The two countries with the greatest shares of the world's Jewish population are the United States and Israel. The United States had been a hub of Jewish immigration since the nineteenth century, as Jewish people sought to escape persecution in Europe by emigrating across the Atlantic. The Jewish population in the U.S. is largely congregated in major urban areas, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, with the New York metropolitan area being the city with the second largest Jewish population worldwide, after Tel Aviv, Israel. Israel is the world's only officially Jewish state, having been founded in 1948 following the first Arab-Israeli War. While Jews had been emigrating to the holy lands since the nineteenth century, when they were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, immigration increased rapidly following the establishment of the state of Israel. Jewish communities in Eastern Europe who had survived the Holocaust saw Israel as a haven from persecution, while the state encouraged immigration from Jewish communities in other regions, notably the Middle East & North Africa. Smaller Jewish communities remain in Europe in countries such as France, the UK, and Germany, and in other countries which were hotspots for Jewish migration in the twentieth century, such as Canada and Argentina.

The average for 2013 based on 21 countries was 4.3 percent. The highest value was in Israel: 76.2 percent and the lowest value was in Hungary: 0.2 percent. The indicator is available from 1960 to 2013. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.

This statistic shows the top 25 countries in the world with the largest number of Jewish population in 2010. In 2010, there were living about 5.7 million Jews in the United States.

The Holocaust was the systematic extermination of Europe's Jewish population in the Second World War, during which time, up to six million Jews were murdered as part of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". In the context of the Second World War, the term "Holocaust" is traditionally used to reference the genocide of Europe's Jews, although this coincided with the Nazi regime's genocide and ethnic cleansing of an additional eleven million people deemed "undesirable" due to their ethnicity, beliefs, disability or sexuality (among others). During the Holocaust, Poland's Jewish population suffered the largest number of fatalities, with approximately three million deaths. Additionally, at least one million Jews were murdered in the Soviet Union, while Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia also lost the majority of their respective pre-war Jewish populations. The Holocaust in Poland In the interwar period, Europe's Jewish population was concentrated in the east, with roughly one third living in Poland; this can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when thousands of Jews flocked to Eastern Europe to escape persecution. At the outbreak of the Second World War, it is estimated that there were 3.4 million Jews living in Poland, which was approximately ten percent of the total population. Following the German invasion of Poland, Nazi authorities then segregated Jews in ghettos across most large towns and cities, and expanded their network of concentration camps throughout the country. In the ghettos, civilians were deprived of food, and hundreds of thousands died due to disease and starvation; while prison labor was implemented under extreme conditions in concentration camps to fuel the German war effort. In Poland, six extermination camps were also operational between December 1941 and January 1945, which saw the mass extermination of approximately 2.7 million people over the next three years (including many non-Poles, imported from other regions of Europe). While concentration camps housed prisoners of all backgrounds, extermination camps were purpose-built for the elimination of the Jewish race, and over 90% of their victims were Jewish. The majority of the victims in these extermination camps were executed by poison gas, although disease, starvation and overworking were also common causes of death. In addition to the camps and ghettos, SS death squads (Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators also committed widespread atrocities across Eastern Europe. While the majority of these atrocities took place in the Balkan, Baltic and Soviet regions, they were still prevalent in Poland (particularly during the liquidation of the ghettos), and the Einsatzgruppen alone are estimated to have killed up to 1.3 million Jews throughout the Holocaust. By early 1945, Soviet forces had largely expelled the German armies from Poland and liberated the concentration and extermination camps; by this time, Poland had lost roughly ninety percent of its pre-war Jewish population, and suffered approximately three million further civilian and military deaths. By 1991, Poland's Jewish population was estimated to be just 15 thousand people, while there were fewer than two thousand Jews recorded as living in Poland in 2018.

In 1995, Israel had a Jewish population of approximately 4.5 million people, of whom approximately 1.75 million were born abroad. Over one million of these immigrants were born in Europe, with over 650,000 of these born in the former Soviet Union. Despite Poland having the largest Jewish population in the world in the pre-WWII years, the number of Polish Jewish migrants and descendents in Israel was relatively small in 1995 when compared to the USSR due to the impact of the Holocaust.

