Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I noticed that proportionally, by religion stats, there are fewer people who are Jewish in the UK, European countries, even Canada and Australia. In absolute size of course, the US is the biggest western country and would have the most immigrants, but by proportion in the US, Jewish population is close to 2%, and in most other western countries, be they Canada, Australia, France, UK etc., they are less than 1% and closer to 0.5%
Did the United States just have a much larger population from earlier waves of immigration, Ellis Island and earlier?
Did Jews leaving Europe for historical reasons cause such a demographic shift?
In the US, Judaism is the second largest religion, while in many other western countries it is Islam (presumably by recent immigration), but also even in Australia and Canada, Buddhists or Hindus' populations are bigger than the Jewish ones there.
Is the larger percentage of Jewish people in the US than in other western nations a product of 20th century immigration? How far back does it go?
Simple answer: Because the US (and Canada to a slightly lesser degree) accepted displaced Jews after/during the Pogroms, Holocaust, etc. My ancestors immigrated here in the 1890's, during the Russian Pogroms, and landed either in NYC or Montreal. We went where they'd take us, and where the boats landed when we got the heck outta dodge. In a nutshell.
Many European Jews also headed for China, as they had open immigration, and offered refuge during these events as well. My late great-uncle escaped before WWII, and went from Russia to China, then Cuba, and finally ended up in New Jersey - where he married my great-aunt, who was 18 at the time (he was like 40+). He was a strange old man and hardcore Communist, but definitely had some interesting and LONG stories to tell!
The lower number of Jews in the UK was because the Jews were expelled from Britain by Edward the 1st in 1290, and only began to trickle back in during the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The Spanish Inquisition is responsible for the low numbers in Spain, with the large Jewish Diaspora resulting from the Spanish expulsion settling in many places and creating the Sephardic Jewish culture. As for the rest of Western Europe? C'mon man. Why are you skirting around the elephant in the room? There were 9 million Jewish people in Europe before the Holocaust and 6 million of them were murdered. Two thirds of Europe's Jews were exterminated. American Jews in the US were not.
America was, and is, a land of religious tolerance. It was also the go to place for Europeans who had little in Europe and had strong incentives to leave. It was thus, of course, an attractive place for Jews fleeing persecution, whether it be Eastern Europe's pogroms, the aftermath of WW2, or any other awful thing from before that stuff. Not sure about Australia, but Canada got less Jewish immigration then the US did because many of the US Jews were driven there by the pogroms in Eastern Europe that started in the 1880's and that was an era when Canada was still pretty wild and was not yet receiving large numbers of immigrants from non-British European sources. That didn't really get going for another 20 years when the settlement of the West kicked off in earnest. As such, we got quite a large number of Jews in Canada (1.1% is a respectable number), but not as many as the US. Assuming Aus may be similar.
Even pre-Holocaust, the Jewish population of Western Europe wasn't all that high. Germany had about 520,000 in the early 30s. New York City at the time had maybe around 3.5 times that number. Most of those were from eastern Europe or their children.
Religious turmoils in Europe motivated a lot of religious minorities to emigrate to the US, including Jews.
Nazis and the USSR assassinated a huge part of the Jews who didn't leave.
A minority of Jews who left came back to Europe after WWII.
Bigger fertility rate in the American Jews families compared to Europe.
Lost of belief for some young Jews in Europe - following the same trend as the rest of the population - and many practicing Jews leaving to Israel.
Well most of the Jews in Europe perished during the Holocaust. After that most of the survivors went to America, Canada, Israel, Australia, South Africa and other nations. Many stayed yet if there was no holocaust Europe would have more Jews than North America.
To live in Europe a person needs a European nationality, and European nationalities are passed on by blood right (Jus Sanguinis). There is a tiny population of Jews in Europe because a Jew cannot acquire any of these nationalities, unless they marry a European person and acquire the European nationality of that person through marriage.
In the USA, nationalities are acquired by birth right, anyone who is born here gets the nationality and that is why there are more Jews here in the U.S..
To live in Europe a person needs a European nationality, and European nationalities are passed on by blood right (Jus Sanguinis). There is a tiny population of Jews in Europe because a Jew cannot acquire any of these nationalities, unless they marry a European person and acquire the European nationality of that person through marriage.
In the USA, nationalities are acquired by birth right, anyone who is born here gets the nationality and that is why there are more Jews here in the U.S..
Eh, that doesn't really explain it at all. European nationality was conferred upon European Jews even when marrying within the community. I believe there was some kind of recent, uh, event that massively reduced the Western European by various methods.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
