The number of Jews in the world is difficult to calculate, especially given the constant debates of the definition of Jew. All numbers given in this article will be estimates, from sources noted below.

Contents

1 Historical Populations 1.1 Ancient and medieval times 1.2 The modern world 2 Population in 1900 3 Current Population 4 References

Historical Populations

Increase in European Jewish populations before 1900

Date	Population
Holland
1829	46,408
1839	52,245
1849	58,626
1859	63,790
1869	68,003
1879	81,693
Hungary
1720	12,656
1785	75,089
1786	77,647
1804	124,128
1805	127,816
1829	202,328
1842	241,632
1850	352,400
1857	413,118
1869	516,658
1880	624,737
1890	725,222
Poland
16th century	200,000
1659	100,000
1764	315,298
1816	212,000
1825	341,125
1826	368,773
1828	384,263
1856	563,000
1868	764,947
1875	860,327
1882	1,045,000
1893	1,229,000
1897	1,333,000
Württemberg
1832	10,670
1846	12,356
1858	11,088
1864	11,610
1871	12,245
1880	13,331
1890	12,639
1900	11,916
Source: The Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906).

Jewish population centers have shifted tremendously over time, due to the constant streams of Jewish refugees created by expulsions, persecution, and sancitoned killing of Jews in various places at various times. The 20th century saw a large shift in Jewish populations, due mostly to the Holocaust, migration to the United States and the creation of Israel and subsequent explusions of Sephardic Jews from the Arab world.

Ancient and medieval times

According to Joseph Jacobs, writing in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906) [1] http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1044&letter=S , the Pentateuch contains a number of statements as to the number of Jews that left Egypt, the descendants of the seventy sons and grandsons of Jacob who took up their residence in that country. Altogether, including Levites, there were 611,730 males over twenty years of age, and therefore capable of bearing arms; this would imply a population of about 3,154,000. The Census of David is said to have recorded 1,300,000 males over twenty years of age, which would imply a population of over 5,000,000. The number of exiles who returned from Babylon is given at 42,360. Tacitus declares that Jerusalem at its fall contained 600,000 persons; Josephus, that there were as many as 1,100,000, of whom 97,000 were sold as slaves. It is from the latter that most European Jews are descended. These appear (writes Jacobs) to be all the figures accessible for ancient times, and their trustworthiness is a matter of dispute. The difficulties of commissariat in the Sinaitic desert for such a number as 3,000,000 have been pointed out by John William Colenso; and the impossibility of the area of Jerusalem containing much more than 80,000 persons with any comfort has been referred to as proving the exaggeration of the figures of Josephus and Tacitus.

In the Hadrianic war 580,000 Jews were slain, according to Dion Cassius (lxix. 14). According to Theodor Mommsen, in the first century C.E. there were no less than 1,000,000 Jews in Egypt, in a total of 8,000,000 inhabitants; of these 200,000 lived in Alexandria, whose total population was 500,000. Adolf Harnack (Ausbreitung des Christentums, Leipzig, 1902) reckons that there were 1,000,000 Jews in Syria at the time of Nero, and 700,000 in Palestine, and he allows for an additional 1,500,000 in other places, thus estimating that there were in the first century 4,200,000 Jews in the world. Jacobs remarks that this estimate is probably excessive.

As regards the number of Jews in the Middle Ages, Benjamin of Tudela, about 1170, enumerates altogether 1,049,565; but of these 100,000 are attributed to Persia and India, 100,000 to Arabia, and 300,000 to an undecipherable "Thanaim", obviously mere guesses with regard to the Eastern Jews, with whom he did not come in contact. There were at that time probably not many more than 500,000 in the countries he visited, and probably not more than 750,000 altogether. The only real data for the Middle Ages are with regard to special Jewish communities. The Jewish Encyclopedia provides a table of this data[2] http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/table.jsp?table_id=421&volid=11&title=STATISTI
CS: .

The Middle Ages were mainly a period of expulsions. In 1290, 16,000 Jews were expelled from England; in 1396, 100,000 from France; and in 1492, about 200,000 from Spain. Smaller but more frequent expulsions occurred in Germany, so that at the commencement of the 16th century only four great Jewish communities remained: Frankfurt, 2,000; Worms, 1,400; Prague, 10,000; and Vienna, 3,000 (Heinrich Grätz , Geschichte der Juden x. 29). It has been estimated that during the five centuries from 1000 to 1500, 380,000 Jews were killed during the persecutions, reducing the total number in the world to about 1,000,000. In the 16th and 17th centuries the main centers of Jewish population were in Poland and the Mediterranean countries, Spain excepted.