Outside of Europe, Morocco had the largest number of Jewish immigrants and descendents in Israel by 1995. Morocco had the largest Jewish population in the Muslim world when Israel was founded in 1948, with over 250,000 people. Many Moroccan Jews sought to emigrate to Israel at this time, but often faced resistance from authorities and local populations who believed the Jews would join in the fight against the Arab forces seeking to establish a Muslim state in Palestine. The government of Morocco then officially prohibited emigration to Israel after gaining independence from France in 1956, however this policy was reversed in 1961 whereby the Moroccan government began facilitating Jewish emigration to Israel in return for payments from Jewish organizations in the U.S. and Israel. By the 1970s, Morocco's Jewish population had fallen to less than 15 percent of its size in 1948.

The world's Jewish population has had a complex and tumultuous history over the past millennia, regularly dealing with persecution, pogroms, and even genocide. The legacy of expulsion and persecution of Jews, including bans on land ownership, meant that Jewish communities disproportionately lived in urban areas, working as artisans or traders, and often lived in their own settlements separate to the rest of the urban population. This separation contributed to the impression that events such as pandemics, famines, or economic shocks did not affect Jews as much as other populations, and such factors came to form the basis of the mistrust and stereotypes of wealth (characterized as greed) that have made up anti-Semitic rhetoric for centuries. Development since the Middle Ages The concentration of Jewish populations across the world has shifted across different centuries. In the Middle Ages, the largest Jewish populations were found in Palestine and the wider Levant region, with other sizeable populations in present-day France, Italy, and Spain. Later, however, the Jewish disapora became increasingly concentrated in Eastern Europe after waves of pogroms in the west saw Jewish communities move eastward. Poland in particular was often considered a refuge for Jews from the late-Middle Ages until the 18th century, when it was then partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and persecution increased. Push factors such as major pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 19th century and growing oppression in the west during the interwar period then saw many Jews migrate to the United States in search of opportunity.

The Jewish population of Europe decreased dramatically during the 20th century, as millions of Jews were killed during the Holocaust of the Second World War, while millions of others emigrated to escape persecution (notably to Israel and the U.S.). Some estimates suggest that the total number of Jews in Europe in 1933 was approximately 9.5 million people, with the majority of these living in Eastern Europe. Jews were a minority in most countries, however they still made up a significant portion of the population in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Romania. Following the war however, the Jewish populations in these countries dropped drastically, and by the end of the century they made up just 0.1 percent or less in several countries.

This dataset contains the estimated religious composition of 198 countries and territories for 2010 to 2050.
The data is sourced from PEW RESEARCH CENTER . In original dataset the number and the percentage share of followers for some religions as "<10000" and "<10%". Because of technical limitations of the visualization tool, these values had to be changed into "10000".

data/rounded_population.csv

This file contains the number followers by religions and region for 2010 to 2050 | Column Name | Description | |-----------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Year | The year for which the data is recorded. | | Region | The region to which the country belongs. | | Country | The name of the country. | | Buddhists | The estimated number of Buddhists in the country for the given year. | | Christians | The estimated number of Christians in the country for the given year. | | Folk Religions | The estimated number of followers of folk religions in the country for the given year. | | Hindus | The estimated number of Hindus in the country for the given year. | | Jews | The estimated number of Jews in the country for the given year. | | Muslims | The estimated number of Muslims in the country for the given year. | | Other Religions | The estimated number of followers of other religions in the country for the given year. | | Unaffiliated | The estimated number of people with no religious affiliation in the country for the given year. |

data/rounded_percentage.csv

This file contains the percentage share of followers by religions and region for 2010 to 2050 | Column Name | Description | |------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Year | The year for which the data is recorded. | | Region | The region to which the country belongs. | | Country | The name of the country. | | Christians | The percentage share of Christians in the country's population for the given year. | | Muslims | The percentage share of Muslims in the country's population for the given year. | | Unaffiliated | The percentage share of people with no religious affiliation in the country's population. | | Hindus | The percentage share of Hindus in the country's population for the given year. | | Buddhists | The percentage share of Buddhists in the country's population for the given year. | | Folk Religions | The percentage share of followers of folk religions in the country's population. | | Other Religions | The percentage share of followers of other religions in the country's population. | | Jews | The percentage share of Jews in the country's population for the given year. | | All Religions | The percentage share of all religious groups combined in the country's population for the year. |

The average for 2013 based on 2 countries was 38.8 percent. The highest value was in Israel: 76.2 percent and the lowest value was in Uzbekistan: 1.3 percent. The indicator is available from 1960 to 2013. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.

