Today, there are about 1.3 million of Jews in Europe. Over one half live in France, the United Kingdom and Germany, in combination. As a proportion of the world Jewry, European Jews are about 9%. In the millennial – telescopic!- perspective, that proportion did not change since the first census of Jews in 1170 by Benjamin from Tudela. In the more fine-grained, microscopic, perspective, a lot happened during the third millennium of Jewish history (the second millennium of the Common Era). Arguably, it was the European millennium, or most of it, anyhow.

Around 1170, perhaps 130,000 Jews lived in Europe, perhaps 10% of the global Jewish population. Somewhere in the 15th century, about the time of Columbus travels, Europe started hosting a majority of the world’s Jews. Which is another way of saying that the Ashkenazi Jewish civilisation rose to numerical dominance. The proportion of European-based Jews in the global Jewry came to the maximum in the beginning of the modern age, around year 1850, when one could reasonably say something like ‘pretty much all Jews live in Europe’. That would be imprecise, for sure (about 85% of Jews were in Europe) but sufficiently close to render the correct ‘big picture’.

Sources: (1) Botticini, M. and Eckstein, Z. 2012. The chosen few: how education shaped Jewish history. (2) Della Pergola, S. World Jewish Population, 2019. American Jewish Year Book 2019. (3) Della Pergola, S. 2001. Some fundamentals of Jewish demographic history, Papers in Jewish Demography 1997. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University.

Parenthetically speaking, the secret of the Ashkenazi numerical power, relative to the non-Ashkenazi Jews, is, simply, in being at the right place at the the right time. Europe, not the Orient, is a place that led on the improvement in material conditions of life and, subsequently, life expectancy. And reduction in the force of mortality led, in turn, to rapid population growth there. It took 100-200 years for these developments to be fully felt in Middle East. While European populations, Jews and non-Jews, grew, the Middle Eastern populations, including Jews, declined, stagnated or, at the very least, did not grow as rapidly. Already around 1700, Western and Eastern Europe combined, had more Jews and Asia and Africa, in combination.

In the late 19th century European Jews started flowing to the New World. Mass migration to Americas reduced the share of Jews in Europe dramatically. The Holocaust delivered another blow to Jewish numbers in Europe. The collapse of the USSR and the socialist camp finished the business. Proportionately today, Jewish Europe is back where it started.

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If using graphical and/or textual content presented here, please cite Jewish World in Data (Daniel Staetsky) as a source