Jews_by_country

Jewish population by country

Jewish population by country

List of countries by Jewish population


As of 2023, the world's core Jewish population (those identifying as Jews above all else) was estimated at 15.7 million, which is approximately 0.2% of the 8 billion worldwide population. Israel hosts the largest core Jewish population in the world with 7.2 million, followed by the United States with 6.3 million. Other countries with core Jewish populations above 100,000 include France (440,000), Canada (398,000), the United Kingdom (312,000), Argentina (171,000), Russia (132,000), Germany (125,000), and Australia (117,200). The number of Jews worldwide rises to 18 million with the addition of the "connected" Jewish population, including those who say they are partly Jewish or that have Jewish backgrounds from at least one Jewish parent, and rises again to 21 million with the addition of the "enlarged" Jewish population, including those who say they have Jewish backgrounds but no Jewish parents and all non-Jewish household members who live with Jews. Counting all those who are eligible for Israeli citizenship under Israel's Law of Return, in addition to Israeli Jews, raised the total to 25.5 million.[1][2]

Quick Facts

The percentage of the eligible Jewish population that is living in each country (top 13, 2018)

   United States (51%)
   Israel (30%)
   France (3%)
   Canada (3%)
   Russia (3%)
   United Kingdom (2%)
   Argentina (1%)
   Germany (1%)
   Australia (1%)
   Brazil (1%)
   Mexico (1%)
   Ukraine (1%)
   Hungary (1%)
  Other (1%)

Two countries account for 81% of those recognised as Jews or of sufficient Jewish ancestry to be eligible for citizenship in Israel under its Law of Return: the United States with 51% and Israel with 30% (including the West Bank with 2%). An additional 16% is split between France (3%), Canada (3%), Russia (3%), the United Kingdom (2%), Argentina (1%), Germany (1%), Ukraine (1%), Brazil (1%), Australia (1%), and Hungary (1%), while the remaining 3% are spread around approximately 98 other countries and territories with less than 0.5% each. With over 7 million Jews, Israel is the only Jewish-majority country and the only explicitly Jewish state.[3]

In 1939, the core Jewish population reached its historical peak of 17 million. Due to the murder of approximately six million Jews during the Holocaust, this number was reduced to 11 million by 1945.[4][5][6] The population grew to around 13 million by the 1970s and then recorded almost no growth until around 2005, due to low fertility rates and assimilation of Jews.[5] From 2005 to 2018, the world's Jewish population grew 0.63% annually on average, while world population overall grew 1.1% annually in the same period.[7] This increase primarily reflected the rapid growth of Haredi and some Orthodox sectors, who remain a growing proportion of Jews.[8]

Israel

Recent Jewish population dynamics are characterized by continued steady increase in the Israeli Jewish population and flat or declining numbers in other countries (the diaspora). Jewish immigration to Palestine began in earnest following the 1839 Tanzimat reforms; between 1840 and 1880, the Jewish population of Palestine rose from 9,000 to 23,000.[9] In the late 19th century, 99.7% of the world's Jews lived outside the region, with Jews representing 2–5% of the population of the Palestine region.[10][11] Through the first five phases of Aliyah, the Jewish population rose to 630,000 by the inception of the state of Israel in 1948. By 2014 this had risen to 6,135,000,[12] while the population of the diaspora has dropped from 10.5 to 8.1 million over the same period.[13] Current Israeli Jewish demographics are characterized by a relatively high fertility rate of 3 children per woman and a stable age distribution.[14] The overall growth rate of Jews in Israel is 1.7% annually.[15] The diaspora countries, by contrast, have low Jewish birth rates, an increasingly elderly age composition, and a negative balance of people leaving Judaism versus those joining.[13] Immigration trends also favour Israel ahead of diaspora countries. The Jewish state has a positive immigration balance (called aliyah in Hebrew). Israel saw its Jewish numbers significantly buoyed by a million-strong wave of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s,[16] and immigration growth has been steady (in the low tens of thousands) since then.[17]

Rest of the world

In general, the modern English-speaking world has seen an increase in its share of the diaspora since the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel, while historic diaspora Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East have significantly declined or disappeared.[18] France continues to be home to the world's third largest Jewish community, at around 500,000,[19][20] but has shown an increasingly negative trend. As a long-term trend, intermarriage has reduced its "core" Jewish population and increased its "connected" and "enlarged" Jewish populations. More recently, migration loss to Israel amongst French Jews reached the tens of thousands between 2014 and 2017, following a wave of anti-Semitic attacks.[21][22] According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, over the next four decades the number of Jews around the world is expected to increase from 14.2 million in 2015 to 16.4 million in 2060.[23]

