There’s a fresh new crop of SDMB threads lately regarding the relative success of Jews in a variety of circumstances, and why this might be so (ie nature/nurture/the usual suspects etc.), but in looking at the raw population numbers, Jews for all their adaptability and intellectual acumen comprise a minuscule one quarter of one percent of the world’s population. The single city of Shanghai in China has more Chinese than there are Jews in the entire world.
Even if the Jews killed during WWII were added back in the numbers would still be relatively tiny. They’ve had millennia to get their act together on this. Why aren’t there more Jews in the world? Why hasn’t (relative) economic and intellectual success translated to demographic success?
Are you asking why there aren’t more converts or why there aren’t more Jews by birth? They’ve suffered not only the tragedy of WWI, but forced assimilation/conversion over the centuries. There are probably millions of Jews (descendents of Jews) out there who don’t even know they’re Jewish.
They’re relatively small because they started out relatively small.
I mean, let’s pretend there were no anti-semitic genocides, ever. Let’s take the heyday of the Roman Empire as our starting point. Would the Jews ever be more than a tiny fraction of the number of pagans under the dominion of the Roman Empire? When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, that was a starting point for the ratio of tons of non-Jews::a few Jews in the Christian world. Six centuries later, Mohammed converted all the pagans from Morocco to Iran to Islam. Would the Jews have ever numbered more than a tiny fraction of them?
Well, I doubt WWI did them or any other Europeans much good.
Being “successful” as in not living in the jungle or starving to death initially increases population (you have reserves of resources to fall back on). But haven’t we seen (aren’t we seeing right now?) that affluent modern populations almost always see their fertility rate and in-group (i.e., non-immigrant) population growth drop (or plummet, in the case of Japan, Korea, Italy)?
plus the other factors mentioned – it’s not so surprising to me.
Abram was promised his descendants would be as numerous as the sands of the beach (I butchered that, but you get the picture). In Orthodox/Lubavitcher circles that’s still a priority, but I don’t know if many other middle/upper class Jews (or most other modern folk) are equating “success” with “high absolute numbers of us.”
I wonder if success hasn’t hurt their numbers. One of the characteristics of a culture getting richer and richer is a decline in birthrates, after all.
Interesting question, and one that even I as a Jew haven’t ever thought of. I just took it for granted.
I think the following factors are involved:
[ul]
[li]Period, near-total eradications of populations. I remember hearing an estimate that %75 of males of fighting age were killed in the wars between Rome and Judea.[/li][li]No “outreach”. Jews historically avoided any hint of bringing outsiders in, fearing that this would not please their (mostly) Christian neighbors[/li][li]Desire to be innocuous. Dunno how this translates to low numbers, but clearly the Jewish communities in Europe were not keen to become big and noticeable.[/li][li]Conversely, assimilation since the early 1800s has reduced the number of people who recognize themselves as being Jewish.[/li][li]Nature of mass kill-offs? Disease, famine, and war hit everyone, but I wonder if they wipe out entire communities? Mass murders of Jews dating back to the Crusades destroyed communities and led many individuals to convert/assimilate.[/li][/ul]
Someone with a strong modeling background could to a computer model of populations to see if the current size of Jewish communities is predictable or runs counter to what we would expect.
I think this is the key factor - Unlike Christianity or Islam, Judaism is not a proselytizing religion.
Judaism is both a religion and an ethnicity.
The lack of proselytizing explains in part why the religion has remained so small. (This is not to discount the effect of persecution, however.)
But as an ethnicity - that is, in terms of their ancestry - Jews are not in essence different from their Middle Eastern neigbors (although populations of European origin have a lot of admixture with local populations). They are not fundamentally different from Arabs. The distinction between Jews and Arabs is largely one of religion and culture, not a basic genetic one. One might as well ask why “Semites” in general are not successful, if you were looking at the question in terms of genetics - and of course Semites as a group are very successful.
