Previously in this series, we surveyed the ancient and medieval history of Ashkenazi Jews—from their origins as Israelites in Judea, to their exile in Italy, to their migration and settlement in the German Rhineland where, by the 14^th century, they came to face immense persecution culminating in the Black Death massacres. This section will cover how Ashkenazi Jews fled Germany to find refuge in Poland, until renewed persecution in the modern era led them to return to their ancestral homeland, helping to refound Israel as the independent nation we see today.

After centuries of intensifying oppression in Germany, the geographic center of Ashkenazi Jewry gradually shifted from Germany to Poland. As early as 1264, Poland had begun extending exceptional legal protections to Jews, safeguarding against assault, destruction of property, and blood libel accusations.¹ By the 15^th century, Poland and its neighbor Lithuania became the “only countries in Europe where the events of the Black Death did not leave a permanent scar on the Jewish communities.”² Many Jews at this time, especially in German territories, came to view Poland as “a place of refuge for the expelled”³ and began emigrating eastward at increasing rates, growing the Jewish population of the region to approximately 24,000.⁴ In the 16^th century, this number rose even higher to upwards of 80,000―due in part to continued immigration, but primarily from high birth rates.⁵ Soon, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was solidified as home to the world’s largest Jewish community,⁶ with an estimated population of more than 200,000 in the 17^th century.⁷

Ashkenazi communities in Poland and throughout Eastern Europe were centered predominantly in small villages called shtetls. Jews in these shtetls spoke Yiddish (a Hebraized Germanic language⁸ which was introduced to the region by German Jewish immigrants), and maintained a distinct culture characterized by Yiddishkeit, meaning “Jewishness.”⁹ The culture and social structure of shtetl life fully solidified in the 18^th century after the Partitions of Poland,¹⁰ during which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dissolved and much of its territory—along with its Jewish inhabitants—came under Russian control.¹¹ But as Poland’s national sovereignty declined, so too did the protections of the Jews who lived there. Jewish communities in Eastern Europe once again faced repeated waves of antisemitic attacks, resulting in massive loss of life and property over the centuries.¹² Some of the most notable pogroms were incited in 1881, when the Jews were blamed for the assassination of the Russian Emperor.¹³

With history’s pattern of anti-Jewish persecution again repeating itself, many Ashkenazi Jews were compelled to flee Poland just as their ancestors had fled Germany. They settled in various regions worldwide, most notably in America and Ottoman-controlled Palestine.¹⁴ America—which was seen as the “Golden Land” of opportunity—received over 2 million hopeful Jewish immigrants between 1881–1924,¹⁵ firmly establishing it as home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the world even into the present day.¹⁶ Immigration to Palestine was prompted by Eastern European Jews’ support of the newly established Zionist Movement,¹⁷ which sought to end the cycle of Jewish persecution and forced displacement by creating a permanent Jewish home with national sovereignty in their ancestral Land. Zionism soon gained increasing sympathy and momentum in international politics,¹⁸ such that by 1922, the League of Nations officially recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and mandated that Britain (which had come to control Palestine by that time) should administrate the territory with the eventual goal to “secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.”¹⁹ Up to the year 1931, roughly 175,000 Jews made aliyah to the Holy Land, immigrating primarily from Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and joining with thousands of other Jews who already lived in Palestine.²⁰ This older community—called the “Old Yishuv”—carried the unbroken legacy of a Jewish remnant which had maintained a constant presence in the Land since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.²¹

Though these migrations to America and Palestine were significant, Poland still retained the largest Ashkenazi Jewish population in the world during this period—over 3.3 million Jews, comprising one-third of Europe’s 9.9 million Jews.²² But soon, the Jewish communities of Europe were decimated by the largest murder of Jews in all of history. Within a decade of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, his radical Nazi regime began a widespread series of conquests during World War II, claiming vast swathes of Europe, including much of Poland. In an organized effort to fully exterminate the Jewish ethnicity, the Nazis systematically annihilated 6 million Jews—almost two-thirds of European Jewry.²³ This heinous genocide, known as the Holocaust or Shoah (“catastrophe”), laid waste to all the shtetls of Europe, bringing their existence to a permanent end.²⁴ By the conclusion of the war, the native Jewish population of Poland was cut down by an estimated 97%; likewise, the German Jewish population decreased by 95%, and even the Italian Jewish population declined by 40%.²⁵

