How did the Wars of Religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries affect the Jews?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Following the expulsion of Jews from England, Spain and France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jewish communities in western Europe were largely destroyed, save for a smaller population present in Italy. Many went East, particularly to Poland, where at the end of the seventeenth century, 75 percent of Jews in the world were living. However, in the mid-sixteenth century, Jews were allowed to return to France, England, the Dutch Netherlands, and Bohemia. This did not mean conditions were particularly good for Jews in western Europe, however, as they were often scapegoated during the Wars of Religion. This was in part because of separatism from local community, retaining their own council and hierarchy. This isolation was also bound by language, as many polish Jews spoke Yiddish. With the return in the mid-sixteenth century, there was a large population of Jews in Bohemia. Ashkenazim, Jews from Poland and Germany, and Sephardim, Jews from Spain and Portugal, settled in Amsterdam as the next largest community, and played an integral role in establishing economic ties to merchants in the Spanish empire.