The modern world

Again following Jacobs, Jacques Basnage at the beginning of the 18th century estimated the total number of European Jews at 1,360,000, but according to a census at the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth numbered 308,500. As these formed the larger part of the European Jews, it is doubtful whether the total number was more than 400,000 at the middle of the 18th century; and, counting those in the lands of Islam, the entire number in the world at that time could not have been much more than 1,000,000.

Assuming that those numbers are reasonable, the increase in the next few centuries was remarkably rapid. It was checked in Germany by the laws limiting the number of Jews in special towns, and perhaps still more by overcrowding; Jacobs gives citations for there being 7,951 Jews at Prague in 1786 and 5,646 in 1843, and 2,214 at Frankfurt in 1811.

Chubinsky reports that in 1840 the Jews of southern Russia were accustomed to dwell thirteen in a house, whereas among the general population the average was only four to five (Globus, 1880, p. 340). The rapid increase was undoubtedly due to the early age of marriage and the small number of deaths of infants in the stable communities. The chief details known for any length of time are for Holland, Hungary, Poland, and Württemberg; see chart at right.

Jacobs in the Jewish Encyclopedia presents some evidence that Jewish increase in this period may have exceeded that of the general population, but remarks also that such figures of increase are often very deceptive, as they may indicate not the natural increase by surplus of births over deaths, but accession by immigration. This applies especially to Germany during the early part of the 19th century, when Jews from Galicia and Poland seized every opportunity of moving westward. Arthur Ruppin , writing in the late 19th century, when forcible measures were taken to prevent Russian Jews from settling in Germany, showed that the growth of the Jewish population in Germany had almost entirely ceased, owing to a falling birth rate and, possibly, to emigration. Similarly, during this period, England and the United States showed notable Jewish immigration.

This growth in actual numbers was somewhat offset by conversion away from Judaism. While Halakha (Jewish law) says that a Jew who converts is still a Jew, in the climate of persecution that prevailed in much of Europe in this period, conversion tended to be accompanied by a repudiation of Jewish identity, and converts to Christianity generally ceased to be considered part of the Jewish community. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives some statistics on conversion of Jews to Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity (which they call "Greek Catholicism"). [3] http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/table.jsp?table_id=425&volid=11&title=STATISTI
CS: The upshot is that some 2,000 European Jews converted to Christianity every year during the 19th century, but that in the 1890s the number was running closer to 3,000 per year, — 1,000 in Austria-Hungary, 1,000 in Russia, 500 in Germany, and the remainder in the Anglo-Saxon world. Partly balancing this were about 500 converts to Judaism each year, mainly formerly Christian women who married Jewish men. For Russia, Galicia, and Romania, conversions were dwarfed by emigration: in the last quarter of the 19th century, probably 1,000,000 Jews from this area of Europe emigrated, primarily to the United States, but many also to the United Kingdom.

Toward the end of the 19th century, estimates of the number of Jews in the world ranged from about 6,200,000 (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1881) to 10,932,777 (American Jewish Year-Book , 1904-1905). This can be contrasted with estimates of about half that number a mere 60 years earlier. [4] http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/table.jsp?table_id=426&volid=11&title=STATISTI
CS:

The Jewish Encyclopedia article on which this discussion is largely based estimates only 314,000 Sephardic Jews at the end of the 19th century. More recent scholarship tends to suggest that this estimate is low. The same source gives two wildly different estimate for the Falasha, the Ethiopian Jews, variously estimating them at 50,000 and 200,000; the former would be comparable to their present-day population.

