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Jews יהודים (Yehudim)
Albert Einstein • Maimonides • Golda Meir • Emma Lazarus
Total population
Estimated 13–14 million[1]
Regions with significant populations
Israel 5,309,000[1]
United States 5,275,000 [1]  France 492,000 [1]  Canada 373,000 [1]  United Kingdom 297,000 [1]  Russia 228,000 [1]  Argentina 184,000 [1]  Germany 118,000 [1]  Brazil 96,000 [1]  Australia 88,831 [2]  Hungary 80,000–100,000 [3]  Ukraine 80,000 [1]  South Africa 72,000 [1]  Belarus 65,000–70,000 [4]  Mexico 40,000 [1]  Belgium 31,200 [5]  Netherlands 30,000 [5]  Italy 28,600 [5]  Ethiopia 26,196 [6]  Iran 25,000 [7]  Chile 20,700 [5]  Uruguay 18,000 [5]  Sweden 18,000 [8]  Turkey 17,800 [5]  Kazakhstan 12,000–30,000 [9]  Spain 12,000 [5]  Austria 9,000 [5]  Azerbaijan 6,800 [5]  Denmark 6,400 [5]
Languages
Historical Jewish languages Hebrew · Yiddish · Ladino · others Liturgical languages Hebrew · Aramaic Predominant spoken languages The vernacular language of each home nation in the Jewish diaspora, including, significantly, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian.
Religion
Judaism
Related ethnic groups
Arabs and other semitic peoples

A Jew (Hebrew: יְהוּדִי‎, Yehudi (sl.); יְהוּדִים, Yehudim (pl.); Ladino: ג׳ודיו, Djudio (sl.); ג׳ודיוס, Djudios (pl.); Yiddish: ייִד, Yid (sl.); ייִדן, Yidn (pl.))^[10] is a member of the Jewish people, an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites or Hebrews of the ancient Middle East. The Jewish people and the religion of Judaism are strongly interrelated, and converts to Judaism have been absorbed into the Jewish community throughout the millennia.

By traditional accounts, Jewish history began during the second millennium BCE with the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Jews enjoyed two periods of political autonomy in their national homeland, the Land of Israel, during ancient history. The first era spanned from 1350 to 586 BCE, and encompassed the periods of the Judges, the United Monarchy, and the Divided Monarchy of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ending with the destruction of the First Temple. The second era was the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom spanning from 140 to 37 BCE. Since the destruction of the First Temple, the diaspora has been the home of most of the world's Jews.^[11] Except in the modern State of Israel, established in 1948, Jews are a minority in every country in which they live and they have frequently experienced persecution throughout history, resulting in a population that fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries.

According to the Jewish Agency, as of 2007 there were 13.2 million Jews worldwide, 5.3 million of whom lived in Israel, 5.3 million in the United States, and the remainder distributed in communities of varying sizes around the world; this represents 0.2% of the current estimated world population.^[12][13] These numbers include all those who consider themselves Jews whether or not affiliated with a Jewish organization, and, with the exception of Israel's Jewish population, do not include those who do not consider themselves Jews or who are not Jewish by halakha (Jewish religious law). The total world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure. In addition to halakhic considerations, there are secular, political, and ancestral identification factors in defining who is a Jew that increase the figure considerably.^[13]

Jews and Judaism

Part of a series of articles on

Jews and Judaism

Who is a Jew? · Etymology · Culture

Religion God in Judaism (Names) Principles of faith · Mitzvot (613) Halakha · Shabbat · Holidays Prayer · Tzedakah Brit · Bar / Bat Mitzvah Marriage · Bereavement Philosophy · Ethics · Kabbalah Customs · Synagogue · Rabbi

Texts Tanakh (Torah · Nevi'im · Ketuvim) Targum Talmud (Mishnah · Gemara) Rabbinic (Midrash · Tosefta) Mishneh Torah · Tur Shulchan Aruch Zohar · Tanya

