J. W. Parkes , D. Phil.
The Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and did not return to these countries until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of them fled to Eastern Europe, and there came together with a very important group of Jews who had migrated through the centuries from Asia Minor by way of Russia. In the region that is now the borderland between Russia and Poland, the so-called ' Pale of Settlement ', the Jews remained under appallingly severe conditions right up to the beginning of the twentieth century.
While all this was going on in the East, the Jews of Western Europe, who had returned to France, England, Holland, and Germany, and had settled also in America, gradually obtained rights of citizenship.