Population in 1900

The following table is based on a table in the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901-1906, which also places these numbers in context of the distribution of world population at that time. [5] http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/table.jsp?table_id=427&volid=11&title=STATISTI
CS:

	Circa 1900
Region	Population	Percent b
World	11,206,849	100.0
Americas, Total	1,549,621	13.8
North c	1,522,500	13.5
Central	1,000	0.00
South	26,121	0.2
Europe, Total	8,966,781	80.0
Russia (1897)	3,872,625	34.6
Poland (1897)	1,316,776	11.7
Austria	1,224,899	10.0
Hungary	851,378	7.5
Germany (1901)	586,948	7.5
Turkey a and Rumelia	282,277	2.5
Romania (1900)	269,015	2.4
United Kingdom	250,000	2.2
Other Europe	312,863	2.7
Asia, Total	300,948	2.6
Other Arabia and Asia Minor f	95,000	0.8
Palestine	78,000	0.6
Caucasus	58,471	0.05
Persia	35,000	0.3
Siberia	34,477	0.3
Other	51,392	0.4
Africa, Total	372,659	3.3
North e	322,659	2.8
Sub-Saharan	50,000	0.4
Oceania g	16,840	0.01

^a Asian regions of Turkey included in Europe. Turkey at this time includes Mesopotamia, where there were 35,000 Jews in Baghdad; Adrianople had 17,000.
^b Minor discrepancies due to rounding.
^c U.S. and Canada.
^e Including est. 50,000 for Ethiopia
^f Excludes Mesopotamia, which is counted with European Turkey and Rumelia.

Current Population

Main article: Jew
Jewish religion
Etymology of "Jew"  · Who is a Jew?
Jewish leadership  · Jewish culture
Jewish ethnic divisions
Ashkenazi (German and E. Europe)
Mizrahi (Arab and Oriental)
Sephardi (Iberian)
Temani (Yemenite)  · Beta Israel
Jewish populations
Israel · United States · Russia/USSR
Germany  · France  · Latin America
Britain  · Famous Jews by country
Jewish languages
Hebrew: (Biblical / Modern)
Aramaic · Yiddish · Ladino
Jewish denominations
Orthodox · Conservative  · Reform
Reconstructionist  · Karaite
Jewish political movements
Zionism: (Labor / General / Revisionist)
Jewish Labor Union (The Bund)
Jewish history
Jewish history timeline  · Schisms
Ancient Israel and Judah
Temples in Jerusalem
Babylonian captivity
Hasmoneans and Greece
Jewish-Roman wars
Era of Pharisees  · The Talmudic Era
Middle Ages  · Muslim Lands
Enlightenment/Haskalah  · Hasidism
The Holocaust  · Modern Israel
Persecution of the Jews
Anti-Semitism: (Historical / Modern)

According to the World Jewish Population Survey of 2002 http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/concepts/demography/demjpop.html , "The size of world Jewry at the beginning of 2002 is assessed at 13,296,100. World Jewry constituted about 2.19 per 1,000 of the world’s total population. One in about 457 people in the world is a Jew. According to the revised figures, between 2001 and 2002 the Jewish population grew by an estimated 44,000 people, or about 0.3 percent."
The major population centers of the Jewish community are (Table from the World Jewish Population Survey)

	2002
Region	Population	Percent b
World	13,296,100	100.0
Americas, Total	6,476,300	48.7
North c	6,064,000	45.6
Central	52,500	0.4
South	359,800	2.7
Europe, Total	1,558,500	11.7
European Union	1,034,400	7.8
Other West	19,600	0.1
Former USSR d	410,000	3.1
Other East and Balkans d	94,500	0.7
Asia, Total	5,069,900	38.1
Israel h	5,025,000	37.8
Former USSR d	25,000	0.2
Other	19,900	0.1
Africa, Total	87,200	0.7
North e	7,400	0.1
South f	79,800	0.6
Oceania g	104,200	0.8

^a January 1.
^b Minor discrepancies due to rounding.
^c U.S. and Canada.
^d Asian regions of Russia and Turkey included in Europe.
^e Including Ethiopia.
^f South Africa, Zimbabwe, and other sub-Saharan countries.
^g Australia, New Zealand.
^h Including about 370,000 Jewish Israeli citizens living in the disputed territories.

References

• This article incorporates text from the public domain 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. Please feel free to update like any other article.
  • This article incorporates text from Jacobs, Joseph, "Statistics" http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1044&letter=S in the Jewish Encyclopedia; that article, in turn, gives an extensive bibliography.
• Jewish Population Survey http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/concepts/demography/demtables.html
• Geography of the Jewish Population http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/comenetz/gjpsyll.html