HOW MANY JEWS ARE THERE?

MISPERCEPTIONS — AND OUTRIGHT IGNORANCE — PLAY A BIG ROLE IN ATTITUDES TOWARD JEWS.

How many Jews are there in the world? Take a guess.

No, actually. Please imagine a number and hold it in your head as you read on.

I put this out there sometimes to bring home a point. Most people in the world — including well-intentioned, intelligent, totally-not-antisemitic people — have no idea how big (or small) the Jewish population is.

I do this in part to demonstrate that Jews play a huge role in the non-Jewish imagination.

Jews, I daresay, take up more space in the minds of Christians, Muslims, atheists, journalists, UN officials, NGO CEOs and many ordinary people than they do in the world.

Surveys have shown that people often overestimate the Jewish population by orders of magnitude. In polls of Americans, respondents guessed that Jews comprise 9% of the world’s population and 30% of the US population. Some European polls indicate that many on that continent think Jews make up 20% of the world. (Remember your number?)

In reality, Jews make up about 0.19% of the world — one-fifth of 1%. They make up around 2% of the US population.

My point in illuminating these numbers is that Jews are a tiny people who loom large in history and the public imagination. This is understandable for a people whose sacred texts and ideas formed the foundations of both Christianity and Islam, adherents of which now account for 4.4 billion people — more than half the world’s population.

This historical centrality, though, seems to mislead people to overestimate the numerical strength of Jews — especially when people use terms like “the three great monotheistic faiths.” They may be great, but numerically there is no comparison between these three theological groups:

Christians: 2,400,000,000

Muslims: 2,000,000,000

Jews: 15,800,000

Put another way: There are almost three times as many Canadians as there are Jews in the world. There are as many Jews in the world as there are Burundians or Papua New Guineans.

About half the Jews in the world live in Israel, which places that country on par with Paraguay, Laos, Serbia and Sierra Leone.

Now imagine if the cacophony of hatred and hysteria directed at Jews and Israelis by the United Nations and millions of incensed protestors worldwide were directed at Canadians or Burundians or Papua New Guineans or Laotians. (And if your response is, “Yes, but those countries aren’t bloodthirsty, warmongering genociders,” well, we’ve got a problem to address another day.) But anyways.

Without putting too fine a point on it, these overestimates suggest a number of things, including that Jews, despite their numbers, loom exceedingly large in the imaginations of non-Jews.

This is touchy territory, but there are legitimate reasons for this. Consider one example: Jews make up ~0.2% of the world population. But they have won ~20% of Nobel Prizes. That’s a 100-fold overrepresentation. The proverbial Martian looking at Nobel Prize winners would assume that Jews constitute a global population 100 times their actual number.

This is just one example. Jews, for very specific cultural and historical reasons, happen to be disproportionately represented in “show biz,” especially Hollywood, which itself has a massively disproportionate impact on the way Americans and others see the world. Jewish writers, actors, producers and directors have, naturally, told their stories or less overtly inculcated in their work their particular experiences, as we all do in our work.

I probably don’t need to list off other areas of endeavor where Jews are “overrepresented,” a term that is problematic in its own way (and, while we’re at it, a hobby for antisemites who love to demonstrate how “Jews control stuff” by counting Jewish people in various fields). The danger in even approaching this topic is that, by noting that Jews are so small in number but so disproportionately successful in (often elite) enterprises, we invite bigots to conclude something along the lines of “That just proves how domineering and controlling those people are …”

This Jew-counting is problematic in other ways.

Jews have won 100 times as many Nobel Prizes than their numbers would seem to anticipate not because of innate “smartness” and certainly not because of a giant conspiracy or because Jews are puppet-masters of the Nobel committee or whatever. The achievements of Jews in any field of endeavor are results — keep this in mind — of individual accomplishment. Jews who won Nobel Prizes are not Jewish Nobel Prize winners. They are Jews who won Nobel Prizes.

At the same time, their Jewishness is not entirely incidental.

Jews place a profound cultural emphasis on education. I am going out on a limb here, but if other cultures put as much emphasis on learning as Jewish parents, educators, religious leaders and cultures do — and did so for hundreds of generations — those groups would probably be on par with Jews in the Nobel Prize stats. And then Jews would not be so disproportionately represented in the Nobel accolades.

There are other factors, though. Jewish history has made adaptability and innovation a survival mechanism and that has translated into excellence in a vast range of fields. Additionally, while Western civilization and others have realized in the past generation or two that multicultural engagement enriches individuals and the entire population, Jews were necessarily engaging cross-culturally since (at least) the beginning of the Diaspora 2,000 years ago.

I always recoil a bit when Jewish people (often Jewish organizations) try to ingratiate themselves by illuminating the number of Jews who have made glorious contributions to science, literature, medicine, etc. (Let’s be clear: No one is arguing “Jews aren’t clever.” That’s a core reason antisemites hate Jews!)

Arguing, essentially, “Look! We’re not bad people, we’re good people!” gives permission to others to make that judgment. The response to prejudice is to demand that people judge members of a group on their individual merits, not by their membership in the group.

Moreover, prejudices about Jews are uniquely malleable. What sounds like a compliment can quickly turn into condemnation.

Antisemitism (“All Jews are bad; we hate them”) and philosemitism (“All Jews are awesome; we love them”) are flip sides of the same coin. Whether we love them or hate them, once we decide that “All members of abc group are xyz,” we are engaging in prejudice. This makes it very easy to swing from one position to the other. Example: “Look how many Jews have won Nobel Prizes” can quickly become “Jews are so smart,” which can rapidly devolve into “Those people are crafty and ordinary people can’t compete with them.”

What was that number you held in mind when I asked you to choose at the start?

If you guessed somewhere under 50 million, I’d say that, given all the other stuff you have to think about every day, that’s not a bad guess.

If you suspected Jews make up maybe 100 million or 200 million or a billion people in the world, take a moment to ponder where you could have come up with that number.

Then try to hold that dissonance in your mind when you see anything related to Jews or Israel and remember how few people you are actually talking about.

A personal note …

I started this Substack because I thought my perspective as a progressive, gay, non-Jewish, Zionist Canadian offered something different to the dialogue about antisemitism, anti-Zionism, Palestinianism and peace. It actually never crossed my mind that people might give me money for it. When people started generously subscribing and donating, I threw myself into this project more, partly because I am a writer by trade and I am still building my RSPs for some distant retirement. Based on online advice (!) I started making my Saturday posts for “Paid Subscribers Only.” But, I modestly acknowledge, each one is too delicious to paywall. So I am going to assume that, if you like my stuff and want more of it, you’ll give if you can. If not, please share. (Please share regardless!) No more paywalls. But there may be other incentives I could offer. Not sure what. Got any ideas? Do folks want to get together for online discussions or see me compile some of these posts as a book? Let me know. Meanwhile, enjoy! (If that is the right word for these sometimes dark musings.)

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