Jews

Jewish identity encompasses religion, ancestry, peoplehood, culture, heritage, and connection to the Land of Israel.[1] Judaism may be understood simultaneously as a religion, an ethnicity, and a culture, and these dimensions can exist together or separately. A person may therefore be secular while remaining strongly identified as Jewish.[7] Jews include communities of widely varied ethnic and national backgrounds, including Ethiopian, Chinese, Indian, Moroccan, Iranian, South American, and Oceanian Jews.[8]

Being Jewish is not a race but involves an interaction among peoplehood, ethnicity, and religion.[2] Jewish identity may be inherited through family descent or acquired through conversion. Historically, the combination of kinship and covenantal consent enabled Jews to function as an ethnic group, religious community, and polity.[9] In a survey of 16,359 self-defined Jews across twelve European Union countries, 76 percent selected two or more bases for their identity; the study concluded that most European Jews understood Judaism as both religion and ancestry.[7]

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described this peoplehood in familial terms: “The Jewish people is an extended family. We argue, we differ…yet we are part of the same story [and] share the same memories.”[1] Shared history, liturgy, customs, literature, family ties, and Hebrew have helped maintain connections among geographically dispersed communities.[10]

The people now known as Jews were originally called Hebrews, a term first used in the Torah in connection with Abraham, and later the Children of Israel or Israelites, referring to the descendants of Jacob, who was also called Israel. The term Jew derives from the Hebrew Yehudi, itself derived from Judah, one of Jacob’s twelve sons. After Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel around 722 BCE, the people of the surviving kingdom of Judah became known as Yehudim.[8]

The terminology developed gradually. Yehudi is rare in the Hebrew Bible and appears mainly in post-exilic works, while Yahadut, the standard modern Hebrew term for Judaism, is absent from the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish sources.[11]

Jewish tradition traces the people’s biblical origins more than 4,000 years to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants.[2] Its foundational narrative recounts the enslavement of the Children of Israel in Egypt, the Exodus under Moses, the covenant at Sinai, the establishment of a monarchy, and the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. These are elements of the Jewish foundation story; their historical chronology and interpretation remain subjects of scholarly debate.[11]

After the Israelite monarchy divided, Assyria conquered the northern kingdom around 722 BCE. Babylonia conquered Judah in 586 BCE, destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, and forced Jews to preserve collective identity outside a territorial state.[8][12] Sources date the beginning of the organized Jewish Diaspora somewhat differently: one account identifies the deportations beginning in 597 BCE, while another describes the Babylonian captivity more generally as its recognized beginning.[13][9]

Jewish communities in Babylonia and Egypt developed institutions for governance, study, worship, and public life. The beit knesset, or house of assembly, became the basis of the synagogue and provided a portable framework for communal organization.[9] Cyrus of Persia permitted Judeans to return in 538 BCE, but many remained in Babylonia, which continued as a major center of Jewish life.[13]

In the biblical period, Jewish identity was understood as membership in a religio-national community. Resident strangers could be integrated into it, with obligations and privileges approaching those of native members. After the Babylonian exile, the community increasingly required formal religious assent.[14] During the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, Jewish texts commonly portrayed Jews in cities such as Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome as members of a global community sharing a common heritage and God.[11]

The Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE was followed by a major dispersal, although a Jewish population remained continuously in the Land of Israel.[10] Communities maintained connections through institutions associated with Jerusalem and Babylonia and, later, through networks of rabbinic responsa and shared halakhic traditions.[12][9]

Medieval Jewish history involved repeated persecution, migration, internal division, interaction with surrounding societies, and continued cultural and spiritual creativity. Jewish continuity was reinforced by the combination of religious faith, national identity, attachment to the Land of Israel, and independent communal institutions devoted to learning and education.[3]

Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, and Portugal followed in 1497. Spanish Jews who refused conversion were forced to leave, while descendants of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula preserved a distinctive Sephardic heritage and influenced the societies in which they settled.[3]

Over time, Jewish communities became established throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Collectively known as the Jewish Diaspora, they retained connections through shared history, liturgy, customs, religious literature, family ties, and Hebrew while developing varied local languages, foods, and forms of observance.[10][2]

