The last several decades saw a sharp decline in the number of Jews living in Europe, according to a report published Monday by the Pew Research Center, which is partly based on 2010 figures.
The report estimates that there were 3.2 million European Jews in 1960, which fell to 2 million by 1991, and to 1.4 million in 2010.
An estimated 3.4 million Jews lived in the European part of the Soviet Union in 1939. In the Holocaust, that number was reduced to 2 million. However, emigration since 1945 has left only 310,000 Jewish inhabitants. In eastern European countries, the 4.7 million-strong Jewish community dwindled to less than 100,000.
In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews worldwide, and a majority of them – 9.5 million, or 57 percent – lived in Europe. By the end of World War II, in 1945, the Jewish population of Europe had shrunk to 3.8 million, or 35 percent of the world’s 11 million Jews. About 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, the decline appeared to be less severe in some Western European countries, whose Jewish population in 1939 was relatively smaller to begin with. About the same number of Jews live in France today as in 1939, while the number of Jews in the United Kingdom has dropped from 345,000 to about 280,000.
The Pew Research report said that today an estimated 10 percent of the world's Jews live in Europe, down from 57 percent in 1939 and 35 percent in 1945.
Measuring Jewish populations, especially in places like Europe and the United States where Jews are a small minority, is fraught with difficulty. This is due to the complexity both of measuring small populations and of Jewish identity, which can be defined by ethnicity or religion. As a result, estimates vary, but Pew Research’s recent figures are similar to those reported by the Israeli academic Sergio DellaPergola, one of the world’s leading experts on Jewish demography.
Much of the postwar decline has been a result of emigration to Israel, the report notes. 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 addition, Jewish populations have not decreased uniformly in every European country. For example, we estimate that there were about as many Jews in France as of 2010 (310,000) as DellaPergola estimates there were in 1939 (320,000), although recent reports have indicated a surge in Jewish emigration from France.
Britain also continues to have a significant Jewish population (about 280,000 in 2010, down from DellaPergola’s estimate of 345,000 in 1939). But a new report released this week found a record level of anti-Semitism in the UK, with more than 1,000 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in 2014.
