Were Jews Expelled From 109 Countries? We Counted.

The 109 countries thing is back. (Was it ever gone?) It turns up mostly in replies, tweets etc. as a sort of conversational shrug: Jews have been expelled from 109 countries, so maybe ask yourself why. Sometimes the account doing the asking has a sun wheel in its bio. Lately, as often as not, it has a watermelon. The meme (trope? genre?) doesn’t seem to mind who is holding it.

It also has a sequel. The ADL lists 109 in its database of hate symbols, along with its companion number, 110, which is shorthand for wanting the United States (or wherever the poster happens to live) to become the 110th. Sometimes it turns up as 1488-110, bundled with two older neo-Nazi codes in case the point was too subtle. So the number was never really about history. It’s a wish list with a footnote.

The usual response from our side is outrage, and I understand the impulse. But I’d like to propose something more boring, which is to read the list.

The version most of these memes trace back to was posted by the Bible Believers Church of Sydney, a fringe group run by Anthony Grigor-Scott, whose website also hosted the Protocols, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and an assortment of Holocaust denial. In 2007 the Federal Court of Australia found that one of the site’s newsletters broke the Racial Discrimination Act. The ruling was overturned on appeal because, not to get too technical, an unincorporated church is not a legal person and so cannot be sued. The list was never part of the case. It is still up, at a new .au address.

Nor is the page only about medieval history. Scroll past the list and the same page offers Issa Nakhleh’s Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Problem, then a numbered run of UN Security Council resolutions against Israel, then another of resolutions the United States vetoed, all sourced to former congressman Paul Findley. So the line from “Jews keep getting expelled” to “Israel keeps getting condemned” was drawn by the list’s original publisher, on the same page, years before anyone put a watermelon in their bio. The people sharing it today may not know that. The people who made it did.

The first thing you notice is that it doesn’t say countries. The page is titled “109 Locations.” Somewhere between Sydney and the comment section, locations became countries, a promotion most of these places did not earn. The second thing you notice, if you count (and why would anyone count?), is that there are 108 entries.

What are they? Forty-four are cities, towns or dioceses. Mainz appears four times, Prague four, Naples three. Two entries are orders by individual bishops in sixth-century Gaul. Eighteen are duchies, provinces and margraviates; Bavaria shows up five times, which may say more about Bavaria than about anyone else. Twenty-seven are mislabelled or are not expulsions at all, starting with the very first entry, Carthage in 250, where there’s no record of any expulsion of Jews. “Belgium” in 1370, nearly five centuries before there was a Belgium. “Germany,” twice, ditto. The Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648, filed as expulsions from “Ukraine” and “Poland,” which is an odd way to describe killing people in the country where most of the world’s Jews lived. The Holocaust is on there too, as an “expulsion.” One does wonder what a website with a Holocaust denial section thought it was conceding.

That leaves nineteen entries in which an actual sovereign state expelled its Jews. Remove the repeats (France three times, Naples three times, Russia three times, Hungary twice) and you have twelve states across seventeen centuries. Twelve. One of them is “Arab Countries, 1948,” which I’d have thought was not the entry the watermelon accounts wanted anyone dwelling on, but here we are.

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So is the meme simply false? Here is where I get a bit frustrated, and not only with the people you’d expect.

Because the honest answer is that the number is fake and the history isn’t. Edward I really did expel England’s Jews in 1290, after taxing them until they were no longer useful to the crown (and, conveniently, cancelling what was owed to them). Spain really did issue the Alhambra Decree in 1492. The Black Death really did bring massacres and expulsions up and down the Rhine, on the theory that Jews had poisoned the wells. A Jewish reader looking at this list isn’t learning anything new. She’s just seeing it arranged by people who think it’s a punchline.

So why were they expelled? Go through the list’s own entries and the reasons fall into a few piles, none of which flatter the people doing the expelling.

The first pile is religion, stated plainly. The Visigothic kings, Spain, Portugal and the Papal States weren’t responding to anything Jews had done. They wanted a realm without Jews in it and offered baptism as the alternative. The bishops of Clermont and Uzès wanted the same thing on a diocesan scale, being bishops.