I think that it’s still not fashionable nor popular - read: not conducive to overall social, and possibly economic, success - to be Jewish in America. I believe that about 50% of Jews marry non-Jews. This tendency away from marrying within the faith reveals to me an awareness that regardless of all other factors, being known as a Jew is not a recipe for comfort in this country. In relatively liberal areas such as the larger northern cities, one can find a level of tolerance and acceptance that can be somewhat benign and tends to be not even noticeable. But there’s also a palpable gentleman’s agreement in places, and in other places, there is a very noticable coolness. There are, to be sure, restricted country clubs still in this country, as well as restricted access to other means and access to power. All of which is to say that all things being equal, which they are not, that when some people have a choice to make, they make the one that gives them - or their soon to be offspring - access that they never had. Or that they tired of longing for. My dad changed his name from a very Jewish sounding one 60 years ago for that very reason. I stayed Jewish on some level - but not perceptibly, not outwardly. I have no doubt that it paid off for me in ways that I may have never even known about. I think a lot of Jews have become crypto-Jews because of the prejudice against them. If not for that, their numbers would have increased parallel to the protestants.
Did american Jews take part in the baby boom of 1946-64 that much of america did? If not that is an interesting question as to why they wouldn’t.
The total fertility rate (number of kids born to each fertile woman) is pretty high in Israel, it was around 4 back in the 50s/60s and is close to 3 now. Even now at 2.94 (2.41 as of 2006) that is high, that is one of the highests for a developed nation (most developed nations have 1.2-2.2-ish ranges).
Jews have suffered from economic and social oppression for millenia. When they weren’t being expelled or physically attacked, they were often restricted as to occupations, where they could live, taxed at high rates, drafted into the army for long periods of service, kept out of higher education, not allowed to own land, forcibly converted to other religions, etc.
As a rabbi explained this to me once Jews and Judaism are alike but NOT the same.
He says Judaism is one of the few (if only) religion practiced by one ethnic group. The Jews.
To answer your question remember only the mother counts when determaining the Jewishness. So whereas you may get mixed marriages contributing to more Catholics, if the mothers not a Jew, the child isn’t.
Similar in strict Islam. The man may marry an non-Muslim woman but a woman may NOT marry a non-Muslim man. Theory is the woman is more likely to take the man’s religion than vice versa.
As pointed out, Judaism, does not seek converts simply because they do NOT believe you have to be Jewish to “go to heaven,” or “be saved” or how you like to call it.
It’s quite common in other area, if you think about it to see groups exerting far more influence than their numbers. For instance the whites over the Africans in South Africa or the Tusti over the Hutu in Burundi and Rwanda. Because it’s local scale and not worldwide like the Jews are know you don’t think about it as much
I don’t think there is any objective basis upon which you could say that all people practicing Judaism are of one ethnic group except by defining the ethnic group as being those who practice Judaism, in which case the statement is just a meaningless tautology, and is equally applicable to every religion.
I suppose you could also interpret it in exactly the opposite way, though: namely, that Jews are so comfortable in the US that they are fully integrated with the non-Jewish majority and thus have ample opportunity to meet, fall in love with, and marry non-Jews. (That’s how my own Jewish father hooked up with my non-Jewish mother, for example.)
After all, Jews are such a tiny proportion of the total American population that they would really have to work on self-segregation in order to limit their mating pool to their own ethnicity. If a group consisting of, what, 2% of the total population is fully integrated into the larger society, then the vast majority of the potential mates they meet will be from outside their group.
If he’s talking about endogamous religious groups—i.e., where members of the group must marry other members of the group in order for their offspring to be members of the group—then they’re certainly not the only such group. The Parsis or modern Zoroastrians are even more strictly endogamous than the Jews, since both a person’s parents must be Parsi in order for that person to count as a Parsi. (Jews, by contrast, are only partly endogamous, since women may marry outside the group but men may not.)
And the Parsis are declining demographically, in terms of their numbers, even faster than the Jews. In a modern multiethnic multicultural society, endogamy is generally not a good recipe for demographic survival.
A few things to bear in mind here…
Intermarriage rates are a lot higher for Jewish men.
Social and economic success are a lot easier to achieve for Jewish men.
Jewish men are a lot more comfortable and integrated with the non-Jewish majority.
IANAJ or a product of a mixed marriage; I just happen to have been friends and boyfriends with an exceptional Jewish chyk or two, I have a lot of respect for them, and I notice that it’s still OK to stereotype them in lots of ways: JAP, overprotective mama, ballbuster, libby-lefty, Joan Rivers…
So… where does that leave Jewish women? “Uncomfortable”? Are you saying things are easier for Jewish men vs Jewish women in the US? Don’t Jewish women inter-marry too?