Newly released population statistics from Israel appear to answer a long-standing question: “Which country is home to the largest Jewish population?”
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the country now has 7.7 million Jews, surpassing the 7.5 million figure cited in a 2020 Pew survey for the United States. Some have contended that Israel claimed the top spot earlier, arguing that Pew’s estimate for American Jews was overly generous.
This year, the Jewish Agency estimates the global Jewish population at 15.8 million, which includes a “core” Jewish population of 6.3 million in the United States. If accurate, this figure suggests that the global Jewish community has yet to return to the pre-Holocaust level of 16.6 million recorded on the eve of World War II.
However, determining the exact size of the Jewish population is complicated by the lack of a universally accepted definition of Jewish identity. Beyond Pew’s estimate of 7.5 million Jews in the U.S., an additional 1.4 million Americans reportedly identify as partly Jewish in some way. Meanwhile, in Israel, there are over 250,000 individuals, mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who live secular Jewish lives but are not officially recognized as Jews by religious authorities.
The dramatic growth of Israel’s Jewish population — which has increased 11-fold since the founding of the state — highlights the country’s demographic success.
It is striking that, based on Jewish Agency figures, nearly 90 percent of the world’s Jewish population now resides in either Israel or the United States. Fewer than one in ten Jews remain in other diaspora communities.
The global Jewish landscape has undergone a profound transformation over the past 80 years. The exodus of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East effectively marked the end of some of the world’s oldest Jewish communities. The mass migration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s significantly reduced the population of many traditional Ashkenazi heartlands, while recent waves of emigration from Western Europe — especially France — have reshaped Israel’s demographic profile.
In recent years, emerging Jewish communities have been observed in parts of Africa. However, their numbers remain too small to influence global Jewish demographics significantly. Photo by National Park Service Digital Image Archives, Wikimedia commons.
