Jewish History
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50 free Jewish History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Jewish history runs for more than three thousand years and across almost every corner of the map, from ancient Jerusalem and Babylon to medieval Spain, the small towns of Eastern Europe, the tenements of Manhattan and the modern Middle East. Few stories take in so many empires, languages and reinventions, which is what makes it such rich ground for a quiz. These questions follow that long arc: the Temples and the exiles, the revolts against Rome, the leading rabbis and philosophers of the Middle Ages, expulsions and migrations, the rise of Zionism, the Holocaust and the people who resisted it, and the first decades of the State of Israel. Along the way are the documents, places and characters that turn up again and again in the story. It is written for anyone curious about the subject, whether you are studying for a Hebrew school class, planning a community quiz night or simply testing what you remember. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will learn something even from the ones you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Persian king conquered Babylon and let the exiled Jews go home to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple?
Cyrus the Great
Cyrus the Great is the only non-Jew the Hebrew Bible calls a messiah, an anointed one, for ending the Babylonian exile.
Q 02Which clifftop fortress above the Dead Sea did a Roman legion capture by building a massive siege ramp?
Masada
Masada fell in 73 or 74 CE, and an ancient account says nearly 1,000 defenders chose mass suicide over capture, a claim historians dispute.
Q 03Which physicist was offered the largely ceremonial presidency of Israel in 1952 and turned it down?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein wrote that he was deeply moved by the offer, but saddened and ashamed that he could not accept it.
Q 04The Dead Sea Scrolls were first found by Bedouin shepherds in caves beside which ancient desert site?
Qumran
Qumran's first cave held seven scrolls in jars; their Bedouin finders hung them from a tent pole while they decided what to do with them.
Q 05Which ancient monument in Rome shows soldiers carrying off the golden menorah from the Jerusalem Temple?
Arch of Titus
The Arch of Titus carving later served as the model for the menorah on the emblem of the State of Israel.
Q 06Which Jewish French army captain was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 and sent to Devil's Island?
Alfred Dreyfus
Alfred Dreyfus spent five years in the penal colony before Émile Zola's open letter in a Paris newspaper helped force the case to be reopened.
Q 07The word ghetto comes from the quarter where which Italian city confined its Jews from 1516?
Venice
Venice created the quarter by order of its doge, and one leading theory traces the word to a local term for the foundry that once stood nearby.
Q 08Which teenage diarist hid from the Nazis for two years in an annex concealed behind a bookcase?
Anne Frank
Anne Frank's diary first appeared in Dutch under a title meaning the back house, and has since been translated into more than 70 languages.
Q 09Who drove the revival of spoken Hebrew, raising his son as its first native speaker in modern times?
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda also compiled a landmark Hebrew dictionary and edited HaZvi, one of the first Hebrew newspapers in Palestine.
Q 10Which Jewish American poet wrote The New Colossus, the sonnet on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty's pedestal?
Emma Lazarus
Emma Lazarus wrote the poem in 1883 for an auction raising money to build the pedestal, and the bronze plaque was only added in 1903.
Q 11Which Polish-born leader proclaimed the State of Israel in Tel Aviv in 1948 and became its first prime minister?
David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion later moved to a modest hut at Sde Boker in the Negev desert, where he lived until his death.
Q 12Which Kyiv-born schoolteacher raised in Milwaukee became Israel's first female prime minister in 1969?
Golda Meir
Golda Meir slipped into Amman days before independence in 1948, disguised as an Arab woman, for a secret meeting with King Abdullah of Transjordan.
Q 13Which Hungarian-born journalist wrote Der Judenstaat and convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897?
Theodor Herzl
Q 21Which king destroyed Jerusalem and its First Temple in the 580s BCE, deporting much of Judah's population to Babylon?
Nebuchadnezzar II
Nebuchadnezzar II's own records are silent on it: no known cuneiform document covers the destruction of the Temple.
