The history of the Jews in Latvia dates back to the first Jewish colony established in Piltene in 1571. Jews contributed to Latvia's development until the Northern War (1700–1721), which decimated Latvia's population. The Jewish community reestablished itself in the 18th century, mainly through an influx from Prussia, and came to play a principal role in the economic life of Latvia.
Under an independent Latvia, Jews formed political parties and participated as members of parliament. The Jewish community flourished. Jewish parents had the right to send their children to schools using Hebrew as the language of instruction, as part of a significant network of minority schools.
World War II ended the prominence of the Jewish community. Under Stalin, Jews, who formed only 5% of the population, constituted 12% of the deportees. 80% of Latvia's Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust.
Today's Jewish community traces its roots to survivors of the Holocaust, Jews who fled to the USSR's interior to escape the German invasion and later returned, and mostly to Jews newly immigrated to Latvia from the Soviet Union. The Latvian Jewish community today is small but active.
The ancient Latvian tribes had no connections with the Jews and their entrance was banned into Livonia. Only after the Livonian War in the second half of the 16th century, when the lands of Latvia became the subject to Denmark, Poland and Lithuania, Jews began to arrive in the territory of Latvia. First was the Duchy of Courland, where there formed a Jewish community near modern day Piltene and Aizpute after 1570. In the 17th century large numbers of Jews arrived in the Duchy of Courland that was a vassal of the King of Poland. The Jews were entrusted with the offices of tax-collectors, money-changers and merchants. They facilitated Duke Jacob's (1610-1681) economic reforms. Attempts of the conservative landowners to banish the Jews failed. In 18th century, Duke Ernst Johann von Biron and his father Peter von Biron had a benevolent attitude toward the Jews.
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The Riga Ghetto was a small area in Maskavas Forštate, a neighbourhood of Riga, Latvia, designated by the Nazis where Jews from Latvia, and later from Germany, were forced to live during World War II. On October 25, 1941, the Nazis relocated all Jews from Riga and its vicinity to the ghetto while the non-Jewish inhabitants were evicted. Most of the Latvian Jews (about 35,000) were killed on November 30 and December 8, 1941, in the Rumbula massacre. The Nazis transported a large number of German Jews to the ghetto; most of them were later killed in massacres.
Jews (יְהוּדִים, Yehudim, jehuˈdim) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group, nation or ethnos native to the Levant, originating from the ancient Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity, nationhood, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the ethnic religion of the Jewish people, although its observance varies from strict to none. Jews take their origins from a Southern Levantine national and religious group that arose towards the end of the second millennium BCE.
Ashkenazi Jews (ˌɑːʃkəˈnɑːzi,_ˌæʃ- ; יְהוּדֵי אַשְׁכְּנַז, Jews of Germania; Ashkenazishe Yidn), also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim, are a Jewish diaspora population who formed in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium CE. Their traditional diaspora language is Yiddish (a West Germanic language with Jewish and Slavic linguistic elements, which uses the Hebrew alphabet), which developed during the Middle Ages after they had moved from Germany and France into Northern Europe and Eastern Europe.