Russian antisemitism attacked Jews as an abstraction, not a lived presence, for centuries.

Evidence

In stark contrast to the much longer history of interactions between Russian rulers and Muslim subjects, Jews were a rarity—and often more an abstraction—for lengthy periods in the history of the empire. The late fifteenth-century Church had been divided by a controversy that drew attention to a group that supposedly wanted to ‘Judaise’ the faith. However, the Blood Libel—a trope that exercised the imagination of so many in Europe—appears not to have circulated as widely in Muscovy. Still, the tsars banned actual Jews from settling there and periodically blocked visiting Jewish merchants as well. For instance, Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741–62) ordered the expulsion of a small community of Jews from Moscow. This stance would not change until the late eighteenth century, when imperial expansion to the west and south and, under Catherine the Great, the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1792, and 1795 made half a million Jews subjects of the Russian empire. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 516

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the common intuition that a large Jewish population preceded antisemitism — here the ideology preceded the actual community.