Numbers are approximate ancestors under each rule — borders moved more often than the families did. Open a flag to see how each empire treated its Jews.
Rome +
Judaea, the Galilee & Alexandria
Provinces
The empire that made the diaspora. Conquest in 63 BCE, the Temple destroyed in 70 CE, Bar Kokhba crushed in 135, Alexandria's community shattered in the revolt of 115–117. Rome scattered this family — and, by tradition, its sages held on in the Galilee for centuries regardless.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Legal religion, punished people: after the destruction of 70 CE every Jew in the empire paid the Fiscus Judaicus, a punitive tax, and after 135 Jews were barred from Jerusalem itself. Yet Judaism stayed lawful, and the sages rebuilt in the Galilee — which is why the tree's longest thread could stay.
The Italian states +
Venice, Lucca, Bologna & Padua
Cities
Stepping stones between the Land of Israel and Ashkenaz. Early-medieval Venice and Lucca carry the traditional line into Europe; Bologna and Renaissance Padua host it again centuries later, until the tightening ghettos send the Padua yeshiva's sons north to the Commonwealth.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Useful, therefore tolerated — mostly. Valued as physicians, traders and lenders; confined at night in Venice's Ghetto from 1516 (the city gave that word to the world); the Talmud burned in the papal 1550s. Scholarship flourished anyway, until the squeeze sent the young north.
Royal France +
Champagne & Paris
County & capital
Troyes, Ramerupt, Vitry, Dampierre, Paris — the lamps of medieval Jewish learning, under counts who protected and kings who expelled. The royal expulsions of 1182, 1306 and 1394 ended French Jewry, and the lines crossed into the Rhineland.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Protected as property: Champagne's counts treated their Jews as revenue to be guarded, so the academies thrived between blows. The crown's pattern — confiscate, expel, readmit for a fee, expel again (1182, 1306, 1394) — eventually ended a three-century world.
Holy Roman Empire +
The Rhineland, Franconia, Bavaria & Bohemia
Regions
Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Cologne under imperial protection that repeatedly failed — the Crusader massacres of 1096, the plague pogroms of 1348–49. Prague's scholar dynasty flourished and was expelled; Bavaria's rural Jews lived on revocable sufferance. The empire's Jews learned to keep moving east.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
The emperor's 'chamber serfs': legally the crown's own possession, taxed for protection that failed catastrophically in 1096 and 1348–49. City-by-city expulsions through the 15th century; in Bohemia, a golden age under one ruler and expulsion orders under the next.
Crown of Castile +
Sepharad
Region
The other great medieval Jewry. A priestly line lived under Castilian rule until the massacres of 1391 made the ending legible; it left for the Ottoman east around 1400, nine decades before the expulsion proved it right.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
From coexistence to catastrophe: centuries of relative tolerance under special royal taxation, then the massacres of 1391, mass forced conversions, an Inquisition (from 1478) to hunt the converts, and the expulsion of 1492. This tree's line read 1391 correctly and left early.
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth +
The heartland
Crown & Grand Duchy
Where most of the tree lived, for longest. Polish and Lithuanian charters — centuries older than the 1569 union — offered protections the west had revoked, and the Suvalkija villages, the Latgale shtetls, Brest, Grodno, Kraków and the Crown towns held the family for ten generations and more. The 1648–49 risings and the Deluge battered it; the partitions of 1772–95 carved it between three empires, and every branch woke up under new rule without moving an inch.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
The best deal in Europe for two centuries: royal charters, religious freedom in practice, and communal self-government — Jewish courts, schools and councils running their own affairs. The price was exposure: Jews managed the nobles' estates and taverns, and when the 1648 risings came, they came for the Jews first.
Habsburgs & Austria-Hungary +
Vienna, Bohemia, Upper Hungary & Galicia
Crown lands
An empire of whiplash: expulsion from Vienna in 1670, the Familiants Law capping Bohemian Jewish families, then full emancipation in 1867 — and a great-great-grandfather born in Vienna in the year of emancipation itself, as Nitra's and Dolní Kralovice's children flocked to the capital the law had finally opened.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Whiplash by decree: expelled from Vienna in 1670, capped by the Familiants Law from 1726 — only the eldest son of a Jewish family could legally marry — tolerated for a fee from 1782, emancipated at last in 1867. Then a golden age in Vienna, shadowed by elected antisemites, and ended absolutely in 1938.
Prussia & the German Empire +
Silesia & Posen
Provinces
Prussia took Silesia in 1742 and emancipated its Jews in 1812 — and the family's market-town branches spent the next century drifting into Breslau and the German middle class. The integration was real, and it was no protection: what Germany became after 1918 took more of this family than any empire before it.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Emancipation that half-arrived: citizenship in 1812 (with exceptions), full legal equality with the Empire in 1871, and genuine integration — commerce, culture, the professions. The antisemitic undercurrent never left, and after 1933 the state this family had joined turned on it totally.
Russian Empire & the Pale +
Congress Poland, Lithuania, Latgale & Belarus
The Pale of Settlement
The empire that inherited the Commonwealth's Jews and penned them in. Conscription, the 1881 pogroms, the 1882 May Laws, the pogrom years after 1903, the mass expulsion of Kovno's Jews in 1915 — between them they drove the Warsaw, shtetl-Poland, Vitebsk, Riga and Lithuanian branches to Britain, and roughly two million others besides.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Confinement as policy: Jews restricted by law to the Pale, double-taxed, conscripted — under Nicholas I boys were taken for terms of twenty-five years — barred by quota from schools and professions, squeezed by the May Laws, and exposed to pogrom waves in 1881–84 and 1903–06 that the state barely pretended to stop. Two million left; several branches of this family among them.
Ottoman Empire +
Salonika, Istanbul, Baghdad, Basrah & Moldavia
Provinces
The empire that took Jews in when Christendom cast them out — refuge for the Iberian line in the 15th century, and home to the Baghdadi line for four centuries of relative peace. It was the empire's collapse, not its rule, that ended Jewish Baghdad: the Farhud came in 1941, under the kingdom that followed.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Second-class but safe: as dhimmi — 'protected people' — Jews paid a special tax and lived under legal disabilities, and were welcomed, protected and largely left alone for four centuries, terms that looked very good from the Europe of the expulsions. Baghdad and Salonika prospered under them; the catastrophe came only after the empire fell.
British Empire +
London, Dublin & Mandate Iraq
Metropole & mandate
Where the branches converged. The East End took the Pale's refugees; Dublin took the ones who missed the boat to America; the empire's trade routes carried the Baghdadi merchants to London, Manchester and Bombay; and the surname was anglicised at the dock. The one empire in this story the family ran to, not from.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Emancipation by instalments, refuge with a queue: full rights by 1858, an open door for the Pale's refugees — narrowed deliberately by the 1905 Aliens Act, aimed squarely at Jewish immigration — and quiet, unspectacular safety, which after everything above was the point. In Mandate Iraq, British protection held until it didn't: its collapse in 1941 opened the door to the Farhud.
The Sephardi Atlantic +
Porto, Amsterdam & Brazil
Trade world
Portugal converted its Jews by force in 1497 and set the Inquisition on them in 1536; the Dutch Republic let them practise openly; colonial Brazil offered distance. One converso merchant line worked all three corners of that triangle.
How it was for the Jews
Treatment
Three regimes in one trade: Portugal forcibly converted its Jews in 1497 and burned 'judaisers' from 1536; Amsterdam let them return openly to Judaism — the first city in western Europe for centuries where that was legal; Brazil offered distance from both, with the Inquisition's occasional visitations as the asterisk.