To understand the complex history of Jews in Russia, one must begin with a fundamental distinction, often effaced in the historiography and popular memory, between Russia as a state—the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and since 1991, the Russian Federation—and the geographically much smaller entity of ethnic Russia. Until the 1720s, there were essentially no Jews in the Russian Empire except for travelers and migrant merchants, and the Russian state forbade Jews from settling in its interior, out of traditional Christian hostility.