Ethnicities Ashkenazi · Sephardi · Mizrahi Romaniote · Italki · Yemenite African · Bukharan · Georgian Mountain · Indian · Chinese Khazars · Crypto-Jews

Population Jews by country · Rabbis Population comparisons Israel · United States · Russia Iraq · Spain · Portugal · Italy Poland · Germany · Bosnia Latin America · France England  · Netherlands · Canada Australia · Hungary · India Turkey · Greece · Africa Iran · China · Romania · Lists of Jews

Denominations Orthodox · Conservative Reform · Reconstructionist Liberal · Karaite · Humanistic Renewal · Alternative

Languages Hebrew · Yiddish Judeo-Persian · Ladino Judeo-Aramaic · Judeo-Arabic

History Timeline · Leaders Ancient · Temple Babylonian exile Jerusalem (in Judaism · Timeline) Hasmoneans · Sanhedrin Schisms · Pharisees Jewish-Roman wars Christianity and Judaism Islam and Judaism Diaspora · Middle Ages Sabbateans · Hasidism · Haskalah Emancipation · Holocaust · Aliyah Israel (history) Arab conflict · Land of Israel Baal teshuva · Persecution Antisemitism (history)

Politics Zionism (Labor · Revisionist   Religious · General) The Bund · World Agudath Israel Jewish feminism · Israeli politics

v • d • e

Main article: Jewish history

The origin of the Jews is traditionally dated to around the second millennium BCE to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Merneptah Stele, dated to 1200 BCE, is one of the earliest archaeological records of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, where Judaism, the first monotheistic religion,^[14] developed over a period of thousands of years. According to Biblical accounts, the Jews enjoyed periods of self-determination first under the Biblical judges from Othniel Ben Kenaz through Samson, then circa 1000 BCE King David established Jerusalem as the capital of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah, also known as the United Monarchy, and from there ruled the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Elaborated reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon based on the Biblical description.

In 970 BCE, David's son Solomon became king of Israel.^[15] Within a decade, Solomon began to build the Holy Temple known as the First Temple. Upon Solomon's death (c. 930 BCE), the ten northern tribes split off to form the Kingdom of Israel. In 722 BCE the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel and exiled its Jews, starting a Jewish diaspora. At a time of limited mobility and travel, Jews became some of the first and most visible immigrants.

The First Temple period ended around 586 BCE as the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah and destroyed the Jewish Temple. In 538 BCE, after fifty years of Babylonian captivity, Persian King Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to rebuild Jerusalem and the holy temple. Construction of the Second Temple was completed in 516 BCE during the reign of Darius the Great seventy years after the destruction of the First Temple.^[16][17] When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, the Land of Israel fell under Hellenistic Greek control, eventually falling to the Ptolemaic dynasty who lost it to the Seleucids. The Seleucid attempt to recast Jerusalem as a Hellenized polis came to a head in 168 BCE with the successful Maccabean revolt of Mattathias the High Priest and his five sons against Antiochus Epiphanes, and their establishment of the Hasmonean Kingdom in 152 BCE with Jerusalem again as its capital.^[18] The Hasmonean Kingdom lasted over one hundred years, but then as Rome became stronger it installed Herod as a Jewish client king. The Herodian Kingdom also lasted over a hundred years. Defeats suffered by the Jews in the First revolt in 70 CE, the first of the Jewish-Roman Wars and the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE notably contributed to the numbers and geography of the diaspora population. Significant numbers of Jews in the Land of Israel left, were expelled or sold into slavery throughout the Roman Empire. Since then, Jews have lived in most countries of the world, primarily in Europe, the wider Middle East and later, North America. In the various countries in which they have lived, the Jews have survived periods of discrimination, oppression, poverty, and even genocide (see: Antisemitism, The Holocaust). There have also been periods of cultural, economic, and individual prosperity in various locations; these include Islamic Spain and Portugal, Germany and Poland during Haskalah, and in the traditionally liberal democracies of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, amongst others.