Debate over United States numbers

The number of Jews in the United States has been much debated because of questions about counting methodology. In 2012, Sheskin and Dashefsky put forward a figure of 6.72 million based on a mixture of local surveys, informed local estimates, and US census data. They qualified their estimate with concern over double counting and suggested the real figure may lie between 6 and 6.4 million.[24] Drawing on their work, the Steinhardt Social Research Institute released their estimate of 6.8 million Jews in the United States in 2013.[25] These figures are in contrast to Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola's number of 5,425,000, also in 2012.[26] He has called high estimates “implausible” and “unreliable”. However, he revised the United States Jewish number to 5.7 million in subsequent years.[27][26] This controversy followed a similar debate in 2001 when the National Jewish Population Survey released a United States Jewish estimate as low as 5.2 million only to have serious methodological errors suggested in their survey.[26] In sum, a confidence interval of a million or more people is likely to persist in reporting the number of Jewish Americans.

In 2020, the Pew Research Center's Jewish Americans 2020 study estimated there were 5.8 million adult Jews in the United States and 1.8 million children of at least one Jewish parent being raised as Jewish in some way, for a total of 7.5 million Jews, 2.5% of the national population.[28] According to Sergio Della Pergola's narrower definition, which count children and adult Jews without religious affiliation only if they have two Jewish parents, this corresponds to 4.8 million Jewish adults and 1.2 million Jewish children in 2020.[29] The American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University, which synthesizes survey data from the 50 states and DC, estimates there are 7.63 million American Jews, 6 million adults and 1.6 million children.[30]

By country

Quick Facts United States, Israel ...

Below is a list of Jewish populations in the world by country. All data below, except the last column, are from the Berman Jewish DataBank at Stanford University in the World Jewish Population (2020) report coordinated by Sergio DellaPergola at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[31] The Jewish DataBank figures are primarily based on national censuses combined with trend analysis:

  • Core Jewish population refers to those who consider themselves Jews to the exclusion of all else.
  • Connected Jewish population includes the core Jewish population and additionally those who say they are partly Jewish or that have Jewish background from at least one Jewish parent.
  • Enlarged Jewish population includes the Jewish connected population and those who say they have Jewish background but not a Jewish parent, and all non-Jews living in households with Jews.
  • Eligible Jewish population includes all those eligible for immigration to Israel under its Law of Return.
  • National official population is the Jewish population reported by a national source. Note that the "National" results may not be entirely accurate, as other sources may have conflicting accounts of Jewish populations in some countries.

Table

More information Countries, Core population ...
pct = percent of total world population
pmp = per million people in country
  1. Including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, not including the Judea & Samaria.
  2. Judea and Samaria total population[when?] (without East Jerusalem): 2,548,700; Gaza: 1,839,900; Total: 4,388,600. The West Bank also includes 404,600 Jews and 8,600 non-Jewish Israelis, for a total of 413,200 Jews and others. The Jewish population of the West Bank consists of Israeli citizens living in Israeli settlements who are treated as residents of Israel under Israeli law. The reported West Bank total of 2,961,900 includes Palestinian, Jewish and other residents.
  3. Including the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

Remnant and vanished populations

The above table represents Jews that number at least a few dozen per country. Reports exist of Jewish communities remaining in other territories in the low single digits that are on the verge of disappearing, particularly in the Muslim world, as their reaction to the birth of Israel in 1948 was the persecution of Jews in nearly all Muslim lands; these are often of historical interest as they represent the remnant of much larger Jewish populations. For example, Egypt had a Jewish community of 80,000 in the early 20th century that numbered fewer than 40 as of 2014, mainly because of the forced expulsion movements to Israel and other countries at that time.[72] Despite a 2,000-year history of Jewish presence, there are no longer any known Jews living in Afghanistan, as its last Jewish residents Zablon Simintov and Tova Moradi, fled the country in September[73] and October 2021,[74][75] respectively.

