A short version
I work in cyber security. Outside of that, my time goes to genealogy and Jewish communal life — the slow, quiet craft of tracing connections.
the longer version→
The short version is tidier. The longer one goes:
Cyber security — mostly the email side — is the day job that pays for everything else. Outside of it, most of my attention goes to two things that turn out to be the same thing — family history and Jewish communal life. One looks back, one looks forward, and both are really about what gets carried across generations.
Genealogy began as curiosity about a surname and grew into a project of more than 1,200 recorded ancestors across twenty-plus countries — biological and adoptive lines both, documented across centuries and, by rabbinic tradition, reaching back very much further. Somewhere along the way it stopped being data and became inheritance. Community work — co-founding the Derbyshire Jewish Community — is the present-tense version of the same urge: find a gap, fill it, remember who's vegetarian, book the room, send the email, show up.
Beyond those: Doctor Who (especially the earliest years), AI experiments that feel more like play than work, a chronic weakness for technical detours, and an instinct for the well-timed wind-up that refuses to retire.
Security
Genealogy
Community
Say hello
Six threads
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01 Cyber Security / trade +
The day job. Defensive side — understanding attacks well enough to block them. Mostly invisible when it's going well, which is how it should be.
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02 Genealogy / obsession +
Started as curiosity about a surname. Now runs to more than 1,200 recorded ancestors across twenty-plus countries — and 157 generations on its longest, most legendary line. Somewhere along the way it stopped being data and became inheritance.
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03 Community / choice +
Co-founder and coordinator of the Derbyshire Jewish Community. Mostly unromantic logistics — emails, posts, events, welcoming newcomers. That's most of what community work actually is.
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04 Doctor Who / devotion +
Followed the whole run, from An Unearthly Child through the Wilderness Years, with AI-regenerated stand-ins for the episodes the BBC wiped. Strong views on the Hartnell and Troughton eras, and on which Doctors don't get the credit they deserve.
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05 AI / enthusiasm +
The rare technology that feels more like play than work. Equal parts skepticism and engagement.
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06 Mischief / instinct +
Best kept off the public record. The element of surprise is the whole point.
Where the family comes from
More than 1,200 recorded ancestors — a Jewish family scattered across Europe and the Middle East, and slowly stitched back together, biological and adoptive lines both. The documented branches lived under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburgs and Austria-Hungary, Prussia and the German Empire, the Russian Empire and its Pale of Settlement — the western strip of that empire where Jews were required by law to live — the Ottoman Empire, and finally the British Empire — most of them not by choice. Beyond the documents, traditional rabbinic genealogies carry the deepest lines through medieval France and Italy back to the ancient Land of Israel — 157 generations on the longest reckoning, taken with exactly as much salt as a 157-generation line deserves.
A note on evidence, for newcomers and sceptics alike: this history comes in three layers, and the page is careful to label them. Documented means backed by records — birth, marriage and death registers, synagogue books, censuses, ship manifests, gravestones. The records themselves sit in public archives — civil registries, JewishGen and state collections — that anyone can consult. Traditional means recorded in the rabbinic genealogies Jewish communities kept for centuries — treasured, but not provable to modern standards, and never presented here as if it were. Legendary means the Bible's own family tree, carried as heritage rather than evidence. Where this family lived, under which rulers, and why each branch left — that part is documented history throughout.
The full tree, with sources attached to every documented person, lives at sassoon.family — private, because it holds the details of living relatives; family can request access.
Some of it deserves more than a flag tile: the family stories, each with a page of its own.
before all of this
Israel Judaea, originally +
Where Jewish history begins, and where every branch of this family traces its deepest origin. The leaving was not chosen: Roman conquest — the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE — scattered the Jews of Judaea across the empire and beyond. One thread of this family followed the older exile east to Babylonia — modern Iraq — becoming the Baghdadi line; the rest drifted through the Mediterranean into Europe, becoming the Ashkenazi lines (Ashkenazi simply means the Jews of northern and eastern Europe, as Sephardi means those of Spain and the Islamic world). The tree's longest thread, by rabbinic tradition, stays in the Galilee for centuries after the dispersal — a line of scholars and sages reaching back through the academies of Yavne — the council that rebuilt Jewish learning after the Temple fell — the royal house of ancient Judah, and ultimately to the opening chapters of Genesis, before crossing to Italy in the eighth century to seed the founding communities of European Jewry. Everything that follows is the long road out from that dispersal.
The number on each flag counts the recorded ancestors who lived or died there — traditional and legendary lines included, which is why the deep Lithuanian and Latvian clusters run high.
Austria +
Vienna
City
16th to late 19th century, Habsburg Empire and Austria-Hungary. An early chapter ended abruptly: a scholarly line lived in Vienna until the expulsion of 1670, when the emperor drove the city's Jews out and this branch went north to Silesia. The later chapters were brighter — Vienna's Jews moved from restricted court-Jew status to full emancipation (equal rights under law) in 1867, after which the city became one of Europe's great Jewish centres. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in the year of emancipation itself. The reasons to leave arrived later: from the 1890s Vienna's politics turned openly antisemitic under mayor Karl Lueger, and the Anschluss of 1938 destroyed the community altogether — leaving, for those who could, became a matter of timing.
Belarus +
Vitebsk
City
Late 19th century, Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement. Nearly half the town was Jewish — a shtetl, one of the small towns where eastern European Jewish life was lived, full of Yiddish-speaking tradesmen and scholars, and the birthplace of Marc Chagall, a cousin of the family through a shared surname line. The family left in the wave of emigration that followed the 1881 pogroms — organised anti-Jewish riots — and the 1882 May Laws, which restricted Jewish settlement and livelihoods further still and drove hundreds of thousands from the Pale to Britain and America.