The Hebrew noun "Yehudi" (plural Yehudim) originally referred to the tribe of Judah.^[19] Later, when the Northern Kingdom of Israel split from the Southern Kingdom of Israel, the Southern Kingdom of Israel began to refer to itself by the name of its predominant tribe, or as the Kingdom of Judah. The term originally referred to the people of the southern kingdom, although the term B'nei Yisrael (Israelites) was still used for both groups. After the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom leaving the southern kingdom as the only Israelite state, the word Yehudim gradually came to refer to people of the Jewish faith as a whole, rather than those specifically from the tribe or Kingdom of Judah. The English word Jew is ultimately derived from Yehudi (see Etymology). Its first use in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) to refer to the Jewish people as a whole is in the Book of Esther.

Etymology

Main article: Etymology of the word Jew

There are many different views as to the origin of the English language word Jew. The most common view is that the Middle English word Jew is from the Old French giu, earlier juieu, from the Latin iudeus from the Greek Ioudaios (Ἰουδαῖος). The Latin simply means Judaean, from the land of Judaea. Judaea is in turn derived from Judah which was the name of the Kingdom of Judah, and one of the Tribes of Israel. The Hebrew word for Jew, יהודי , is pronounced [jə·hu·ˈdiː].

The etymological equivalent is in use in other languages, e.g., "Jude" in German, "juif" in French, "jøde," in Danish, in Spanish (judío), etc., but derivations of the word "Hebrew" are also in use to describe a Jewish person, e.g., in Italian (Ebreo), and Russian: Еврей, (Yevrey). The German word "Jude" is pronounced [ˈjuː·də] and is the origin of the word Yiddish. (See Jewish ethnonyms for a full overview.)

Who is a Jew?

Main article: Who is a Jew?

Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, and a culture, making the definition of who is a Jew vary slightly depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used.^[20] Generally, in modern secular usage, Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family regardless of whether or not they follow the religion, those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage (sometimes including those who do not have strictly matrilineal descent), and people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism and therefore are followers of the religion.^[21] At times conversion has accounted for a substantial part of Jewish population growth. In the first century of the Christian era, for example, the population more than doubled, from 4 to 8–10 million within the confines of the Roman Empire, in good part as a result of a wave of conversion.^[22]

Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, and halakhic conversions. Historical definitions of who is a Jew date back to the codification of the oral tradition into the Babylonian Talmud. Interpretations of sections of the Tanakh, such as Deuteronomy 7:1-5, by learned Jewish sages, are used as a warning against intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews because "[the non-Jewish male spouse] will cause your child to turn away from Me and they will worship the gods of others." Leviticus 24:10 says that the son in a marriage between a Hebrew woman and an Egyptian man is "of the community of Israel." This contrasts with Ezra 10:2-3, where Israelites returning from Babylon vow to put aside their gentile wives and their children. Since the Haskalah, these halakhic interpretations of Jewish identity have been challenged.

Ethnic divisions

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Main article: Jewish ethnic divisions

Ashkenazi Jews of late 19th century Eastern Europe portrayed in Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878), by Maurycy Gottlieb.

Within the world's Jewish population, which is considered a single self-identifying ethnicity^{[citation needed]}, there are distinct ethnic divisions, most of which are primarily the result of geographic branching from an originating Israelite population, and subsequent independent evolutions. An array of Jewish communities were established by Jewish settlers in various places around the Old World, often at great distances from one another resulting in effective and often long-term isolation from each other. During the millennia of the Jewish diaspora the communities would develop under the influence of their local environments; political, cultural, natural, and populational. Today, manifestation of these differences among the Jews can be observed in Jewish cultural expressions of each community, including Jewish linguistic diversity, culinary preferences, liturgical practices, religious interpretations, as well as degrees and sources of genetic admixture.

