The Jewish Diaspora in Europe and Its Consequences for Modern Jewish Genealogy

by Marine Vigneau, founder of GENEAELIE — Genealogist and Family Historian

During the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, while I was living in Poland and was part of the Polish Jewish community, I witnessed within my own daily environment the re-formation of a contemporary Jewish diaspora. The arrival of Ukrainian Jewish families displaced by the fighting made tangible a process I had previously encountered only in sources, archives, or historical texts: the abrupt separation from one’s place of origin, improvised exile, and the gradual rebuilding of a protective sociability rooted in language, ritual, mutual aid, and memory. This direct confrontation with a diaspora in the making revealed, in its rawest form, a phenomenon that has shaped Jewish history since antiquity: the need to invent continuities despite dispersion, solidarities despite rupture, and communities despite loss.

According to Vyacheslav Likhachev, *“the history of the Jews in Europe is fundamentally a chronicle of mobility”*¹. He notes that roads, networks, and mutual support have long formed the backbone of Jewish continuity: from the biblical Exodus to the dispersions that followed the successive destructions of the Temple, mobility structures Jewish identity¹. This mobility created a form of non-territorial anchoring based not on the permanence of a place but on the persistence of connection. The Kiev Letter, preserved in the Cairo Genizah and described as one of the most important sources for the history of Eastern Europe², already attests in the 10th century to a transregional network strong enough to organize the ransom of a Jew enslaved hundreds of kilometers away.

The Iberian expulsions of the 15th and 16th centuries carried Sephardic communities toward the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, bringing with them Ladino; at the same time, Ashkenazic groups from the Rhineland spread eastward a Germanic idiom that would become Yiddish³. These circulations profoundly reshaped the European Jewish map, generating a linguistic and cultural plurality whose layers remain visible today.

From 1881 onward, new migratory waves transformed European societies. Likhachev emphasizes that Jews from Eastern and Central Europe fled pogroms, discriminatory legislation, and the economic collapse of the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Romania¹. France emerged as a privileged refuge: the first European state to grant full citizenship to Jews⁴, it attracted nearly one hundred thousand migrants between 1881 and 1925⁴. By 1939, Paris was home to more than 130,000 Jews from Eastern Europe. The Yiddish saying “Lebn vi Got in Frankraykh” (“To live like God in France”) captures this aspiration.

The Shoah marked an irreversible rupture. Approximately six million Jews were murdered; the Jewish population of Europe fell from 9.5 million in 1933 to 3.5 million by 1950⁵. By 1950, the majority of the world’s Jews no longer lived in Europe⁵. Entire communities vanished—along with their archives, traditions, lineages, and languages. The diaspora has since been marked by absences that genealogy must confront: missing documents, erased traces, forced silence.

Madeleine King observes that Jewish genealogical research is particularly complex for any period prior to the French Revolution of 1789⁶. Jewish communities did not keep parish registers⁷; most surviving documents were produced by civil authorities—tax rolls, residence permits, lists of tolerated households—reflecting a status based on “supervised tolerance”⁷. Expulsions, conversions, shifting jurisdictional boundaries, territorial recompositions, and the destruction of archives explain the fragmented nature of the sources. Added to this are the complexities of Jewish naming practices: late adoption of hereditary surnames, Hebrew and vernacular variations, symbolic appellations, divergent transliterations, and administrative francisation. Endogamy further complicates contemporary genetic interpretation⁸.

These historical discontinuities now intersect with contemporary phenomena observed in Ukraine. The report Ukraine’s Jewish Community: Current Dynamics and Needs Assessment (2025) describes a community that, since 2014—and especially since 2022—has faced mass displacement, the fragmentation of communal structures, and accelerated identity reconstruction. Likhachev writes that *“the war disrupted traditional community structures, leading to the collapse of local networks and a rapid reconfiguration of solidarities”*⁹. He further notes that *“forced mobility has pushed Ukrainian Jewry back into a diasporic logic of survival and reconstruction, recalling in many ways the historical dynamics of previous centuries”*¹⁰. The genealogical consequences are immediate: the loss of documents, internal migrations, the dispersion of entire families, and the rupture of intergenerational transmission.

This continuity between ancient ruptures and contemporary disruptions underscores the need for genealogical approaches capable of understanding mobility across long time spans. Yet the discipline is being transformed by digital shifts: digitized civil registers, transnational inventories, community databases, naturalization files, consular archives, oral testimonies, and private photographic collections now form an unprecedented body of sources. Digitization does not erase the voids; it makes them visible, locatable, and intelligible.

It is within this framework that GENEAELIE’s approach takes place. It draws on French, Polish, Ukrainian, German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian archives; on Latin, Gothic, and Hebrew scripts; on Jewish historical languages; and on surviving community records. It seeks to restore continuity where history has created discontinuity: orthographic variations, forced migrations, naturalizations, identity erasure, marranism, destruction of documents, administrative francisation, and losses linked to contemporary conflicts. GENEAELIE does not simply collect acts; it recontextualizes them, interprets silences, reconstructs coherence, and situates individual trajectories within the long history of the European Jewish diaspora. To recover a lineage is to restore a voice; to repair an erasure; to return to families a memory fragmented by centuries.

1. Vyacheslav Likhachev, EDJC Conference, Vilnius, 2023.
2. Kiev Letter, 10th century, Cairo Genizah, Cambridge University Library.
3. Linguistic studies on the formation of medieval Yiddish.
4. Jewish migration flows, 1881–1925.
5. American Jewish Yearbook, 1951.
6. Madeleine King, “Difficultés de la recherche généalogique juive”, Revue des Études juives, no. 150, 1991.
7. Ibid.
8. Contemporary methodological observations on endogamy and DNA.
9. “The war disrupted traditional community structures”, in Ukraine’s Jewish Community: Current Dynamics and Needs Assessment, 2025.
10. “Forced mobility has pushed Ukrainian Jewry back into a diasporic logic of survival and reconstruction”, ibid.