Jewish population by country
, the world's "core" Jewish population, those identifying as Jews above all else, was 14.6 million. The "connected" Jewish population, including those who say they are partly Jewish or that have Jewish background from at least a single Jewish parent, in addition to the core Jewish population, was 17.8 million. The "enlarged" Jewish population, including those who say they have Jewish background but not a Jewish parent, and all non-Jewish household members who live in households with Jews, in addition to the Jewish connected population, was 20.7 million. The Law of Return Jewish population, which counts all those eligible to immigration to Israel under its Law of Return, was 23.5 million.
Two countries, the United States, and Israel, including the West Bank, account for 81% of those recognised as Jews and eligible for citizenship by Israel under its Law of Return. France, Canada, Russia, United Kingdom, Argentina, Germany, Ukraine, Brazil, Australia and Hungary hold an additional 16%, and the remaining 3% are spread around other countries and territories with less than 0.5% each. With nearly 6.5 million Jews, Israel is the only Jewish-majority and.
In 1939, the core Jewish population reached its historical peak of 17 million. Due to the Holocaust, the number was reduced to 11 million by 1945. The population grew to around 13 million by the 1970s and then recorded near-zero growth until around 2005, due to low fertility rates and to assimilation. From 2005 to 2018, the world's Jewish population grew on average 0.63% annually. This increase primarily reflected the rapid growth of Haredi and some Orthodox sectors, who are becoming a growing proportion of Jews.
Recent trends
Recent Jewish population dynamics are characterized by continued steady increase in the Israeli Jewish population and flat or declining numbers in other countries. The Jewish population of Israel increased from the country's inception in 1948 to 6,135,000 in 2014 while the population of the diaspora has dropped from 10.5 to 8.1 million over the same period. Current Israeli Jewish demographics 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 those joining.Immigration trends also favor Israel ahead of diaspora countries. The Jewish state has a positive immigration balance. Israel saw its Jewish numbers significantly buoyed by a million-strong wave of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and immigration growth has been steady in the low tens of thousands since then. In the rest of the world, only the United States, Canada, Australia, and Germany have had a positive recent Jewish migration balance outside of Israel. 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 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, around 500,000, but has shown an increasingly negative trend. Emigration loss to Israel amongst French Jews reached the tens of thousands between 2014 and 2017 following a wave of antisemitic attacks.
Debate over United States numbers
The number of Jews in the United States has been the subject of much debate because of questions over counting methodology. In 2012, Sheskin and Dashefsky put forward a figure of 6.72 million based on a mixture of local surveys, informed local estimates, and US census data. They qualified their estimate with a concern over double counting and suggested the real figure may lie between 6 and 6.4 million. Drawing on their work, the Steinhardt Social Research Institute released their own estimate of 6.8 million Jews in the United States in 2013. These figures are in contrast to Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola's number of 5,425,000, also in 2012. He has called high estimates “implausible” and “unreliable” although he revised the United States Jewish number upward to 5.7 million in subsequent years. This controversy followed a similar debate in 2001 when the National Jewish Population Survey released a United States Jewish estimate as low as 5.2 million only to have serious methodological errors suggested in their survey. In sum, a confidence interval of a million or more people is likely to persist in reporting on the number of Jewish Americans.By country
Below is a list of Jewish populations in the world by country. All data below, but the last column, is from the Berman Jewish DataBank at Stanford University in the World Jewish Population report coordinated by Sergio DellaPergola at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Jewish DataBank figures are primarily based on national censuses combined with trend analysis. "Core" Jewish population refers to those who consider themselves Jews to the exclusion of all else. The "connected" Jewish population, in addition to the core Jewish population, includes those who say they are partly Jewish or that have Jewish background from at least one Jewish parent. The "enlarged" Jewish population includes the Jewish connected population and those who say they have Jewish background but not a Jewish parent, and all non-Jews living in households with Jews. The Law of Return Jewish population includes all those eligible to immigration to Israel under its Law of Return.Table
Remnant and vanished populations
The above table represents Jews that number at least a few dozen per country. Reports exist of Jewish communities remaining in other territories in the low single digits that are on the verge of disappearing, particularly in the Muslim world, as their reaction to the birth of Israel in 1948 was the persecution of Jews in nearly all Muslim lands; these are often of historical interest as they represent the remnant of much larger Jewish populations. For example, Egypt had a Jewish community of 80,000 in the early 20th century that numbered fewer than 40 as of 2014, mainly because of the forced expulsion movements to Israel and other countries at that time. Afghanistan may have only one Jew left, Zablon Simintov, despite a 2,000 year history of Jewish presence. In Syria, another ancient Jewish community saw mass exodus at the end of the 20th century and numbered fewer than 20 in the midst of the Syrian Civil War. The size of the Jewish community in Indonesia has been variously given as 65, 100, or 18 at most over the last 50 years.Major Jewish population centers worldwide
Jewish population by city
Censuses in many countries do not record religious or ethnic background, leading to a lack of certainty on the exact numbers of Jewish population.City | Country | Number |
New York City | 1,100,000 | |
Jerusalem | 546,100 | |
Los Angeles | 519,200 | |
Tel Aviv | 401,500 | |
San Francisco | 391,550 | |
Chicago | 291,800 | |
Paris | 277,000 | |
Boston | 248,000 | |
Rishon LeZiyyon | 229,300 | |
Petah Tiqwa | 220,900 | |
Haifa | 217,600 | |
Washington, D.C. | 215,600 | |
Philadelphia | 214,600 | |
Ashdod | 200,400 | |
Netanya | 196,300 | |
Toronto | 188,710 | |
Be'er Sheva | 181,000 | |
London | 172,000 | |
Buenos Aires | 159,000 | |
Ramat Gan | 146,900 | |
Atlanta | 119,800 | |
Miami | 119,000 | |
Moscow | 100,000 | |
San Diego | 100,000 | |
Montreal | 90,780 | |
Cleveland | 86,600 | |
Denver | 83,900 | |
Phoenix | 82,900 | |
