The Vanishing Breed

This is not a scholarly article with annotations of sources and detailed attributions. Much too bulky! You are getting here a version of history that I have been able to drag out of Google and the Bible to make the points I want to make.

It is what it is.

My story of populations is a numbers game so we will have a few numbers to talk about.

The story goes back to Abraham. Sarah, his wife, was barren, so she brought her handmaiden Hagar to give Abraham children. She bore Ishmael. When God intervened, and Rachel bore Isaac, she persuaded Abraham to turn Hagar and her son out. Ishmael is the supposed progenitor of the Arabs, the other element, with the Jews, of the Semitic race.

The story shifts to Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, who took his family, numbering some seventy persons, to Egypt, where his son Joseph stood at the right hand of the Pharaoh. We know that things changed after some time, and the rulers, perhaps fearing the power and numbers of these cliquey Hebrews, as they were then called, enslaved them. There is much dispute about dates, but scholars estimate that the Hebrews spent some four hundred years in Egypt. Then Moses persuaded the then ruler to allow the Hebrews to depart. I won’t bother you with the details, but it was not an amical parting. Now we are coming to more numbers.

 It has been estimated that 2.4 million souls, (I don’t remember my source, and apparently that wasn’t all of them,) made up the twelve tribes that went into the desert with Moses. The date is estimated by some to have been about 1500 B.C.E.

The Hebrews eventually conquered the “Promised ” (to Abraham,) Land. The Hebrews eventually split into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom of ten tribes was conquered by the Assyrians and dispersed in 722 B.C.E. (There are supposed to be traces of them in Ethiopia, India and even Japan.)

The southern kingdom, primarily the tribes of Judah, survived as a physical entity until 132 A.D., when the final tranche were dispersed by the Romans. (There always were Jews remaining in Jerusalem and in the Galilee. It is thought that some converted to Islam.)

Josephus, the Jewish historian, estimated the numbers of people in the Roman Empire were 100 million. He also said that Jews made up ten percent of the population. That would mean they numbered some ten million at that time, some two thousand years ago. (The current population with its Arab component about equals that figure.) Other authors, in more recent times, estimated the Jewish population in the Empire at 5.2 million.

They say Jewish numbers fell to 1.5 million in the shift from the Temple regime to the Rabbinic, with the latter’s demand for personal Judaic observance. The focus on personal study for an agrarian population in servitude resulted in a major shift to what became Christianity, which demanded only faith in the Jewish Jesus as the Messiah. Over time, the rabbinic focus on education provided the remnant with survival tools by generating an island of literacy in a world of ignorance.

Let us jump forward in time closer to our era.

In 1939, the estimated population of the Jews in the world was eighteen million. World population in 1940 was estimated at about 2.3 billion. Jewish population was about 0.78 percent of world population at that time.

(By international edict (The San Remo conference in 1921, the British Mandate in 1932, the U.N. in 1947) to establish the Jewish National Home, they were restored to their land, (at least a part of it,) in 1948. A portion of their existing community returned there.)

In 2023, Jewish population was estimated at about 15.7 million, with a world population of 8.2 billion. Thus Jewish population was then less than 0.2 per cent of world population. Ishmael’s descendants now number in excess of one billion.

I am reminded of the apocalyptic story of the Chinese official who was asked how many Jews he thought there were in the world. He answered that he thought there were between 50 and 100 million. When told of the actual number, he was surprised, and remarked, “Well, they sure make a lot of noise”.

We have all heard the anti-Semitic tropes that ascribe mythical powers to Jews relative to their control of financial markets, or governments, or what have you. We know these are false. They are mechanisms some groups use to stimulate dis-affection with current political arrangements in their own favor or to distract populations from their own wrong-doing or ineptitude. There is one tiny germ of truth in all this. Jews seem to punch way above their weight in many areas of human endeavor.

The reality is that Jewish integration, (might I say, assimilation,) in western society, particularly in the centuries since they have been released from the ghetto, has meant there is Jewish DNA somewhere in almost every family tree. (Even before!. It is claimed that Leonardo da Vinci was born of a Jewish mother. So was Christopher Columbus!)

Jewish culture has yielded contributions to world society by far beyond what the numbers of Jews should indicate. Inconvenient as it may be, Jews are acculturated by their background to question everything. And if one questions, one often finds new and better answers. That, and a fierce devotion to education, even at a young age, may be making the difference. And in the open societies which have characterized the West, out-performance fostered social mobility.

This outperformance has been evident for a long time in many areas, both positive and negative. For every Isaiah and Jesus, Freud and Einstein, we sometimes have a Bugsy Siegel, a Madoff, a Roy Cohen, a Jeffery Epstein. Some would even add the name Netanyahu. Where would most of us judge the balance lies from a world point of view?

Jewish numbers in the world population have been diminished over the ages by persecution and genocide. In latter years, in more open societies, the rate of intermarriage has ballooned. This has led to large numbers of individuals from the follow-on generation being lost to the community through assimilation.

 In America, which has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, intermarriage in the latest generation has reportedly reached over fifty per cent. Numbers as a percentage of world population will likely continue to drop. For Jews, the only element in this picture that is positive is the appearance of Israel. Statehood is likely to strengthen the viability of this racial stream into the future.

This is obviously of concern to members of the Jewish community who would like to see a continuity of the belief systems they value. But why should it be of concern to others? It is obvious from the clash of opinions in the world that a great many people do in fact wish, for whatever reason, to see the community disappear.

For any objective observer, I would have to ask, given the evident contribution to the world’s well-being, (if we put aside the current hostilities that were designed to eliminate them,) coming out of just the fraction of the Jewish community residing in Israel, how great the balance of benefit for the world must lie with the continuing existence of this vanishing breed?

It may seem at this time problematic, but the current hostilities in which Israel is engaged in, may in the future be viewed by many who ascribe to western civilization, as a battle by Israel that is being fought by them to perpetuate the Western values most of us share.

(MMR, OCT/2024)