World
Israel overtakes USA as centre of largest Jewish population for the first time
But who should be counted as a Jew?
January 8, 2025 11:15
But who should be counted as a Jew?
January 8, 2025 11:15New population statistics released by Israel should settle one question: “Which country has the largest Jewish community?”
Israel’s 7.7 million Jews — according to the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics — have overtaken the 7.5 million Jews estimated to be in the USA in the 2020 Pew survey.
Although some would argue that Israel reached number 1 some time ago, believing that the Pew survey figure was over-generous.
The Jewish Agency’s total for the global Jewish population this year — 15.8 million — includes a “core” Jewish population of 6.3 million for the USA. (If this is correct, world Jewry has yet to recover to the 16.6 million recorded on the eve of the Second World War).
But there is no universally agreed definition of who counts as a Jew. In addition to the 7.5 million Americans cited by Pew, another 1.4 million were said to consider themselves at least partly Jewish in some way. And then there are probably more than 250,000 people in Israel, mostly from the former Soviet Union, who act as secular Jews in pretty much every way but are not officially recorded as Jewish by the rabbinical authorities.
It is a measure of Israel’s success that since the birth of the state, its Jewish population has grown 11-fold.
It is astonishing to think — on the basis of the Jewish Agency figures - that nearly 90 per cent of world Jewry lives either in Israel or the USA. Barely one in ten Jews now live in other diaspora countries.
The Jewish landscape has been utterly transformed in the last 80 years. The exodus of Jews from North Africa and Middle East has effectively closed the book on some of the most ancient communities. The great migrations of the 1990s from the former Soviet Union have all but emptied some of the historic Ashkenazi heartlands and new waves of migration from Western Europe (and France in particular) have changed Israel dramatically.
New Jewish groups may be beginning to emerge in parts of Africa — but they are too small as yet to have any impact on the overall demographics.