Poland seemed to attract many Jewish immigrants due to the special privileges given to them since the 13th century. There were so many Jews that arrived that they started a new culture, and even a new language - Yiddish - a mixture between German and Hebrew. They were traders and were fairly welcome in the community. The culture started to flourish once more, until the Cossack rebellion of 1648, when the eradication of all the Jews in the Ukraine was attempted. Some reports say that over 100 000 Jews were killed. From then on life turned sour, and the Polish Jews saw what had happened to them as similar to that which had happened to other Jews in Spain in 1492. The Jews slowly started moving Westwards through Germany. In ancient Hebrew, Germany was known as "Ashkenaz", and hence the Jews who lived there, or today's Jews who have ancestors who came from around there, are called Ashkenazi Jews.

The exodus of Jews from Poland was no so great as to destroy the community - indeed, in the 19th century half of the world's Jews lived in Poland, which was one of the more tragic facts behind the virtual eradication of the Polish Jewish community in the Holocaust.

The Jews in Germany were for the time being fairly welcome and were allowed travel, albeit restricted, to certain towns where they tended to centralise. Some Jews worked their way up to the very highest circles (for example, the German courts), which helped to maintain a better relationship between the Germans and the Jews. But immigration was troubling Germany, whose citizens became poorer and poorer as a result, and there started to appear a direct contrast between the lifestyle of the Jew and the German. By the end of the 18th century, there were Jews in England, Holland and eastern parts of France.

There was some mixing between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, although synagogues were normally different, and customs widely different (Sephardim, for example, did not speak Yiddish).

In Russia, however, life was very different. Pogrom attacks were frequent, and laws against the Jews were harsh. In 1903 a document was created which was to further the Jews plight - the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". This document, shown to be a fake many years ago, was translated into many different languages and distributed all over Europe. It led the reader to believe that the Jews were planning to take over the world, and it claimed to provide the plans on how this was done. Needless to say, this had a catastrophic effect on the image of the Jews, who were suddenly seen as plotters and evil.

Glasnost and Perestroika were very new concepts in Russian history, coming about in the late 1980s and only then were the majority of Jews allowed to leave Russia, previously having been held there because of a claim of their knowledge of state secrets. It has taken that long for such changes to come about!