Antisemitism in Ukraine
The lands of present-day Ukraine passed through several states and empires. In the Polish-Lithuanian period, Christian hostility combined with conflicts involving landlords, economic intermediaries and Cossack power.
Explore UkrainePublished by WTJPublication updated
A borderland community caught in struggles over power
The lands of present-day Ukraine passed through several states and empires. In the Polish-Lithuanian period, Christian hostility combined with conflicts involving landlords, economic intermediaries and Cossack power. The revolt of 1648 brought devastating attacks on Jews. In 1918–1921, armed forces from different camps used anti-Jewish scapegoating amid civil war. Nazi occupation later exploited the false equation of Jews with Bolshevism to help justify mass murder.
Before 1648
Borderland life · A local community becomes a symbol of someone else’s power
Political and economic tensions could attach collective blame to Jewish neighbours.
Changing borders, rooted people
Jewish communities lived in towns across lands that now form Ukraine, then governed through different kingdoms and local authorities. They developed religious and economic institutions. Present-day national borders should not be projected backward onto this history. The people were local even when the state around them changed.
The intermediary becomes the target
Some Jews worked as estate managers, leaseholders or traders within the Polish-Lithuanian order; many did not. Opponents could make those roles stand for all Jews and for the power of landlords. A conflict over actual institutions became an accusation against an entire religious minority.
Religion strengthens collective blame
Christian anti-Jewish ideas helped mark Jews as outsiders in conflicts involving faith and political authority. The combination mattered: resentment toward a ruler or economic arrangement could be redirected against Jewish residents. Explaining this mechanism does not validate the accusation or make the victims responsible for it.
1648 and after
Revolt & massacres · A revolt against rulers engulfs Jewish towns
Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s uprising brought devastating violence against Jewish communities.
The Cossack uprising
In 1648, a Cossack revolt led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky challenged the Polish-Lithuanian order. The struggle involved political control, land and religion. Jewish communities became targets because attackers associated them with that order and drew on existing religious hostility.
People disappear behind a category
Attackers killed Jews and destroyed communities during the revolt. The victims included people with no authority over the institutions being challenged. Collective blame made their identity sufficient for targeting. Historians debate the overall death toll; the destruction does not depend on presenting a disputed number as certain.
Memory carried by survivors
Survivors preserved accounts and religious commemorations of the catastrophe. Communities later rebuilt in parts of the region. The revolt remained a central rupture in Jewish memory, while appearing differently in other national narratives. Those perspectives need examination rather than being merged into a single heroic story.
1918–1921
Civil-war pogroms · Each army can invent its own Jewish enemy
Political breakdown and competing armed movements brought mass anti-Jewish violence.
War after the revolution
After the Russian Revolution and the collapse of imperial power, armies and local forces competed across Ukraine. Jewish civilians faced pogroms during the civil-war period. The danger came from multiple armed camps, rather than one uniform national movement or every person seeking Ukrainian independence.
The false Bolshevik equation
Antisemites treated the involvement of some Jews in revolutionary movements as proof that Jews collectively controlled Bolshevism. Jewish communities in fact contained many opposing political views. The accusation made civilians answerable for a revolution regardless of what they believed or had done.
Authority fails or participates
Some commanders encouraged attacks, others failed to prevent them, and some attempted restraint. Looting and violence could be justified through claims of fighting revolution or defending the nation. Following specific forces and orders explains how political rhetoric became permission to attack local families.
1941–Soviet era
Mass murder & erasure · A ravine holds the people a conspiracy condemned
At Babi Yar, Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators murdered Kyiv’s Jews.
Kyiv, September 1941
After German forces occupied Kyiv, Jews were ordered to assemble. On 29–30 September 1941, German killing units, with assistance from police and local auxiliaries, murdered 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar. The massacre was organized through instructions, custody and shooting; it was not an unexplained eruption of crowd anger.
A lie legitimizes the target
Nazi propaganda associated Jews collectively with Bolshevism and presented them as a danger behind Soviet rule. That was a conspiracy claim, not a description of Jewish civilians’ politics. Earlier anti-Jewish accusations gave the occupiers language they could adapt to their genocidal aims.
Naming whom the regime omitted
Soviet remembrance often described victims broadly as Soviet citizens, obscuring their targeting as Jews. Recovering that specificity explains the crime more accurately. A shared place of suffering does not mean every victim was selected for the same reason or that Jewish identity was irrelevant.
2023–present
October 7 & today · October 7 & today
Ukraine’s inherited nationalist and Soviet antisemitism met a different response after October 7: solidarity amid its own struggle for survival.
Flags in a city already at war
After October 7, Israeli flags appeared on public billboards in Kyiv. Solidarity rallies and prayers followed. Ukraine was already living through Russia’s invasion, yet people made space to respond to the attack on Israel.
Researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev describes this moment as an outpouring of solidarity with Israel and Jews. The response differed from the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents recorded in several Western countries. The same international event entered a different local story, shaped by a society’s own experience of war.
An inheritance can be challenged rather than revived
Ukraine inherited pogroms, nationalist exclusion, Nazi destruction and Soviet suspicion of Zionists. Those histories left ways to portray Jews as foreign or disloyal. Islamist hostility also appeared in marginal online material identified by researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev. Yet these ingredients did not produce the same post-October 7 trajectory as in several Western countries.
A November 2023 statement by Ukrainian academics, artists and activists criticized Israel through anti-colonial arguments while condemning Hamas’s attacks and rejecting blame of Jews worldwide. It shows a meaningful boundary within the left: opposition to Israel need not embrace Islamists or reproduce an older Jewish conspiracy. Russia’s invasion had reorganized communal life around survival and aid, while solidarity with Israelis under attack became a visible response. The country’s political setting changed which inheritances were mobilized.
A community scattered by another war
Jewish community research describes deaths, damaged relationships, material losses and emigration during Russia’s full-scale invasion. Families and institutions were trying to preserve communal life while people were separated or forced to move.
These losses should not be retold as an exodus caused by October 7. Likhachev’s study instead reports a decline in recorded antisemitism over 2022–2024. Jewish insecurity was still profound, but its main setting was the war in Ukraine itself. Following that distinction keeps the people’s actual circumstances at the centre of the story.