Jewish population by country

Trends

Israel and Palestine

Recent Jewish population dynamics are characterized by a continued steady increase in the Israeli population and flat or declining numbers in countries outside the Holy Land (the diaspora). Aliyah to Palestine began in earnest following the 1839 Tanzimat reforms; between 1840 and 1880, the Jewish population in Palestine rose from 9,000 to 23,000. In the late 19th century, 99.7% of the world's Jews lived outside the region, with Jews representing 2–5% of the Palestinian population. Through the phases of Aliyah, the Jewish population rose to 630,000 by the establishment of Israel in 1948. By 2014 this had risen to 6,135,000, while the population of the diaspora had dropped from 10.5 to 8.1 million over the same period. Current demographics of Israel are characterized by a relatively high fertility rate of 3 children per woman and a stable age distribution. The overall growth rate of Jews in Israel is 1.7% annually. The diaspora countries, by contrast, have low Jewish birth rates, an increasingly elderly age composition, and a negative balance of people leaving Judaism versus converting to Judaism. Immigration trends also favor Israel ahead of diaspora countries. The Jewish state has a positive immigration balance (called aliyah in Hebrew). Israel saw its Jewish numbers significantly buoyed by a million-strong wave of Aliyah from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, and immigration growth has been steady (in the low tens of thousands) since then.

Rest of the world

In general, the modern English-speaking world has seen an increase in its share of the diaspora since the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel, while historic diaspora Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East have significantly declined or disappeared. France continues to be home to the world's third largest Jewish community, at around 438,500, but has shown an increasingly negative trend. As a long-term trend, intermarriage has reduced its "core" Jewish population and increased its "connected" and "enlarged" Jewish populations. More recently migration loss to Israel amongst French Jews reached the tens of thousands between 2014 and 2017 following a wave of antisemitic attacks.

Roughly 85% of the global Jewish population of 16,570,000 is concentrated in two countries: Israel and the United States, which are the only nations with Jewish populations exceeding one million. Jews constitute 0.2% of the world's population. Outside of these two primary countries, the nations with the largest Jewish populations, in descending order, are France (438,500), Canada (350,000), the United Kingdom (300,000), Argentina (170,000), and Russia (120,000). Even though Jewish birth rates are similar to the global average, the overall population has grown more slowly because it is older on average. By 2010, about one in three Jews worldwide was aged 50 or above, giving Jews the largest proportion of older adults among major religious groups.

Jewish communities are highly concentrated geographically: 96% live in the ten countries with the largest Jewish populations, totaling 15.73 million people. About 830,500 Jews live elsewhere in the world. Today, roughly 27,000 Jews reside in Muslim-majority countries, mainly in Turkey (14,200), Iran (9,100), and Azerbaijan (5,000). In the Arab world, the biggest Jewish populations are found in Morocco (2,000), Tunisia (1,000), and the United Arab Emirates (500). Regionally, the Jewish population increased in the Middle East and North Africa (up 18% to nearly 7 million), and grew slightly in Asia-Pacific (2%) and North America (1%). It declined in sub-Saharan Africa (down 37% to 50,000), Latin America–Caribbean (down 12% to 390,000), and Europe (down 8% to 1.3 million). Despite these shifts, Jews remained a small and generally stable share of regional populations.

Debate over American numbers

The number of Jews in the United States has been much debated because of differences in counting methodology resulting in recurring discrepancies of a million or more people in reports. These methodology differences are detailed by Pew Research Center in a 2020 study which estimated there were 5.8 million adult Jews in the United States and 1.8 million children of at least one Jewish parent being raised as Jewish in some way, for a total of 7.5 million Jews, 2.5% of the national population. However, Pew noted that Hebrew University demographer Sergio Della Pergola, reviewing the same data and applying a narrower definition that counts children and adult Jews without religious affiliation only if they have two Jewish parents, determined that there were 4.8 million Jewish adults and 1.2 million Jewish children in the U.S. for a total of 6 million Jews, 2% of the national population. These numbers can be further complicated by applying the matrilineal descent principle from Halakha, with Pew noting that while only 4.8 million of the 5.8 million adults classified as Jews reported having a Jewish mother, a further 1.3 million adults classified as non-Jews of Jewish background reported that they did have a Jewish mother.