The worldwide Jewish population experienced a marked decline during the 20th century due to the murder of six million Jewish people during the Holocaust, the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. While there were almost 17 million Jewish people alive before the Holocaust, or the Shoah as it is known in Hebrew, after the war this was only around 11.5 million people. By using several different fertility scenarios, demographers have been able to reconstruct what the Jewish population would be in modern times if the genocide of Jewish people had not happened. In scenarios where there was a low or very low fertility rate, the Jewish population in 2000 would be in the range of 26 to 33 million people, double what it was in reality. In a scenario where the population growth rate was the same as that observed in the Jewish population after WWII, which was extremely low, the global Jewish population would have risen to over 20 million people.

Israel Population: 2022 Census: excl Foreign Workers: Avg: Jews and Others: ow Jews data was reported at 7,246.900 Person th in Mar 2025. This records an increase from the previous number of 7,240.900 Person th for Feb 2025. Israel Population: 2022 Census: excl Foreign Workers: Avg: Jews and Others: ow Jews data is updated monthly, averaging 7,159.600 Person th from Jan 2023 (Median) to Mar 2025, with 27 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 7,246.900 Person th in Mar 2025 and a record low of 7,055.500 Person th in Jan 2023. Israel Population: 2022 Census: excl Foreign Workers: Avg: Jews and Others: ow Jews data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Israel – Table IL.G001: Population.

The survey provides comparable data on the perceived extent and nature of antisemitism across a number of selected EU Member States, whether it is manifested as hate crime, hate speech, discrimination or in any other form that undermines Jewish people’s feelings of safety and security. The survey was commissioned by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). It follows up on the agency’s first survey, conducted in seven countries in 2012.

The overall objectives of FRA’s second survey on discrimination and hate crime against Jews in the European Union (EU) are 1) to collect comparable data in the selected EU Member States and thereby contributing to the assessment and further development of policies that aim to protect the fundamental rights of Jewish people living in the EU; 2) to identify changes over time with respect to the results of the first survey on discrimination and hate crime against Jews in 2012; 3) to further develop research methodologies for surveying hard-to-reach groups using online survey tools; 4) to deliver FRA’s key stakeholders research evidence that can be used to raise awareness of fundamental rights and address gaps in the protection of rights.

The 2018 survey collected data from 16,395 self-identified Jewish respondents (aged 16 or over) in 12 EU Member States – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. These Member States are home to over 96 % of the EU’s estimated Jewish population. The survey collected data through an open online survey and was available for respondents to complete for seven weeks in May–June 2018.

The survey asked respondents about their opinions on trends in antisemitism, antisemitism as a problem in everyday life, personal experiences of antisemitic incidents, witnessing antisemitic incidents and worries about becoming a victim of an antisemitic attack. The survey also provides data on the extent to which respondents consider antisemitic acts against the Jewish community – such as vandalism of Jewish sites or antisemitic messages in the broadcast media or on the internet – to be a problem in the countries. The survey collected data on the effects of antisemitism on respondents’ daily behaviour and their feelings of safety, and about any actions they take due to security fears. The questions about personal experiences of specific forms of harassment or physical violence were followed up with questions concerning the details of such incidents, including their frequency, the number and characteristics of perpetrators, and the reporting of the incident to any organisation or institution. The survey collected data about personal experiences of feeling discriminated against on different grounds and in various areas of everyday life – for example, at work, school, or when using specific services. The survey followed up on respondents’ discrimination experiences with questions concerning the reporting of incidents and the reasons for non-reporting. The survey also explored the level of rights awareness regarding antidiscrimination legislation, victim support organisations and knowledge of any legislation concerning the trivialisation or denial of the Holocaust. In addition, the survey collected socio-demographic data, such as respondents´ gender and age, educational background, employment status, and income.