The second pile is accusations, and here the record is almost embarrassing. In 1348 and 1349 Jews were accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. Pope Clement VI pointed out at the time, in two bulls, that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else and that it was raging in places with no Jews at all. Towns expelled and burned them anyway. Brussels in 1370 and Breslau in 1453 followed charges of host desecration, a crime that requires you to believe a communion wafer can bleed. In Brandenburg in 1510, dozens of Jews were executed and the rest expelled after a Christian thief confessed, under torture, to selling them a stolen host. The confession was false. Philip Melanchthon said so publicly in 1539, and the elector let the Jews back in. Sandomierz was a blood libel, the claim that Jews murder Christian children for their blood, a charge popes had been condemning since the thirteenth century.

The third pile is money. Philip Augustus cancelled debts owed to Jews in 1182 and took a cut. Philip IV seized their property in 1306. Edward I, see above. Regensburg expelled its Jews in 1519 within weeks of the death of the emperor who had protected them, after a preacher, Balthasar Hubmaier, spent years stirring up the town. The Frankfurt and Worms riots were led by guildsmen who wanted competitors gone.

The fourth is wartime suspicion. Maria Theresa expelled the Jews of Prague in 1744 on charges that they had helped the invading Prussians, which nobody proved, and reversed herself four years later. General Grant blamed Jews for cotton smuggling that plenty of non-Jews were also doing, and Lincoln revoked his order within weeks.

Notice what’s missing from every pile: a crime that Jews actually committed. The charges were false, unfalsifiable or beside the point, and the people bringing them usually stood to gain something, whether a cancelled debt, a removed competitor or a convert. “Ask yourself why” is a fair question, as it happens. The answer just isn’t about the Jews.

What the list is really asking is not “did this happen” but “what does it mean that it happened,” and the meme’s answer is that persecution is evidence of guilt. Nobody makes that argument about the Huguenots, or the Roma, or the Armenians. It’s reserved for one group, which is sort of the whole point.

What gets left off, meanwhile, is the other half of the ledger: the invitations. Poland-Lithuania wanted Jews for centuries. Sultan Bayezid II took in the refugees from Spain. Cromwell let them back into England. Many of the German towns on this list readmitted their Jews within a generation and then, apparently, expelled them again, which is how you get Mainz four times. Expelled from Mainz four times means admitted to Mainz at least three. Read that way, the list is less a record of Jews wearing out their welcome than of rulers who kept wanting Jewish money and then didn’t want to owe it.

Do I think a debunk changes the minds of people posting this? Not really. Nobody arrives at “109 countries” by way of evidence. But some of the people reading those replies haven’t decided anything yet, and it might help them to know that the famous number isn’t a number, the countries aren’t countries, and the source is a Holocaust denial website in Sydney that is still online. That seems worth a screenshot.

The full list, annotated

All 108 entries in the order the original page lists them. 44 are cities, towns or dioceses; 18 are regions; 27 are mislabelled or not expulsions; 19 are sovereign-state entries, which collapse to 12 distinct states.

