Myth: Jews have been kicked out of 109 countries.

“Jews have been kicked out of 109 countries. At some point you have to ask why.”

The number is designed to end an argument before it starts. It arrives with a shrug attached, the “at some point you have to ask why,” which is the actual payload: not a historical question but the suggestion that a two-thousand-year record of persecution is best explained by the persecuted.

Ask where the number comes from and it falls apart in about five minutes.

109 is a hate symbol, and 110 is a threat

The ADL lists 109/110 in its hate symbols database, the same catalogue that holds the swastika and the SS bolts. Its entry is blunt: “The number 109 is white supremacist numeric shorthand for an antisemitic claim that Jews have been expelled from 109 different countries,” and the follow-up number 110 is used “to urge that the United States or some other specific location be the next and 110th place to expel Jews,” often written alongside the neo-Nazi code 1488.

That is what a person is repeating when they say it, whether or not they know it. The figure traces to a list of “109 locations” that appeared on a long-running Australian antisemitic website, and comparable lists compiled by other antisemites run anywhere from 100 to more than 1,000, because the number depends entirely on what you agree to call a country.

How the list gets to 109

Three methods, all visible on the face of the list.

It counts cities and provinces as countries. The list spans from Carthage in 250 CE to 1948 and includes towns, free cities, duchies, principalities and provinces beside actual kingdoms. Medieval Germany alone supplies dozens of entries, because it was hundreds of separate jurisdictions and a town council could order a Jewish quarter emptied.

It counts the same kingdom once per expulsion. France appears for 1182, 1306, 1322 and 1394. Those are four real expulsions ordered by four kings, and between each of them the Jews were invited back, because the crown wanted the tax revenue returned. Under this arithmetic, a country that repeatedly asked Jews to come home scores four points against them.

It counts the crimes committed against Jews as evidence about Jews. Nazi-era deportations appear on the list. So does 1948, and that is the part worth stopping on.

The biggest expulsion on the list is the one nobody mentions

Roughly 850,000 Jews were driven out of Arab and Muslim countries between 1948 and the 1970s: Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Iran. Property confiscated, citizenship stripped, communities two and a half thousand years old ended inside a decade. Baghdad was roughly a quarter Jewish in 1940 and has almost no Jews now.

Those countries are entries on the 109 list. The meme therefore counts the ethnic cleansing of Middle Eastern Jews as a mark against Jews, and it is usually deployed by people who elsewhere insist that Israel is a European colonial project with no indigenous population behind it. Both claims cannot be true, and the ones being counted are the same people.

The real record, and the real reason

Expulsions from an entire country come to about a dozen across European history, and the causes are documented in the expelling states’ own archives. They are about money and about Church law, not about anything Jews did.

England, 1290. Edward I expelled roughly 2,000 Jews after decades of taxing the community to exhaustion, then cancelled the debts owed to it. The crown kept the assets.
France, 1306. Philip IV, deep in debt from war, arrested the Jews of France, seized their property and expelled about 100,000 people. Two years earlier he had done much the same to the Knights Templar, for the same reason.
Spain, 1492. The Alhambra Decree followed a century of forced conversion, mob violence and Inquisition, and came after Granada’s fall removed the strategic reason for tolerating a minority the crown had been squeezing for revenue.

Underneath all of them sits a structural trap. Canon law barred Christians from lending at interest, so Jews were pushed into moneylending, then barred from guilds and landholding that would have let them leave it, and then resented for the one occupation left open. A ruler who owed money to Jewish lenders could clear his balance sheet with a decree. The pattern is not a mystery about Jewish behaviour. It is a mystery about nothing at all.

Applied to anyone else, the argument is obviously obscene

The logic is that repeated victimisation proves the victim earned it. Run it on the Roma, expelled from state after state across the same centuries. Run it on the Armenians, the Huguenots, the Rohingya. Nobody says “if it happened that often, ask why” about them, because in every other case the answer is understood to lie with the people doing the expelling.

And the record answers it directly. England expelled its Jews in 1290 and readmitted them in 1656. France expelled and recalled them four times. The expulsions stopped in the nineteenth century, when European states began granting Jews citizenship and legal equality. Nothing about Jews changed in 1656 or 1791 or 1871. What changed was the law of the countries around them.