jerusalem, then lived in the “diaspora” until the state of Israel was founded in 1948.

In connection with the Crusades 900 years ago, Jerusalem was besieged, and a cruel massacre annihilated the city’s Jewish and Muslim populations.
In the Middle Ages a wave of Jewish persecution swept across Europe.
In 1290 all Jews were expelled from England, in 1394 the same thing happened in France, and in 1421 the Jews in Austria were expelled.
In 1492, the Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, declared that all Jews who did not leave the country would be executed. About 200,000 Jews, whose ancestors had lived in the country for hundreds of years, were forced to flee.
The pogroms in Tsarist Russia and in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century led to hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing these often religiously and nationalistically motivated persecutions of Jews.

At the end of the 19th century, the Dreyfus Affair took place in France, a political legal scandal in which the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of high treason and deported to Devil’s Island for life. The Jewish officer was later exonerated and the charge against him was revealed as a gross miscarriage of justice. During the trial, which was covered by the journalist Theodor Herzl, French anti-Semites demanded that all Jewish officers be forced out of the army, and later that all Jews be expelled from France. The Dreyfus affair attracted great international attention, and the affair led Theodor Herzl to realize that European anti-Semitism would never improve, which led to him writing the book “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”) and initiating the first Zionist Congress, whose stated goal was the formation of a Jewish state.

The Holocaust was the most extensive genocide in history; around six million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany prior to and during World War II. The genocide took place by identifying and segregating the Jews, then rounding them up in ghettos on occupied land, and deporting them to concentration camps where they were exterminated by systematic murder.