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 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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2020, Mexico had a Jew population of 58,876 people. More than a third of that population lived in Mexico State by that time. Mexico City had almost 18,000 Jewish people in this same year.

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Jews were the dominant religious group in the Israel-Palestine region at the beginning of the first millennia CE, and are the dominant religious group there today, however, there was a period of almost 2,000 years where most of the world's Jews were displaced from their spiritual homeland. Antiquity to the 20th century Jewish hegemony in the region began changing after a series of revolts against Roman rule led to mass expulsions and emigration. Roman control saw severe persecution of Jewish and Christian populations, but this changed when the Byzantine Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion in the 4th century. Christianity then dominated until the 7th century, when the Rashidun Caliphate (the first to succeed Muhammad) took control of the Levant. Control of region split between Christians and Muslims intermittently between the 11th and 13th centuries during the Crusades, although the population remained overwhelmingly Muslim. Zionism until today Through the Paris Peace Conference, the British took control of Palestine in 1920. The Jewish population began growing through the Zionist Movement after the 1880s, which sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rising anti-Semitism in Europe accelerated this in the interwar period, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, many European Jews chose to leave the continent. The United Nations tried facilitating the foundation of separate Jewish and Arab states, yet neither side was willing to concede territory, leading to a civil war and a joint invasion from seven Arab states. Yet the Jews maintained control of their territory and took large parts of the proposed Arab territory, forming the Jewish-majority state of Israel in 1948, and acheiving a ceasefire the following year. Over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced as a result of this conflict, while most Jews from the Arab eventually fled to Israel. Since this time, Israel has become one of the richest and advanced countries in the world, however, Palestine has been under Israeli military occupation since the 1960s and there are large disparities in living standards between the two regions.

Background/Aims: Ashkenazi Jews have a 1:40 prevalence of BRCA1/2 mutations. Orthodox Jews are an understudied population with unique cultural and religious factors that may influence BRCA1/2 genetic testing uptake. Methods: Using a mixed-methods approach, we conducted a cross-sectional survey and focus groups among Orthodox Jewish women in New York/New Jersey to explore factors affecting decision-making about BRCA1/2 genetic testing. Results: Among 321 evaluable survey participants, the median age was 47 years (range, 25–82); 56% were Modern Orthodox and 44% Yeshivish/Chassidish/other; 84% were married; 7% had a personal history of breast or ovarian cancer. Nearly 20% of the women had undergone BRCA1/2genetic testing. Predictors of genetic testing uptake included being Modern Orthodox (odds ratio [OR] = 2.31), married (OR = 3.49), and having a personal or family history of breast or ovarian cancer (OR = 9.74). Focus group participants (n = 31) confirmed the importance of rabbinic consultation in medical decision-making and revealed that stigma was a prominent factor in decisions about BRCA1/2 testing due to its potential impact on marriageability. Conclusion: In order to increase the uptake of BRCA1/2 genetic testing among the Orthodox Jewish population, it is crucial to understand religious and cultural factors, such as stigma and effect on marriageability, and engage religious leaders in raising awareness within the community.

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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 the interwar period, Nazi leaders and propaganda repeatedly put forward the bogus claim that Jews owned up to 20 percent of all wealth in Germany, despite making up fewer than one percent of the population. At this time, Jews were used as a scapegoat for Germany's economic difficulties after the First World War and during the Great Depression, and the Nazis claimed that the Jews were lining their pockets at the expense of "Aryan" Germans. Unfortunately, there are no official figures for Jewish wealth in the 1930s, and emigration tax data only gives an insight into the finances of wealthier Jews. There are, however, a range of estimates from contemporary and more recent sources, which have been used to estimate the real share of German capital that was owned by Jews. Contemporary estimates At various points in the 1930s, the media, statistical office, and central bank all claimed that the combined wealth of German Jews was somewhere between two and 20 billion Reichsmarks (RM). While these three institutions were all state run under the Nazi regime, and despite their uncertainty, some of these estimates are still treated with consideration due to the credentials of the journalists, economists, and statisticians involved. Additionally, these figures were used with the purpose of identifying just how much money the state could take from the Jewish population, therefore it was of interest for the Nazi authorities to ascertain accurate figures, and not inflate estimates for propaganda purposes. Interestingly, the estimates from the Statistical office actually increased from 1933 to 1936, despite the fact that the state had already been seizing Jewish wealth and restricting Jewish business on a large scale since 1933; this has been attributed to the economic impact of the Great Depression. Modern estimates The estimates from Junz and Ritschl were published in 2002 and 2019 respectively, and used some of the contemporary estimates in their investigation, while taking many additional factors into account. These are now some of the most widely-cited estimates on this subject, with estimates of around 8-16 billion RM in 1933, five billion RM in 1936, and 4.4 billion RM in 1938. In Ritschl's 2019 paper, he then goes on to estimate the share of total German wealth owned by Jews; his results show that the Jewish share of private capital was slightly higher than the average, but was still very much in line with their population size.