#	Year	Place (as listed)	Type	Note
1	250	Carthage	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	No record of a Jewish expulsion; the Decian persecution of 250 targeted Christians.
2	415	Alexandria	City, town or diocese	City. Bishop Cyril drove Jews out during riots (Socrates Scholasticus).
3	554	Diocese of Clermont (France)	City, town or diocese	A diocese. Best-known event is Bishop Avitus’s forced conversion in 576.
4	561	Diocese of Uzès (France)	City, town or diocese	A diocese, by order of its bishop.
5	612	Visigoth Spain	Sovereign state	King Sisebut’s forced-conversion-or-exile decree. Real.
6	642	Visigoth Empire	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Same Visigothic kingdom counted again; there was no ‘Visigoth Empire’.
7	855	Italy	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Louis II’s order; Italy was not a country and the order is not known to have been enforced.
8	876	Sens	City, town or diocese	Town in Burgundy.
9	1012	Mainz	City, town or diocese	City. First of four Mainz entries.
10	1182	France	Region / sub-state	Philip Augustus’s royal domain only (around Paris), not the kingdom; Jews readmitted 1198.
11	1182	Germany	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	No such event; the 1182 date belongs to Philip Augustus in France (already listed). ‘Germany’ was hundreds of separate states.
12	1276	Upper Bavaria	Region / sub-state	A duchy-level territory. First of five Bavaria entries.
13	1290	England	Sovereign state	Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion. Real.
14	1306	France	Sovereign state	Philip IV, after seizing Jewish property. Readmitted 1315.
15	1322	France (again)	Sovereign state	Repeat of France; partial, readmitted later.
16	1348	Switzerland	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Black Death massacres in Swiss towns; no Swiss state existed in the modern sense.
17	1349	Hielbronn (Germany)	City, town or diocese	Heilbronn, a town. Black Death violence.
18	1349	Saxony	Region / sub-state	Territory, Black Death period.
19	1349	Hungary	Sovereign state	Black Death period; listed again in 1360.
20	1360	Hungary	Sovereign state	Louis I’s expulsion. Repeat of Hungary; readmitted 1364.
21	1370	Belgium	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Brussels/Brabant after a host-desecration libel. Belgium founded 1830.
22	1380	Slovakia	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	No Slovak state existed; part of the Kingdom of Hungary.
23	1388	Strasbourg	City, town or diocese	City. Listed again in 1514.
24	1394	Germany	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	‘Germany’ again; not a state.
25	1394	France	Sovereign state	Charles VI’s final expulsion from the kingdom. Real. Third France entry.
26	1420	Lyons	City, town or diocese	City.
27	1421	Austria	Region / sub-state	Vienna Gesera: the Duchy of Austria. Expulsion plus mass burning.
28	1424	Fribourg	City, town or diocese	City.
29	1424	Zurich	City, town or diocese	City.
30	1424	Cologne	City, town or diocese	City.
31	1432	Savoy	Region / sub-state	Duchy.
32	1438	Mainz	City, town or diocese	Mainz, second time.
33	1439	Augsburg	City, town or diocese	City.
34	1442	Netherlands	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	No Netherlands state until 1581; vague.
35	1444	Netherlands	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Netherlands again, two years later.
36	1446	Bavaria	Region / sub-state	Duchy. Second Bavaria entry.
37	1453	France	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Fourth France entry; no such event. France’s last medieval expulsion was 1394. Possibly a garbled local German expulsion.
38	1453	Breslau	City, town or diocese	City (Wrocław), after Capistrano’s preaching.
39	1454	Wurzburg	City, town or diocese	City/bishopric.
40	1462	Mainz	City, town or diocese	Mainz, third time.
41	1483	Mainz	City, town or diocese	Mainz, fourth time.
42	1484	Warsaw	City, town or diocese	City.
43	1485	Vincenza (Italy)	City, town or diocese	City (Vicenza).
44	1492	Spain	Sovereign state	Alhambra Decree. Real.
45	1492	Italy	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Actually Sicily and Sardinia under the Spanish crown; same decree as Spain.
46	1495	Lithuania	Sovereign state	Grand Duchy. Real; readmitted 1503.
47	1496	Naples	Sovereign state	First of three Naples entries.
48	1496	Portugal	Sovereign state	Manuel I’s decree, mostly forced conversion. Real.
49	1498	Nuremberg	City, town or diocese	City.
50	1498	Navarre	Sovereign state	Kingdom of Navarre. Real.
51	1510	Brandenberg	Region / sub-state	Margraviate, after a host-desecration trial in Berlin.
52	1510	Prussia	Region / sub-state	Territory; likely the same 1510 event.
53	1514	Strasbourg	City, town or diocese	Strasbourg again.
54	1515	Genoa	City, town or diocese	City-republic. Listed again 1550.
