Scroll through almost any heated discussion about Jews, Israel, or antisemitism — on social media, comment sections, or activist forums — and a familiar line appears with ritual regularity: “Jews were expelled from 109 countries.”¹
It is usually offered without explanation, without sources, and without context. Just a number, dropped like a trump card. The implication is clear enough: if Jews were expelled everywhere, then Jews must be the problem.
It sounds historical. It is not.
The claim does not come from academic research, population studies, or comparative history. It is a slogan — engineered to convert persecution into guilt.
Where the Number Comes From — and Why It Persists
The figure “109” did not emerge from any recognised historical accounting. It originated in extremist ideological circles in the late 20th century and was subsequently laundered into online discourse to give it the veneer of fact.² Its power lies not in accuracy, but in ambiguity. It carries the appearance of precision while remaining unfalsifiable.
Those who invoke it have consistently failed to produce a coherent list because the claim relies on collapsing centuries of radically different political realities into a single misleading total. Medieval duchies, city-states, short-lived principalities, overlapping jurisdictions, and repeated expulsions from the same territory under different rulers are all counted as separate “countries.”³
For example, the Edict of Expulsion from England in 1290 is often treated as equivalent to a temporary expulsion from a small German principality in the early 16th century — despite the fact that neither resembles a modern nation-state. Some lists even double-count the same territory under different regimes.⁴
This elasticity is not a flaw. It is what makes the claim rhetorically useful.
What Actually Drove Historical Expulsions
Acknowledging this manipulation does not mean denying that expulsions occurred. Many did — and they were often devastating. It may even be possible to justify the 109 figure if someone wished to. But all that would be evidence for is Jewish expulsion, not misconduct.
Historians have long identified the mechanisms behind medieval and early modern expulsions. Rulers cancelled debts owed to Jewish lenders by expelling them. Religious authorities targeted Jews during periods of intensified Christian or Islamic competition. Jews were scapegoated during plagues, economic collapse, or political instability. As a legally vulnerable minority, they were an expedient target.⁵
In other words, expulsions tell us far more about the societies that enacted them than about the people expelled.
Reducing this complex history to a single accusatory figure erases causation and responsibility — while turning victimhood into insinuation. Those who use the number tell us more about them than any implied Jewish evil.
The History the Slogan Erases
But if we want to understand what documented mass expulsion actually looks like in the modern historical record, there is a far more recent and far better evidenced example.
In the mid-20th century, nearly one million Jews were expelled or forced to flee from Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East and North Africa.⁶ These were not transient or colonial populations. Many of these Jewish communities predated Islam itself by centuries.⁷
Countries affected included Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Iran.⁸
This was not a series of isolated incidents. It was a region-wide collapse.
Jews were stripped of citizenship, subjected to discriminatory laws, had property confiscated, bank accounts frozen, and businesses seized. Pogroms occurred in multiple countries. In some cases, Jews were permitted to leave only if they formally relinquished all assets. In others, departure itself was criminalised.⁹
By the end of the 20th century, Jewish populations in many of these countries had declined by more than 99 percent. Entire ancient civilizations — linguistic, cultural, and religious — vanished within a single generation.¹⁰
This history is extensively documented through census data, government records, refugee scholarship, and international reporting. Scholars including Norman Stillman, Martin Gilbert, and Lyn Julius have detailed the scale and mechanisms of this displacement.¹¹ Yet it is frequently minimised because it complicates contemporary political narratives.
Not Whataboutism — But What Evidence Looks Like
Raising this history is often dismissed as “whataboutism.” It is not.
It is a methodological contrast. It shows what serious historical accounting looks like: identifiable states, specific laws, named confiscations, measurable population collapse, and an unambiguous refugee crisis. It highlights the difference between evidence-based history and insinuation by arithmetic.
The irony is stark. Jews were expelled en masse from Arab and Muslim countries, resettled largely in Israel or the West, and then accused of being perpetual outsiders everywhere else — including in the one place they rebuilt their lives.¹²
Why the Myth Persuades
The appeal of the “109 countries” claim lies not in its accuracy, but in its psychological utility.
As Jean-Paul Sartre observed in his analysis of antisemitic thinking, antisemitism is not a conclusion reached through evidence, but a passion that selects evidence to justify itself.¹³ The slogan offers a simple, emotionally satisfying explanation for Jewish survival, cohesion, and achievement: not resilience or history, but supposed universal rejection.
Large, round numbers feel authoritative. They resolve cognitive dissonance by replacing complexity with insinuation — and they absolve the believer from the burden of learning specifics.
But history does not work that way.
Facts Over Slogans
Real history is precise. It names places, dates, laws, riots, and demographic collapse. It distinguishes between medieval and modern, between empire and nation-state, between cause and pretext.
Propaganda relies on slogans that sound factual while doing ideological work.
If someone genuinely wants to discuss Jewish expulsions, they can start by abandoning the slogan and engaging with the best-documented mass displacement of Jews in modern history: the near-total uprooting of Jewish communities from much of the Arab world and Iran in the 20th century.
Antisemitism does not survive because it is true. It survives because it is repeated until it feels true.
Insisting on precision is not pedantry — it is how historical dishonesty loses its grip.
References
- David Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2018).
- Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now (New York: Schocken, 2019).
- Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE–1492) (New York: Ecco, 2013).
- Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
- Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
- Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
- Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979).
- Lyn Julius, Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2018).
- Edwin Black, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2010).
- Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House.
- Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands; Julius, Uprooted, passim.
- Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Knopf, 1999).
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1948).
