Historical Jewish population by region 1170-1995

The world's Jewish population has had a complex and tumultuous history over the past millennia, regularly dealing with persecution, pogroms, and even genocide. The legacy of expulsion and persecution of Jews, including bans on land ownership, meant that Jewish communities disproportionately lived in urban areas, working as artisans or traders, and often lived in their own settlements separate to the rest of the urban population. This separation contributed to the impression that events such as pandemics, famines, or economic shocks did not affect Jews as much as other populations, and such factors came to form the basis of the mistrust and stereotypes of wealth (characterized as greed) that have made up anti-Semitic rhetoric for centuries.

Development since the Middle Ages

The concentration of Jewish populations across the world has shifted across different centuries. In the Middle Ages, the largest Jewish populations were found in Palestine and the wider Levant region, with other sizeable populations in present-day France, Italy, and Spain. Later, however, the Jewish disapora became increasingly concentrated in Eastern Europe after waves of pogroms in the west saw Jewish communities move eastward. Poland in particular was often considered a refuge for Jews from the late-Middle Ages until the 18^th century, when it was then partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and persecution increased. Push factors such as major pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 19^th century and growing oppression in the west during the interwar period then saw many Jews migrate to the United States in search of opportunity.

The Holocaust and its aftermath

Between 1939 and 1948, the Jewish population in Europe dropped from 9.4 to 2.7 million people. Up to six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, while hundreds of thousands more fled. Since the Second World War, the United States has had the largest Jewish population in the world, although the growth of the Zionist movement and the foundation of the state of Israel has seen millions of Jews return to their ancestral homeland in the Middle East.