JUNE 22

217 BCE:
Ptolemy IV of Egypt defeated Antiochus III at the Battle of Raphia. The Battle of Raphia, also known as the Battle of Gaza, was part of the
ongoing power struggle between the Seleucids and the Ptolomies for the land
mass that included…

JUNE 20

840: Louis the Pious,
King of the Franks and the Holy Roman Emperor by virtue of being the son of
Charlemagne. When it came to dealing with his Jewish subjects, Louis followed
in the footsteps of his father. During his reign charters were issu…

JUNE 19

325: Promulgation of the Nicene Creed. The
creed dealt with various splits among the various Christian groups and only
dealt in a tangential manner with matters pertaining to Jews. The creed altered
the method for selecting the date of Easter….

JUNE 10

1190: During the Third Crusade Frederick I Barbarossa drowns in the
Saleph River while leading an army to Jerusalem.  The German emperor was one of three monarchs
leading the crusade.  The other two were
Phillip Augustus of France an…

May
2

373:
“Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria…aggressive opponent of Arianism and polemicist
against Judaism died today.” 

693:
The Sixteenth Council of Toledo, which had opened on April 25, met for the last
time. Among its other accomplishments,…

April 29

711: According to some sources the date on which an
army led by Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Gibraltar marking the start of the Moslem
conquest of the Iberian Peninsula with all that would come to mean for the
Jewish population during the next s…

April 25

693:
Opening session of the Sixteenth Council of Toledo which, before its close,
would add more regulations that would prove oppressive to the Jews living under
the Visigoths.  This Visigoth
anti-Semitism would provide a major impetus fo…