As early as the eighteenth century, Jews in Eastern Europe constituted the largest Jewish community in the world. By the early twentieth century, they were the absolute majority, and 90 percent lived in regions that had been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth several generations earlier, or were among communities of immigrants created elsewhere by Jews from those regions. At the same time, only 0.3 percent of Jews worldwide lived in the Land of Israel (ca. 26,000 in 1881), though Jews of the Diaspora mentioned the Land daily in prayers and commemorated it in festivals and fasts.
