Medieval Anti-Jewish Massacres and Expulsions in Europe

Jewish communities across medieval and early modern Europe faced a recurring pattern of mob massacre and state-ordered expulsion rooted in religious hostility, economic resentment and blood libel accusations. During the First Crusade in 1096, crusading bands moving through the Rhineland destroyed flourishing Jewish communities along the Rhine, killing thousands who refused forced baptism. In Iberia, the Jewish community of Granada was massacred in 1066 amid the collapse of the city's Muslim taifa government, and in 1391 a wave of anti-Jewish riots swept Castile and Aragon, devastating Jewish quarters in Seville, Barcelona and other cities and marking the effective end of the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry. This pattern of violence and legal restriction culminated in 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree ordering Spain's Jews to convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom, expelling more than 160,000 people and ending centuries of Jewish settlement in Spain. Historians treat these episodes as connected stages in the deteriorating status of European Jewry across the medieval and early modern periods.