In Syria, another ancient Jewish community saw mass exodus at the end of the 20th century and numbered fewer than 20 in the midst of the Syrian Civil War.[76] The size of the Jewish community in Indonesia has been variously given as 65, 100, or 18 at most over the last 50 years.[77][78] In Yemen due to the ongoing civil war, the Yemenite Jews have faced persecution by the Houthis, who have demanded they convert to Islam or face mandatory expulsion from the country. The Israeli military has conducted operations evacuating the population and moving them to Israel.[79] On 28 March 2021, 13 Jews were forced by the Houthis to leave Yemen, leaving the last four elderly Jews in Yemen.[80][81] According to one report there are six Jews left in Yemen: one woman, her brother, three others, and Levi Salem Marahbi (who had been imprisoned for helping smuggle a Torah scroll out of Yemen).[82]

See also


References

  1. "Jewish Population Rises to 15.7 Million Worldwide | The Jewish Agency". www.jewishagency.org. Retrieved 14 January 2024.
  2. "Israel's Population Crosses 9 Million Mark!". United With Israel. 10 May 2019. Archived from the original on 12 May 2019. Retrieved 12 May 2019.
  3. "World Jewish Population - Latest Statistics". Archived from the original on 7 April 2012. Retrieved 14 February 2015.
  4. "The continuing decline of Europe's Jewish population". 9 February 2015. Archived from the original on 1 April 2020. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
  5. "Chart: The decline of Europe's Jewish population". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 22 August 2016. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
  6. DellaPergola, Sergio (2019). "World Jewish Population, 2018". American Jewish Year Book 2018. Vol. 118. pp. 361–449. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03907-3_8. ISBN 978-3-030-03906-6. S2CID 146549764.
  7. "Haredi Orthodox account for bulk of Jewish population growth in New York City - Nation". Jewish Journal. 22 January 2013. Archived from the original on 25 December 2014. Retrieved 14 February 2015.
  8. Salmon, Yosef (1978). "Ideology and Reality in the Bilu "Aliyah"". Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 2 (4). [President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute]: 431. ISSN 0363-5570. JSTOR 41035804. Retrieved 3 February 2023. Jewish influx into Palestine. Between 1880 and 1907, the number of Jews in Palestine grew from 23,000 to 80,000. Most of the community resided in Jerusalem, which already had a Jewish majority at the beginning of the influx. [Footnote: Mordecai Elia, Ahavar Tziyon ve-Kolel Hod (Tel Aviv, 1971), appendix A. Between 1840 and 1880 the Jewish settlement in Palestine grew in numbers from 9,000 to 23,000.] The First Aliyah accounted for only a few thousand of the new-comers, and the number of the Biluim among them was no more than a few dozen. Jewish immigration to Palestine had begun to swell in the 1840s, following the liberalization of Ottoman domestic policy (the Tanzimat Reforms) and as a result of the protection extended to immigrants by the European consulates set up at the time in Jerusalem and Jaffa. The majority of immigrants came from Eastern and Central Europe - the Russian Empire, Romania, and Hungary - and were not inspired by modern Zionist ideology. Many were motivated by a blend of traditional ideology (e.g., belief in the sanctity of the land of Israel and in the redemption of the Jewish people through the return to Zion) and practical considerations (e.g., desire to escape the worsening conditions in their lands of origin and to improve their lot in Palestine). The proto-Zionist ideas which had already crystallized in Western Europe during the late 1850s and early 1860s were gaining currency in Eastern Europe.
  9. The estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882 represented just 0.3% of the world's Jewish population: see On, Raphael R. Bar. "ISRAEL'S NEXT CENSUS OF POPULATION AS A SOURCE OF DATA ON JEWS." Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies / דברי הקונגרס העולמי למדעי היהדות ה (1969): 31*-41*. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23524099.
  10. Mendel, Yonatan (5 October 2014). The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Security and Politics in Arabic Studies in Israel. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 188. ISBN 978-1-137-33737-5. Note 28: The exact percentage of Jews in Palestine prior to the rise of Zionism is unknown. However, it probably ranged from 2 to 5 per cent. According to Ottoman records, a total population of 462,465 resided in 1878 in what is today Israel/Palestine. Of this number, 403,795 (87 per cent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 per cent) were Christian and 15,011 (3 per cent) were Jewish (quoted in Alan Dowty, Israel/Palestine, Cambridge: Polity, 2008, p. 13). See also Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 43 and 124.