Jews are often identified as belonging to one of two major groups: the Ashkenazim, or "Germans" (Ashkenaz meaning "Germany" in Medieval Hebrew, denoting their Central European base), and the Sephardim, or "Spaniards" (Sefarad meaning "Spain" or "Iberia" in Hebrew, denoting their Spanish and Portuguese base). The Mizrahim, or "Easterners" (Mizrach being "East" in Hebrew), that is, the diverse collection of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, constitute a third major group, although they are sometimes termed Sephardi for liturgical reasons.

Smaller groups include, but are not restricted to, Indian Jews such as the Bene Israel, Bnei Menashe, Cochin Jews, and Bene Ephraim; the Romaniotes of Greece; the Italian Jews ("Italkim" or "Bené Roma"); the Teimanim from Yemen and Oman; various African Jews, including most numerously the Beta Israel of Ethiopia; and Chinese Jews, most notably the Kaifeng Jews, as well as various other distinct but now almost extinct communities.

The divisions between all these groups are approximate and their boundaries are not always clear. The Mizrahim for example, are a heterogeneous collection of North African, Central Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities that are often as unrelated to each other as they are to any of the earlier mentioned Jewish groups. In modern usage, however, the Mizrahim are sometimes termed Sephardi due to similar styles of liturgy, despite independent development from Sephardim proper. Thus, among Mizrahim there are Iraqi Jews, Egyptian Jews, Berber Jews, Lebanese Jews, Kurdish Jews, Libyan Jews, Syrian Jews, Bukharian Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews, and various others. The Teimanim from Yemen and Oman are sometimes included, although their style of liturgy is unique and they differ in respect to the admixture found among them to that found in Mizrahim. In addition, there is a differentiation made between Sephardi migrants who established themselves in the Middle East and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s and the pre-existing Jewish communities in those regions.

Despite this diversity, Ashkenazi Jews represent the bulk of modern Jewry, with at least 70% of Jews worldwide (and up to 90% prior to World War II and the Holocaust).^[23] As a result of their emigration from Europe during the wartime periods, Ashkenazim also represent the overwhelming majority of Jews in the New World continents, in countries such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and Brazil. In France, emigration of Mizrahim from North Africa has led them to outnumber the Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Only in Israel is the Jewish population representative of all groups, a melting pot independent of each group's proportion within the overall world Jewish population.

Genetic studies of DNA

See also: Y-chromosomal Aaron, Genealogical DNA test, and Matrilineality

Despite the evident diversity displayed by the world's distinct Jewish populations, both culturally and physically, genetic studies have demonstrated most of these to be genetically related to one another, having ultimately originated from a common ancient Israelite population that underwent geographic branching and subsequent independent evolutions.^[24]

A study published by the National Academy of Sciences found that "the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population", and suggested that "most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora".^[24] Researchers expressed surprise at the remarkable genetic uniformity they found among modern Jews, no matter where the diaspora has become dispersed around the world.^[24]

Moreover, DNA tests have demonstrated substantially less inter-marriage in most of the various Jewish ethnic divisions over the last 3,000 years than in other populations.^[25] The findings lend support to traditional Jewish accounts accrediting their founding to exiled Israelite populations, and counters theories that many or most of the world's Jewish populations were founded by entirely gentile populations that adopted the Jewish faith, as in the notable case of the historic Khazars.^[25][26] Although groups such as the Khazars could have been absorbed into modern Jewish populations — in the Khazars' case, absorbed into the Ashkenazim — it is unlikely that they formed a large percentage of the ancestors of modern Ashkenazi Jews, and much less that they were the genesis of the Ashkenazim.^[27]

