During the Khmelnytsky Uprising between 1648 and 1657, an army of Cossacks massacred and took large numbers of Jews, Roman Catholics, and Uniate Christians into captivity.

[16] During 1821 anti-Jewish riots in Odesa followed the death of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople, in which 14 Jews were recorded killed.

The teachings of Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, or BeShT, (1698–1760) had a profound effect on Eastern European Jews.

[31] The traditional measures used to keep the Russian Empire free of Jews[citation needed] were hindered when the main territory of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was annexed during the partitions of Poland.

During the second (1793) and the third (1795) partitions, large populations of Jews were absorbed by the Russian Empire, and Catherine the Great established the Pale of Settlement that included Congress Poland and Crimea.

The term became common after a wave of anti-Jewish violence swept the southern Russian Empire (including Ukraine) between 1881 and 1884, after Jews were blamed for the assassination of Alexander II.

Systematic policies of discrimination, strict quotas on the number of Jews allowed to obtain education and professions caused widespread poverty and mass emigration.

Counter-revolutionary groups, including the Black Hundreds, opposed the Revolution with violent attacks on socialists and pogroms against Jews.

A backlash came from the conservative elements of society, notably in spasmodic anti-Jewish attacks – around five hundred were killed in a single day in Odesa.

At the start of the 20th century, anti-Jewish pogroms continued to occur in cities and towns across the Russian Empire such as Kishinev, Kyiv, Odesa, and many others.

Numerous Jewish self-defense groups were organized to prevent the outbreak of pogroms among which the most successful one was under the leadership of Mishka Yaponchik in Odesa.

[35] From 1911 to 1913, the antisemitic tenor of the period was characterized by a number of blood libel cases (accusations of Jews murdering Christians for ritual purposes).

[37] In 1912-1914, S. An-sky led the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition to the Pale, which visited around 70 shtetls in Volyn, Podolia, and Galicia (all in modern Ukraine) gathering folk stories, artifacts, recording music, and making photos, as an attempt to preserve and salvage traditional Ashkenazim culture that was vanishing because of modernization, pogroms, and emigration.

From March to May 1915, in the face of the German army, the government expelled thousands of Jews from the Empire's border areas, mainly the Pale of Settlement.

Archives declassified after 1991 provide evidence of a higher number; in the period from 1918 to 1921, "according to incomplete data, at least 100,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine in the pogroms.

[38] Among the prominent Ukrainian statesmen of this period were Moisei Rafes, Pinkhas Krasny, Abram Revutsky, Moishe Zilberfarb, and many others.

The removal of the restrictions on Jews' geographical mobility and educational opportunities led to a migration to the country's major cities.

In contrast with the Bolshevik government's official policy of equality among citizens, antisemitism remained deeply entrenched in the political and social ideologies of the tsarist counterrevolutionaries, especially among paramilitary groups such as the Black Hundreds.

'[52] Thus, during the Russian Civil War that followed the 1917 Revolution, the Jews became a crucial site of the conflict between revolutionary Reds and counterrevolutionary Whites, particularly in the contested territory of Ukraine.

These connections, combined with the cultural tradition of antisemitism among Russian peasantry,[53] provided ample justification for the Whites to attack Ukraine's Jewish population.

[54] The pogroms that erupted in January 1919 in the northwest province of Volhynia spread during February and March to the cities, towns, and villages of many other regions of Ukraine.

In Tetiev on 25 March, approximately 4,000 Jews were murdered, half in a synagogue set ablaze by Cossack troops under Colonels Kurovsky, Cherkowsy, and Shliatoshenko.

[23] According to David A. Chapin, the town of Proskurov (now Khmelnitsky), near the city of Sudilkov, "was the site of the worst atrocity committed against Jews this century before the Nazis."

[24] On 15 February 1919, during the Ukrainian-Soviet war, Otaman Ivan Semesenko initiated a pogrom Proskurov in which many Jews were massacred on Shabbat (parashah Tesaveh).

[59] From 1919 to 1920, Jewish parties and Zionist organizations were driven underground as the Communist government sought to abolish all potential opposition.

[106] According to the Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister of Israel, early 2012 there were 250,000 Jews in Ukraine, half of them living in Kyiv.

In April 2014, in the city of Donetsk occupied by Russian-backed forces, leaflets were distributed by three masked men as people left a synagogue, ordering Jews to register to avoid losing their property and citizenship "given that the leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine support the Banderite junta in Kyiv[a] and are hostile to the Orthodox Donetsk Republic and its citizens".

"[131] After the Euromaidan, the number of Ukrainian Jews making aliyah from Ukraine grew 142% during the first four months of 2014 compared to the previous year.

[143] During the brief overlap of Zelenskyy's and Groysman's terms (20 May to 29 August 2019), Ukraine was the only country in the world apart from Israel to have both a Jewish president and prime minister.

[154] On 22 August 2024, Israeli Ynet news reported that at least 100 Jewish Ukrainian soldiers had been killed fighting Russia since the beginning of the invasion.