55	1519	Regensburg	City, town or diocese	City.
56	1533	Naples	Sovereign state	Naples again.
57	1541	Naples	Sovereign state	Naples a third time.
58	1542	Prague & Bohemia	Region / sub-state	Kingdom of Bohemia under the Habsburgs; not carried out in full.
59	1550	Genoa	City, town or diocese	Genoa again.
60	1551	Bavaria	Region / sub-state	Bavaria a third time.
61	1555	Pesaro	City, town or diocese	Town.
62	1557	Prague	City, town or diocese	Prague again.
63	1559	Austria	Region / sub-state	Austria again.
64	1561	Prague	City, town or diocese	Prague a third time.
65	1567	Wurzburg	City, town or diocese	Würzburg again.
66	1569	Papal States	Sovereign state	Pius V, except Rome and Ancona. Real.
67	1571	Brandenburg	Region / sub-state	Brandenburg again.
68	1582	Netherlands	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	No such expulsion; after the 1581 Union of Utrecht the Dutch Republic became a refuge for Jews fleeing Spain and Portugal.
69	1582	Hungary	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	No kingdom-wide expulsion; at most a local town ordinance (e.g. Sopron).
70	1593	Brandenburg, Austria	Region / sub-state	Brandenburg a third time, Austria a third time.
71	1597	Cremona, Pavia & Lodi	City, town or diocese	Three towns in the Duchy of Milan.
72	1614	Frankfort	City, town or diocese	Fettmilch riot. The Emperor restored the Jews in 1616 and executed the ringleaders.
73	1615	Worms	City, town or diocese	Riot; Jews restored the next year.
74	1619	Kiev	City, town or diocese	City.
75	1648	Ukraine	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Khmelnytsky massacres; murder, not an expulsion. No Ukrainian state.
76	1648	Poland	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Same Khmelnytsky uprising. Poland was where most Jews lived.
77	1649	Hamburg	City, town or diocese	City.
78	1654	Little Russia (Beylorus)	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Wartime violence; ‘Little Russia’ meant Ukraine, not Belarus.
79	1656	Lithuania	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Wartime occupation violence; Lithuania again.
80	1669	Oran (North Africa)	City, town or diocese	Spanish-held port town.
81	1669	Vienna	City, town or diocese	Leopold I’s expulsion (carried out 1670).
82	1670	Vienna	City, town or diocese	Same Vienna expulsion counted twice.
83	1712	Sandomir	City, town or diocese	Town (Sandomierz), after a blood libel.
84	1727	Russia	Sovereign state	Catherine I’s decree. Real.
85	1738	Wurtemburg	Region / sub-state	Duchy, after Joseph Süß Oppenheimer’s execution.
86	1740	Little Russia (Beylorus)	Sovereign state	Elizabeth’s 1742 decree; Russia again.
87	1744	Prague, Bohemia	Region / sub-state	Maria Theresa; reversed 1748. Prague a fourth time.
88	1744	Slovakia	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Not a state; part of Hungary.
89	1744	Livonia	Region / sub-state	Province of the Russian Empire.
90	1745	Moravia	Region / sub-state	Same Maria Theresa decree; reversed.
91	1753	Kovad (Lithuania)	City, town or diocese	City (Kovno).
92	1761	Bordeaux	City, town or diocese	City; targeted one group of recent arrivals.
93	1772	Deported to the Pale of Settlement (Poland/Russia)	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Residence restriction inside Russia, not an expulsion from a country.
94	1775	Warsaw	City, town or diocese	Warsaw again.
95	1789	Alsace	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Riots in 1789; France emancipated its Jews two years later.
96	1804	Villages in Russia	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Internal relocation; Russia again.
97	1808	Villages & Countrysides (Russia)	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Internal relocation; Russia again.
98	1815	Lübeck & Bremen	City, town or diocese	Two cities.
99	1815	Franconia, Swabia & Bavaria	Region / sub-state	Regions; Bavaria a fourth time.
100	1820	Bremen	City, town or diocese	Bremen again.
101	1843	Russian Border Austria & Prussia	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Border-zone residence rule inside Russia.
102	1862	Areas in the U.S. under General Grant’s Jurisdiction	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	General Orders No. 11, revoked by Lincoln within weeks.
103	1866	Galatz, Romania	City, town or diocese	City.
104	1880s	Russia	Sovereign state	Russia again (May Laws era restrictions and expulsions).
105	1891	Moscow	City, town or diocese	City.
106	1919	Bavaria (foreign born Jews)	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	Foreign-born Jews only; Bavaria a fifth time.
107	1938-45	Nazi Controlled Areas	Mislabelled or not an expulsion	The Holocaust: genocide, not expulsion.
108	1948	Arab Countries	Sovereign state	Real; roughly 850,000 Jews expelled or forced out of Arab and Muslim countries.