Why Jews are fast disappearing from Europe

European institutions that attack Jewish communal interests must understand the history

THE STORY is now 140 years old. It began when Russia’s Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by far-left revolutionaries in March 1881. The assassination was quickly blamed on ‘foreign agents,’ or, as some chose to interpret that term in time honoured tradition, Jews. The result was a wave of pogroms over the following three years.

It was a turning point in Jewish history in several respects, not least the development of Zionism and the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel.

But the most significant response at the time was mass migration. Jews fled the country, driven both by the fear of antisemitism and the promise of a better life elsewhere, particularly the United States.

Between 1881 and 1914, two million Jews left Eastern Europe for the USA.

Remarkably, European Jewry’s young age composition at the time enabled it to absorb these losses and continue to grow.

But the Shoah put a devastating stop to that — Europe’s Jewish population fell from 9.5 million in 1939 to 3.8 million in 1945.

About two million among this surviving remnant remained in the Soviet Union, from where it was very difficult to emigrate. Instead, communist policies eroded religious identities, leaving Jewish life severely fractured.

However, particularly after the collapse of communism, the floodgates opened. The Jewish population of the former Soviet Union fell from about 1.8 million in the 1980s to 210,000 today.

Interestingly, the story in Western Europe was the opposite.

There the Jewish population grew after 1945, climbing from about 800,000 to over a million by 2000. Democracy and economic opportunity attracted Jews from elsewhere and kept many European Jews where they were.

But a recent wave of emigration among French Jews in response to Islamist attacks on Jewish targets there has changed that — the Jewish population of Western Europe now shows decline for the first time since 1945.

Many of these moved to Israel, the attraction of which has also contributed to the wider story of European Jewish population decline. Over a million of those who left Eastern Europe between 1969 and 2020, particularly in the post-communist era, went to Israel.

Smaller waves of Western European Jews made aliyah after 1948 and 1967.

Typically, Jewish migrants have been young rather than old. As a result, post-war Jewish populations left in Europe have become older, which has served to dampen natural population growth.

All these factors together have seen the Jewish population of Europe decline from 3.8 million in 1945 to 1.3 million today.

Typically, Jewish migrants from Europe have been young rather than old’

Jewish community leaders sometimes inflate Jewish population numbers to exaggerate the size of their constituencies. There are some empirical grounds for this — indeed, using Israeli Law of Return criteria to determine who is a Jew, the current Jewish population of Europe is 2.8 million. The fact that many of these people are not themselves Jewish but are, rather, married to Jews or descendants of Jews is often ignored.

But in inflating the figures, community leaders may be missing an opportunity. The facts are clear. The Jewish population of Europe has fallen from 9.5 million in 1939 to 1.3 million today. Jews have disappeared from Europe for two main reasons: either antisemitism or because they felt life would be better elsewhere.

Neither story reflects well on the narrative of an open democratic Europe.

So, when European institutions pass legislation or issue judgements against Jewish community interests — such as the recent decision of the European Court of Justice to effectively ban kosher and halal slaughter — they really ought to be reminded of the story behind these data. The vast majority of European Jews today want to remain here. If European leaders had any sense of history at all, or a sophisticated understanding of democratic values, they would be doing everything possible to sustain and support the Jewish communities living in their midst.