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Approximately nine million Jews lived in Europe in 1933; by the end of World War II, nearly two out of every three had been murdered.[4] The annihilation also destroyed thousands of Jewish communities across German-occupied Europe and North Africa.[15]

Nazi persecution escalated from legal discrimination, propaganda, organized violence, and forced emigration to deportation, ghettoization, forced labor, and systematic mass murder beginning in 1941.[4] Germany itself had approximately 525,000 Jews in 1933, less than one percent of its population. About 400,000 held German citizenship, while approximately 100,000 lacked citizenship and were mostly from families that had immigrated from Eastern Europe.[16]

Jews in ghettos nevertheless maintained schools, libraries, welfare services, and religious institutions. The Oneg Shabbat archive, clandestine photography, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 document cultural, spiritual, documentary, and armed resistance.[4]

The demographic effects have endured. The world Jewish population was estimated at 16.5 million in 1939 and 11 million in 1945. The 2024 core-population estimate of 15.7368 million remained below the prewar level, while the Jewish share of the world population fell from 7.17 per 1,000 people in 1939 to 1.97 per 1,000 in 2024.[5]

The modern State of Israel was founded in 1948, reestablishing Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral homeland and making Hebrew its national language.[10] Israel’s Basic Law: Israel—The Nation State of the Jewish People describes the Land of Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people and the state as the place where they exercise their natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination.[17]

Approximately 650,000 Jews lived in Israel at its establishment, representing about six percent of world Jewry after the Holocaust. JPR reports that Israel’s Jewish population subsequently reached about 7.2 million, or 46 percent of world Jewry, through immigration from postwar Europe, Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and the former Soviet Union, together with natural growth.[18]

A 2025 SAPIR essay argues that recent Jewish migration has been concentrated overwhelmingly toward Israel and the United States.[19] A separate study identifies seven broad contemporary regions of Jewish life: Israel, the United States, the rest of the English-speaking world, Latin America, Western continental Europe, the former Communist bloc, and communities in Africa and Asia.[12]

World Jewish population estimates depend on how Jewish identity is defined. The Berman Jewish DataBank estimated a core population of 15,736,800 on January 1, 2024, based on populations in 104 countries and territories with at least 100 Jews.[5] JPR reports a comparable core estimate of 15,809,000. Under either measure, Jews constitute under 0.2 percent of humanity, or approximately 1.92 per 1,000 people.[6]

The DataBank estimated 7,153,000 core Jews in Israel and 6,300,000 in the United States, together accounting for more than 85 percent of world Jewry. Other large communities included France at 438,500, Canada at 400,000, the United Kingdom at 313,000, Argentina at 170,000, Germany at 125,000, Russia at 123,000, and Australia at 117,000.[5]

Broader definitions produce larger totals. The same report estimated 18,755,661 people with Jewish parents, an enlarged Jewish population of 21,774,677, and a Law of Return population of 24,735,988. The broader categories include some people who do not currently identify as Jewish, non-Jewish household members, and relatives eligible under Israel’s immigration law.[5]

Definitions also explain differing U.S. totals. Pew estimated about 7.5 million U.S. Jews in 2020, including 5.8 million adults and 1.8 million children, under a definition including Jews by religion and Jews of no religion who identified through ethnicity, culture, or family background.[20]

Jewish identity has been shaped by internal communal standards and by external forces, including persecution that sometimes defined Jewish membership more broadly than Jewish communities did. Halakhah—traditional Jewish law—has provided the most enduring formal definition, although it was neither the earliest nor the only one.[14]

Under traditional Jewish law, a person is Jewish if born to a Jewish mother or formally converted; practice or belief is not required to retain that status. Reform Judaism recognizes descent through either a Jewish mother or father when accompanied by a Jewish upbringing. Conversion requirements differ, and many Orthodox Jews do not recognize Reform or Conservative conversions as valid.[8]

Modern social-scientific definitions are broader in some respects and narrower in others. Pew’s principal U.S. category combines Jews by religion with Jews of no religion who still identify as Jewish, while excluding people who profess another religion or no longer consider themselves Jewish.[20] A 1990 U.S. study cited by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs found that up to one-third of people who considered themselves Jewish by conversion had undergone no formal conversion.[12]

Israeli immigration and religious authorities also use different standards. The Law of Return extends immigration rights to Jews, converts, and children or grandchildren of Jews, subject to legal limitations. The Population and Immigration Authority recognizes Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform conversions for immigration and registration, while the Chief Rabbinate does not recognize some non-Orthodox converts for marriage, divorce, or burial.[17] The DataBank’s core definition is explicitly an operational social-scientific measure rather than a definition according to rabbinic law.[5]

Jewish religious life is grounded in the Torah and includes belief in one God, obligations of justice and mercy, respect for human dignity, charity, Sabbath observance, and the dietary laws known as kashrut.[2] Practice varies widely among communities and individuals.

