The first surviving authentic document of Kievan Rus was a letter written in Hebrew. By the end of the 19th century, there were already five and a half million Jews living in Russia, accounting for 80 percent of the total number in the world.
New hypotheses
Until recently, the main version of how the Jews ended up in Eastern Europe was the Rhine hypothesis, according to which the Eastern European Jews descended from the descendants of the Israeli-Canaanite tribes who migrated from the Holy Land under the influence of Islamic expansion in the 7th century in the middle reaches of the Rhine. Before that, there were already small communities that moved to these lands in the late Roman era.
Further, already at the beginning of the 15th century, a large group of Jews migrated to the East.
However, the latest major studies of genomes conducted by American geneticist Dr. Eran Elhaik from Johns Hopkins University showed that the genetic map of Jewish communities is far from monolithic, moreover, it is dominated by South European and Caucasian ancestral signatures with a small admixture of the Middle East. Dr. Elhaik's research was published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
Similar studies have been carried out by other scientists. In 2013, 17 researchers from 12 scientific organizations studied more than 3.5 thousand mitochondrial DNA in Jews from Europe, the Caucasus and the Middle East and came to the conclusion that more than 80% of them come from the Old World, and not from the Front Asia and not from the Caucasus.
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According to the author of the study, Englishman Martin Richards (Center for the Study of Archeogenetics at the University of Huddersfield) and his colleagues, among whom there are Russian scientists from the Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Rychkov and Oksana Naumova, this suggests that about 2000 years ago a large group of Jews migrated from Palestine, and these were predominantly men, which is important, since Jewishness is transmitted through the maternal line.
Thus, today we can say that Jewish migration on the territory of Russia went, firstly, in several stages, and secondly, it came from different places: from the territory of Palestine and from the territory of the Khazar Kaganate, and the number of Palestinian Jews was smaller.
The first Jews in the future territory of Russia
The first Jews on the future territory of Russia appeared in the 1st-2nd centuries. They lived in Greek island colonies. This is evidenced by the tombstone of a Jewish warrior found in Taman dating back to the 1st century, as well as numerous monuments with Jewish symbols and Jewish symbols (images of a menorah, shofar, lulav and etrog).
It is also known that a significant number of Jews lived in the Bosporus kingdom at the end of the 4th century; these were the descendants of the participants in the Bar-Kokhba uprising and those who were expelled during the Assyrian and Babylonian captivity.
In the 7th century, the Taman Peninsula was a major center of concentration of Jews. This is evidenced by the entry of the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, which he made in 671:
"… in the city of Phanagoria and its environs, many other tribes also live near the Jews living there."
The researcher of the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe Julius Brutskus wrote that part of the Palestinian Jews from Persia through the Derbent passage migrated to the lower Volga, where in the 8th century the city of Itil appeared - the capital of the Khazar Kaganate. As you know, Judaism became one of the religions of the Kaganate in the second half of the 8th and early 9th centuries, which evidently took root there under the influence of Jewish communities. At that time, Jewish merchants-Radanites, under the patronage of the Khazar rulers, were engaged in trade and controlled the circulation of fur, weapons, silk and spices between the West and the East.
After the collapse of the Khazar Kaganate, Jews were forced to migrate west. This is confirmed by the chronicles of 1117 about the resettlement of the Khazars from Belaya Vezha (Sarkel) near Chernigov, as well as numerous place names like Zhidovo, Zhidichev, Zhidova vila, Kozari, Kozara, Kozarzevek in the territory of Ancient Rus and Poland.
Jews in Kievan Rus
Even in the early period of Kievan Rus, Jewish communities were already in Smolensk, Chernigov, Przemysl and Volodymyr-Volynsky. Information about them is contained in the documents of the XI-XIII centuries. There was also a significant Khazar-Jewish colony in Kiev at this time. In the annals of Kievan Rus there are references to the Zhidovsky quarter and the Zhidovsky gates.
One of the oldest authentic manuscripts of Kievan Rus, the so-called Kievan letter, was written in Hebrew. It was a letter of recommendation issued to Yaakov ben Hanukkah by the Jewish community in Kiev. It dates back to the 10th century.
There are other historical confirmations of the activity of the Jewish population of Kievan Rus in the X-XII centuries. So, in 1094 and 1124 in Kievan Rus commentaries to the Pentateuch were compiled. In 1156 the Greek monk Theodosius mentioned the Karaites who lived in Kiev. The Kiev rabbi of the end of the XII century Moshe ben Ya'akov from Kiev was personally acquainted with the French rabbi Ya'akov Tam and was in correspondence with the head of the Baghdad yeshiva, Shmuel ben Ali ha-Levi Gaon (he died around 1194), the head of the yeshiva in Baghdad. Binyamin from Tudela, who visited Kiev in 1173, called it “the great city”.
Pale of Settlement
The term “Pale of Settlement” today has a negative connotation, and is often misunderstood as a kind of narrow demarcation border. Let's define the terms. The Pale of Settlement was called the border of the territory of the Russian Empire, outside of which, from 1791 to 1915, permanent residence of Jews was prohibited. It is important to understand that this was not a narrow strip of land, the territory of the Pale of Settlement was 1,224,008 sq. km, that is, it was a whole country, which is larger in area than the territory of Moldova, or Belarus, or Ukraine. For comparison: the territory of Israel: 22,072 sq. km.
It is known that Napoleon, recruiting the militia, turned to the Jews of France: "Who are you, citizens, or outcasts?"
Jews living in the Pale of Settlement on the territory of the Russian Empire rarely cooperated with Napoleon, perceiving the invasion as a threat to their culture, traditions and faith, that is, they did not feel like outcasts, but began to actively help the Russian army in the fight against the invaders.
The Pale of Settlement was not only a form of discrimination (and not on a national, but on a religious basis), but also a form of protecting Jewish society from external influences.
Jews were not taken into the army for a long time, they did not pay taxes. They were allowed many types of activities, including distilling, brewing, and were allowed to work as artisans and artisans.
After the Pale of Settlement appeared, not all Jews were restricted in their rights. An exception was made for Jews of non-Jewish religion, for merchants of the first guild, dentists, pharmacists, paramedics, mechanics, the same distillers and brewers, graduates of universities, clerks of the Jewish merchants of the 1st guild.
Partitions of Poland
The largest part of the Jews ended up in the Russian Empire after the partitions of Poland (1772-1794). After the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, about 200 thousand Jews turned out to be in Russia. The Russian government took into account the specifics of the tradition. The Jews retained the right to practice their faith in public and own property. Senate decree of 1776 legalized the existence of the kagala.
Catherine II began to restrict the rights of Jews, but it was still far from reactionism of the late 19th century and the pogroms.
In 1795, the Pale of Settlement included 15 provinces: Volyn, Yekaterinoslav, Kiev, Podolsk, Poltava, Tauride, Kherson, Chernigov (modern Ukraine), Vitebsk, Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev (modern Belarus), Vilna, Kovno (modern Lithuania) and Bessara (modern Moldova).
Jews in Russia by the end of the 19th century
Some statistics. At the end of the 19th century, in 1897, there were 7.5 million Jews in the world, 5, 25 million of them lived on the territory of the Russian Empire. Of these, 3.837 million lived in European Russia, 105 thousand Jews - in the Caucasus, Siberia and Central Asia.
Jews accounted for over 50% of the urban population of Lithuania and Belarus. In the cities of Ukraine lived: Russians - 35.5%, Jews - 30%, Ukrainians - 27%.