Topics: 1. Rights awareness, perceptions and attitudes: perception of crime level, unemployment racism, antisemitism, immigration, government corruption, and intolerance towards Muslims as a problem in the country; increase vs. decrease of racism, antisemitism and intolerance towards Muslims in the country; perception of antisemitic acts against the Jewish community as a problem in the country (antisemitic graffiti, desecration of Jewish cemeteries, vandalism of Jewish buildings or institutions, expressions of hostility towards Jews in the street or other public places, antisemitism in the media, in political life, and on the internet including social media; increase vs. decrease of the aforementioned problems; frequency of personally experienced antisemitic comments of non-Jewish people (Jews have too much power in the country, Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes, the Holocaust is a myth or has been exaggerated, Israelis behave ‘like Nazis’ towards the Palestinians, world a better place without Israel, Jews are not capable of integrating into national ...

Israel Population: 2008 Census: excl Foreign Workers: Avg: Jews and Others: ow Jews data was reported at 6,640.700 Person th in Oct 2018. This records an increase from the previous number of 6,630.900 Person th for Sep 2018. Israel Population: 2008 Census: excl Foreign Workers: Avg: Jews and Others: ow Jews data is updated monthly, averaging 6,095.150 Person th from Jan 2009 (Median) to Oct 2018, with 118 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 6,640.700 Person th in Oct 2018 and a record low of 5,612.500 Person th in Jan 2009. Israel Population: 2008 Census: excl Foreign Workers: Avg: Jews and Others: ow Jews data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Israel – Table IL.G001: Population. The group 'Jews and others' includes Jews, population not classified by religion and non-Arab Christians.

With the heightened threat to Germany's Jewish population following the Nazi Party's ascent to power in 1933, many German Jews chose to flee or emigrate. In 1933, Germany's Jewish population was approximately 500,000 people; by the end of the war, it is estimated that 300,000 fled the country, and 165,000 were murdered in the Holocaust. In order to flee, most Jewish emigrants from Germany had to give up the majority of their wealth to the German state, whose emigration tax and seizure of property stripped Jews of their financial assets. Destination and transit For Germany's Jewish refugees, the most common destination country was the United States, and almost half of all these refugees would arrive in the U.S. over this 12 year period. As the United States had a strict quota of 27,000 German migrants per year, many refugees were forced to enter via other countries. France was the second most common destination country, receiving 100,000 refugees. However, France was also used as a transit country for German Jews wishing to travel further afield, especially after it was annexed by Germany in 1940. This was also true for several other European countries, such as the Netherlands, which had provided protection for German Jews in the mid-1930s, before rapidly becoming very unsafe following the outbreak of war in 1939. The Frank family Possibly the most famous example of this was the story of Anne Frank and her family. Anne had been born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929, but her family moved to the Netherlands in 1934 after Hitler came to power. The family then led a relatively comfortable and successful life in Amsterdam, with her father, Otto, founding his own businesses. When the Netherlands was invaded by the Germans in 1940, the family tried to emigrate once more; Otto had been granted a single Cuban visa in 1942, but the family was forced to go into hiding as the restrictions tightened. For the next two years, with the help of non-Jewish friends, they lived in secret in the upper floor of Otto's business premises with several other Jewish refugees, in a small space concealed behind a bookcase. In August 1944, through unknown means, the group was betrayed and then arrested by Dutch authorities, and the Frank family was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau thereafter. Anne's mother, Edith, died of starvation in Auschwitz within five months of her capture, while Anne and her sister, Margot, died one month later after being transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. Otto was the sole survivor of the group. Otto's secretary, Miep Gies, had saved Anne's diary the day after the group was arrested, which she then gave to Otto; he then devoted much of the remainder of his life to the publication and promotion of his daughter's diary, which has now become one of the most famous and widely-read books in recent history. Additionally, the hiding space is now open to the public, and has become one of the Netherlands' most popular tourist museums.

Throughout history, the displacement and migration of Jewish populations has been a repeating theme. In ancient times, the worlds Jewish population was concentrated in the Middle East, especially around Judaism's spiritual homeland in present-day Israel. However, the population distribution of the world's Jewry began to shift in the Middle Ages, with an increasing share living in Europe. Initially, Western Europe (particularly France, Italy, and Spain) had the largest Jewish populations, before they then migrated eastward in later centuries. Between the 18th and mid-20th centuries, over half of the worl'd Jews lived in Europe, with over 80 percent of these living in Eastern Europe.

