The history of Jewish political parties in Eastern Europe was short, stretching as it did only from the 1880s until 1949, when what little remained of them after World War II was liquidated by the then recently established Communist regimes. Even during that brief period, experience demonstrated that their ability to change the circumstances in which the Jewish populations lived was severely limited. With the Jewish people in the states and major historic regions of Eastern Europe only rarely exceeding 10 percent of the total population, the parties could not realistically have been expected to gain a significant share in government.
