I’ve always wondered this, because I know there are Christians there. Has a census ever been taken on Christians living in Israel?
According to the CIA World Factbook entry for Israel (a great resource for this type of stuff):
Which adds up to exactly 100.0%. So all of the declared Hindus, Budhists, atheists, Shintoists, neo-pagans, and others all together are less than the roundoff error? I find that hard to believe. Unless the religions listed were the only ones available to choose from on the survey forms, and there was no space for “other”?
I assume that’s what “unspecified” covers.
The real question here is - Why does the CIA Factbook distinguish between Arab Christians and other Christians? I’m not aware that “Arab Christianity” is a separate religion.
It might well be- perhaps they are similar to the Copts in Egypt, who are their own branch of the Christian church.
Well maybe, but in that case you might as well break the Christians down into Catholic and Protestant, and the Muslims down into Sunni and Shia. Why should Arab Christians be counted separately?
I thought I’d heard that a Christian Hebrew (I’m trying to avoid the massive pileup I’ve caused before by asking about the concept of Christian Jews) was denied immigration to Israel because he admitted he was Christian. Does this sound plausible?
I don’t know exactly where the CA factbook takes its data from – is it from official Israeli Census data or from its own sources? Israeli forms (I just checked both the ID request form and Passport request form) do not have a “religion” entry, and I’m pretty sure it’s actually illegal to require it on government forms anymore.
I can easily believe that most non-practicing Jews will still identify as “Jews” in a survey – there’s a very large overlap in people’s minds here between religion and ethnicity. Hence the relatively low number of “Unspecified” (read: strongly enough atheist to refuse to provide any answer when surveyed.)
As for the rest – I find it entirely plausible that there are less than 0.1% Budhists, Shintoists, etc… in Israel. There really are very few people here who identify temselves as belonging to a non-Abrahamic religion. I’m kind of surprised that Baha’i didn’t make it onto the list (their relgious center is in Haifa), but that’s about it.
What is a “Christian Hebrew”?
This relates to a common gripe I have about supposed surveys of religion in Britain, where the majority of people will described themselves as “Church of England”, despite many of them not believing in a virgin birth, or in the resurrection, or a lot of what happened in between.
I’m guessing he means an ethnic Jew who practices Christianity.
Jewish law holds that if you’re born a Jew, you remain a Jew, regardless of what religion you practice (if any), so such persons should be permitted to emigrate to Israel.