In these anxious and troubling times, here’s one piece of good news. The number of people in England and Wales willing to identify as Jewish has increased in recent years — in fact, more so than initially reported.
When the Office of National Statistics first revealed the findings of the 2021 Census little over a year ago, the Jewish population was up by around 3 per cent from the previous decade to 271,000 (rounded to the nearest 1,000). Now in its latest update, the ONS has put the population at 287,000 — an increase of more than 5 per cent. (The Scottish Census results are due soon.)
The reason for the rise, of course, is the astonishing growth of Strictly Orthodox communities with their large families, reversing what had once seemed UK Jewry’s irreversible population decline during the latter half of the 20th century.
But what lies behind the ONS revision is that it has now counted in the small number of Jews who identified as ethnic-only rather than religious, whereas the earlier figure included only those who had responded to the voluntary religion question.
Nearly twice as many Jews in 2021 identified as ethnically-only Jewish as they had in the previous 2011 Census — and more than double identified as both religiously and ethnically Jewish as did so before.
All in all, 76.3 per cent in 2021 identified as Jews through religion; 18.2 per cent jointly through religion and ethnicity; and 5.6 per cent through ethnicity alone.
The proportion of strictly secular Jews, while small, appears to have grown over the decade.
Legally, Jews have been defined as an ethnic group in the UK for nearly 60 years for the purposes of anti-racism legislation. The famous court case over JFS admissions in 2008-9 turned on that. But every so often, a debate erupts over disregard of Jews as an ethnic group. Lord Finkelstein recently linked the failure to see Jews as victims of racism to a belief that they were not an ethnic minority.
At face value, the ONS data — in which more than three- quarters of Jews in England and Wales identified solely by religion but just under a quarter as ethnic — might seem to undermine the argument for recognising Jews as an ethnic group.
But it is important to exercise caution in using the ONS figures in any political discussion. The way the Census form is designed, it is simply easier to identify as Jewish by religion.
While the religious question is optional, “Jewish” is listed as one of the response categories. The ethnic question is compulsory but to identify as Jewish you have to tick in one of the “other” boxes and then write in “Jewish”. If you have already answered the religion question, you may see little point in bothering to add information to the ethnic question as well.
The Board of Deputies is now pressing for Jewish to be explicitly added to the ethnicity list. If the ONS accepts the case, then the proportion identifying as ethnically Jewish — either exclusively or as well as saying they are Jewish by religion — could rise by the next Census in 2031.
UK Jews 2011-21 (Office of National Statistics)
Census data does have a practical application; having a breakdown of the age and location of a population can help plan services in the community, such as schools and care for the elderly.
(The actual Jewish population will be larger than the official data because some people won’t have identified as Jewish at all on the Census form. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research believes there could be as many as 3,500 Charedi children missing from the national statistics.)
But defining Jews is not so straightforward. In his book Britain’s Jews Harry Freedman observed that “Judaism is as much an ethnicity as it is a religion, although actually it is a bit of each and not fully either”. Not a formula that is likely to win him a sociology prize but it does express the sense that Jewish identity is not easy to pin down in a single term.
Chief Rabbi Sacks, moreover, warned against trying to reduce Judaism to a simple ethnic definition. “Judaism is not an ethnicity and Jews are not an ethnic group,” he wrote in a commentary on the sidrah of Kedoshim. Jews were made up of different ethnic groups, he noted. “Besides which, ethnicity does not last. If Jews are merely an ethnic group, they will experience the fate of all such groups, which is that they disappear over time.”
A survey like the Census can only brush the surface, it cannot capture nuances of identity. A secular British family may enjoy turkey and plum pudding on Christmas Day as a national tradition but the food has no religious symbolism. An avowedly secular Jewish family may hold some kind of Seder as a cultural rather than religious celebration but eating matzah and bitter herbs is part of a religious ceremony.
The raw data of the Census perhaps indicates a slight trend towards secularism. Which potentially has implications for the way the community organises itself. Secular Jews might prefer cultural centres such as JW3 to synagogues; Jewish schools might need broader Jewish studies curricula to engage the non-religious.
The constraints of the Census make firm conclusions hard to draw. However, we are about to get a much more detailed picture of the Jewish community from the JPR survey conducted in late 2022, the preliminary findings of which are due to be unveiled next month.