Brest
City
15th to 17th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Brisk, in the records — one of the oldest and most important Lithuanian-Jewish communities. A scholarly line was anchored here from the early 1400s, joined in the 16th century by a celebrated arrival from Italy. The wars of the mid-17th century — the 1648–49 Cossack risings and the Muscovite and Swedish invasions that followed — devastated Lithuanian Jewry and scattered its families across the Commonwealth.
Grodno & the small towns
Region
16th to 18th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Grodno, Slonim, Kuźnica, Traby, Navahrudak, Mogilev, Bobruisk — a web of communities through which half a dozen of the tree's lines pass, the adoptive line among them. Rabbinic postings and marriage matches moved scholarly families constantly between these towns; that mobility, not flight, explains most of the moves — until the 17th-century wars and, later, the Pale's poverty gave harder reasons.
Brazil +
São Paulo
City
Late 16th to 17th century, Portuguese colonial Brazil. The far end of the converso escape route — conversos were Jews forcibly converted to Christianity, many of whom kept their Judaism in secret: a Porto-born merchant ancestor crossed the Atlantic around the turn of the 17th century, part of the so-called New Christian trading world that linked Portugal, Amsterdam and Brazil — places where the Inquisition's reach was thinner, though never absent.
Czechia +
Dolní Kralovice
Village
Early 19th century, Habsburg Empire. A small rural Jewish community in Bohemia; daily life was constrained by Austria's Familiants Law — which capped the number of Jewish families and restricted marriages — until Jewish emancipation in 1849. Two generations of the family were born in this village; when emancipation finally opened the cities to Jews, the line moved on to Vienna, part of a broad 19th-century migration of Bohemian rural Jewry into the imperial capital.
Hlučín
Town
Late 18th century, on one of the most contested borders in central Europe. When a 5×great-grandfather was born here in 1772, the town had been Prussian Silesia for thirty years, having been lost by the Habsburgs in the Silesian Wars. Across the next five generations it would pass between Prussian, Czechoslovak, Nazi German, and Czechoslovak rule. The next generation of the family moved south to Rybnik, where this branch put down roots — the ordinary mobility of Silesian Jewry, where residence rights, trade licences and marriage matches pulled families from one market town to the next.
Prague
City
15th to early 17th century, Kingdom of Bohemia. One of the capitals of Ashkenazi life — and home, across more than a century, to a celebrated dynasty of scholars in this tree, rabbis and communal leaders of the city's golden age. Habsburg expulsion orders in 1541 and 1557 and the pull of the Commonwealth's freedoms sent its sons east, to Kraków, Poznań and beyond — exactly the route this tree records, branch after branch.
Egypt +
Alexandria
City
Roman era. One of the great cities of the ancient Jewish diaspora — the communities living outside the Land of Israel. By tradition a sage of the Mishnah era (the early rabbinic period, around 200 CE) was born here and returned to the Galilee, in the centuries when scholars moved freely between Alexandria's vast Greek-speaking Jewish community and the academies of the Land of Israel. The community itself was shattered in the diaspora revolt of 115–117 CE; for Alexandria's Jews, staying was rarely an option for long.
Goshen
Region
The Bible's Egypt. By the traditional reckoning, around a dozen generations of the tree's longest line lived in Goshen, in the eastern Nile delta — and the leaving is the most famous departure in Jewish history, retold at every Passover table since, this family's included.
France +
Troyes
City
11th to 14th century, county of Champagne. One of the lamps of medieval Jewish learning — and by rabbinic tradition this tree descends directly from the city's most famous school of Torah commentary, through the scholar-village of Ramerupt nearby. Leaving was royal policy: the expulsions of the Jews from France in 1182, 1306 and finally 1394 extinguished French Jewry, and the lines crossed into the Rhineland and beyond.
Vitry & Dampierre
Towns
11th to 13th century, Champagne. Tosafist towns — home to the medieval scholars who built on the great Troyes commentaries. The scholar families of the tree's traditional line moved between Champagne's academies as students followed teachers: the ordinary mobility of a world built around the yeshiva — the traditional academy of Jewish study — rather than the market.
Paris
City
12th to 14th century — and then again, six hundred years later. The medieval Paris line lasted until the era of the expulsions; by tradition one rabbinic ancestor of this branch ended his days in the south, in Marseille, after the northern communities scattered. The city returns to the tree in the modern era from an unexpected direction: a 3×great-grandfather born in Baghdad in 1849 settled in Paris and died there in 1927 — part of the Baghdadi merchant diaspora that spread west along the trade routes, the same currents that carried his relatives to Manchester and London.
Germany +
The Rhineland
Region
10th to 15th century, Holy Roman Empire. Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Cologne were the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry, and the tree's traditional lines run straight through them — including a scholar dynasty brought from Italy to Mainz in the 10th century, the seeding event of Rhineland Jewish life, with later branches in Nuremberg, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Franconia and Leipzig. The reasons to leave were written in fire: the Crusader massacres of 1096 and the plague-era pogroms of 1348–49 drove the survivors east into Poland and Lithuania — the road almost every Ashkenazi family once walked.
Bavaria
Region
Late 17th to early 18th century, Holy Roman Empire. Jewish life in Bavaria during this period was largely rural and tightly constrained by court-protection arrangements, with communities centred on small towns rather than the larger cities. A 7×great-grandfather — a rabbi — was born here in 1700; the line then moved east into Habsburg Silesia, part of a broader 18th-century migration of Bavarian Jews toward the more established and legally secure Silesian communities, settling at Zülz where the family put down roots for the next several generations.
Breslau
City
Early 20th century, German Empire, Weimar Republic, then Nazi Germany. Breslau had one of Germany's largest Jewish communities and a famed rabbinical seminary — a world destroyed in the Shoah, the Holocaust. A grandmother of the family was born here in 1938; her father was arrested on Kristallnacht and held at Buchenwald, until her mother walked into Gestapo headquarters and bluffed him out. The family fled in February 1939.