  11. Yaakov Levi (5 May 2014). "Israel Population Now 8.3 Million - 75% Are Jewish". Israel National News. Archived from the original on 7 September 2014. Retrieved 6 September 2014.
  12. DellaPergola, Sergio (2016), "World Jewish Population, 2015", in Dashefsky, Arnold; Sheskin, Ira M. (eds.), American Jewish Year Book 2015, vol. 115, Springer International Publishing, pp. 273–364, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24505-8_7, ISBN 9783319245034
  13. "Fertility Rates, by Age and Religion". Statistical Abstract of Israel. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 11 September 2012. Archived from the original on 5 November 2013. Retrieved 6 September 2013.
  14. "Data: Arab Growth Slows, Still Higher than Jewish Rate". Israel National News. Archived from the original on 26 August 2018. Retrieved 6 September 2014.
  15. "Immigration to Israel by Year". Jewish Virtual Library. Archived from the original on 12 November 2014. Retrieved 6 September 2014.
  16. "Demography". Jewish Virtual Library. Archived from the original on 27 March 2016. Retrieved 6 September 2014.
  17. European Jewish Congress. "The Jewish Community of France". Archived from the original on 29 December 2016. Retrieved 29 September 2017.
  18. "La communauté juive de France compte 550.000 personnes, dont 25.000 à Toulouse". France info. 19 March 2012. Archived from the original on 13 January 2015. Retrieved 14 February 2015.
  19. "France tops list for Jewish emigration to Israel". RFI. 6 September 2014. Archived from the original on 8 September 2014. Retrieved 6 September 2014.
  20. "Why 5,000 Jews emigrated from France to Israel last year". The Local Europe AB. 9 January 2017. Archived from the original on 10 January 2017. Retrieved 29 September 2017.
  21. "The Changing Global Religious Landscape". 5 April 2017. Archived from the original on 13 May 2022. Retrieved 20 May 2022.
  22. Sheskin, Ira; Dashefsky, Arnold (2 November 2012). Dashefsky, Arnold; Sheskin, Ira (eds.). "Jewish Population in the United States, 2012" (PDF). Current Jewish Population Reports. Storrs, Connecticut: North American Jewish Data Bank. Archived from the original on 7 September 2014. Retrieved 6 September 2014.
  23. Tighe, Elizabeth; et al. (September 2013). "American Jewish Population Estimates: 2012" (PDF). Brandeis University: Steinhardt Social Research Institute. Archived (PDF) from the original on 8 October 2019. Retrieved 6 September 2014.
  24. "US Jewish Population is Anywhere Between 5.425 Million and 6.722 Million". Jewish Political News and Updates. 18 February 2013. Archived from the original on 21 October 2013. Retrieved 6 September 2014.
  25. DellaPergola, Sergio (2016). Dashefsky, Arnold; Sheskin, Ira (eds.). "World Jewish Population, 2016". Current Jewish Population Reports. 116. The American Jewish Year Book (Dordrecht: Springer). Archived from the original on 30 September 2017. Retrieved 29 September 2017.
  26. Cooperman, Alan; Alper, Becka A.; Schiller, Anna (11 May 2021). Jewish Americans in 2020 (PDF). Pew Research Center. pp. 50–51. Retrieved 28 November 2023.
  27. Cooperman, Alan; Alper, Becka A.; Schiller, Anna (11 May 2021). Jewish Americans in 2020 (PDF). Pew Research Center. p. 52. Retrieved 28 November 2023.
  28. Saxe, Leonard; Parmer, Daniel; Tighe, Elizabeth; de Kramer, Raquel Magidin; Kallista, Daniel; Nussbaum, Daniel; Seabrum, Xajavion; Mandell, Joshua (2021). American Jewish Population Estimates 2020: Summary & Highlights. American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University.
  29. DellaPergola, Sergio (2022). "World Jewish Population, 2020". American Jewish Year Book 2020. Vol. 120. pp. 273–370. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-78706-6_7. ISBN 978-3-030-78705-9. S2CID 245642037. Archived from the original on 20 May 2022. Retrieved 20 May 2022.
  30. "Section 1. Population". www.census.gov. Retrieved 14 January 2024.
  31. "Data tables, 2024 Census". Statistics of Canada. October 2024. Archived from the original on 26 October 2017. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  32. "DC2107EW - Religion by sex by age". Nomis - official labour market statistics. Archived from the original on 8 December 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  33. "Scotland's Census 2011 - National Records of Scotland" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 12 April 2019. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  34. "Population by religion, sex and urban/rural residence". Archived from the original on 15 December 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  35. "Personen nach Religion (ausführlich) für Deutschland". Archived from the original on 5 June 2013. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  36. "The Jews of South Africa in 2019" (PDF). p. 102. Archived (PDF) from the original on 8 August 2020. Retrieved 18 August 2020.
