Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Jews have been widely distributed throughout European cities and nations, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Russia. In the late fifteenth century, the monarchs of Spain and Portugal formed offices of the Inquisition to impose the Catholic orthodoxy of converted Jews and drove them to either convert to Christianity or flee. Sephardic Jews, to escape religious persecution, started a mass migration[1].

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Ashkenazi (from Central and Eastern Europe) and Sephardic (from Spain and Portugal) are the two main ethnic subgroups of European Jews. Approximately 70–80% of Jews worldwide are Ashkenazi Jews. They first appeared in the Rhineland (western Germany) and northern France in the tenth century, and they subsequently moved eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. They used to speak Yiddish, a dialect of Hebrew and German. The Iberian Peninsula is the original place of Sephardic Jews, who were compelled to escape during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in the late 1400s[2]. They mostly resided in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Balkans, and they frequently spoke Ladino, which is a combination of Hebrew and Spanish/Portuguese. Ashkenazi Jews[3] lived in communities under continuous rabbinic authority. Initially, the majority of European Jews lived in southern Europe. They moved north during the High and Late Middle Ages. Jewish immigrants from Babylon and Persia, Maghrebi Jewish traders from North Africa, and settlers from southern Europe began to settle in western and central Europe by the eleventh century, especially in France and the Rhine River region. 

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The Holocaust, in which almost 6,000,000 Jews were killed during World War II[4], was a planned attempt by the Nazi regime in Germany to exterminate the Jewish people. Hundreds of Jewish communities in continental Europe were destroyed as a result of the Shoah; two out of every three European Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide perished.

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According to estimates, there are now about 1.4 million Jews in Europe (0.2% of the total population), or 10% of all Jews worldwide. The largest Jewish population in Europe in the twenty-first century is found in France, which is followed by the UK, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine.

Over 21,900 new immigrants (olim) arrived in Israel in 2025, a notable increase in immigration from the West. Aliyah from Western Europe had a sharp increase with over 5,100 arrivals, a 138% increase since 2023, mostly due to growing antisemitism. The following were the top European nations for immigration: France: 3,357 arrivals, a huge increase of 45% to 51% year over year. 890 people arrived from Great Britain, a 136% increase from 2023. Germany: Displayed a consistent 34% growth[5].

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