Opole
City
Mid-to-late 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia and then the German Empire. Jews had been emancipated in Prussia in 1812; the Upper Silesian community was middle-class, German-speaking, and well integrated — so well integrated that few saw reason to leave until after 1933, when the Nazi state made the reasons unmistakable and the exits closed one by one. A great-great-grandmother of the family was born here in 1880; she did not get out, and was shot at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas on 29 November 1941.
Pitschen
Village
Early 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia. A small Jewish community in an Upper Silesian market town, just before Prussia's 1812 Emancipation Edict lifted the last restrictions. A 4×great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1811. The Edict, a year later, is exactly why families like his would soon scatter: once Jews could live and trade anywhere in Prussia, the small-town communities steadily emptied toward the cities. Pitschen is also the stage for the family's best story: the soldier who carried a wounded officer off the field at Leuthen, fought this town's magistrates for four years for the right simply to live here, walked to Berlin in winter to remind Frederick the Great of a battlefield promise — and was given the name Mühsam, 'arduous', by the King himself. The full story is under Numbers.
Poznań
City
Late 19th century, Prussia and the German Empire. Poznań had been one of the most important Polish-Jewish centres for centuries; by this period the community was thinning as Jews moved westward to larger German cities. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1872 before making exactly that move — west to Breslau.
Rybnik
City
Early 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia. A modest Upper Silesian Jewish community, primarily engaged in trade and small commerce. Two generations of the family were born here in the early 1800s, working among the traders of Silesia. When the later generations moved on, it was the pull every small Silesian community felt after Prussian emancipation in 1812 — the freedom to settle anywhere drew Jewish families out of the market towns toward the larger cities and their livelihoods.
Zülz
Village
18th to early 19th century, Habsburg then Prussian Silesia (Prussia took the region in 1742). Zülz was remarkable — one of only two towns in all of Silesia where Jews were permitted continuous residence from medieval times. Two generations of the family were born here: a 6×great-grandfather in 1741, and a 4×great-grandmother in 1814. After the 1812 Prussian Emancipation Edict allowed Jews to live anywhere in Prussian territory, the concentrated Jewish community in Zülz slowly dispersed, and this branch moved on to Pitschen.
Greece +
Salonika
City
15th century — Byzantine and briefly Venetian until 1430, then Ottoman. Refuge for the tree's Iberian branch: the Ottomans took in the Jews that Spain persecuted and expelled, and Salonika would in time grow into the largest Jewish city in the world. The line moved on to Istanbul within a generation — not in flight this time, but along the empire's own trade and rabbinic networks.
Iraq +
Baghdad
City
Mid-19th to mid-20th century, Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, and then the Kingdom of Iraq. One of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, tracing back to the Babylonian exile — around 40,000 strong by 1900, prosperous in trade, banking and crafts. Shattered by the Farhud in June 1941, a two-day anti-Jewish pogrom in the power vacuum following the collapse of the pro-Nazi Iraqi government — among the dead was a great-great-grandfather of the family. Those who left afterwards — and within a decade nearly all of Iraq's Jews did — were fleeing what followed: dismissals, arrests and property seizures after 1948, until the airlifts of 1950–51 carried away a community two and a half thousand years old.
Basrah
City
Turn of the 20th century, Ottoman Empire. A Jewish merchant community at the Gulf trade port, closely tied to Baghdad's much larger community further up the Tigris. A great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1900; the family later made its way to England, part of the broader Baghdadi-Jewish merchant diaspora that moved through the British Empire's trade networks — Bombay, Shanghai, Singapore, and London — and the family name was anglicised on arrival.
Ireland +
Dublin
City
Late 19th and early 20th century, United Kingdom-ruled Ireland. The Dublin branch of the family arrived by accident — Russian Jewish refugees bound for America, they landed in Liverpool, made their way across to Dublin, and settled in Portobello, the city's 'Little Jerusalem' that filled with Lithuanian and Russian arrivals in the 1880s-90s. The Irish-born daughter they raised there grew up with a thick Irish accent and eventually took it with her to London — the usual onward move for Ireland's small community, drawn to a Jewish world many times larger, with work and marriage prospects to match.
Italy +
Lucca
City
8th to 10th century. Traditional cradle of one of Ashkenaz's founding dynasties — a family of scholars who, in the 10th century, were invited north over the Alps to Mainz, the event that by tradition seeded Rhineland Jewry. They left not in flight but by invitation — a rarity in this tree.
Venice
City
8th to 10th century. The tree's longest traditional line passes through early-medieval Venice — communities living on the trade routes between the Land of Israel and Europe, the same routes by which scholars and their families moved west after the eighth century.
Bologna
City
13th to 15th century. A waypoint of the same traditional line as it moved between Italy and Germany. Italian Jewry lived under papal and civic pressure that tightened and loosened by decade — banking licences granted and revoked, residence permitted and rescinded — which kept scholarly families permanently mobile.
Padua
City
16th century. Home to one of Renaissance Italy's great yeshivot — academies of Jewish study; a celebrated rabbinic line here sent its sons north to Poland-Lithuania, where Jewish life offered a freedom the ghettos of Italy increasingly did not. One of them, by family tradition, was elected king of Poland — for a single night.
Latvia +
Daugavpils
City
Mid-17th to 18th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (soon after, Russian Empire). Known in Yiddish and in Jewish records as Dvinsk, the city would later become one of the great Lithuanian-Latvian yeshiva centres. This is one of the densest places in the whole tree: dozens of ancestors across a dozen interwoven lines were born here from the 1640s onward. Families rarely stayed put more than a generation or two — trade and marriage routes shuffled them constantly between Dvinsk, the Latgale shtetls and Riga.
Riga
City
17th to early 20th century, successive rule under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (to 1621), the Swedish Empire (to 1710), and then the Russian Empire. One branch of the family — traceable back through seven generations — was anchored in Riga continuously from the 1620s, when a 9×great-grandfather was born there, through to a great-grandmother born in 1901. Riga by 1900 had become a major Baltic Jewish centre, with roughly one in ten residents Jewish and flourishing Yiddish and Hebrew cultural life; the 1901-born great-grandmother left for England as part of the broader emigration out of the Russian Empire in the years around the 1903–1906 pogroms.
