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.
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 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 Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews 2013, is a comprehensive national survey of the Jewish population. The survey explores attitudes, beliefs, practices and experiences of Jews living in the United States. There are two datasets, a respondent dataset (where there is one row per respondent) and a household dataset (where there is one row per person in the sampled households). The respondent dataset includes all of the information collected as part of the survey. The household dataset is a reshaped version of the respondent dataset that includes a limited number of variables describing the demographic characteristics and Jewish status of all of the people in the surveyed households.
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.
In 2023, 1,060 people fell victim to anti-Jewish destruction, damage, and/or vandalism hate crimes in the United States. In that year, there were a further 700 anti-Jewish intimidation hate crimes across the country.
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.
This statistic shows the denominational affiliation of Jewish community members in the United States, as of January 2017. 28 percent of Jews identified with the Reform movement while 29 percent considered themselves to be "just Jewish"
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/7310/termshttps://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/7310/terms
This nationwide study investigated respondents' opinions on current affairs at both the national and international levels. Issues such as morality in the United States, approval of the United Nations, and the positon of the United States in world affairs were explored, as well as attitudes toward the Constitution and individual rights. Respondents were asked about their feelings toward minority groups such as the John Birch Society, communists, and Blacks, with special emphasis on the Jewish minority. Respondents' beliefs about Jews as a group, their contacts with Jews, and their feelings about political and social rights of Jews in the United States were probed. Past treatment of the Jewish people was also explored, and the respondents were asked to compare Jews with other groups in the United States on the basis of ambition, wealth, intelligence, and power. A number of variables assessed the respondents' leisure activities, their religious beliefs and education, and their outlooks on life. Derived measures include indexes such as anti-Semitic beliefs, Index of Jewish contacts, Fascism Scale, Despair Scale, Tolerance of Cultural Diversity Index, Enlightenment Values Scale, Anomie Scale, Political Anxiety Scale, Self-Image Scale, Libertarian Index, and Monism Scale. Demographic data include sex, race, age, education, income, religion, home ownership, marital status, and number of children. The study was received from the International Data Library and Reference Service, Survey Research Center, University of California at Berkeley.
Attitude to Jews and other minorities. Topics: Attitude to West Germans/East Germans, gipsies, Arabs, Vietnamese, Turks, Poles, Africans and Jews as neighbors; provocative behavior by these population groups; judgement on protection of foreigners by authorities; judgement on the influence of large concerns, trade unions, media, banks, Americans, Japanese, churches and Jews on society; assessment of antisemitism in Germany and expected development in the next few years; attitude to a Jewish candidate for Federal President; judgement on the influence of Jews on world events; significance of the term Holocaust as well as Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka; Auschwitz as lie or truth; knowledge about the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust as well as population groups persecuted by the Nazis; knowledge about the star of David; attitude to a Holocaust Memorial; importance of knowledge about National Socialist perscution of Jews for Germans; perceived exploitation of the Holocaust for personal intents by Jews; attitude to considering finished the topic of persecution of Jews in the past; religious denomination; party preference; interest in politics; union membership; behavior at the polls in the last Federal Parliament election.
The data result from a mail survey of rabbis conducted in the fall and winter of 2000 in the four major movements of American Judaism- Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, and Reform. The first wave was sent two days before the presidential election. The data collection effort loosely paralleled the 2000 Cooperative Clergy Study format but differed in several important respects to capture concerns important to the Jewish community. The survey effort collected data on rabbi political activism, public political speech, political attitudes and electoral choices, thoughts on the role of religion in society, attitudes on issues related to Jewish unity and Jewish law, ratings of and membership in Jewish and secular political organizations, attitudes about Joseph Lieberman, and personal attributes, as well as aspects of congregations.
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This dataset is about book series. It has 1 row and is filtered where the books is Judaism in America : from curiosity to third faith. It features 10 columns including number of authors, number of books, earliest publication date, and latest publication date.
According to a survey conducted in 2022, 70 percent of Americans said that it was mostly or somewhat true that Jews stick together more than other Americans in the United States. 53 percent also agreed that it was mostly or somewhat true that Jews in business go out of their way to hire other Jews.
Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
License information was derived automatically
This dataset is about book subjects. It has 4 rows and is filtered where the books is Jews and the American soul : human nature in the twentieth century. It features 10 columns including number of authors, number of books, earliest publication date, and latest publication date.
This study was designed to gather information on anti-Semitism in the United States. The major topics covered include the anti-Semitic beliefs of non-Jews as well as the anti-Semitic experiences of Jews. Additionally, other questions in the instrument gauge Christian fundamentalism and attitudes toward other racial and ethnic groups. The sample used two independent, but integrated samples to represent the population of the United States ages 18 years or older. The "General Public" sample of 1,072 interviews and the Jewish/Black "Supplemental" sample of 143 are combined here into a single sample.
Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
License information was derived automatically
This dataset is about books. It has 12 rows and is filtered where the book subjects is Jews-United States-Attitudes. It features 9 columns including author, publication date, language, and book publisher.
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.
Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
License information was derived automatically
This dataset is about book subjects. It has 5 rows and is filtered where the books is Israel and Zion in American Judaism : the Zionist fulfillment. It features 10 columns including number of authors, number of books, earliest publication date, and latest publication date.
This study, designed and carried out by the "http://www.asarb.org/" Target="_blank">Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB), compiled data on 372 religious bodies by county in the United States. Of these, the ASARB was able to gather data on congregations and adherents for 217 religious bodies and on congregations only for 155. Participating bodies included 354 Christian denominations, associations, or communions (including Latter-day Saints, Messianic Jews, and Unitarian/Universalist groups); counts of Jain, Shinto, Sikh, Tao, Zoroastrian, American Ethical Union, and National Spiritualist Association congregations, and counts of congregations and adherents from Baha'i, three Buddhist groupings, two Hindu groupings, and four Jewish groupings, and Muslims. The 372 groups reported a total of 356,642 congregations with 161,224,088 adherents, comprising 48.6 percent of the total U.S. population of 331,449,281. Membership totals were estimated for some religious groups.
In January 2024, the ARDA added 21 religious tradition (RELTRAD) variables to this dataset. These variables start at variable #9 (TOTCNG_2020). Categories were assigned based on pages 88-94 in the original "https://www.usreligioncensus.org/index.php/node/1638" Target="_blank">2020 U.S. Religion Census Report.
Visit the "https://www.thearda.com/us-religion/sources-for-religious-congregations-membership-data" Target="_blank">frequently asked questions page for more information about the ARDA's religious congregation and membership data sources.
Financial overview and grant giving statistics of Judaism & Democracy Action Alliance of North America Inc.
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.