Even the archetype of Israelite-origin is also beginning to be reviewed for some Jewish populations amid newer studies. Previously, the Israelite origin identified in the world's Jewish populations was attributed only to the males who had migrated from the Middle East and then forged the current known communities with "the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism".^[28] Research in Ashkenazi Jews has suggested that, in addition to the male founders, significant female founder ancestry might also derive from the Middle East, with about 40% of the current Ashkenazi population descended matrilineally from just four women, or "founder lineages", that were "likely from a Hebrew/Levantine mtDNA pool" originating in the Near East in the first and second centuries CE.^[28]

Points in which Jewish groups differ is largely in the source and proportion of genetic contribution from host populations.^[29][30] For example, Teimanim differ from other Mizrahim, as well as from Ashkenazim, in the proportion of sub-Saharan African gene types which have entered their gene pools.^[29] Among Yemenites, the average stands at 35% lineages within the past 3,000 years.^[29] Yemenite Jews, as a traditionally Arabic-speaking community of local Yemenite and Israelite ancestries,^[30] are included within the findings, though they average a quarter of the frequency of the non-Jewish Yemenite sample.^[29] The proportion of male indigenous European genetic admixture in Ashkenazi Jews amounts to around 0.5% per generation over an estimated 80 generations, and a total admixture estimate "very similar to Motulsky's average estimate of 12.5%."^[24]

DNA analysis further determined that modern Jews of the priesthood tribe — "Kohanim" — share a common ancestor dating back about 3,000 years.^[31] This result is consistent for all Jewish populations around the world.^[31] The researchers estimated that the most recent common ancestor of modern Kohanim lived between 1000 BCE (roughly the time of the Biblical Exodus) and 586 BCE, when the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple.^[32] They found similar results analyzing DNA from Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.^[32] The scientists estimated the date of the original priest based on genetic mutations, which indicated that the priest lived roughly 106 generations ago, between 2,650 and 3,180 years ago depending whether one counts a generation as 25 or 30 years.^[32]

Beyond intra-Jewish genetic interrelationships, other findings show that by the yardstick of the Y chromosome, the world's Jewish communities are closely related to Arab Israelis and Palestinians,^[33][34] who together as a single population also represent modern "descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times", albeit religiously Christianized and later largely Islamized, and both ultimately culturally Arabized.^[33] The authors of one of the studies wrote that "the extremely close affinity of Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations observed ... supports the hypothesis of a common Middle Eastern origin".^[24]

Population

Main article: Jewish population

Significant geographic populations

There are an estimated 13 million Jews worldwide.^[12] The table below lists countries with significant populations. Please note that these populations represent low-end estimates of the worldwide Jewish population, accounting for around 0.2% of the world's population.

State of Israel

Main article: Israel

David Ben Gurion (First Prime Minister of Israel) publicly pronouncing the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948

Israel, the Jewish nation-state, is the only country in which Jews make up a majority of the citizens.^[45][46] Israel was established as an independent democratic state on May 14, 1948.^[47] Of the 120 members in its parliament, the Knesset,^[48] currently, 12 members of the Knesset are Arab citizens of Israel, most representing Arab political parties and one of Israel's Supreme Court judges is a Palestinian Arab.^[49] Between 1948 and 1958, the Jewish population rose from 800,000 to two million.^[50] Currently, Jews account for 76.4% of the Israeli population, or 5,600,000 of the citizens.^[47] The early years of the state of Israel, were marked by the mass immigration of Holocaust survivors and Jews fleeing Arab lands.^[51] Israel also has a large population of Ethiopian Jews, many of whom were airlifted to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s.^[52] Between 1974 and 1979 nearly 227,258 immigrants arrived in Israel, about half being from the Soviet Union.^[53] This period also saw an increase in immigration to Israel from Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States^[54] A trickle of immigrants from other communities has also arrived, including Indian Jews and others, as well as some descendants of Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors who had settled in countries such as the United States, Argentina, Australia and South Africa. Some Jews have emigrated from Israel elsewhere, due to economic problems or disillusionment with political conditions and the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. Jewish Israeli emigrants are known as yordim.