Rēzekne & Viški
Towns
17th to 19th century, Polish Livonia and then the Russian Empire. A dense cluster of Latgale branches — generation after generation in the shtetls of Rēzekne (Rezhitsa in the records), Malta and Viški, between Dvinsk and the Lithuanian border. Movement was constant but local, driven by trade and marriage, until the railway age and the pogrom years pushed the young toward Riga and the boats.
Lithuania +
Kaunas
City
Late 19th century and then the Second World War, Russian Empire and then Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Kovno was a major Litvak (Lithuanian-Jewish) centre — home to the famed Slabodka Yeshiva and a third Jewish by population. A great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1898; for young Jewish men of his generation the reasons to go all pointed the same way — Tsarist military conscription, the pogrom years after 1903, and the Tsar's mass expulsion of Kovno's Jews into the Russian interior in 1915. Four decades later, two great-great-grandmothers from other branches of the family were shot at the Ninth Fort on 29 November 1941, having been deported from Germany for that purpose. In the same year, that great-grandfather's own mother was killed a hundred kilometres west, in the Ponary massacres near Vilna — a third casualty from a third branch, all in 1941.
Kukliai
Village
Late 16th to 18th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A tiny village in the southern Suvalkija region, near Lazdijai — and, improbably, one of the deepest wells in the whole tree: dozens of ancestors across more than a century of interlocking village lines were born here, from the 1590s onward. The lines eventually flowed out in every direction — north to Riga, east to the Latgale shtetls, even south to Galicia — the typical paths for village families, following marriage and trade toward the larger communities.
Lazdijai
Town
Late 16th to early 17th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A small town in Suvalkija near the Polish border, part of the deep Lithuanian-Jewish heartland. An 11×great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1572, and the line continued here for another generation before moving north to Riga. The moves that followed were the ordinary mobility of Lithuanian Jewry — marriage and trade carried lines between towns, and eventually toward the opportunity of a Baltic port.
Veisiejai, Metelė & Seirijai
Towns
16th to 18th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The villages around the Suvalkija lakes — recorded in the tree as Vishay, Metele and Seirijai — hold the densest documented cluster of all: whole networks of interrelated families, generation after generation, back to ancestors born in the 1540s. Lines left the way village lines always did, by marriage into the next town over — until, town by town, they reached the cities.
Vilnius & Anykščiai
City & town
15th to 17th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Šnipiškės quarter across the river from Vilna held one 17th-century branch; Anykščiai, north of Kaunas, holds the single deepest documented line in the Baltic part of the tree — ancestors recorded back to the 1390s. Jewish settlement in Lithuania was itself the result of an earlier flight: the Grand Dukes' charters drew families east when crusade-era and plague-era Germany expelled them.
The northern towns
Region
17th to 18th century — Pasvalys, the ‘New Town’ by Panevėžys, Marijampolė, Jurbarkas, Kelmė, Ariogala. The wider web of the Lithuanian branches, every one tied by marriage back to the Suvalkija and Latgale clusters. The Grand Duchy's Jews lived dispersed across hundreds of such towns; lines moved between them constantly, and the 19th century funnelled their descendants toward Kovno, Riga, and eventually the boats.
Moldova +
Chișinău
City
17th to 18th century, Principality of Moldavia under Ottoman suzerainty. A small early community on the trade roads between the Commonwealth and the Black Sea, with a branch in Telenești to the north; one line lived here for two generations before marrying north into the Latgale branches. Border principalities changed hands with every war, and Jewish families moved with the trade rather than wait for the next army.
Netherlands +
Amsterdam
City
17th century, Dutch Republic. The free city of the Sephardi world: Amsterdam tolerated open Jewish practice when almost nowhere in western Europe did, and the tree's Portuguese line passed through it as converso merchants returned to Judaism beyond the Inquisition's reach. Those who moved on did so for trade — Amsterdam was a junction, not a terminus, in the Sephardi Atlantic world.
Poland +
Będzin
Town
Early 18th to 19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A predominantly Jewish town near the Silesian border, where Jews had lived continuously since the medieval period and made up around four-fifths of the population by the 19th century. Multiple generations of the family were born here from the 1740s through the 1830s — among the deepest continuous Polish anchors in the tree. When the family finally left, the pressures were those of all Congress Poland: a crowded shtetl economy with too little work, Tsarist restrictions tightening after 1881, and the pull of relatives already in the West.
Chęciny
Town
Late 18th to mid-19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then Russian-ruled Congress Poland. A medieval market town in the Świętokrzyskie hills near Kielce, with one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in Poland — its synagogue dates from the 1630s. Three generations of the family were born here, from a 5×great-grandfather around 1786 to a 3×great-grandmother in 1838. The same forces that later emptied towns like this — shtetl poverty and the Tsarist restrictions of the 1880s — carried this line, like so many, toward the cities and then the boats.
Ciechanów
Town
Mid-19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A market town north of Warsaw whose Jewish population grew to roughly half the total before the First World War. A 3×great-grandfather was born here around 1846; his son moved west to Lubień Kujawski, and his grandson — the next generation on — would emigrate further still, to London's East End, joining the broader Russian-Jewish flight that intensified after the 1881 pogroms. That grandson would open the Cable Picture Palace on Cable Street.
Głogów
City
Late 17th to early 18th century, Habsburg Silesia (Prussian after 1742). A Lower Silesian city — German Glogau — where the family's deepest known Polish ancestor, an 8×great-grandfather, was born in 1670. The line continued here for several generations before moving south to Zülz — a legal calculation as much as anything, since in a Silesia where Jewish residence was otherwise precarious, Zülz was one of the rare towns where Jews could live without question. There this branch's continuous story properly begins.
