The Jews of Europe
Jewish communities have been present in Europe for more than two millennia, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Baltic region and from the Rhine valley to the Balkans. Living at the intersection of their own religious traditions and the societies around them, they developed an intangible cultural heritage of remarkable richness, transmitted through song, gesture, narrative, and everyday practice. A substantial part of this heritage was severely damaged, and in many places nearly destroyed, during the Holocaust; its documentation and safeguarding therefore carry particular urgency today.
Musical traditions among European Jews were notably varied. In the Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe, klezmer ensembles accompanied weddings and festive occasions, drawing on dance repertoires, liturgical modes, and the characteristic timbres of the clarinet and violin. Hasidic circles cultivated the nigun, a wordless melody used in prayer and devotional gatherings.
Yiddish theater drew on the older folk practice of the Purimspiel, the comic plays performed during Purim. In 1876, Abraham Goldfaden established what is generally regarded as the first professional Yiddish theater company in Iași, Romania. The form subsequently flourished in Warsaw, Vilna, Vienna, and Moscow, where the Moscow State Jewish Theater, led by Solomon Mikhoels, gained international recognition. Combining drama, humor, music, and social commentary, Yiddish theater offered a vivid reflection of Jewish life in modern Europe.
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Jewish artisans produced ritual and domestic objects of high craftsmanship, including silver Torah crowns and pointers, Hanukkah lamps, Kiddush cups, embroidered Torah mantles, festival paper-cuts, and illuminated marriage contracts (ketubot), the latter especially in Italy. The scribal art (sofrut), through which Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot are written by hand, remains active today. Many of these crafts combined Jewish symbolism with the prevailing artistic styles of their regions.
Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, preserved Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) ballads and love songs across the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans for several centuries. Cantorial singing, in the synagogue as in the concert hall, also exerted a lasting influence on both sacred and popular music.
Storytelling is a cornerstone of Jewish cultural memory. Folk tales, Hasidic narratives, legends such as that of the Golem of Prague, and the humorous accounts of the "fools of Chelm" circulated at the family table, in the study house, and around the fireside. Writers such as Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz gave literary form to this largely oral world. Sephardic communities, for their part, valued proverbs, riddles, and comic tales, among them those featuring the trickster Djoha. Such narratives transmitted ethical values, humor, and a capacity for resilience from one generation to the next.
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Jewish foodways reflect both the dietary laws of kashrut and the ingredients available in each region. Ashkenazi cuisine is associated with challah, gefilte fish, chicken soup, and cholent, the slow-cooked stew prepared for Shabbat. Sephardic cooking includes burekas, stuffed vegetables, and confections based on almonds, honey, and citrus. In Rome, fried artichokes (carciofi alla giudia) became emblematic of the Jewish quarter. Festive dishes, from Passover to Purim, serve as vehicles of memory as much as of taste.
Dance occupied a central place in communal celebration. Wedding dances such as the freylekhs, the bulgar, and the sher were typically performed in circles or lines and often included ritual elements, notably the mitzvah tantz, in which guests danced with the bride. In Hasidic thought, dance expressed joy and served as a form of worship. In Sephardic and Balkan communities, circle dances developed in close dialogue with regional musical idioms.
Religious observance structured the rhythm of daily and yearly life through Shabbat, the festivals, prayer, study, and life-cycle ceremonies. Practice nevertheless varied by region: the Ashkenazi and Sephardic rites differ in their liturgy, melodies, and customs (minhagim), and each community shaped its own sacred spaces, from the wooden synagogues of Poland and Lithuania to the monumental synagogues of Amsterdam, Venice, and Budapest. Liturgical poetry (piyyutim), scriptural commentary, and communal charity were integral components of this living tradition.
The Jewish calendar is closely tied to lunar cycles and agricultural seasons. Festivals such as Sukkot, with its four species (lulav, etrog, myrtle, and willow), and Tu BiShvat, the "New Year of the Trees," attest to a sustained relationship with land and cultivation. In European communities, this knowledge also found expression in folk medicine, herbal remedies, weather lore, and an extensive Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish vocabulary relating to plants, animals, and the seasons, often preserved in the domestic sphere and transmitted largely by women.
The Jews of Europe: A Historical Overview
Jewish life in Europe predates the Common Era. Jewish communities were established in Greece and in Rome by the second century BCE, and they spread with the Roman Empire across Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Gaul, and the Rhineland. Over the following centuries, Jews settled in cities throughout the continent, from Spain and Portugal to France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Russia. In 1492, the Alhambra Decree ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom, and Portugal imposed a similar choice in 1496–97. Those who converted, the conversos, remained under the scrutiny of the Inquisition, while tens of thousands of others went into exile [1].
European Jewry is traditionally divided into two main groups. The Sephardim trace their ancestry to the Iberian Peninsula. After the expulsions, they rebuilt their communities in the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, North Africa, Italy, and the Netherlands, and many of them kept Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), a language based on Old Castilian and enriched with Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, and other elements [2]. The Ashkenazim first emerged in the Rhineland and northern France around the tenth century. They later moved eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, where they formed the largest Jewish population in the world. Their language, Yiddish, is a Germanic language with substantial Hebrew-Aramaic and Slavic components. Over the centuries, Ashkenazi communities developed a dense network of self-governing institutions under rabbinic leadership [3].
The Holocaust brought this world to a near end. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews. Roughly two out of every three European Jews perished, about one-third of the Jewish people worldwide, and thousands of communities were destroyed along with their synagogues, schools, languages, and traditions [4].
Today, about 1.3 million Jews live in Europe, less than 0.2% of the continent’s population and about 9% of world Jewry. The largest communities are in France and the United Kingdom, followed by Germany and Russia [5]. In recent years, rising antisemitism has led a growing number of Western European Jews to emigrate to Israel. In 2025, Israel welcomed some 21,900 new immigrants (olim). The overall total declined, mainly because fewer people arrived from Russia, but immigration from Western countries grew markedly: about 3,300 arrivals from France (up 45% from 2024) and 840 from the United Kingdom (up 19%) [6].
Jews from Europe
Jews from Europe
Venise et son ghetto
Antisemitism pushing jews out of their homes in France
The Jewish community's place in French society
מבט - עלייה היסטורית של יהודים מצרפת | כאן 11 לשעבר רשות השידור
Links
Sources of the Historical Overview
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Jewish Virtual Library: documentation on the Spanish expulsion, the Inquisition, and the dispersal of Sephardic Jews.
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Centro Sefarad-Israel (Madrid): Spanish public institution devoted to the Sephardic legacy and Judeo-Spanish culture.
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The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe: the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry, its eastward migration, and the history of Yiddish.
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Yad Vashem: the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, with databases on the destruction of European Jewish communities.
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Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR): Jewish Population of Europe in 2020 (DellaPergola & Staetsky), with country-by-country estimates.
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The Jerusalem Post, “Aliyah Ministry closes 2025 with 21,900 new immigrants”: 2025 immigration figures from the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration and the Jewish Agency.