Diaspora (outside Israel)

Main article: Jewish diaspora

The waves of immigration to the United States and elsewhere at the turn of the nineteenth century, the founding of Zionism and later events, including pogroms in Russia, the massacre of European Jewry during the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel, with the subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands, all resulted in substantial shifts in the population centers of world Jewry by the end of the twentieth century.

In this Rosh Hashana greeting card from the early 1900s, Russian Jews, packs in hand, gaze at the American relatives beckoning them to the United States. Over two million Jews would flee the pogroms of the Russian Empire to the safety of the US from 1881–1924.

Currently, the largest Jewish community in the world is located in the United States, with almost 5.7 million Jews. Elsewhere in the Americas, there are also large Jewish populations in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, and smaller populations in Mexico (45,000),^[55] Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and several other countries (see History of the Jews in Latin America).

Western Europe's largest Jewish community can be found in France, home to 600,000 Jews, the majority of whom are immigrants or refugees from North African Arab countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (or their descendants). There are over 265,000 Jews in the United Kingdom. In Eastern Europe, there are anywhere from 500,000 to over two million Jews living in the former Soviet Union, but exact figures are difficult to establish. The fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, outside Israel, is the one in Germany, especially in Berlin, its capital.^[56] Tens of thousands of Jews from the former Eastern Bloc have settled in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East were home to around 900,000 Jews in 1945. Fueled by anti-Zionism^[57] after the founding of Israel, systematic persecution caused almost all of these Jews to flee to Israel, North America, and Europe in the 1950s (see Jewish exodus from Arab lands). Today, around 8,000 Jews remain in all Arab nations combined.

Iran is home to around 10,800 Jews, down from a population of 100,000 Jews before the 1979 revolution. After the revolution some of the Iranian Jews emigrated to Israel or Europe but most of them emigrated (with their non-Jewish Iranian compatriots) to the United States (especially Los Angeles).^[58][5]

Outside Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia, there are significant Jewish populations in Australia and South Africa.

Population changes: Assimilation

Since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, a proportion of Jews have assimilated into the wider non-Jewish society around them, by either choice or force, ceasing to practice Judaism and losing their Jewish identity. Some Jewish communities, for example the Kaifeng Jews of China, have disappeared entirely, but assimilation has remained relatively low over much of the past millennium, as Jews were often not allowed to integrate with the wider communities in which they lived. The advent of the Jewish Enlightenment (see Haskalah) of the 1700s and the subsequent emancipation of the Jewish populations of Europe and America in the 1800s, changed the situation, allowing Jews to increasingly participate in, and become part of, secular society. The result has been a growing trend of assimilation, as Jews marry non-Jewish spouses and stop participating in the Jewish community. Rates of interreligious marriage vary widely: In the United States, they are just under 50%,^[59] in the United Kingdom, around 50%, in Australia and Mexico, as low as 10%,^[60][61] and in France, they may be as high as 75%. In the United States, only about a third of children from intermarriages affiliate themselves with Jewish religious practice. The result is that most countries in the Diaspora have steady or slightly declining religiously Jewish populations as Jews continue to assimilate into the countries in which they live.

Population changes: Wars against the Jews

Jews (identifiable by the distinctive hats that they were required to wear) being killed by Christian knights. French Bible illustration from 1255.

Throughout history, many rulers, empires and nations have oppressed their Jewish populations or sought to eliminate them entirely. Methods employed ranged from expulsion to outright genocide; within nations, often the threat of these extreme methods was sufficient to silence dissent. The history of antisemitism includes the First Crusade which resulted in the massacre of Jews; the Spanish Inquisition (led by Torquemada) and the Portuguese Inquisition, with their persecution and Auto de fé against the New Christians and Marrano Jews; the Bohdan Chmielnicki Cossack massacres in Ukraine; the Pogroms backed by the Russian Tsars; as well as expulsions from Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, and other countries in which the Jews had settled. The persecution reached a peak in Adolf Hitler's Final Solution, which led to the Holocaust and the slaughter of approximately 6 million Jews from 1942 to 1945.

