Although Jews have had a long history in ethnolinguistically Ukrainian territory, by the turn of the twenty-first century only a small remnant of this once commanding population remained. In 2001, Ukraine had a population of 48 million, approximately 75 percent of which was of Ukrainian ethnicity, with a large Russian minority (some 21%, or 10 million). The exact number of Jews is a matter of some controversy: the 1989 census listed 487,300 Jews, but only 104,300 were recorded in the first post-Soviet census of 2001, a figure that is questioned by some but that certainly reflects the massive emigration of Jews in the 1990s.
