Modern Jewish Life: A Global, Mostly Two-Center People
Fifteen million Jews, split almost evenly between Israel and everywhere else
Quick facts
- World Jewish population, 2023
- c. 15.7 million
- Israel
- 7.2 million
- United States
- 6.3-7.5 million (sources vary by methodology)
- Pre-Holocaust world population (1939)
- c. 16.5-17 million
What happened
The Jewish Agency for Israel's 2023 demographic report put the world's core Jewish population at approximately 15.7 million people, up from 15.6 million the year before. Of those, 7.2 million lived in Israel, now the largest single Jewish population center in the world, while about 8.5 million lived in the diaspora, with roughly 6.3 million of them in the United States. Pew Research Center's parallel study of American Jews found 7.5 million Jews of all ages in the United States, about 2.4 percent of the total population, split between those who identify as Jewish by religion and a growing share who identify as Jewish by ethnicity or culture without religious practice. Both reports describe a population still well below its pre-Holocaust level of roughly 16.5 to 17 million in 1939, one that took nearly eighty years to approach its earlier size.
Why it matters
For the first time since antiquity, Jewish life is organized around two roughly equal centers, a sovereign state and a diaspora, rather than the diaspora-only condition that defined nearly two thousand years of Jewish history after Rome crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt. The population figures also register, starkly, how deep a demographic wound the Holocaust inflicted: modern Jewry has still not fully recovered the numbers it had before 1939.
How we know
Population figures are drawn from annual demographic surveys conducted by the Jewish Agency for Israel using Israeli government and diaspora community census and registry data, cross-checked against the Pew Research Center's independent survey-based study of the American Jewish population.
Sources
- The Jewish Agency for Israel. Jewish Population Rises to 15.7 Million Worldwide in 2023 · General sourcejewishagency.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Pew Research Center. The size of the U.S. Jewish population · General sourcepewresearch.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Related timelines
- History of Christianity → · Jewish and Christian history remain closely intertwined from antiquity through the present; see the History of Christianity timeline for the shared and divergent paths of the two traditions.