The history of the Jews in Russia goes back to the beginnings of the Russian state. At one time, the Russian Empire hosted the largest population of Jews in the world. Within these territories, the primarily Ashkenazi Jewish communities of many different areas flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, and they also faced periods of antisemitic discriminatory policies and persecution, including violent pogroms.

Many analysts have documented a "renaissance" in the Jewish community inside Russia since the beginning of the 21st century;Renaissance of Jewish life in Russia November 23, 2001, By John Daniszewski, Chicago Tribune however, the Russian Jewish population has experienced precipitous decline since the dissolution of the USSR which continues to this day, although it is still among the largest in Europe.

Overview and background The largest group among Russian Jews are Ashkenazi Jews, but the community also includes a significant proportion of non-Ashkenazi from other Jewish diaspora including Mountain Jews, Sephardi Jews, Georgian Jews, Crimean Karaites, Krymchaks and Bukharan Jews.

The presence of Jewish people in the European part of Russia can be traced to the 7th–14th centuries AD. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Jewish population in Kiev, in present-day Ukraine, was restricted to a separate quarter. Evidence of the presence of Jewish people in Muscovite Russia is first documented in the chronicles of 1471. Since the reign of Catherine II in the 18th century, Jewish people were restricted to the Pale of Settlement (1791–1917) within Russia, the territory where they could live or to which they could immigrate. The three partitions of Poland brought much additional territory to Russia, along with the Jews who were long settled in those lands. Alexander III of Russia escalated anti-Jewish policies. Beginning in the 1880s, waves of anti-Jewish pogroms swept across different regions of the empire for several decades, spurring in part a great outward migration. More than two million Jews fled Russia between 1880 and 1920, mostly to the United States and Palestine. The Pale of Settlement took away many of the rights that the Jewish people of late 17th-century Russia had enjoyed. At this time, the Jewish people were restricted to an area of what is current day Belarus, Lithuania, eastern Poland and Ukraine. Where Western Europe was experiencing Jewish emancipation at this time, in Russia, the laws for the Jewish people were getting ever-more oppressive. They were allowed to move further east, towards a less crowded region, though only a minority of Jews took this migration option. The sporadic and often impoverished communities were formed in small settlements known as shtetls.

Before 1917 there were 300,000 Zionists in Russia, while the main Jewish socialist organization, the Bund, had 33,000 members. Only 958 Jews had joined the Bolshevik Party before 1917; thousands joined after the Revolution. The chaotic years of World War I, the February and October Revolutions, and the Russian Civil War had triggered social disruption that led to antisemitism. Some 150,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of 1918–1922, 125,000 of them were killed in Ukraine, 25,000 were killed in Belarus.Pogroms in the Ukraine (1919–1921) Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, April 3, 2008, retrieved September 9, 2015.

The Jewish section of the Communist Party considered the use of the Hebrew language "foreign" and "non-vernacular" and the teaching of Hebrew was replaced with the teaching of Yiddish.

Following the Russian civil war, however, the new Bolshevik government's policies inspired a flourishing of secular Jewish culture in Belarus and western Ukraine in the 1920s. The Soviet government outlawed all expressions of antisemitism, with the public use of the ethnic slur жид ("Yid") being punished by up to one year of imprisonment, and tried to modernize the Jewish community by establishing 1,100 Yiddish-language schools, 40 Yiddish-language daily newspapers and by settling Jews on farms in Ukraine and Crimea; the number of Jews working in the industry had more than doubled between 1926 and 1931. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Jews were 1.8 percent of the Soviet population but 12–15 percent of all university students. In 1934 the Soviet state established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Russian Far East. This region never came to have a majority Jewish population. The JAO is Russia's only autonomous oblastConstitution of the Russian Federation, Article 65 and, outside of Israel, the world's only Jewish territory with an official status. Правительство Еврейской автономной области The observance of the Sabbath was banned in 1929, foreshadowing the dissolution of the Communist Party's Yiddish-language Yevsektsia in 1930 and worse repression to come. Numerous Jews were victimized in Stalin's purges as "counterrevolutionaries" and "reactionary nationalists", although in the 1930s the Jews were underrepresented in the Gulag population. The share of Jews in the Soviet ruling elite declined during the 1930s, but was still more than double their proportion in the general Soviet population.

