I have known for some time that a small demographic change may have happened in the British Jewish community in 2006. After all, that was the year I moved back to the UK from Israel with my young son and my wife, who, at the time, was pregnant with twins.
But it turns out something even more important was going on that year— the first sign of a seismic demographic shift that can now be confirmed as a highly significant turning point in the recent history of the British Jewish community.
Board of Deputies research from that time shows that 3,387 Jewish children were born in the UK in 2006 — the highest number since 1991.
That, in and of itself, is nothing particularly remarkable (although mazeltov, of course, to those involved) — the number of births in any given year is a result of fluctuations in the size of the female population of child-bearing age and fertility rates.
The significance of that specific number of births can only really be seen when we compare it to the number of Jewish deaths recorded in the same year: 3,032.
The annual number of Jewish deaths in the UK had been declining quite steadily over time, not least because the size of the Jewish population as a whole had been declining, so this was the lowest number recorded for decades. But 2006 was the first year for several decades in which more Jewish births were recorded than Jewish deaths.
In fact, for a long time, Jewish deaths vastly outnumbered Jewish births. In 1980, there were 1,224 more deaths than births. In 1990, that number had risen to 1,479. By 2,000 it had fallen somewhat, but was still at 874.
Why does any of this matter? There is a simple demographic rule. If more people die than are born, the size of a population will fall. If more are born than die, a population will grow.
Of course, other factors come into play - populations can grow or fall as a result of migration or, in the case of religious groups, through assimilation or conversion. But none of these are particularly significant phenomena for the demography of British Jews today. The key force driving Jewish population development in this country is “natural change” - the balance between births and deaths.
And, in 2006, rather than seeing natural decrease, as in every previous year for decades, we saw natural increase — indeed, an excess of 355 births over deaths.
Of course, it might have been a blip. But now, with the capacity to look at the following decade, we can see that it was not. In every year since 2006, more Jews have been born in the UK than have died. In fact, the gap between the two has been growing over time, from 355 more births than deaths in 2006 to over 1,000 in every year since 2013.
What that means is that the British Jewish population has shifted from a state of decline to a state of growth. And that is pretty remarkable. First, only a small handful of countries around the world have growing Jewish populations at all, notably Israel, Canada and Australia. But most are in decline.
Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, Ukraine and many others fall into this category. And, in general, trajectories tend not to change from decline to growth very often, unless there is a significant increase in immigration. But immigration is not an important factor in the UK. Something else is going on.
Actually, two things are going on. First, mortality rates are declining. Thanks to improvements in living standards and medical science, we are living longer. Much longer. In 1900, life expectancy was 52 for women in Britain and 48 for men. Today, it is 83 for women and 79 for men. It is that state of transition over time that has caused annual mortality rates to drop, both in the general and Jewish populations of the UK.
At the same time, Strictly Orthodox Jewish women are having, on average, six to seven children. That has driven the average among British Jewish women to 2.6 children, comfortably above replacement-level fertility of 2.1.
Thus, collectively, we are not only having more than enough babies to replace ourselves, we are also living longer lives. So it’s not all doom and gloom in British Jewry. On the contrary, we’re blooming.
Jonathan Boyd is Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research