Q 22Which Roman client king of Judea rebuilt the Second Temple and built the harbour at Caesarea Maritima?
Herod the Great
Herod the Great enlarged the Temple's base, and the Western Wall where Jews pray was part of the retaining wall of that platform.
Q 23Which Jewish commander surrendered to the Romans at Yodfat in 67 and later wrote the history titled The Jewish War?
Flavius Josephus
Theodor Herzl died at 44 and was buried in Vienna; in 1949 his remains were reburied in Israel on a hill that bears his name.
Q 14Which 1917 British statement backed a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, then under Ottoman rule?
Balfour Declaration
The Balfour Declaration was a single letter from the British foreign secretary, yet it became a core part of the British Mandate for Palestine.
Q 15Which 1492 order by Ferdinand and Isabella told Spain's unconverted Jews to leave the country?
Alhambra Decree
The Alhambra Decree was not formally revoked until 1968, and in 2015 Spain offered citizenship to descendants of the Jews it had expelled.
Q 16Which rabbi and philosopher, born in Córdoba and settled in Egypt, served as personal physician to Saladin?
Maimonides
Maimonides also wrote the fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah, an enduring code of Jewish law, and is said to be buried in Tiberias.
Q 17Which 11th-century rabbi from Troyes wrote the commentary printed in every edition of the Talmud since the 1520s?
Rashi
Rashi's daughters married his students, and most Ashkenazi rabbinical dynasties can trace their lineage back to two of them.
Q 18Which rebel leader, hailed as the messiah by Rabbi Akiva, led the last great Jewish revolt against Rome in 132?
Simon bar Kokhba
Simon bar Kokhba kept an independent Jewish state going for about three years; letters found in a desert cave in the 20th century revealed his original name, bar Kosevah.
Q 19Which band of Jewish rebels recaptured the Jerusalem Temple from the Seleucid Greeks, a victory celebrated at Hanukkah?
The Maccabees
The Maccabees may owe their name to an Aramaic word for hammer, a tribute to the ferocity in battle of their leader Judah.
Q 20Which biblical king is credited with building the First Temple in Jerusalem?
Solomon
Solomon's sanctuary is thought to have stood for about four centuries, yet no positively identified remains of it have ever been found.
Flavius Josephus was kept as a slave by the general Vespasian, who freed him on becoming emperor and whose family name he then took.
Q 24Which ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was begun by Jews in Ptolemaic Egypt in the 3rd century BCE?
Septuagint
The Septuagint takes its name from the Latin for seventy, after the seventy-two scholars who, in legend, translated the first five books for Ptolemy II.
Q 25Which trove of 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments lay for centuries in the storeroom of Egypt's Ben Ezra Synagogue?
Cairo Geniza
The Cairo Geniza sat in a room with no door or window, reached only by climbing a ladder to an opening high in the synagogue wall.
Q 26Which 17th-century rabbi from Smyrna was hailed by many Jews as the messiah, then converted to Islam?
Sabbatai Zevi
Sabbatai Zevi was brought before the Ottoman sultan's court and, to save his life, chose conversion, wearing a turban from then on.
Q 27Which Jewish revival movement, founded in 18th-century Ukraine by the Baal Shem Tov, prizes joy in worship?
Hasidism
Hasidism spread rapidly across Eastern Europe, and those who opposed it earned a name of their own, the Misnagdim.
Q 28Which 18th-century Berlin thinker, hailed as the German Socrates, became the leading figure of the Jewish Enlightenment?
Moses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn's descendants include the composers Fanny and Felix, and the founders of a banking house that carried the family name.
Q 29Which Dutch philosopher, expelled by his Portuguese-Jewish congregation in 1656, made his living grinding lenses?
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza was cast out for good after challenging rabbinic authority, and he kept clear of every religious affiliation afterwards.
Q 30What name was given to the western zone of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live permanently?
Pale of Settlement
The Pale of Settlement was created under Catherine the Great, at first to speed the colonisation of new Black Sea lands, and lasted until 1917.