Before the Holocaust Jews had lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. Jews could be found in every country in Europe, from the British Isles to the Soviet Union. According to historian Martin Gilbert, until 1939 there had been Jews in Holland for 800 years, in Austria for 1030 years, in France for 1936 years and in Greece for 2239 years. (See the map Two Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Europe.) Some of these Jews were descended from those exiled from Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century B.C.E. (Before the Common Era); most were descended from Jewish traders and those taken as prisoners and slaves after the two great Jewish rebellions against Rome in 70 and 135 B.C.E.

The place of Jews in the wider society of Europe had always been characterised as a kind of exile. Certainly Christian Europe saw the Jews in their midst as rebels against their 'true' religion, responsible for the death of Christ and generally as an evil presence. (See Antisemitism) The Jews, having no choice, accepted this role as the negative aspect of their "Chosen People" status. They were typically excluded from mainstream professional and social life, forced to wear distinctive clothing that proclaimed their identity and confined to living in specially marked or walled-off areas of towns and cities. (The term ghetto to refer to such places was probably first used in Venice, Italy, where in 1516 Jews were confined to an area called the Geto Nuovo. )

There were pogroms (spontaneous outbreaks of Jew-hatred) against European Jews from the earliest times, but these intensified during the late 11th century with the first crusade. Over the period 1050 - 1648 Jews were expelled from countries including England, France, various Germanic states, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania and the Ukraine, largely at the instigation of the Catholic Church. It was not until 1965 that Vatican II revised Catholic teaching about the Jews, accepting their legitimacy to continue as a religion and exonerating them for the murder of Christ.

Until the French Revolution of 1789, the position of Jews in Europe remained precarious. For a while, the Revolution's call for "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" for all French people applied to Jews as well, until they were limited again by Napoleon. By the 19th century French antisemitism had returned, this time cloaked in the new theories of race. France's leading socialist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, wrote: "The Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it…by fire or fusion or by expulsion. The Jew must disappear." In 1894 a French Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was tried on trumped-up treason charges. Dreyfus was convicted, although years later he was pardoned after it was proved that he had been framed.

When the Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881, the Jews were blamed and thus began widespread pogroms which lasted into the early 20th century. These pogroms spread throughout Eastern Europe and set off massive waves of Jewish emigration to the West, especially the U.S., but also to the Jewish homeland of Palestine.