Fewer Jews alive today than before Holocaust: new study

The world’s Jewish population has yet to recover from the Holocaust that wiped out more than a third of its members, a stunning new analysis shows.

There were an estimated 16.6 million Jews alive in 1939 before the Holocaust killed more than 6 million of them.

By comparison, there are about 14.8 million Jews alive today, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Jewish population did increase by 6.2%, going from 13.91 million to 14.8 million, between 2010 and 2020, figures show.

But globally, the overall non-Jewish population jumped 12.3%, from 7 billion to 7.87 billion, during that same time frame, the study said.

“During this time, the rest of the world’s population grew about twice as quickly,” Pew noted.

Jews account for a tiny 0.2% of the global population.

The study’s findings come at a vulnerable time for Jews, who are battling a rise in antisemitism triggered by the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza.

“Have Jews made up for the loss of people killed in the Holocaust? The answer is no,” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

“It takes a long time to replace a third of the population. It still hasn’t happened. It’s a reminder of how many people we lost in the Holocaust,” he said.

Pew acknowledged that precisely estimating the size of the world’s Jewish population is difficult. Its estimates in Israel are based on the Israeli Ministry of Interior’s population register of Jews. Outside of Israel, the definition of Jewishness is based on self-identification with Judaism as a religion.

The overwhelming number of the world’s Jews live in Israel/the Middle East/North Africa (6.8 million) and North America (6.1 million), mostly in the United States, the study says.

The Jewish population jumped by nearly 18% in and around Israel but just 0.6% in North America in the previous decade.

But it dropped by 8% in Europe, from 1.39 million in 2010 to 1.28 million in 2020, and 37% in sub-Saharan Africa, from 80,000 to 50,000, for the same period.

The population increased by 2% in the Asia-Pacific region, rising from 180,000 to 190,000.

“Between 2010 and 2020, the Middle East and North Africa surpassed North America to become the geographic region with the largest Jewish population,” Pew said. “This is primarily because Israel added over 1 million Jews to its population between 2010 and 2020, compared with an increase of just 30,000 in the U.S.”

Israel and the United States are the only countries with millions of Jewish residents, with 85% of Jews worldwide living in one of the two countries combined.

Sarna said the Jewish birth rate is lower in many Western societies as it is for non-Jews, with the exception of Orthodox Jews who marry younger and have larger families.