The worldwide Jewish population grew by 870,000 in the decade from 2010 to 2020, according to the Pew Research Center’s global religion survey released on June 9 and reported on by JNS.
The analysis of worldwide religious trends looked at self-reported religious belief, except in Israel, where the surveyors used the government’s population register.
“The number of Jews around the world grew by 6%, from an estimated 14 million in 2010 to nearly 15 million in 2020,” the researchers wrote. “That’s fewer than the estimated 16.6 million Jews who were alive in 1939 prior to the Holocaust.”
Those numbers notably exclude those who might identify ethnically as Jewish but who report being religiously unaffiliated, agnostic or atheist.
A Pew survey that used a broader definition of Jewish identity, which included both religion and ethnicity, found about 1.8 million more Jews in the United States than the June 9 report did.
Much of the increase in the Jewish population from 2010 to 2020 came in Israel, where the number of Jews grew from 5.76 million to 6.78 million. The number of Jews in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean declined during that decade by about 200,000.
The Jewish populations of North America and Asia grew by a small number.
The Pew researchers combined data from more than 2,700 censuses, surveys and population registers, covering about 99.98% of the world’s population in 201 countries and territories.
Globally, they found that Islam was the fastest growing religion from 2010 to 2020, gaining more than 300 million adherents to reach a global population of more than 2 billion.
Christianity remains the largest worldwide religion for now, with just under 2.3 billion believers, but Pew found 40 countries where the Christian population declined by more than 5% and only one, Mozambique, where it increased by that much.
