Is it true that that as the Jews gradually moved out of the Mediterran ean region into otherparts of the world they often faced discrimination from other religious groups?

Answer 1

Jews moved gradually at some times, and quite abruptly at others. The two great Jewish revolts against Rome, crushed in the years 70 and 117, led to major persecution, the killing of hundreds of thousands, and the forced exile (into slavery) of many more Jews. There was nothing gradual about diffusion of the Jewish population at those points. The Jewish diaspora did grow gradually before that time and after. Discrimination in the pre-Christian Roman Empire outside the times of those revolts was sporadic. The primary cause was suspicion because Jews refused to set up statues of the emperor in their synagogues and and accept his divinity (Emperors after Augustus generally claimed to be divine). Christians, of course, had the exact same problem.

Note that the Sephardic Jews never moved out of the Mediterranean region. They stayed largely on the Medeterranean coast across North Africa, into the Ottoman empire and up the Adriatic coast all the way to Venice.

After Rome became officially Christian, things settled down for a while. Some early Christian leaders had very nasty things to say about Jews because they did not convert to Christianity, but the disagreement stayed relatively civil until the rise of Islam. At that point, Jews began to suffer severely under Christian rulers because they did not take sides when Jews and Muslims came to blows. Gradualism came to a savage end with the First Crusade, when the crusaders slaughtered Jews across the Rhineland as they started on their way south to the Holy Land, and then, when they conquered Jerusalem, the slaughtered all of the Jews there (they slaughtered Muslims too, but for the Muslims, they offered the choice, convert or die). The first Crusade was the start of a series of violent disasters for the Jews of Europe.