Israel’s population stood at 10.305 million as the country entered the new Jewish year, according to figures released by the Central Bureau of Statistics ahead of Rosh Hashanah. To a demographer, that is a line in a government spreadsheet. To anyone who reads the Hebrew Bible as a living document rather than an ancient artifact, it is something closer to a milestone in a redemption already underway, one more data point in the kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, that the prophets described millennia before any of them could have known a Jewish state would exist to count its own people. The population grew by approximately 124,000 people over the past year, an increase of 1.2 percent.
The country’s residents include roughly 7.828 million Jews and others classified by the CBS as non-Arab minorities, making up 78.3 percent of the population. Arabs number approximately 2.173 million, or 21.7 percent, and an additional 304,000 foreign nationals live in the country.
The figures, part of the CBS’s annual “Israel in Numbers” report published each year ahead of Rosh Hashanah, showed approximately 182,000 births and 50,000 deaths over the past Jewish year. Israel’s total fertility rate stands at 2.88 children per woman, more than double the OECD average of 1.41. Life expectancy remains high by international standards, at 81.4 years for men and 85.9 years for women.
Migration told a mixed story. Roughly 24,000 new immigrants arrived in Israel over the past year, along with another 4,000 people who entered through family reunification. But a negative international migration balance reduced the country’s overall population growth by approximately 8,000 people. Around 21,000 Israelis who had been living abroad returned home, while approximately 57,000 residents left the country.
Israel also recorded 53,025 marriages and 16,499 divorces over the past year. The country had more than three million private households, averaging 3.17 people per household, compared with an OECD average of roughly 2.5.
Beyond Israel’s borders, the CBS figures placed the worldwide Jewish population at approximately 15.9 million as of January 1 this year. Nearly 46 percent of the world’s Jews now live in Israel. Since the state’s founding in 1948, approximately 3.51 million people have made aliyah, the Hebrew term for immigration to the land of Israel.
The Longer Trend
The distribution behind those numbers has shifted dramatically over the past 87 years. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the global Jewish population stood at 16.6 million, with 57 percent, or roughly 9.5 million, living in Europe. Only about 3 percent of the world’s Jews lived in pre-state Israel at the time.
The Holocaust cut the global Jewish population by more than a third within six years. By 1945, roughly 11 million Jews remained worldwide, and Europe’s Jewish population had fallen from 9.5 million to about 3.8 million, meaning two out of every three European Jews had been murdered or displaced. Israel’s Jewish population that year stood at roughly half a million people, about 5 percent of world Jewry. When Israel declared independence in 1948, the global Jewish population stood at approximately 11.5 million, with about 6 percent living in the new state.
The trend lines then moved in opposite directions for the next eight decades. Europe’s Jewish population continued shrinking after the war, falling to about 3.2 million by 1960 and roughly 2 million by 1991. Today it stands at approximately 1.3 million, or about 0.1 percent of Europe’s total population, down from a share that once made up 90 percent of world Jewry at its 19th-century peak. Israel’s Jewish population moved the opposite direction, climbing from half a million in 1945 to 5.6 million by 2010 and approximately 7.8 million today.
The global total has still not caught up to where it stood before the Holocaust. Between 2010 and 2020, the worldwide Jewish population grew by only 6.2 percent, from 13.91 million to 14.8 million, while the world’s overall population grew by 12.3 percent over the same decade, nearly double the Jewish growth rate. Five years ago, ahead of Rosh Hashanah 5782 in September 2021, the Jewish Agency put the global total at 15.2 million, with 6.9 million living in Israel, or 45.3 percent, and the remaining 8.3 million scattered across the Diaspora, including 6 million in the United States alone. That means Israel’s share of world Jewry rose only about seven-tenths of a percentage point over the five years between that count and this year’s 46 percent, a pace roughly consistent with the trajectory DellaPergola has projected reaching 50 percent by 2035. Even with this year’s figure of 15.9 million, the global Jewish population remains roughly 700,000 below the 16.6 million recorded in 1939, eighty-seven years after the Holocaust began.
Sergio DellaPergola, a leading demographer of world Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has described the shortfall in stark terms. “The Jewish population has not returned to what it was before the war,” he said. “The damage is still visible and not yet recovered to its early dimensions.” Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, made the same point after a recent Pew Research Center study reached similar conclusions. “Have Jews made up for the loss of people killed in the Holocaust? The answer is no,” Sarna said. “It takes a long time to replace a third of the population. It still hasn’t happened.”