With their homes, families, and entire way of life destroyed, Holocaust survivors found hope in Zionism—the promise of a new life in the Promised Land. In the years during and following the Nazis’ reign of terror, 370,000 Ashkenazi Jews flooded into Mandatory Palestine from Poland, Germany, and throughout Europe.²⁶ Then finally, on May 14, 1948, the modern State of Israel declared its independence,²⁷ reestablishing Jewish national autonomy for the first time in two millennia. Despite facing repeated wars and ongoing attacks since its founding, Israel has continued to overcome these immense obstacles, and today has the single largest Jewish population of any nation in the world.²⁸

After a two-thousand year exile—as Israelite refugees in small Italian communities, as persecuted merchants in the German Rhineland, as oppressed villagers in Poland fleeing the pogroms and the Holocaust—Ashkenazi Jews finally returned to their God-given homeland. Never once did the Jewish ethnic group fade from recorded history; and never once did Jews, their allies, or their enemies forget the unbroken Israelite heritage of the Jewish people in every generation. In the concluding part of this series, we will confirm what the historical facts already clearly demonstrate, rebutting revisionist narratives of the origins of Ashkenazi Jews and evaluating genetic evidence.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

1. The Statute of Kalisz, which enumerated these protections for Jews, was chartered in 1264 for the district of Greater Poland, before King Casimir III expanded it in 1334 to be binding throughout the entire Kingdom of Poland.
   Bolesław the Pious, Statute of Kalisz (1264), trans. Tristan Korecki and Philip Earl Steele, Polish Freedom. polishfreedom.pl. ↩︎
2. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), vol. 3, s.v. “Black Death.” archive.org. ↩︎
3. Bernard D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), 27–32. books.google.com. ↩︎
4. Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 4. books.google.com. ↩︎
5. Ibid, 4-5. ↩︎
6. Ibid, 3. ↩︎
7. Ibid, 4. ↩︎
8. Alexander Beider, “Yiddish in Eastern Europe,” in Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present, ed. Benjamin Hary and Sarah Bunin Benor (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2018), 276-312. academia.org. ↩︎
9. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 18, s.v. “Shtetl.” archive.org. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Jews in the Russian Empire were largely confined to live in a region called the Pale of Settlement, which encompassed much of “modern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova.” Jews had previously been banned from Russia, but the annexation of much of Poland resulted in a sudden massive Jewish presence in Russian territories; as a result, Jews were restricted to this specific region of the Empire.
    Rebecca M. Kulik, “Pale of Settlement,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com. ↩︎
12. Two notable examples from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, respectively, were the Chmielnicki Uprising (1648–1657) and the Massacre of Uman (1768), in which Cossacks in the Ukraine slaughtered thousands of Jews while rebelling against the Polish-Lithunanian Commonwealth. These uprisings were part of the greater trend of political decline which eventually culminated in the dissolution of the Commonwealth.
    Herman Rosenthal, “Cossacks’ Uprising,” vol. 4; Herman Rosenthal and J. G. Lipman, “Haidamacks,” vol. 6, in The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1906). jewishencyclopedia.com (Cossacks), jewishencyclopedia.com (Haidamacks). ↩︎
13. “…none [suffered] more than the Jews, who were blamed for the tsar’s assassination. A Jewish girl, Hessia Helfmann, was the one [and only] Jewish member of the group that organized the murder of Alexander II. Her role was actually a secondary one—she kept a secret residence for the others—but her connection with the terrorists was the pretext for a wave of government-inspired pogroms that brought death and terror to 160 Jewish towns and cities in southern Russia throughout the spring and summer of 1881.”
    Arthur Liebman, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917 (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), 17. archive.org. ↩︎
