Ugarit: See CANAAN, CANAANITES; SYRIA, ANCIENT

Ukraine. According to archeological evidence from Greek colonies in Crimea, Jews appeared in what is now Ukraine in the last centuries BCE. In the seventh to ninth centuries CE, the steppe part of contemporary Ukraine was under the control of the *Khazar state. The Khazars had accepted Judaism as their official religion and gave refuge to Jews from *Islamic and *Byzantine regions. Jews were present in the medieval towns of Kievan Rus’; a letter from Kiev Jews dated to the first third of the tenth century was found in the Cairo *Genizah, and a *pogrom in Kiev in 1113 is mentioned in the Russian Primary Chronicle.

*Ashkenazi Jews began to settle in Ukraine in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in territories belonging to the Polish kingdom and the Great Duchy of *Lithuania; Ashkenazi immigration continued until the midseventeenth century. Jews settled in towns under royal protection where they engaged in local and international trade, served as tax collectors, and established industries. After the Lublin Union of 1569, when *Poland and Lithuania became one state, Polish colonization of the eastern Ukraine began. Lands were distributed among Polish magnates who established private towns and villages and invited Jews to fulfill various managerial functions. Jews administered large landholdings and villages, collected taxes from the Ukrainian peasantry, leased inns and mills, and produced and sold alcohol.