Las Vegas | 80,000 | |
Budapest | 80,000 | |
Detroit | 78,000 | |
São Paulo | 75,000 | |
Marseille | 70,000 | |
Seattle | 63,400 | |
Dallas | 57,800 | |
St. Louis, Missouri | 54,500 | |
Tampa | 51,100 | |
Johannesburg | 50,000 | |
Houston | 48,400 | |
Portland | 47,500 | |
Pittsburgh | 42,200 | |
Melbourne | 41,643 | |
Minneapolis | 40,240 | |
Saint Petersburg | 40,000 | |
Rio de Janeiro | 40,000 | |
Mexico City | 39,777 | |
Sydney | 35,196 | |
Hartford | 34,500 | |
New Haven | 29,700 | |
Cincinnati | 27,000 | |
Vancouver | 26,255 | |
Milwaukee | 25,800 | |
Manchester | 25,000 | |
Berlin | 25,000 | |
Tucson | 22,900 | |
Rochester | 22,500 | |
Columbus | 25,500 | |
Montevideo | 20,000 | |
Amsterdam | 20,000 | |
Kansas City | 19,000 | |
Orlando | 19,000 | |
Kiev | 17,900 | |
Istanbul | 17,000 | |
Austin | 16,300 | |
Strasbourg | 16,000 | |
Cape Town | 16,000 | |
Porto Alegre | 15,000 | |
Jacksonville | 15,000 | |
Antwerp | 15,000 | |
Panama City | 15,000 | |
Providence | 14,200 | |
Ottawa | 14,010 | |
Winnipeg | 13,690 | |
Rome | 13,000 | |
Buffalo | 13,000 | |
San Antonio | 12,740 | |
Richmond | 12,500 | |
Albany | 12,500 | |
Odessa | 12,400 | |
Charlotte | 12,000 | |
New Orleans | 12,000 | |
Munich | 11,000 | |
Frankfurt | 10,500 | |
Kharkiv | 10,300 | |
Indianapolis | 10,000 | |
Córdoba | 9,000 | |
Stockholm | 9,000 | |
Nashville | 9,000-9,200 | |
Louisville | 8,700 | |
Calgary | 8,335 | |
Milan | 8,000 | |
Rosario | 8,000 | |
Leeds | 8,000 | |
Vienna | 7,000 | |
Chapel Hill | 6,000 | |
Raleigh | 6,000 | |
Zurich | 6,000 | |
Edmonton | 5,550 | |
Birmingham | 5,300 | |
Perth | 5,187 | |
Hong Kong | 5,000 | |
El Paso | 5,000 | |
Madison | 5,000 | |
Santa Fe | 5,000 | |
Bogotá | 5,500 | |
Dayton | 4,000 | |
Toledo | 3,900 | |
Glasgow | 3,500 | |
Youngstown | 3,200 | |
Prague | 3,000 | |
Greensboro | 3,000 | |
Durban | 2,700 | |
Chișinău | 2,649 | |
Athens | 2,500 | |
Bucharest | 2,481 | |
Brisbane | 2,195 | |
Curitiba | 1,774 | |
Belo Horizonte | 1,714 | |
İzmir | 1,500 | |
Pretoria | 1,500 | |
Dublin | 1,439 | |
Recife | 1,300 | |
Helsinki | 1,200 | |
Montgomery | 1,200 | |
Brasília | 1,103 | |
Florence | 1,000 | |
Casablanca | 1,000 | |
Asunción | 1,000 | |
Sofia | 1,000 | |
Guadalajara | 900 | |
Bratislava | 800 | |
Monterrey | 500 |
Jewish population by towns and villages as a percentage of total population
List does not include cities in Israel.Rank | City | Country | Percent | Number |
1 | Qırmızı Qəsəbə | 100 | 3,300 | |
2 | Kiryas Joel | 99 | 22,000 | |
3 | Deal | 91 | 600 | |
4 | Beachwood | 90.4 | 10,700 | |
5 | Hampstead | 74.2 | 5,170 | |
6 | Côte-Saint-Luc | 69.1 | 20,146 | |
7 | Lakewood | 59 | 59,607 | |
8 | Teaneck | 50 | 18,000 | |
9 | Livingston | 46 | 12,600 | |
10 | Caulfield North | 41.4 | 6,319 | |
11 | Caulfield South | 33.9 | 4,008 | |
12 | Rose Bay | 27.3 | 2,744 | |
13 | Sarcelles | 25 | 15,000 | |
14 | Mercer Island | 25 | 5,000 | |
15 | St Kilda East | 24.8 | 3,246 | |
16 | Créteil | 24.4 | 22,000 | |
17 | Vaucluse | 23.2 | 2,163 | |
18 | Westmount | 23.2 | 4,495 | |
19 | Bellevue Hill | 21.4 | 2,300 | |
20 | Dollard-des-Ormeaux | 21.1 | 10,115 | |
21 | Vaughan | 18.2 | 33,090 | |
22 | Elsternwick | 17.8 | 1,846 | |
23 | Montreal West | 13.8 | 710 | |
24 | New York City | 18 | 1,540,000 | |
25 | Bondi | 12.7 | 1,272 | |
26 | Los Angeles | 12.5 | 519,000 | |
27 | Mount Royal | 12.0 | 2,205 | |
28 | San Jose, California | 4 | 40,000 | |
29 | Marseille | 9 | 70,000 | |
30 | Buenos Aires | 8.22 | 244,000 | |
31 | Newton Mearns | 5.98 | 1,431 | |
32 | Philadelphia | 4.89 | 276,000 | |
33 | Toronto | 4.21 | 103,500 |