14. As explained in Part 2 of this series, the name “Palestine” came to refer to the territory of Israel after the dissolution and renaming of Judea in the 2^nd century by Roman Emperor Hadrian. In the following centuries, “Palestine” was the name of a geographic region under the rule of various empires throughout history; however, at no time prior to the founding of the modern State of Israel was there ever an independent nation of Palestine. ↩︎
15. Library of Congress, “From Haven to Home.” loc.gov. ↩︎
16. Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population, 2024,” in American Jewish Year Book 2024, ed. Arnold Dashefsky and Ira Sheskin (Cham: Springer, 2025), 1. cbs.gov.il. ↩︎
17. Shoshana Neuman. “Aliyah to Israel: Immigration under Conditions of Adversity.” IZA Discussion Paper, No. 89 (1999), 7. iza.org. ↩︎
18. Notably, the nations of Britain, America, and France supported the establishment of a Jewish state. In America (1891), hundreds of prominent figures—motivated by worsening conditions of Jews in the Russian Empire—signed a petition called the Blackstone Memorial to urge the President to exert diplomatic pressure to “give Palestine back to [the Jews] again”; in France (1917), the Secretary General of Foreign Affairs offered his sympathy and support for the idea of assisting “the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago”; in Britain (1917), Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour likewise assured the Zionist Federation of Britain’s commitment to “use their best endeavors to facilitate” the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
    William E. Blackstone, Blackstone Memorial (1891). wikisource.org.
    Jules Cambon, Letter to Nahum Sokolow (4 June 1917). britainpalestineproject.org.
    Arthur James Balfour, Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917). jewishvirtuallibrary.org. ↩︎
19. League of Nations, Mandate for Palestine, Preamble and Article 2. digitallibrary.un.org. ↩︎
20. Neuman, “Aliyah to Israel,” 7, Table 3. iza.org. ↩︎
21. The “Old Yishuv” refers specifically to the Jewish community in late Ottoman Palestine, prior to the First Aliyah of new Zionist immigrants. Tracing the Old Yishuv’s tumultuous history—from the Ottoman era (1517–1917) back through the Mamluk era (1291–1517), the Crusader era (1099–1291), the early Islamic conquests (638–1099), and the Byzantine/Roman era (70–638)—is beyond the scope of this series. For a cursory century-by-century introduction to the continuous history of Jews in the Land of Israel, see Dan Bahat, ed., Twenty Centuries of Jewish Life in the Holy Land: The Forgotten Generations, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Israel Economist, 1976). archive.org. ↩︎
22. Based on 1939 Jewish population estimates.
    Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, “Appendix III: Estimated Jewish Population of Europe,” in Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946). avalon.law.yale.edu ↩︎
23. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Introduction to the Holocaust.” ushmm.org. ↩︎
24. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Shtetl.” archive.org. ↩︎
25. Comparison of native Jewish populations in these countries between 1939 and 1946: Poland, from 3,351,000 to 80,000; Germany, from 215,000 to 20,000; Italy, from 50,000 to 30,000. Some of the decline resulted from Jews fleeing or being displaced by the Holocaust, but even many who fled were likely killed. Post-war Germany and Italy also had an additional population of displaced Jewish refugees from other regions (~83% originating from Poland), numbering 74,000 and 16,000 respectively. For a comprehensive survey of Jewish population losses not just in these countries but all across the nations of Europe, see “Appendix III: Estimated Jewish Population of Europe,” in Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946). avalon.law.yale.edu. ↩︎
26. This figure includes the 217,000 immigrants of the Fifth Aliyah (1932–1938) who fled Europe after Hitler first rose to power, just prior to WWII and the Holocaust.
    Neuman, “Aliyah to Israel,” 7, Table 3. iza.org. ↩︎
27. Provisional Government of Israel, Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (14 May 1948). timesofisrael. ↩︎
28. DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population, 2024,” 1. cbs.gov.il. ↩︎