Overall, trust in state institutions in Israel remained stable between June and December 2023, as measured among the Jewish population. As of December 2023, the IDF rated highest among Israeli institutions, with 86.5 percent of the Jewish public expressing trust in the army. In the observed period, trust rates increased most for the Israeli police, growing from 35 to 58.5 percent. In contrast, faith in the national government and the parliament (Knesset) decreased by five percent. Following the Israel-Hamas war, which started on October 7th, 2023, faith in public institutions came into question among the Israeli public.

According to a survey conducted in 2022, ** percent of Jewish Americans said that they made 100,000 U.S. dollars or more in the United States. In comparison, ** percent of Muslim Americans said that they made less than 30,000 U.S. dollars.

As early as 1319, allegations of well-poisoning had been levelled at leper communities in Europe, in an attempt to demonize and ostracize this group in society. In France and Spain in 1321, the "leper's plot" developed into a widespread conspiracy, claiming that leper communities were acting on the orders of the Jews or Spanish Moors, poisoning water supplies in an attempt to spread disease among Christians. Under royal decrees, many lepers were then tortured into confessing to these acts, and were subsequently burnt at the stake (although this was often carried out by vigilante mobs before it could be done by the courts). After the initial hysteria in 1321, the involvement of lepers was quickly dismissed, and a papal bull was introduced to grant protection to leper communities in France; this however did not dispel the myths surrounding the Jews' involvement in the conspiracy, and the issue emerged again a few decades later. Why the Jews were blamed When the bubonic plague made its way to Europe, many were eager to find a scapegoat on whom they could blame their misfortune. The "well-poisoning" accusations were quickly raised again against Jewish communities in France and Spain, and also across the German states. Historians point to several reasons why Jews were blamed for the Black Death; many Jews lived in separate communities and did not use the same common wells, and Jewish religious practices promote bathing and hand-washing; both of these factors meant that the plague spread differently and at a different rate among Jews than it did among the general population. Modern historians also point to the fact that Jews were often moneylenders, and their debtors often used the plague as an opportunity to expunge their debts; Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV also forfeited the property of Jews who were killed in the pogroms, giving further impetus to these mobs. Anti-Jewish pogroms The first reported pogroms took place in Toulon in 1348, before the violence then spread across the rest of Western Europe. Over the next three years, hundreds of Jewish communities were attacked and exterminated, with the majority taking place in the German states. A number of larger communities, such as those in Cologne and Mainz, were destroyed completely, resulting in the deaths and forced conversions of thousands of Jews. Pope Clement VI introduced two papal bulls in 1348, which granted the church's protection to Europe's Jews. He also urged the clergy and nobility to take measures that protected Jews in their local areas, although most sources show that authorities were apathetic or complicit in the actions of the mobs. There is even evidence that authorities orchestrated several of the pogroms, such as in Strasbourg, where authorities led the city's Jewish community to a newly-built house outside the city, but when they arrived, any Jews who refused to convert to Christianity were then burned alive inside the house. Legacy Many of the sources present different versions of events, with death tolls ranging from one hundred to several thousand in some cases, while some sources also claim that Jews set fire to their own homes rather than convert. It is now impossible to confirm the exact sequence of events, or the actual number of deaths resulting from these pogroms, however, the limited sources available do provide a brief foundation for the modern understanding of medieval anti-Semitism and the destruction inflicted upon the Jews during the plague. It is also important to note that these pogroms were not unique to the Black Death's outbreak, and there is evidence of numerous massacres of Jewish communities in the centuries that followed. The demographic impact of the massacres was that there was a mass exodus of Jews from west to Eastern Europe, to countries such as Poland (where they were actually welcomed by authorities). The consequences of this demographic shift would be most felt six centuries later, when millions of Jews across Eastern Europe were exterminated at the hands of the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.

Most estimates place the total number of deaths during the Second World War at around 70-85 million people. Approximately 17 million of these deaths (20-25 percent of the total) were due to crimes against humanity carried out by the Nazi regime in Europe. In comparison to the millions of deaths that took place through conflict, famine, or disease, these 17 million stand out due to the reasoning behind them, along with the systematic nature and scale in which they were carried out. Nazi ideology claimed that the Aryan race (a non-existent ethnic group referring to northern Europeans) was superior to all other ethnicities; this became the justification for German expansion and the extermination of others. During the war, millions of people deemed to be of lesser races were captured and used as slave laborers, with a large share dying of exhaustion, starvation, or individual execution. Murder campaigns were also used for systematic extermination; the most famous of these were the extermination camps, such as at Auschwitz, where roughly 80 percent of the 1.1 million victims were murdered in gas chambers upon arrival at the camp. German death squads in Eastern Europe carried out widespread mass shootings, and up to two million people were killed in this way. In Germany itself, many disabled, homosexual, and "undesirables" were also killed or euthanized as part of a wider eugenics program, which aimed to "purify" German society.