Poland had become a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in the Middle Ages, although shifting borders and foreign influence meant that long-term security was never fully attained, and a series of pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1800s, and rising anti-Semitism in Central Europe in the early-1900s contributred to waves of migration to the United States and Israel during this time. After the Holocaust saw the genocide of up to six million Jews (over one third of the world's Jewish population), the share of Jews living in Europe dropped drastically, and emmigration outside of Europe increased. Today, the United States has the world's largest Jewish population in the world at around 7.3 million people, just ahead of Israel with 7.1 million.

The data reported here are from the 2000 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, detailing the views of American Jews about a broad range of subjects. Among the topics covered in the present survey are the Israel-Arab peace process, the attachment of American Jews to Israel, political and social issues in the United States, Jewish perceptions of anti-Semitism, Jewish opinion about various countries, and Jewish identity concerns. Some of the questions appearing in the survey are new; others are drawn from previous American Jewish Committee surveys, including the 1997, 1998, and 1999 Annual Surveys of American Jewish Opinion. The 2000 survey was conducted for the American Jewish Committee by Market Facts, Inc., a leading survey-research organization. Respondents were interviewed by telephone during September 14-28, 2000; no interviewing took place on the Sabbath. The sample consisted of 1,010 self-identified Jewish respondents selected from the Market Facts consumer mail panel. The respondents are demographically representative of the United States adult Jewish population on a variety of measures. (AJC 3/4/2015).

Please Note: This dataset is part of the historical CISER Data Archive Collection and is also available at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at https://doi.org/10.25940/ROPER-31094161. We highly recommend using the Roper Center version as they may make this dataset available in multiple data formats in the future.

Among the topics covered in the present survey are the consequences of the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States, the Israel-Arab peace process, the attachment of American Jews to Israel, political and social issues in the United States, Jewish perceptions of anti-Semitism, Jewish opinion about various countries, and Jewish identity concerns. Some of the questions appearing in the survey are new; others are drawn from previous American Jewish Committee surveys, including the Annual Surveys of American Jewish Opinion carried out in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000. The 2001 survey was conducted for the American Jewish Committee by Market Facts, Inc., a leading survey-research organization. Respondents were interviewed by telephone during November 19 - December 4, 2001; no interviewing took place on the Sabbath. The sample consisted of 1,015 self-identified Jewish respondents selected from the Market Facts consumer mail panel. The respondents are demographically representative of the United States adult Jewish population on a variety of measures. (AJC 3/4/2015)

Please Note: This dataset is part of the historical CISER Data Archive Collection and is also available at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at https://doi.org/10.25940/ROPER-31094162. We highly recommend using the Roper Center version as they may make this dataset available in multiple data formats in the future.

SSRS conducted a survey of Muslims, Jews, and the general population for the "https://www.ispu.org/" Target="_blank">Institute for Social Policy and Understanding from March 17 through April 22, 2020. The study investigated the opinions of Muslims, Jews, and the general population regarding politics, important issues facing the country, faith customs, and religious discrimination.

For the survey, SSRS interviewed 801 Muslim respondents, 351 Jewish respondents, and 1,015 general population adult respondents. A total of 2,167 respondents were surveyed.

In 2023, the population of Jewish people in Israel was estimated at **** million. This marked an increase of about *** percent compared to the previous year. Over the period observed, the Jewish population in the country experienced a steady growth.

The Religion and State (RAS) project is a university-based project located at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. The general goal is to provide detailed codings on several aspects of separation of religion and state for 183 states on a yearly basis between 1990 and 2014. This constitutes all countries with populations of 250,000 or more, as well as a sampling of countries with lower populations.

This module recodes the governmental and societal discrimination variables used in the Religion and State, Round 3 except that it uses a minority group within a state as the unit of analysis. For example, in the UK, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Sikhs are all coded separately. The dataset includes all minorities which are at least 0.2% of the population as well as the following categories of minorities regardless of their population size: (1) Christians in Muslim countries, (2) Muslims in Christian countries, and (3) Jews in Christian-majority and Muslim-majority countries, where present.