Judaism
Is European Jewry past saving?
Over the past 50 years, the numbers of Jews in Europe have fallen by over a half, according to a new report
November 1, 2020 13:19
By, simon rocker
3 min read
Over the past 50 years, the numbers of Jews in Europe have fallen by over a half, according to a new report
November 1, 2020 13:19BySimon Rocker, simon rocker
Nearly a quarter of a century ago the historian Bernard Wasserstein wrote a book on European Jewry whose bleak thesis was summed up in its title, Vanishing Diaspora. European Jewry, he wrote, was disappearing as “a population group, as a cultural entity and as a significant force in European society and in the Jewish world”.
His pessimism could only have been reinforced by a new report on the Jews of Europe published by London’s Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Its battery of statistics charts the story of numerical decline.
In 2020, European Jewry comprised just nine per cent of the world Jewish population, compared with 88 per cent in 1880 and, despite the large exodus to the USA, still 58 per cent on the eve of World War Two. It accounted for a quarter of world Jewry in 1970.
While there were 9.5 million Jews in Europe out of a world Jewish population of 16.5 million in 1939, the figure had fallen to 3.2 million in 1970 and to 1.3 million (out of 14.8 million) in 2020. The number of European Jews has dropped by 59 per cent in the last 50 years.
For the better part of a millennium, the continent had been the primary creative centre of Jewish life — the birthplace of Rashi and Maimonides, the source of Chasidism, musar, Zionism and Reform. Now its percentage of world Jewry was smaller than when the famed traveller Benjamin of Tudela ventured across the Jewish world 850 years ago.
Meanwhile, within Europe, there has been a decisive shift in the population balance from East to West after the Holocaust and the migrations that followed the collapse of Communism. In 1939, 14 per cent of European Jews lived in the West. But now more than three-quarters do.
According to the authors, the combined total of Jews in Russia and Ukraine is now just 200,000. Over the past half-century, East European Jewry dropped by 85 per cent (compared with a nine per cent drop in Western Europe). Two in every three Jews live in France (with 448,000), Britain (292,000) or Germany (118,000).
There has been some post-War immigration; 300,000 Jews came from North Africa and the Middle East from 1948 to 1968. Now 70,000 Israelis (who will include some Christians and Muslims) reside in Europe. In Norway and Finland, more than half the Jewish community is Israeli-born. But the incomers have not been nearly enough to make up for the loss from assimilation or emigration.
Compiled by the JPR’s Daniel Staetsky and the leading Jewish demographer Sergio DellaPergola, Emeritus Professor of the Hebrew University, the 88-page report, Jews in Europe at the turn of the Millennium, is the most comprehensive analysis of its kind. They calculate that if you factor in people with one Jewish parent who regard themselves as partly, not exclusively Jewish, and others of more distant Jewish ancestry, then that would lift the overall Jewish population by a million or so.
While Jews traditionally have not gone in for proselytisation, the authors note that in two communities, Spain and Poland, more than a fifth have joined through conversion, according to a 2018 survey done for the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency.
Poland presents an interesting phenomenon where a significant number of young people who were not raised as Jews have rediscovered their Jewish roots. But this may be a special case not widely applicable to the continent as a whole.
According to the same survey, the country with the highest proportion of born Jews (94 per cent) and lowest of converts (4 per cent) was the UK. British Jews were most likely to identify being Jewish with religion, 61 per cent, as opposed to culture or ethnicity.
The authors draw attention to one “emerging tendency” in parts of Europe, a lower rate of intermarriage, citing Austria, Hungary and Germany in particular. This may be either “the consequence of the drift out of the community of its more assimilated fringes” or “the symptom of a process of Jewish de-secularisation and disassimilation”. Whatever the cause, this is a “significant finding which calls for the relevant religious and cultural organisations to seize the opportunities”.
They also observe that in the UK, Austria, Belgium and possibly Switzerland, the Jewish population “may be growing, or at least, not declining”. All have “sizeable strictly Orthodox communities”.
The report will be an important contribution to debates over the future of Jewish Europe. Some may consider most communities on the continent as past a tipping point where the only task is to manage decline and concentrate on providing care to the elderly.
Others may not be quite so ready to write Europe off. As we know better than ever from the past few months, Jewish communities are not bound by physical space and education can be provided digitally. Small communities can tap into the resources of larger ones. Many educated young European Jews are Anglophone, enabling them to access programmes from the English-speaking world.
When six years ago the then head of the Jewish Agency Natan Sharansky talked of the end of Jewish history in Europe, he was rebuked in an article in this newspaper by Barbara Spectre, founder of Paideia, European Institute for Jewish Studies, in Stockholm, which runs a unique one-year course in Jewish studies.
Documenting some of the initiatives launched by young Jews in Europe who foresaw a future for themselves, she found “a fledgling but vibrant new Jewish community”. Perhaps they will surprise us yet.