The Holocaust Of all races, the Nazi's viewed Jews as being the most inferior. Conspiracy theories involving Jews go back for centuries in Europe, and they have been repeatedly marginalized throughout history. German fascists used the Jews as scapegoats for the economic struggles during the interwar period. Following Hitler's ascendency to the Chancellorship in 1933, the German authorities began constructing concentration camps for political opponents and so-called undesirables, but the share of Jews being transported to these camps gradually increased in the following years, particularly after Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) in 1938. In 1939, Germany then invaded Poland, home to Europe's largest Jewish population. German authorities segregated the Jewish population into ghettos, and constructed thousands more concentration and detention camps across Eastern Europe, to which millions of Jews were transported from other territories. By the end of the war, over two thirds of Europe's Jewish population had been killed, and this share is higher still when one excludes the neutral or non-annexed territories.

Lebensraum Another key aspect of Nazi ideology was that of the Lebensraum (living space). Both the populations of the Soviet Union and United States were heavily concentrated in one side of the country, with vast territories extending to the east and west, respectively. Germany was much smaller and more densely populated, therefore Hitler aspired to extend Germany's territory to the east and create new "living space" for Germany's population and industry to grow. While Hitler may have envied the U.S. in this regard, the USSR was seen as undeserving; Slavs were the largest major group in the east and the Nazis viewed them as inferior, which was again used to justify the annexation of their land and subjugation of their people. As the Germans took Slavic lands in Poland, the USSR, and Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansings (often with the help of local conspirators) became commonplace in the annexed territories. It is also believed that the majority of Soviet prisoners of war (PoWs) died through starvation and disease, and they were not given the same treatment as PoWs on the western front. The Soviet Union lost as many as 27 million people during the war, and 10 million of these were due to Nazi genocide. It is estimated that Poland lost up to six million people, and almost all of these were through genocide.

In 1800, the population of the area of modern-day Lithuania was estimated to be just under 780,000. Lithuania’s rate of population growth would remain largely unchanged in the 19th century, as the Russian Empire would slowly but gradually develop its border regions. While large numbers of Lithuanians would emigrate west-ward (largely to the United States) between 1867 and 1868 after a famine in the country, growth would remain largely uninterrupted until the beginning of the First World War in 1912, which would see Lithuania, like much of the Baltic region, devastated as the battleground between the German and Russian Empires. As the conflict spread, those who were not made to evacuate by orders from the Russian government would face economic turmoil under German occupation, and as a result, Lithuania’s population would fall from just under 2.9 million in 1910, to under 2.3 million by 1920.

While Lithuania’s population would start to grow once more following the end of the First World War, this growth would be short-lived, as economic turmoil from the Great Depression, and later occupation and campaigns of mass extermination in the Second World War, most notably the extermination of 95 to 97 percent of the country’s Jewish population in the Holocaust, would cause Lithuania’s population growth to stagnate throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In the years following the end of the Second World War, Lithuania’s population would steadily climb, as industrialization by the Soviet Union would lead to improved economic growth and access to health, and campaigns of mass immunization and vaccination would lead to a sharp decline in child mortality. As a result, by the 1990s, Lithuania would have a population of over 3.7 million. However, Lithuania’s population would rapidly decline in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as economic crises and mass emigration from the country, paired with sharp declines in fertility, would result in a dramatic reduction in population. As a result, in 2020, Lithuania is estimated to have a population of just over 2.7 million.

In 2022, there were 580 incidents related to anti-Semitism in the state of New York, the most out of any state. California, New Jersey, Florida, and Texas rounded out the top five states for anti-Semitic incidents in that year.

Throughout the 19th century, what we know today as Poland was not a united, independent country; apart from a brief period during the Napoleonic Wars, Polish land was split between the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian (later German) and Russian empires. During the 1800s, the population of Poland grew steadily, from approximately nine million people in 1800 to almost 25 million in 1900; throughout this time, the Polish people and their culture were oppressed by their respective rulers, and cultural suppression intensified following a number of uprisings in the various territories. Following the outbreak of the First World War, it is estimated that almost 3.4 million men from Poland served in the Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian armies, with a further 300,000 drafted for forced labor by the German authorities. Several hundred thousand were forcibly resettled in the region during the course of the war, as Poland was one of the most active areas of the conflict. For these reasons, among others, it is difficult to assess the extent of Poland's military and civilian fatalities during the war, with most reliable estimates somewhere between 640,000 and 1.1 million deaths. In the context of present-day Poland, it is estimated that the population fell by two million people in the 1910s, although some of this was also due to the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed in the wake of the war.

