Backing into a Jewish Majority in Israel
Daniel J. Elazar
It is one of the saddest ironies of our times that in wake of the
Holocaust in which six out of sixteen and a half million Jews
were killed, and the reestablishment of the Jewish state which
offered the greatest possibilities for Jewish redemption in two
thousand years, the Jewish people are in the midst of a
demographic self-destruction of major proportions. The recent
report to the Israeli government by Prof. Roberto Bacchi,
Israel's leading demographer, only highlights what he and others
have been telling us for two decades or more: that not only is
the Jewish people as a whole still suffering as a result of the
loss of the reproductive capacity of a major segment of its
population and one that was still reproducing above replacement
levels, but that the Jewish diaspora has long since dropped below
replacement levels in terms of its reproduction, not to speak of
assimilation.
The one new dimension to the Bacchi report is that the Jewish
birth rate in Israel, which has been the one significant Jewish
community where Jews are reproducing above replacement level, is
also dropping -- from a yearly average of 29.6 per thousand
between 1951 and 1959 to an average of 14.6 per thousand between
1980 and 1984. Between 1950 and 1953, the average Jewish woman
had 3.94 children, whereas between 1979 and 1983 that figure had
dropped to 2.77. Most of that drop was the result of the
changing birthrate among Israeli women born in Asia and Africa:
from 6.09 children to 3.06, but the birthrate of mothers born in
Europe and America, and Israel also dropped: from 3.10 and 3.52
to 2.74 and 2.79, respectively.
In reporting the projections of the Central Bureau of Statistics
for the year 2000, the CBS expects Israeli Jewish women to
continue to produce enough children to maintain a certain level
of population growth (much less than that of their Arab
counterparts, but that is another story). In this respect,
Israel will still stand apart from the diaspora. There the
combination of delayed marriage, low reproduction rate, and
intermarriage is leading to a continued downward trend. Bacchi
gives the following population figures for the diaspora, based on
the work of the demographic unit of the Institute for
Contemporary Jewry:
1939: 16,155,000
1945: 10,392,000
1970: 10,240,000
1985: 9,500,000
The same demographers project less than eight million Jews in the
diaspora by the year 2000, with the decline coming from
demographic loss, not as the result of aliya, which the
demographers expect to remain small and to account for only a
fraction of the change.
Bacchi and his colleagues, Uriel O. Schmelz and Sergio Della
Pergola, are generally correct in the trend they project. But it
must be noted that there is a difference of opinion among the
demographers as to just how bad the situation is. Three schools
seem to have emerged.
One is the Israeli school, represented by Bacchi, Schmelz, and
Della Pergola, which is the most pessimistic. Their very careful
demographic work has resulted in very cautious and conservative
estimates of the contemporary Jewish population which leads them
to their conclusions.
The second school, consisting of what might be called the
"mainstream" American demographers, such as Sidney Goldstein,
Alvin Chenkin, and Gary A. Tobin, see the situation less
pessimistically, but also as generally unfavorable. For example,
while the Israelis see the Jewish population in the United States
as around 5.7 million, the mainstream American demographers, who
are also conservative in their estimates, see it as over 5.8
million. The discrepancy is accounted for by the results of
recent demographic studies undertaken in a number of local
American Jewish communities which have discovered unexpectedly
large Jewish populations in sunbelt metropolitan areas (American
Jewish Year Book 1985). Thus 88,000 more Jews were "found"
between 1983 and 1984 as a result of these studies.
By the same token, the Israelis take the lowest figures of Jewish
population in the Soviet Union, those of the Soviet census.
Since it is likely that the Soviets undercount Jews for their own
purposes and policies, half a million or more Jews "pass" as
Russians or members of other nationality groups, the census
proposing too low a figure. Hence it may be more reasonable to
estimate the higher figure, although there is insufficient
evidence to do so unequivicably.
The third group consists of the demographic revisionists,
principally Professors Steven M. Cohen and Calvin Goldscheider of
the United States who suggest that, at least for American Jewry
there is no population decline. While the Jewish birthrate is
low and intermarriage is a reality, there are enough conversions
to Judaism on the part of non-Jewish partners and a sufficient
improvement in the birthrate after a decade of less than
replacement rates to at least hold the American Jewish population
steady if not to provide for a slight increase. They estimate
the actual intermarriage rate of American Jewry at 25 percent and
expect the Jews to gain approximately half of the offspring of
intermarriages. Moreover, they claim that the far-below-
replacement-level birthrates of fifteen years ago (1.5 children
per couple) represented an aberration caused by the deferral of
marriage of the "generation of 1968." They agree that the
present rate of 2.1 children per couple is, in fact, the norm and
has been since the 1920's.
If the optimists' analysis is applied to other parts of the
diaspora, then Prof. Bacchi's gloomy forecasts are premature, to
say the least. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing which
of these schools is right.
