History of the Jews in Russia

Overview and background[edit]

The largest group among Russian Jews are Ashkenazi Jews, but the community also includes a significant proportion of other 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 CE. 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. During 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. 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 the 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.^[12] Where Western Europe was experiencing emancipation at this time, in Russia the laws for the Jewish people were getting more strict. They were allowed to move further east, towards a less crowded region, though it was only a minority of Jews who took to this migration option.^[12] The sporadic and often impoverished communities formed were known as Shtetls.^[12]


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.^[13]: 565 The chaotic years of World War I, the February and October Revolutions, and the Russian Civil War had created social disruption that led to antisemitism. Some 150,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of 1918–1922, 125,000 of them in Ukraine, 25,000 in Belarus.^[14] The pogroms were mostly perpetrated by anti-communist forces; sometimes, Red Army units engaged in pogroms as well.^[15] Anton Denikin's White Army was a bastion of antisemitism, using "Strike at the Jews and save Russia!" as its motto.^[16] The Bolshevik Red Army, although individual soldiers committed antisemitic abuses, had a policy of opposing antisemitism, and as a result, it won the support of much of the Jewish population. After a short period of confusion, the Soviets started executing guilty individuals and even disbanding the army units whose men had attacked Jews. Although pogroms were still perpetrated after this, in general the Jews regarded the Red Army as the only force which was able and willing to defend them. The Russian Civil War pogroms shocked world Jewry and rallied many Jews to the Red Army and the Soviet regime, strengthening the desire for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people.^[15] In August 1919 the Soviet government arrested many rabbis, seized Jewish properties, including synagogues, and dissolved many Jewish communities.^[17] The Jewish section of the Communist Party labeled the use of the Hebrew language "reactionary" and "elitist" and the teaching of Hebrew was banned.^[18] Zionists were persecuted harshly, with Jewish communists leading the attacks.^[13]: 567


Following the civil war, however, the new Bolshevik government's policies produced 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,^[19] 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.^[13]: 567 At the beginning of the 1930s, the Jews were 1.8 percent of the Soviet population but 12–15 percent of all university students.^[20] 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.^[21] The JAO is Russia's only autonomous oblast^[22] and, outside of Israel, the world's only Jewish territory with an official status.^[23] The observance of the Sabbath was banned in 1929,^[13]: 567 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.^{[13]: 567 [24]} 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. According to Israeli historian Benjamin Pinkus, "We can say that the Jews in the Soviet Union took over the privileged position, previously held by the Germans in tsarist Russia".^[25]: 83


In the 1930s, many Jews held high rank in the Red Army High Command: Generals Iona Yakir, Yan Gamarnik, Yakov Smushkevich (Commander of the Soviet Air Forces) and Grigori Shtern (Commander-in-Chief in the war against Japan and Commander at the front in the Winter War).^[25]: 84 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.^[26] Over 150 were designated Heroes of the Soviet Union, the highest award in the country.^[27] 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 Israel and the West: Germany, the United States, Canada and Australia. For many years during this period, Russia had a higher rate of immigration to Israel than any other country.^[28] Russia's Jewish population is still the third biggest in Europe, after France and United Kingdom.^[29] In November 2012, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, one of the world's biggest museums of Jewish history, opened in Moscow.^[30]