  37. "The distribution of the population by nationality and mother tongue". Statistics of Ukraine. Archived from the original on 1 July 2017. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  38. "De religieuze kaart van Nederland, 2010–2015" (in Dutch). 22 December 2016. Archived from the original on 23 June 2018. Retrieved 11 December 2018.
  39. "Population by national and/or ethnic group, sex and urban/rural residence". Archived from the original on 1 November 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  40. "Cuadro 8. Autodefinición en materia religiosa (GIS XXI, 2011)" (PDF). p. 216. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  41. "Jewish community in Venezue... JPost - Jewish World - Jewish News". archive.is. 5 September 2012. Archived from the original on 5 September 2012. Retrieved 25 September 2019.
  42. "For India's Jewish Community, Wait for Minority Status Continues". 28 July 2017. Archived from the original on 11 December 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  43. "Tabl. 4.2. Ludność według rodzaju i kolejności identyfikacji narodowo-etnicznych w 2011 roku" (PDF). Statistics of Poland. p. 91. Archived (PDF) from the original on 27 October 2014. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  44. "Religious composition: 2021 census" (in Czech). Retrieved 5 July 2022.
  45. INE. "Indicador". tabulador.ine.pt. Retrieved 13 March 2024.
  46. Cohen, Adi (24 May 2023). "Tchau Israel! Tens of thousands of Israelis call this country their new home". Haaretz. Retrieved 13 March 2024.
  47. "Bilancia podľa národnosti a pohlavia - SR-oblasť-kraj-okres, m-v [om7002rr]" (in Slovak). Statistics of Slovakia. Archived from the original on 22 March 2021. Retrieved 31 July 2019.
  48. "Етнически малцинствени общности | NCCEDI". nccedi.government.bg (in Bulgarian). Archived from the original on 30 July 2019. Retrieved 11 August 2019.
  49. "Ethnic composition: 2019 estimation". Archived from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 1 January 2020.
  50. "016 -- Population by religious community, age and sex in 2000 to 2017". Statistics of Finland. Archived from the original on 24 November 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  51. 5.01.00.03 Национальный состав населения. [5.01.00.03 Total population by nationality]. Bureau of Statistics of Kyrgyzstan (in Russian, Kyrgyz, and English). 2018. Archived from the original (XLS) on 13 November 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  52. "Definitieve Resultaten Achtste Algemene Volkstelling (Vol. I)" (PDF). p. 39. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  53. "Table A9: Population by Religion, Sex and Residence" (PDF). p. 73. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
  54. "Wohnbevölkerung nach Religion und Herkunft, 1990 - 2000". Archived from the original on 19 January 2019. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
  55. "Egypt's Jewish community buries deputy leader". Al Jazeera. 12 March 2014. Archived from the original on 22 July 2015. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  56. Donati, Jessica; Harooni, Mirwais (12 November 2013). "Last Jew in Afghanistan faces ruin as kebabs fail to sell". Reuters. Archived from the original on 13 January 2016. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  57. Gab, Ben Zion (3 November 2021). "'Last Jew in Afghanistan' loses title to hidden Jewish family". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 9 August 2023.
  58. Zion, Ilan Ben; Press, Llazar Semini Associated (29 October 2021). "Woman now thought to be Afghanistan's last Jew flees country". Independent.ie. Retrieved 9 August 2023.
  59. "Syria". Jewish Virtual Library. Archived from the original on 17 July 2015. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  60. CIA World Fact Book
  61. Levenda 2007, pp. 188.
  62. "Israel airlifts 19 of last remaining Yemeni Jews". The Guardian. 21 March 2016. Archived from the original on 5 July 2021. Retrieved 4 July 2021.
  63. Bassist, Rina (29 March 2021). "Houthis deport some of Yemen's last remaining Jews". Al-Monitor. Archived from the original on 18 June 2021. Retrieved 2 July 2021.
  64. Joffre, Tzvi (29 March 2021). "Almost all remaining Jews in Yemen deported - Saudi media". The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on 20 May 2022. Retrieved 2 July 2021.
  65. Boxerman, Aaron (30 March 2021). "As 13 Yemeni Jews leave pro-Iran region for Cairo, community of 50,000 down to 6". The Times of Israel. Archived from the original on 1 July 2021. Retrieved 1 July 2021.

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Jews_by_country, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.