This writer, who is not a demographer but a consumer of
demographic data, tends to accept the views of the middle school,
based upon the worldwide study of Jewish community organization
which I conducted between 1968 and 1978 and which is being
continued under my direction at the Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs. That study is focused on Jewish communities country by
country and, of course, has had to bring together and assess the
various demographic studies and estimates for each.
We have found a general tendency of the Israelis to undercount,
usually for good scientific reasons, exercising due caution as
demographers. This is a useful counterpoise to the tendency of
Jewish community leaders and journalists in the past to
exaggerate the Jewish presence in their communities by simply
assuming that, since there were X numbers of Jews a generation
ago, there must be X plus 10 percent or whatever today. Thus, in
the case of the number of Jews in Argentina, the local leadership
used to give the estimate of 500,000 and the late Pinhas Sapir
was fond of speaking of 750,000. The very low figure of 233,000
presently in use is far from those optimistic guesses. It, in
turn, is based on positive responses to the "Jewish" questions in
the Argentine census and distributing those who mark "no
religion" according to the precentage of Jews in the total
population. Every other bit of information that we have suggests
that Jews in Argentina, as elsewhere, are more likely to indicate
"no religion" or to refuse to answer the census questions than
any other group, often on principle. Examining the various
estimates and how they were obtained, we came to an estimate of
350,000 Jews in Argentina or 117,000 more than the 233,000
estimated by the Israeli group. Similarly, the last Australian
census found 10,000 more Jews than had been expected in that
country, raising the total from 65,000 to 75,000, or
approximately 17 percent more than anticipated. All told, we
would suggest that Bacchi and his colleagues have "lost" one
million Jews who are still "out there".
The great unknown in all this is what is really happening with
regard to assimilation and intermarriage. We have insufficient
comprehensive data to draw any real conclusions, especially
outside the U.S. It is clear that intermarriage is not a one way
street, at least at this stage, but it is unclear what happens in
the next generation when the children of couples in which one
partner has converted to Judaism reach marriageable age after
having been exposed to an intermarriage that works within a
climate of decultured and minimally religious Jewishness.
Beyond that, it is also clear that the Jewish population is aging
rapidly. Eighty-five percent of American Jews are over the age
of 16. Jewish school enrollments have dropped by hundreds of
thousands since their high point in the mid-1960's, in great part
because of the drop in the Jewish birthrate.
On the other hand, as Cohen and Goldscheider argue, the children
of the post World War II baby boom are now at the peak of their
childbearing years and the overall number of Jewish births is
increasing, whereas it was the much smaller cohorts born in the
Depression that were at the peak of their childbearing years in
the 1960's, and there were simply fewer of them available to have
children. Thus there may even be a sudden spurt upward in Jewish
population, which may or may not signify a shift in the downward
slide.
Two other factors need to be taken into consideration: the
increase in birthrates among seriously Orthodox Jewish families
and the increased intensity of Jewish commitment among those Jews
who care at all. The first has direct demographic implications.
If ultra-Orthodox families are having between 7 and 10 children
apiece, even though they may represent only 5 percent of world
Jewry, they will constitute a very high percentage of whatever
growth there is, especially when bolstered by the 3 to 5 children
of modern Orthodox families. Unfortunately, we have no proper
statistics available as to the impact of that population on
Jewish demography overall.
With regard to the second factor, obviously the only way to
change the demographic situation is through persuasion, that is
to say, by talking up the need for a greater number of Jewish
babies. Such things as family allowances and benefits really do
not make the difference in an affluent society, if they ever did
for Jews, and in any case they are not available in the diaspora.
It is simply necessary to mount a campaign to encourage young
Jews to marry other Jews and have children, more children at
that.
Where the organized Jewish community can help in the diaspora is
in assisting young couples in covering the costs of Jewish
education for their children, by subsidizing day schools, summer
camps, and the like sufficiently so that tuition and fees can be
kept at the affordable level for larger families. Failing that,
the economic costs of bearing additional children, especially for
serious Jews, will simply be too great and only the highly
committed ultra-Orthodox who are willing to make real economic
sacrifices for their Jewish commitments will continue to bear
large families.
Paradoxically, because of the political situation in the diaspora
as well as in Israel, where the Orthodox are organized and have
more power than other groups in Jewish life, the Jewish
community, which may not be willing to subsidize non-Orthodox
Jewish education will end up subsidizing education for the
Orthodox community in any case. There are demographic merits in
this, although little attention has been paid to the likely
consequences for Jewish life a generation or two from now, after
the year 2000. If the present trends - even the more moderate
ones projected by the mainstream American Jewish demographers,
hold true, there will indeed be an overall decline in the Jewish
population in the diaspora coupled with a great increase in the
percentage of diaspora Jewry that is Orthodox. That will change
the balance of power within diaspora Jewry in crucial ways.
What of Israel and the diaspora? If Bacchi's projections are
correct, sometime around the year 2010 Israel will become the
largest Jewish community in the world as a result of the
combination of Jewish population growth within the Jewish state
and decline in the diaspora, including the United States. Thus,
we will back into the Zionist ambition, not out of strength, but
out of weakness.