Grabów nad Prosną
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town in the Greater Poland region, and the namesake of one of the family's lines. A 3×great-grandfather was born here in 1840; his son was born a generation later in Posen city itself. Posen's Jews spent the century leaving — thin small-town economies and the lure of full civic life in the German cities pushed each generation further west, this line included.
Kobylin
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town with a Jewish community of a few hundred. A 3×great-grandfather was born here in 1848; like the rest of Posen's small-town Jewry, the family's next generations moved on westward, where work and emancipated city life beckoned. His daughter, a generation later, would be born in Rawicz and end her life at the Ninth Fort in 1941.
Kazimierza Wielka, Opatów & Suwałki
Towns
15th to 19th century. Kazimierza Wielka, in the Świętokrzyskie countryside, holds one of the tree's notable medieval Polish anchors — a priestly line settled there in the late 1400s after wandering from Spain by way of Salonika and Istanbul; Opatów and Suwałki carry later branches. The draw of Poland was simple: Polish royal charters offered Jews protections that western Europe had revoked — until, centuries later, partition and the Pale reversed the bargain.
Kraków
City
16th to 17th century, Kingdom of Poland and then (from 1569) the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Kazimierz quarter in the golden age of Polish Jewry — by tradition one line here touches the circle of the city's great legal scholars. The catastrophes of the mid-17th century — the 1648 risings and the Swedish wars — battered the Commonwealth's Jewry and set even its most rooted families moving again.
Krotoszyn
Town
Mid-18th to mid-19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then (after partition) Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A Greater Poland town with a Jewish community established in the 17th century. Several generations of the family were born here from the 1740s onward. Each generation's departures followed the same Posen pattern: as legal emancipation widened and the local economies narrowed, Jewish families left the market towns for Breslau, Berlin and beyond.
Lubień Kujawski
Town
Late 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A small shtetl in Kuyavia, like thousands of others where Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities formed the commercial backbone of market towns. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1877 before emigrating to London's East End in the same wave of post-1881 Jewish flight that brought so many families out of Russian-ruled Poland.
Radom
City
Early 20th century, Russian Empire until 1918 and then the Second Polish Republic. Unlike the rest of the family, this branch was Polish Catholic — part of the non-Jewish majority in a growing industrial town. A great-grandfather from this line escaped occupied Poland in 1939, making his way through Romania, Hungary and France to England, where he served as a wireless mechanic with Polish RAF squadrons — including at RAF Tempsford, the secret airfield from which SOE agents were flown into occupied Europe.
Raszków
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town in the Greater Poland region, in the Ostrów Wielkopolski (Adelnau) district. A 3×great-grandmother was born here in 1855. Her generation's moves were the standard Posen account — small communities dwindling as families followed work and wider rights west into the German cities.
Staszów
Town
Early-to-mid 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A market town in the Świętokrzyskie hills with one of Poland's oldest Jewish communities — four-fifths Jewish by the end of the 19th century. A 5×great-grandfather was born here in 1838, and the line reaches back one further generation to a 6×great-grandfather born around 1817. His son emigrated north to Warsaw, and the family eventually made its way to London's East End, part of the same post-1881 exodus that drew so many Russian-ruled Polish Jews westward.
Rawicz
Town
Mid-to-late 19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. Jews here were increasingly Germanised in language and custom; many eventually moved west to Breslau and Berlin. A great-great-grandmother of the family was born in Rawicz in 1878; she stayed behind when the next generation fled in 1939, was later deported, and was shot at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas on 29 November 1941.
Warsaw
City
Mid-to-late 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. Warsaw held the largest Jewish community in Europe — hundreds of thousands of Yiddish and Polish speakers, a hub of Jewish publishing, theatre and politics. Several great-great-grandparents of the family were born here in the 1860s-70s; they emigrated to London's East End in the wave of Jewish flight that followed the 1881 pogroms and the 1882 May Laws — Tsarist legislation that restricted where Jews could live and work, driving roughly two million from the Pale of Settlement to Britain and America.
Portugal +
Porto
City
16th to 17th century. A Sephardi merchant family in the era of forced conversion: Portugal's Jews were converted en masse in 1497 and the Inquisition arrived in 1536, so families like this one lived outwardly Catholic and left when they could — on the classic routes of the conversos, the forced converts who kept their Judaism in secret: north to Amsterdam and across the Atlantic to Brazil, where this line's story in the tree continues.
Romania +
Bucecea
Town
Early 17th century, Bukovina — then the Principality of Moldavia. Not a home but a resting place: a Prague-born ancestor of the great scholarly dynasty, who had settled in Lithuania, was buried here around 1620 — presumably dying on the road, hundreds of miles from both. Rabbinic figures of that world travelled enormous distances between communities, and not all of them made it home.
Slovakia +
Nitra
City
Early to mid-19th century, Kingdom of Hungary under the Habsburgs. Nitra had a historic Jewish community with its own Orthodox yeshiva (religious academy) — a small but significant town in the Hungarian Jewish landscape. Two generations of the family were born here in the early 1800s before the line eventually made its way to Vienna — the great Hungarian-Jewish story of the century, as emancipation in 1867 and the new railways opened the imperial capital and the provincial communities sent their sons there in droves.
Spain +
Sepharad
Region
13th to 15th century. Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain. A priestly line lived here through the long medieval flowering of Spanish Jewry — until the massacres of 1391 and the rising persecution that would end in the 1492 expulsion. This branch read the signs early, leaving around 1400 for Salonika — then still Byzantine, definitively Ottoman from 1430 — under an empire that took in the Jews Spain cast out.
Turkey +
Istanbul
City
15th century, Ottoman Empire. The next stop for the Iberian priestly line after Salonika: newly conquered in 1453, the Ottoman capital actively recruited Jewish settlement to repopulate and rebuild the city. Within a generation the line resurfaces in southern Poland; the Ottoman lands and the Commonwealth were the two great refuges of the age, and families moved between them along the trade roads.