According to James Carroll, "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."^[62] Of course, there are many other complex demographic factors involved; the rate of population growth, epidemics, migration, assimilation, and conversion could all have played major roles in the current size of the global Jewish population.

Population changes: Growth

Israel is the only country with a consistently growing Jewish population due to natural population increase, though the Jewish populations of other countries in Europe and North America have recently increased due to immigration. In the Diaspora, in almost every country the Jewish population in general is either declining or steady, but Orthodox and Haredi Jewish communities, whose members often shun birth control for religious reasons, have experienced rapid population growth.^[63]

Orthodox and Conservative Judaism discourage proselytization to non-Jews, but many Jewish groups have tried to reach out to the assimilated Jewish communities of the Diaspora in order for them to reconnect to their Jewish roots. Additionally, while in principle Reform Judaism favors seeking new members for the faith, this position has not translated into active proselytism, instead taking the form of an effort to reach out to non-Jewish spouses of intermarried couples. There is also a trend of Orthodox movements pursuing secular Jews in order to give them a stronger Jewish identity so there is less chance of intermarriage. As a result of the efforts by these and other Jewish groups over the past twenty-five years, there has been a trend of secular Jews becoming more religiously observant, known as the Baal Teshuva movement, though the demographic implications of the trend are unknown. Additionally, there is also a growing movement of Jews by Choice by gentiles who make the decision to head in the direction of becoming Jews.

Jewish languages

Main article: Jewish languages

Hebrew is the liturgical language of Judaism (termed lashon ha-kodesh, "the holy tongue"), the language in which the Hebrew scriptures (Tanakh) were composed, and the daily speech of the Jewish people for centuries. By the fifth century BCE, Aramaic, a closely related tongue, joined Hebrew as the spoken language in Judea.^[64] By the third century BCE, Jews of the diaspora were speaking Greek. Modern Hebrew is now one of the two official languages of the State of Israel along with Arabic.

Hebrew was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer ben Yehuda, who arrived in Palestine in 1881. It hadn't been used as a mother tongue since Tannaic times.^[64] For over sixteen centuries Hebrew was used almost exclusively as a liturgical language, and as the language in which most books had been written on Judaism, with a few speaking only Hebrew on the Sabbath.^[65] For centuries, Jews worldwide have spoken the local or dominant languages of the regions they migrated to, often developing distinctive dialectal forms or branching off as independent languages. Yiddish is the Judæo-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to Central Europe, and Ladino is the Judæo-Spanish language developed by Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Iberian peninsula. Due to many factors, including the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab lands, and widespread emigration from other Jewish communities around the world, ancient and distinct Jewish languages of several communities, including Gruzinic, Judæo-Arabic, Judæo-Berber, Krymchak, Judæo-Malayalam and many others, have largely fallen out of use.

The three most commonly spoken languages among Jews today are English, modern Hebrew, and Russian. Some Romance languages, such as French and Spanish, are also widely used.^[66]

Jewish culture

Main articles: Secular Jewish culture and Judaism

Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, and has been called not only a religion, but also a "way of life,"^[67] which has made drawing a clear distinction between Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish identity rather difficult. Throughout history, in eras and places as diverse as the ancient Hellenic world, in Europe before and after The Age of Enlightenment (see Haskalah), in Islamic Spain and Portugal, in North Africa and the Middle East, India and China, or the contemporary United States and Israel, cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews or specific communities of Jews with their surroundings, others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to from the religion itself. This phenomenon has led to considerably different Jewish cultures unique to their own communities, each as authentically Jewish as the next.

History of the Jews

Main article: Jewish history

See also: Timeline of Jewish history and Schisms among the Jews

Jews and migrations

Etching of the expulsion of the Jews from Frankfurt on August 23, 1614. The text says: "1380 persons old and young were counted at the exit of the gate"