Recent Migration of Jews

Migration Patterns of Jews

Israel is the destination for 73 percent of Jews who migrate internationally. As the world’s only state with a Jewish majority, Israel offers an especially strong pull factor for Jewish migrants. The United States is the destination for 10 percent of Jewish international migrants and Canada for 4 percent

Distribution of Jews, 1910 and 2012

(a) In 1910, most Jews lived in Europe (including Russia). (b) Now most live in Israel or the United States.

In the modern period, only since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 has a significant percentage of the world’s Jews lived in their ancestral homeland (Figure 6-43). Jews trace their origins as a people to the land of Israel and King David’s establishment of the Kingdom of Israel around 3,000 years ago. Most Jews have not lived there since 70 C.E., when the Romans forced them to disperse throughout the world, an action known as the diaspora, from the Greek word for “dispersion.”

Jews in Israel

Jews worship at the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, at the base of the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, Israel.

Many Jews migrated from the eastern Mediterranean to Europe. Having been exiled from the home of their religion, Jews lived among other nationalities, retaining separate religious practices but adopting other cultural characteristics of the host country, such as language.

Other nationalities often persecuted the Jews living in their midst. Historically, the Jews of many European countries were forced to live permanently in ghettos, defined as city neighborhoods set up by law to be inhabited only by Jews. The term ghetto originated during the sixteenth century in Venice, Italy, as a reference to the city’s former copper foundry or metal-casting district, where Jews were forced to live. Ghettos were frequently surrounded by walls, and the gates were locked at night to prevent escape. Persecution and rising nationalist movements in Europe sparked the growth of Jewish nationalism, known as Zionism. This led to increased Jewish migration to the land of Israel (then under Ottoman rule) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During the Holocaust (1939-1945), the Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews, about two-thirds of the Jews of Europe. After its establishment in 1948, the State of Israel absorbed several hundred thousand Jewish refugees from Europe as well as from Southwest Asia & North Africa. Today, less than 15 percent of the world’s 14 million Jews live in Europe, compared to 90 percent a century ago.

Pause & Reflect 6.2.5

What country had the largest Jewish population in 1910?