A new survey by the Pew Research Center, an American think tank based in Washington that provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the US and the world. shows that the Jewish population of Europe has dropped massively in recent decades, even several generations after the Holocaust, as concerns over renewed anti-Semitism on the continent have prompted Jewish leaders to talk of a new “exodus” from the region.
In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews worldwide, and a majority of them – 9.5 million, or 57% – lived in Europe, according to estimates by Sergio Della Pergola of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert on Jewish demographics.
By the end of WWII, in 1945, the Jewish population of Europe had shrunk to 3.8 million, or 35% of the world’s 11 million Jews. About 6 million European Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
The global Jewish population – estimated by Pew Research at 14 million as of 2010 – has risen, but it is still smaller than it was before the Holocaust. And in the decades since 1945, the Jewish population in Europe has continued to decline. In 1960, it was about 3.2 million; by 1991, it fell to 2 million, according to the estimates by Sergio Della Pergola.
Now, there are about 1.4 million Jews in Europe – just 10% of the world’s Jewish population, and 0.2% of Europe’s total population.
In Eastern Europe, a once large and vibrant Jewish population has nearly disappeared. DellaPergola estimates that there were 3.4 million Jews in the European portions of the Soviet Union as of 1939. Many were killed in the Holocaust, and others moved to Israel or elsewhere. Today, a tiny fraction of the former Soviet republics’ population – an estimated 310,000 people – are Jews.
Similar trends have occurred in Eastern European countries that were outside the USSR, including Poland, Hungary, Romania and several other nations. Collectively, they were home to about 4.7 million Jews in 1939, but now there are probably fewer than 100,000 Jews in all these countries combined.
Much of the postwar decline has been a result of emigration to Israel, which declared its independence as a Jewish state in 1948.
The Jewish population of Israel has grown from about half a million in 1945 to 5.6 million in 2010. But there are other possible factors in the decline of European Jewry, including intermarriage and cultural assimilation.
In Western Europe in 2010, France’s Jewish population was 310,000 — roughly the same as the 320,000 recorded Jews there in 1939, before the Nazis invaded and tens of thousands of Jews were deported to concentration camps.
In 2014, immigration to Israel hit a 10-year high, with France topping the list of countries of origin for the first time. Nearly 7,000 French citizens moved to Israel in 2014, double the number that went the year before, and the Jewish Agency expects this number to reach 10,000 in 2015 as a result of fears of anti-Semitism.
French Jews have increasingly faced the question of whether to leave the country, most starkly after last month’s wave of terror attacks by Islamist terrorists, including an assault on a Paris kosher supermarket that saw four Jews killed.
In the U.K., the Jewish population was 280,000 in 2010, down from 345,000 in 1939, according to the figures collected by DellaPergola.
Britain saw a record number of anti-Semitic incidents last year. The Community Security Trust, a British charity that focuses on securing the Jewish community and its structures, said that 1,168 anti-Semitic incidents occurred in 2014, more than double the number from the year before.