A Coming Majority
DellaPergola, who was born in Italy in 1942 and has lived in Israel since 1966, formerly chaired Hebrew University’s Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry and holds a doctorate in Social Sciences and Contemporary Jewry from the same institution. He has published or edited numerous books on world Jewish demography, including Israel and Palestine: The Power of Numbers and Diaspora vs. Homeland: Migration to Israel, 1991-2019, and has served as a senior policy consultant to the President of Israel, the Israeli government, and Israel’s own Central Bureau of Statistics. His work has earned him the Marshall Sklare Award for distinguished achievement in the social scientific study of Jewry and the Michael Landau Prize for Demography and Migration. He now sits on the board of the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which published his latest projection this year, going further than simply tracking where world Jewry stands today. In a report titled “The Jewish People in 2126: Demography, Identity, and the Future of a Global Minority,” DellaPergola projected that Israel could soon hold a majority of the world’s Jews for the first time in the modern era.
“In 2026, Jews in Israel represented approximately 46 percent of the world’s Jewish population,” DellaPergola wrote. “At current rates of differential demographic growth, the emblematic 50 percent could be surpassed as early as 2035.” He called the coming shift “epochal.”
The projection rests on a demographic divergence that has been building for decades. Jewish communities in the Diaspora, like most Western populations, have fallen below the fertility rate needed to sustain their numbers, while intermarriage in the United States has climbed from a negligible rate a century ago to more than 60 percent by 2020, a trend DellaPergola links to weakening transmission of Jewish identity across generations. Israel remains the outlier. Its Jewish fertility rate is the highest of any developed nation, and DellaPergola notes that even secular Tel Aviv sees couples averaging roughly two children per family, more than in any European country. He attributes part of that pattern to the gap between Israel’s Haredi and secular populations, which currently averages six to seven children per family for strictly Orthodox households compared with just over two for secular ones, a divide he projects will push the Haredi share of Israel’s Jewish population to nearly a third by 2050.
DellaPergola also points to a striking wrinkle since October 7, 2023. Israel has recorded a rare negative migration balance in the years since, with more people leaving the country than arriving, even as rising antisemitism abroad is prompting a growing number of Jews in Europe and North America to consider relocating to Israel. He described the resulting tension as “a strong desire to leave, but without being able to truly decide where.”
DellaPergola frames his projection as an exercise in identifying long-term trends rather than issuing a firm prediction, and closes his report on a note of continuity rather than certainty. “If there is still a world in 2126,” he wrote, “there will be a Jewish people. It will be a Jewish People very different from the current one, in a world even more unrecognisable than the one we live in today.”
Counting the Jubilee, Watching the Ingathering
The Hebrew Bible has its own calendar for return, one considerably older than DellaPergola’s. Every fiftieth year in the biblical cycle is a yovel, a Jubilee, in which land reverts to its original ancestral owners:
“And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.” (Leviticus 25:10)
The Jubilee is not simply a debt cancellation. It is a mechanism built into the Bible itself for reversing dispossession, for putting people back on the land their family once held. Some observers of Israel’s modern history have noticed a rhythm to its milestones that echoes this fifty-year structure. The Balfour Declaration, recognizing a Jewish national home, came in 1917. Roughly fifty years later, in 1967, Jerusalem returned to Jewish control for the first time in nearly two thousand years. The Sages themselves, however, were famously wary of this kind of calculation. The Talmud records a blunt rebuke of those who try to calculate the end of days: “Rabbi Yonatan said: Cursed are those who calculate the end” (Sanhedrin 97b). Whatever pattern one may notice in the dates, the tradition itself counsels against building a countdown clock out of it.
What the tradition does not counsel against is watching for the thing the prophets actually promised: the Jewish people themselves returning to their land, out of every nation where they had been scattered. That is not a metaphor requiring careful interpretation. It is a plain description of exactly what the Central Bureau of Statistics just finished counting. Immigrants from Russia, France, the United States, Britain, Ukraine, Belarus, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Georgia, South Africa, Germany, and Brazil arriving in a single year is not a modern coincidence. It is kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, described repeatedly across the Hebrew Bible in language that reads as though it were written to describe this exact moment.
“For I will take you from among the nations, and gather you out of all the countries, and bring you into your own land.” (Ezekiel 36:24)
“Fear not, for I am with thee; I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back; bring My sons from far, and My daughters from the end of the earth.” (Isaiah 43:5-6)
“He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock.” (Jeremiah 31:10)
None of these verses mentions a percentage. None of them names 2035. What they describe is a direction, and Israel’s own statisticians, publishing dry population tables ahead of a new year, are now the ones documenting that direction in real time. A people that stood at 3 percent of its own nation’s population in 1939, that fell to half a million souls after the murder of a third of its number, is now approaching the point where it may once again hold the majority of its people within its own borders. The prophets did not need Sergio DellaPergola to tell them this was coming. They wrote it down first.