Ukraine +
Horodok
Town
17th to 18th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — in the region the Habsburgs would later name Galicia. Gródek in the records — a market-town community west of Lviv, where several generations of one line lived after arriving, unusually, from a Lithuanian village by marriage. The partitions handed Galicia to the Habsburgs in 1772, and the slow squeeze of village economies kept its Jewish families moving thereafter.
Volhynia & the Dnieper towns
Region
17th century — Horokhiv, Piatigory, Cherkassy. Communities in the path of the 1648–49 Cossack risings, which destroyed hundreds of Jewish towns and sent the survivors fleeing west and north — the greatest catastrophe of early-modern Jewish history, and the likely reason these lines next appear in Lithuania.
and now
London, England where I was born +
19th and 20th centuries. The East End — Whitechapel, Stepney, Hackney — became home to tens of thousands of Ashkenazi refugees fleeing Tsarist pogroms, with several branches of the family among them; Baghdadi Sephardi families like the Sassoons settled separately. A great-great-grandfather opened the Cable Picture Palace on Cable Street in 1912; after his early death his widow kept it going until the Blitz destroyed it on 5 May 1941. Generations later, it's also where I was born.
Derbyshire, England where I live +
Home with my wife since 2023, and where I co-founded the Derbyshire Jewish Community.
In the beginning legendary
Eden, Goshen & the Exodus
The tree's longest line opens where the Book does. By the traditional reckoning it runs from Eden through the patriarchs to around a dozen generations in Goshen, in the eastern Nile delta — and out again, in the most famous departure in Jewish history, retold at every Passover table since.
IsraelEgypt
c. 1000 BCE – 135 CE traditional
Jerusalem & the Galilee
Through the royal house of ancient Judah to the academies of Yavne and the sages of the Galilee — including one, by tradition, born in Roman Alexandria who returned to teach. Then the leaving that was not chosen: the Temple destroyed in 70 CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt crushed in 135 CE, and the Jews of Judaea scattered across the empire. One thread went east to Babylonia; it would stay there two and a half thousand years.
IsraelEgyptIraq
2nd – 8th century traditional
The Galilee, after Rome
The longest thread stays in the Land of Israel for centuries after the dispersal — a line of scholars handing the chain down generation by generation, until the eighth century, when it crosses the Mediterranean to Italy.
IsraelIraq
8th – 10th century traditional
Venice & Lucca
Early-medieval Italy, on the trade routes between the Land of Israel and Europe. From Lucca, in the 10th century, a dynasty of scholars is invited north over the Alps to Mainz — not flight but invitation, a rarity in this tree, and by tradition the seeding event of Rhineland Jewry.
Italy
10th – 14th century traditional
The Rhineland & Champagne
Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Cologne; Troyes, Ramerupt, Vitry, Dampierre and Paris — the cradle of Ashkenaz and the lamps of medieval Jewish learning, the tree's lines running straight through the most famous school of Torah commentary. The reasons to leave were written in fire: the Crusader massacres of 1096, the French royal expulsions of 1182, 1306 and 1394, and the plague-era pogroms of 1348–49, which drove the survivors east.
GermanyFrance
13th – 15th century traditional
Bologna, Franconia & Sepharad
One line zig-zags between Italy and Germany — Bologna, Nuremberg, Heidelberg — as licences and residence rights tighten and loosen. Meanwhile a priestly line in Spain reads the signs after the massacres of 1391 and leaves around 1400 for Ottoman Salonika, then Istanbul, then — within a generation — southern Poland.
ItalyGermanySpainGreeceTurkey
15th – 17th century
Prague, Padua & the Commonwealth
A celebrated dynasty of scholars holds Prague for over a century until Habsburg expulsions push its sons east to Kraków and Poznań. Padua's great yeshiva sends a line north — one of whom, by family tradition, was elected king of Poland for a single night. Brest anchors a scholarly line from the 1400s; the deepest documented Baltic lines begin (Anykščiai in the 1390s, the Suvalkija villages from the 1540s); Vienna's early line ends with the expulsion of 1670; a Prague-born scholar is buried on the road in Bukovina around 1620. In the west, the Porto conversos slip the Inquisition for Amsterdam and Brazil. And in 1648–49 the Cossack risings destroy hundreds of communities in Volhynia and the Dnieper towns — the catastrophe that redraws the whole map.
CzechiaItalyPolandLithuaniaBelarusAustriaUkraineRomaniaPortugalNetherlandsBrazil
18th century
Silesia, Bohemia & the Baltics
The documented branches thicken. Zülz and Głogów in Silesia — two of the rare towns where Jews could always live; Dolní Kralovice under the Familiants Law; Hlučín on the contested border; a Bavarian rabbi's line moves east to safer ground. Dvinsk and the Latgale shtetls become the densest places in the whole tree; one line reaches Galician Horodok, another passes through Ottoman-era Chișinău.
PolandCzechiaGermanyLatviaUkraineMoldova
19th century
Empires & emancipation
Prussia emancipates in 1812 and the Silesian and Posen small towns empty toward Breslau and Berlin; Habsburg emancipation in 1867 pulls the Nitra line to Vienna, where a great-great-grandfather is born in the year of emancipation itself. In the Russian Empire the squeeze tightens instead: the 1881 pogroms and 1882 May Laws drive the Warsaw, Vitebsk, shtetl-Poland and Riga branches toward London's East End and, by accident, Dublin. Baghdad and Basrah prosper — and the Baghdadi merchant diaspora carries one ancestor to Paris.
GermanyPolandAustriaSlovakiaLithuaniaLatviaBelarusIraqIrelandFranceEngland
20th century
Catastrophe & arrival
A great-great-grandfather opens a cinema on Cable Street in 1912; the Tsar expels Kovno's Jews in 1915; a father is bluffed out of Buchenwald after Kristallnacht and the Breslau family flees in February 1939; a Polish Catholic great-grandfather escapes occupied Poland to fly with Polish RAF squadrons. Then 1941: the Farhud in Baghdad, the Ninth Fort and Ponary in Lithuania — four ancestors lost in a single year — and the Blitz takes the cinema. By 1951 the airlifts have emptied Jewish Baghdad. The surviving branches converge on London.
