Jewish history in Wales stretches back centuries, yet its significance remains little known outside specialist circles.

My new book uncovers how Jews, Judaism, Israel and Palestine have played a far greater role in Welsh history and imagination than many realise. In fact, they have helped shape ideas of nationhood, identity and belonging over centuries.

In her 2012 book Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine, the scholar Jasmine Donahaye observed that “the fate of Jews in Britain had been historically closely caught up with the fate of the Welsh, though this seems to have passed largely unnoticed in Wales”.

My research builds on that insight, tracing Wales’s relationship with Jews, Judaism, Israel and Palestine from the earliest historical references to the present day. My research shows that these connections have been far more significant than historians have generally acknowledged.

The subject has often been overlooked. While scholarship on Jewish life in Wales has grown in recent decades, Wales has generally been absent from wider studies of Jewish history and antisemitism in Britain, which have tended to focus on England.

But the Welsh connection with Jews and Judaism stretches back much further than many people might imagine.

The first contact between Wales and Jewish culture appears to date from the Roman period with the discovery of a Graeco-Hebrew amulet in the Roman camp of Segontium in present-day Caernarfon, in north-west Wales. By the medieval era, Jews were already woven into Welsh political, economic and religious life.

Jewish communities existed........

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