The Spanish Inquisition, when the Catholic ruling couple Ferdinand and Isabella waged their murderous campaign against the Jews of Spain and then Portugal, was one of the darkest periods in European history.

The pencil with the rubber attached to the top is an item so ubiquitous that few would consider where it came from. But, as with every household object, someone had to come up with the idea.

That someone was Hymen Lipman, a Jewish inventor who lived in Philadelphia. On March 30, he won the patent for his product, which placed a rubber atop the end of a wooden pencil.

Just days after 25 people were killed as they sat down for seder in the Park Hotel in Netanya, a 17-year-old Israeli girl went on a routine trip to the supermarket. Her visit to the Kiryat Yovel neighbourhood of Jerusalem that Friday afternoon coincided with that of another teenage girl, one named Ayat al-Akhras.

Visitors to his Jerusalem Windows cannot fail to be struck by the beauty and vibrancy of Jewish artist Marc Chagall’s designs, each featuring one featuring a different tribe of Israel. Bur the Russian born artist, who was 97 when he died, had a legacy that extended far beyond the Hadassah hospital in Israel.

It was late on a Saturday afternoon, the end of the working day, when the first flames were spotted at the Triangle Waist Company factory in New York.

The tragedy left 146 people dead and more than 70 with injuries, prompting the introduction of improved regulations on factory safety.

Name a popular or successful musical that appeared on Broadway or in the West End in the last 50 years, and there’s a high chance it will be one written by Stephen Sondheim.

Born in New York City, he had a troubled upbringing but at the age of nine fell in love with the theatre after seeing a production of Oscar Hammerstein II’s Very Warm for May.

Dignitaries and statesmen from 40 countries visited Israel for the official opening ceremony of the refurbished Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. The UN general secretary Kofi Annan spoke, as did the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Holocaust survivor and human rights campaigner Elie Wiesel.

Exactly two years and six months after terrorists struck the World Trade centre, a similarly-inspired group bombed ten sites in Madrid, including the busy interchange at Atocha station.

Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer wasn’t the first political player whose career was prematurely ended by a sex scandal, and he likely won’t be the last.

Perhaps the most famous thinker of all time, Karl Marx died in 1883 at the age of 64. The father of communism, the man whose theories of work, class struggle and alienation transformed the world in the 20th century and continue to appeal to many today, was buried in his adopted home of Highgate.