GermanyPolandLithuaniaIraqEngland
Now
London → Derbyshire
Born in London, where the branches met. Home in Derbyshire with my wife since 2023 — where the present-tense version of all this is the Derbyshire Jewish Community.
England
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.
The Baghdadi line+
The oldest continuous thread: east to Babylonia with the first exile, and there — through Baghdad and Basrah — for some two and a half thousand years. Merchants and communal figures under the Ottomans; one son to Paris, one branch to Manchester; a great-grandfather born in Basrah in 1900 whose family reached England through the empire's trade routes, anglicising the name on arrival. A great-great-grandfather was murdered in the Farhud in 1941; within a decade the world that line came from no longer existed.
The traditional rabbinic line+
The 157-generation reckoning. By rabbinic tradition: the Galilee until the eighth century, Venice and Lucca, the invitation north to Mainz, Champagne's academies and the great school of Torah commentary, the flight east after the Crusades and the plague, Prague's scholar dynasty, Padua's yeshiva — and then it dissolves into the documented Lithuanian and Polish lines like a river reaching its delta. Taken, as the intro says, with exactly as much salt as it deserves; carried, all the same, with some pride.
The Silesian line+
Anchored in the two Silesian towns where Jews could always legally live — Głogów from the 1670s, then Zülz for three generations — joined by a Bavarian rabbi's family moving to safer ground and by the Vienna line expelled in 1670. After Prussian emancipation in 1812 it dispersed through Pitschen and Opole toward Breslau. A great-great-grandmother of this line, born in Opole in 1880, was shot at the Ninth Fort in 1941.
The Posen line+
Grabów, Kobylin, Krotoszyn, Raszków, Rawicz — small-town Greater Poland under Prussian rule, Germanising generation by generation and moving west for work and full civic life. It converged on Breslau, prospered, and was caught by what came next: a great-grandfather arrested on Kristallnacht and bluffed out of Buchenwald, the family out in February 1939; a great-great-grandmother who stayed, deported, and shot at the Ninth Fort in 1941.
The Litvak lines+
Litvak is simply Yiddish for a Lithuanian Jew. Not one line but a weave: the village clusters around the Suvalkija lakes (documented to the 1540s, with one thread to the 1390s in Anykščiai), the dense Dvinsk and Latgale shtetls, and Riga — held continuously from the 1620s to a great-grandmother born there in 1901. Marriage and trade shuffled these families between the same few dozen towns for three centuries, until the pogrom years sent the young to England.
The Congress Poland lines+
Warsaw, Będzin, Chęciny, Staszów, Ciechanów, Lubień Kujawski — the crowded market-town Jewry of Russian-ruled Poland. The 1881 pogroms and the May Laws pushed them out in the great wave; they landed in Whitechapel and Stepney, and one of them opened the Cable Picture Palace on Cable Street in 1912. His widow kept it going until the Blitz took it in May 1941.
The Vienna–Bohemia line+
Two generations in a Bohemian village under the Familiants Law, a Nitra line in Upper Hungary — and when emancipation opened the capital, both converged on Vienna, where a great-great-grandfather was born in 1867, the year of emancipation itself. The next generation moved north to Breslau and married into the Posen line, binding the Habsburg and Prussian halves of the family together.
The Irish detour+
Russian Jewish refugees bound for America who landed in Liverpool, crossed to Dublin instead, and settled in Portobello — 'Little Jerusalem'. The Irish-born daughter they raised there took her thick Dublin accent to London, where this branch joined the others.
The Riga & Vilna line+
From Riga — a great-grandmother born there in 1901 — and from the towns of the old Vilna and Grodno lands, reaching London by the same routes and for the same reasons as the rest: the Russian Empire made staying impossible.
The Radom line+
From Radom, a great-grandfather escaped occupied Poland in 1939 through Romania, Hungary and France, and served as a wireless mechanic with Polish RAF squadrons — including at RAF Tempsford, the secret airfield that flew SOE agents into occupied Europe. His line joined the family in London after the war.
traditional era
settled moves
flight
Modern borders, for orientation only — the routes are simplified to the major movements, and the names mix modern and historical the way the records do.
Expelled by decree
France in 1182, 1306 and 1394. Prague in 1541 and 1557. Vienna in 1670. Spain's long ending, read early and left in 1400. Portugal's forced conversions of 1497 and the Inquisition from 1536. Whole branches of this tree moved because a ruler signed a paper.
Fled massacre & pogrom
A pogrom is an organised anti-Jewish riot — the word recurs in this family's story. The Crusader massacres of 1096 and the plague pogroms of 1348–49 emptied the Rhineland eastward. The Cossack risings of 1648–49 destroyed the Volhynian and Dnieper communities. The 1881 pogroms and 1882 May Laws, and the pogrom years after 1903, drove the Warsaw, shtetl-Poland, Vitebsk and Riga branches to Britain. The Breslau family fled in February 1939, a father bluffed out of Buchenwald; the Radom great-grandfather escaped occupied Poland the same year.
The ones who couldn't leave
Four ancestors in 1941: a great-great-grandfather killed in the Farhud in Baghdad; two great-great-grandmothers deported from Germany and shot at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas on 29 November; a great-great-grandmother murdered in the Ponary forest near Vilna. This view exists so the others have their context.
Squeezed out
The slower departures: the Familiants Law rationing Bohemian marriages, Tsarist conscription and the Pale's crowded shtetl economies, Posen's thin market towns, the 1915 expulsion of Kovno's Jews into the Russian interior. Nothing burned — it just became impossible to stay.
