|
The vast territories of the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest population of Jews in the world.〔''Jewish Encyclopedia'' of 1901–1906 ()〕 Within these territories the primarily Ashkenazi Jewish communities of many different areas flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of antisemitic discriminatory policies and persecutions. Russian Jewry consists predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews but also comprises a number of other Diasporan Jewish groups, such as Mountain Jews, Crimean Karaites, Krymchaks, Bukharan Jews, and Georgian 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 within Russia, the territory where they could live or immigrate to. Alexander III 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. 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. The chaotic years of World War I, the February and October Revolutions, and the Russian Civil War had created social disruption that led to Anti-Semitism. Some 150,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of 1918-1922, 125,000 of them in Ukraine, 25,000 in Belarus.〔(Pogroms in the Ukraine (1919-1921) ) ''Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence'', 3 April 2008, retrieved 9 September 2015.〕 These were probably the largest-scale European massacres of Jews to date.〔(Russian Civil War Pogroms ) ''Zionism and Israel - Encyclopedic Dictionary'', 2005, retrieved 9 September 2015.〕 The pogroms were mostly perpetrated by anti-communist forces; sometimes, Red Army units engaged in pogroms as well. 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, mainly by Ukrainian units of the Red Army during its retreat from Poland (1920), 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, and also strengthened the desire for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people.〔(Modern Jewish History: Pogroms ) ''Jewish Virtual Library'', 2008, retrieved 9 September 2015.〕 In 1919 the Soviet government arrested many rabbis, seized Jewish properties, including synagogues, and dissolved many Jewish communities. The Jewish section of the Communist Party labeled the use of the Hebrew language "reactionary" and "elitist" and the teaching of Hebrew was banned in August 1919.〔(August 30: Hebrew Banned in Revolutionary Russia ) ''Jewishcurrents.org'', 29 August 2013, retrieved 9 September 2015.〕 Zionists were persecuted harshly, with Jewish communists leading the attacks. 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 Anti-Semitism, with the public use of the word "Yid" being punished by up to one year of imprisonment, 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. In 1934 the Soviet state established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Russian Far East, but the region never came to have a majority Jewish population.〔James Brook, (Birobidzhan Journal; A Promised Land in Siberia? Well, Thanks, but ... ), ''The New York Times'', July 11, 1996〕 Today, the JAO is Russia's only autonomous oblast〔Constitution of the Russian Federation, Article 65〕 and, aside of Israel, the world's only Jewish territory with an official status. The observance of the Sabbath was banned in 1929, 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. 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. Over 150 were designated Heroes of the Soviet Union, the highest award in the country.〔(Jewish Soldiers in the Allied Armies ) ''Yad Vashem'', 2002-07-30, retrieved 7 September 2015.〕 More than two million Soviet Jews are believed to have died during the Holocaust in warfare and in Nazi-occupied territories. As a result of the persecution, both state-sponsored and unofficial, Anti-Semitism became deeply ingrained in the society. 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. Russia's Jewish population is the third biggest in Europe, after France and United Kingdom.〔(Jewish Population of the World ) ''Jewish Virtual Library'', retrieved 9 September 2015.〕 The government of Vladimir Putin takes an official stand against antisemitism, while some movements, parties, and groups have explicit antisemitic positions. == Early history == Jews have been present in contemporary Armenia and Georgia since the Babylonian captivity. Records exist from the 4th century showing that there were Armenian cities possessing Jewish populations ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 along with substantial Jewish settlements in the Crimea.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Armenia )〕 The presence of Jewish people in the territories corresponding to modern Belarus, Ukraine, and the European part of Russia can be traced back to the 7th-14th centuries CE.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Ukraine: Virtual Jewish History Tour )〕〔 Under the influence of the Caucasian Jewish communities, the Bulan, the Khagan Bek of the Khazars, and the ruling classes of Khazaria (located in what is now Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan), may have adopted/converted to Judaism at some point in the mid-to-late 8th or early 9th centuries. After the conquest of the Khazarian kingdom by Sviatoslav I of Kiev (969), the Khazar Jewish population may have assimilated or migrated in part. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the Jews in Russia」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|