Poland 1918-1945

After more than a century of foreign rule, an independent Polish state was established by the Allied Powers in 1918, although it's borders were considerably different to today's, and were extended by a number of additional conflicts. The most significant of these border conflicts was the Polish-Soviet War in 1919-1920, which saw well over 100,000 deaths, and victory helped Poland to emerge as the Soviet Union's largest political and military rival in Eastern Europe during the inter-war period. Economically, Poland struggled to compete with Europe's other powers during this time, due to its lack of industrialization and infrastructure, and the global Great Depression of the 1930s exacerbated this further. Political corruption and instability was also rife in these two decades, and Poland's leadership failed to prepare the nation for the Second World War. Poland had prioritized its eastern defenses, and some had assumed that Germany's Nazi regime would see Poland as an ally due to their shared rivalry with the Soviet Union, but this was not the case. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, in the first act of the War, and the Soviet Union launched a counter invasion on September 17; Germany and the Soviet Union had secretly agreed to do this with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August, and had succeeded in taking the country by September's end. When Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 it took complete control of Poland, which continued to be the staging ground for much of the fighting between these nations. It has proven difficult to calculate the total number of Polish fatalities during the war, for a variety of reasons, however most historians have come to believe that the figure is around six million fatalities, which equated to almost one fifth of the entire pre-war population; the total population dropped by four million throughout the 1940s. The majority of these deaths took place during the Holocaust, which saw the Nazi regime commit an ethnic genocide of up to three million Polish Jews, and as many as 2.8 million non-Jewish Poles; these figures do not include the large number of victims from other countries who died after being forcefully relocated to concentration camps in Poland.

Post-war Poland

The immediate aftermath of the war was also extremely unorganized and chaotic, as millions were forcefully relocated from or to the region, in an attempt to create an ethnically homogenized state, and thousands were executed during this process. A communist government was quickly established by the Soviet Union, and socialist social and economic policies were gradually implemented over the next decade, as well as the rebuilding, modernization and education of the country. In the next few decades, particularly in the 1980s, the Catholic Church, student groups and trade unions (as part of the Solidarity movement) gradually began to challenge the government, weakening the communist party's control over the nation (although it did impose martial law and imprison political opponent throughout the early-1980s). Increasing civil unrest and the weakening of Soviet influence saw communism in Poland come to an end in the elections of 1989. Throughout the 1990s, Poland's population growth stagnated at around 38.5 million people, before gradually decreasing since the turn of the millennium, to 37.8 million people in 2020. This decline was mostly due to a negative migration rate, as Polish workers could now travel more freely to Western Europea...

The German state’s persecution of the Jews escalated following Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. While the Holocaust ultimately resulted in the Nazi regime murdering two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population, a large part of the pre-Holocaust persecution involved the financial ruination of Germany’s Jews. After assuming power, the Nazis then coerced Jews into fleeing the country, stripping them of their wealth in the process.

Reichsfluchtsteuer During the Great Depression, the Weimar Republic introduced an emigration tax in order to prevent wealthy individuals from taking their capital abroad. Originally, those with assets exceeding a value of 200,000 Reichsmarks (RM) or those who earned over 20,000 RM per year would be taxed 25 percent of all assets over a certain value if they wished to move abroad. This law was introduced as a short term measure in 1931, set to expire one year later, but it was extended until 1934. When the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, they repeatedly restricted and extended this law, and lowered the threshold of asset worth to 50,000 RM in 1934. This coincided with the widespread boycott of Jewish businesses, as well as an escalation of violence, intimidation, and restrictions aimed at Jews; therefore, any Jew wishing to flee persecution in Germany would be forced to give up a large share of their assets to the government.

In practice Following the taxation of assets in Germany, the remaining values were to be transferred to the emigrant in their destination country. This process was done through the German Central Bank, and authorities adopted an official policy of suspicion when dealing with Jews, and the sums taken were much higher than the official tax rates. The emigration tax was used as a means of seizing additional assets from Jewish emigrants, and it is estimated that in 1937 alone, the final amount transferred abroad was worth just 7.5 percent of the original value. In total, over one billion RM of assets was declared by German emigrants between 1933 and 1937, and 250 million was taken as emigration tax, but an additional 530 million was seized or frozen by the state. Although these laws applied to all German emigrants at the time, it is estimated that over 90 percent of the funds were taken from Jews and other persecuted minorities.