Drawn by emancipation & opportunity
Prussia's 1812 edict pulled the Silesian and Posen towns into Breslau and Berlin; Habsburg emancipation in 1867 pulled Nitra and the Bohemian villages into Vienna; the Baghdadi merchants followed the British Empire's trade routes to London, Manchester, Paris and beyond. Dublin's community moved on to London's bigger Jewish world. The pull migrations — rarer in this tree than the push.
Moved by marriage & trade
The default mode for three centuries in the Commonwealth: the Suvalkija villages, the Latgale shtetls, Riga, Brest and the Grodno towns swapping sons and daughters along trade and yeshiva networks. Most moves in this tree were twenty miles, not two thousand.
Invited
Once, in the whole tree: the Lucca scholar dynasty asked north over the Alps in the 10th century to seed the communities of the Rhineland. And once, commanded by no one mortal: the departure from Egypt, retold every Passover since.
1,221
recorded ancestors
157
generations on the longest line
legendary
24
countries on this page
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1390s
deepest documented line — Anykščiai, Lithuania
7
empires ruled the branches
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4
ancestors lost in 1941
9
kings & queens in the direct line — King David among them
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1
surname bestowed by a king — Mühsam
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No photographs, naturally — what follows are artists' imaginings, most of them centuries old themselves, all public domain.
Saul Wahl Katzenellenbogen
15×great-grandfather
Poland-Lithuania · 1541–1617. Born in Padua, made his fortune in Brest — and, by tradition, king of Poland for a single night during the deadlocked royal election of August 1587, spending his hours of royal power enacting protections for the Commonwealth's Jews. His surname remembers it: Wahl is German for 'election'. The one elected monarch on this list, and the only one historians can shake hands with — the night is legend, the man is documented.
King David
116×great-grandfather
Israel · reigned c. 1010–970 BCE, Jerusalem. The shepherd-king of Bethlehem, second king of Israel, psalmist — and the royal house through which this tree's traditional line descends. Carried by rabbinic tradition rather than records, as the note on evidence explains.
Gerard van Honthorst, 'King David Playing the Harp', 1622 — an artist's imagining. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
King Terah
137×great-grandfather
Ur of the Chaldees → Harran · legendary. Father of the patriarch Abraham; later tradition styles his line as kings of their city. From here on the crowns belong to the Bible's own genealogy.
Imagined portrait, woodcut from Guillaume Rouillé's 'Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum', 1553. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
King Serug
139×great-grandfather
Ur of the Chaldees · legendary. Great-great-grandfather of Abraham in the line of Genesis chapter 11.
Imagined portrait, 'Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum', 1553. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
King Peleg of Babylon
141×great-grandfather
Salem and Babylon · legendary. The Bible notes that 'in his days the earth was divided' — a king for an unquiet age.
Imagined portrait, 'Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum', 1553. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Queen Lomna of Babylon
141×great-grandmother
Salem and Babylon · legendary. Peleg's queen, named in the Book of Jubilees rather than Genesis itself.
King Arpachshad
144×great-grandfather
Arrapachtis, Mesopotamia · legendary. Son of Shem; the ancient kingdom his title remembers sat in what is now northern Iraq.
Imagined portrait, 'Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum', 1553. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Queen Resueja
144×great-grandmother
Arrapachtis, Mesopotamia · legendary. Arpachshad's queen, another name preserved by the Book of Jubilees.
King Shem, Melchizedek
145×great-grandfather
Salem (Jerusalem) · legendary. By tradition Noah's son Shem and Melchizedek, king of Salem, are one and the same — the king and high priest who blesses Abraham in Genesis. King, priest, and the oldest crown in the tree.
Dieric Bouts, 'The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek', c. 1465 — the king-priest blesses Abraham. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The soldier of Leuthen
1757
My 6×great-grandfather Pinkus was born around 1741 in Zülz, Silesia, a rabbi's son, at a time when Jews in the German lands had no fixed legal rights at all. At about sixteen he was a grenadier in Frederick the Great's army at the Battle of Leuthen — 5 December 1757, Prussia outnumbered three to one, a victory still taught in military academies. In the chaos a senior officer was wounded and taken; Pinkus dealt with the patrol, tied the man to his own back, and crawled him across a frozen field of the dead and dying, flattening himself whenever a patrol passed, until he reached the Prussian lines. Frederick had the young soldier brought before him, promoted him, and told him: if you ever find yourself in need, come to your King.
The town that said no
1780–1784
After the war Pinkus married Barbara, of Byczyna, and they built a prosperous trading business near Pitschen. In 1780 he bought land in the town itself, built a house, and arrived with the family's belongings — and the Magistrate turned them back at the town limits, invoking a privilege of 1555 that let Pitschen exclude Jews. The furniture was never even unloaded. For four years Pinkus fought on every legal front available: petitions refused, appeals deferred, and royal Cabinet Orders from Frederick himself — which the Magistrate simply ignored.
The walk to Berlin
1784–1785
So, twenty-seven years after the battle, Pinkus remembered what the King had said. He and Barbara walked to Berlin — several hundred kilometres, on foot, in winter — and were granted their audience. Frederick heard the account, was furious, and declared, in words the family has carried ever since, that whoever had been forced to fight so arduously — so mühsam — for his rights deserved the support of his King: he commanded that Pinkus bear that word as his name. To Barbara he said: “She has a brave man.” The royal command was issued in writing on 18 December 1785. Pitschen resisted one final year — and when the family at last entered as recognised residents, the decent citizens of the town came out to welcome them, a band of music at the head.
After
Eight generations
Pinkus and Barbara lived out their lives in Pitschen, raised nine children, and were buried in Namysłów — Pitschen had no Jewish cemetery of its own; their Hebrew gravestones still stood, much worn, into the twentieth century. He died on 28 July 1807, she on 14 August 1822. Their daughter's line runs eight generations and roughly 285 years down to me — through a great-great-grandmother murdered at the Ninth Fort in 1941, and her granddaughter who escaped to England — and it is the reason my maternal line carries the name Mühsam at all. The story rests on a 1912 family chronicle and modern genealogical research, independently confirmed by a second compiled record.