In the 1930s, many Jews held high rank in the Red Army's High Command: Generals Iona Yakir, Yan Gamarnik, Yakov Smushkevich (Commander of the Soviet Air Forces) and Grigori Shtern (Commander-in-Chief during the war against Japan and Commander at the front during the Winter War). During World War Two, an estimated 500,000 soldiers in the Red Army were Jewish; about 200,000 were killed in battle. About 160,000 were decorated, and more than a hundred achieved the rank of Red Army general. Over 150 were designated Heroes of the Soviet Union, the highest award in the country.Jewish Soldiers in the Allied Armies , Yad Vashem, 2002-07-30, retrieved September 7, 2015. More than two million Soviet Jews are believed to have died during the Holocaust in warfare and in Nazi-occupied territories. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many Soviet Jews took the opportunity of liberalized emigration policies, with more than half of the population leaving, most for the United States, Israel, Germany, Canada and Australia. For many years during this period, Russia had a higher rate of immigration to Israel than any other country. Russia's Jewish population is still the third biggest in Europe, after France and United Kingdom.Jewish Population of the World , Jewish Virtual Library, retrieved September 9, 2015. In November 2012, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, one of the world's biggest museums of Jewish history, opened in Moscow.

History

Classical antiquity Jewish presence is documented in classical antiquity in several locations along the northern coast of the Black Sea, within the territory of modern-day Krasnodar Krai. Among these finds is a manumission text from Phanagoria, dating to 52 AD, which consecrates freed slaves to a local synagogue (proseuche), with the latter serving as their legal guardian. Similar patterns are attested on the opposite side of the Kerch Strait at Panticapaeum. There is also an inscription from Gorgippia (modern Anapa), dating to 59/60 AD, that mentions "Jews by race". Centuries later, Jerome, a Christian writer who flourished in the late 4th and early 5th centuries AD, mentions a Jewish tradition concerning the settlement of Jewish captives by Hadrian in the Cimmerian Bosporus, likely in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 which was suppressed by Hadrian.

Kievan Rus' In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Jewish population may have been restricted to a separate quarter in Kiev, known as the Jewish Town (Old East Slav: Жидове, Zhidovye, i.e. "The Jews"), the gates probably leading to which were known as the Jewish Gates (Old East Slavic: Жидовская ворота, Zhidovskaya vorota). The Kievan community was oriented towards Byzantium (the Romaniotes), Babylonia and Palestine in the 10th and 11th centuries, but appears to have been increasingly open to the Ashkenazim from the 12th century on. Few products of Kievan Jewish intellectual activity exist, however.A. I. Pereswetoff-Morath, A Grin without a Cat, vol. 2: Jews and Christians in Medieval Russia – Assessing the Sources (Lund Slavonic Monographs, 5), Lund 2002 Other communities, or groups of individuals, are known from Chernigov and, probably, Volodymyr-Volynskyi. At that time, Jews were probably found also in northeastern Russia, in the domains of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky (1169–1174), although it is uncertain to which degree they would have been living there permanently.

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Although northeastern Russia had a low Jewish population, countries just to its west had rapidly growing Jewish populations, as waves of anti-Jewish pogroms and expulsions from the countries of Western Europe marked the last centuries of the Middle Ages, a sizable portion of the Jewish populations there moved to the more tolerant countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Middle East.

Expelled en masse from England, France, Spain and most other Western European countries at various times, and persecuted in Germany in the 14th century, many Western European Jews migrated to Poland upon the invitation of Polish ruler Casimir III the Great to settle in Polish-controlled areas of Eastern Europe as a third estate, although restricted to commercial, middleman services in an agricultural society for the Polish king and nobility between 1330 and 1370, during the reign of Casimir the Great.

After settling in Poland (later Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth) and Hungary (later Austria-Hungary), the population expanded into the lightly populated areas of Ukraine and Lithuania, which were to become part of the expanding Russian Empire. In 1495, Alexander the Jagiellonian expelled Jewish residents from Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but reversed his decision in 1503.

In the shtetls populated almost entirely by Jews, or in the middle-sized town where Jews constituted a significant part of population, Jewish communities traditionally ruled themselves according to halakha, and were limited by the privileges granted them by local rulers. (See also Shtadlan). These Jews were not assimilated into the larger eastern European societies, and identified as an ethnic group with a unique set of religious beliefs and practices, as well as an ethnically unique economic role.

Tsardom of Russia

Documentary evidence as to the presence of Jews in Muscovite Russia is first found in the chronicles of 1471. The relatively small population of them were subject to discriminatory laws, but these laws do not appear to have been enforced at all times. Jews residing in Russian and Ukrainian towns suffered numerous religious persecutions. Converted Jews occasionally rose to important positions in the Russian State, for example Peter Shafirov, vice-chancellor under Peter the Great. Shafirov came, as most Russian Jews after the fall of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, from a Jewish family of Polish origin. He had extraordinary knowledge of foreign languages and served as the chief translator in the Russian Foreign Office, subsequently he began to accompany Tsar Peter on his international travels. Following this, he was raised to the rank of vice-chancellor because of his many diplomatic talents and skills, but was later imprisoned, sentenced to death, and eventually banished.

Russian Empire