Orthodox Judaism maintains traditional religious rules in their most comprehensive form. Reform and Conservative Judaism developed partly through efforts to adapt observance to modern circumstances, while other currents include Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism. Secular Jews may retain strong cultural or ethnic identification with little or no formal religious observance.[2]

Pew’s 2020 survey found that 37 percent of U.S. Jewish adults identified with Reform Judaism, 17 percent with Conservative Judaism, 9 percent with Orthodox Judaism, about 4 percent with other branches, and 32 percent with no particular stream. The elements most often deemed essential to Jewish identity were remembering the Holocaust, leading a moral and ethical life, and working for justice and equality.[20]

The Jewish people encompass substantial ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Major historical groupings include Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern European communities, Sephardic Jews descended from Iberian communities, and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Other communities include Beta Israel from Ethiopia, Indian Jewish communities, and converts of many backgrounds.[10]

Pew’s 2020 survey found that about two-thirds of U.S. Jewish adults identified with Ashkenazi ancestry or customs, 3 percent with Sephardic ancestry or customs, 1 percent with Mizrahi ancestry or customs, and 6 percent with combinations or other categories. Ninety-two percent identified as White and non-Hispanic, while 17 percent lived in households containing at least one person who was Black, Hispanic, Asian, another non-White ethnicity, or multiracial.[20]

Across this diversity, shared history, scripture, liturgy, family ties, and Hebrew have maintained collective connections, even as communities developed distinctive vernaculars, foods, clothing, and customs.[10][2]

Jewish continuity through long periods of dispersal and lost sovereignty rested partly on portable legal, institutional, and cultural frameworks. Halakhah supplied a shared body of law and obligation, while synagogues, schools, charitable societies, rabbinic courts, and communal agreements enabled collective life in many political settings.[9]

Connections among dispersed communities were maintained through institutions associated with Jerusalem and Babylonia and, later, through responsa carried among distant communities. These networks helped preserve common halakhic traditions even when no central executive institution existed.[12][9] Writing, learning, education, and independent religious and cultural institutions also reinforced continuity.[3]

Such institutions remained important even under extreme persecution. In Nazi ghettos, schools, libraries, welfare services, religious institutions, and documentary projects helped sustain community and preserve evidence of Jewish life.[4]

One historical study estimates roughly 3,500 years of Jewish existence, about 1,000 years of Jewish statehood, and at least 2,600 years of diaspora life. It also estimates that Jews lived for almost 2,000 years without an independent state and about 1,500 years without an effective political center in their historic national territory.[9]

No single definition of Jewish identity commands universal acceptance. Traditional halakhic law uses matrilineal descent or conversion, Reform Judaism recognizes patrilineal descent under specified conditions, and secular or demographic frameworks may emphasize ancestry, culture, or self-identification. Consequently, a person recognized as Jewish in one setting may not be recognized in another.[8]

In Israel, the distinction has practical consequences because eligibility under the Law of Return is broader than recognition by the Chief Rabbinate for marriage, divorce, and burial.[17] These differences reflect distinct legal and religious purposes rather than a single agreed boundary.

The historical emergence of Judaism is also debated. Yonatan Adler argues that widespread treatment of the Torah as authoritative dates to the Hasmonean era, around 140 BCE, while many ancient historians identify signs of Judaism centuries earlier, following the return from Babylonian exile. The limited evidence prevents a definitive conclusion.[11]

Population totals likewise vary by definition. Recent estimates range from about 15.7 to 15.8 million under core definitions to approximately 18.8 million people with Jewish parents, about 21.7 million in enlarged-population measures, and roughly 24.7 million under Law of Return criteria.[5][6]