Jewish Population Grew From 14 to 15 Million, Pew Says

Those numbers notably exclude those who might identify ethnically as Jewish but who report being religiously unaffiliated, agnostic or atheist. 

A Pew survey that used a broader definition of Jewish identity, which included both religion and ethnicity, found about 1.8 million more Jews in the United States than Monday’s report did. 

Much of the increase in the Jewish population from 2010 to 2020 came in Israel, where the number of Jews grew from 5.76 million to 6.78 million. The number of Jews in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean declined during that decade by about 200,000. 

The Jewish populations of North America and Asia grew by a small number. 

The Pew researchers combined data from more than 2,700 censuses, surveys and population registers, covering about 99.98% of the world’s population in 201 countries and territories. 

Globally, they found that Islam was the fastest-growing religion from 2010 to 2020, gaining more than 300 million adherents to reach a global population of more than 2 billion. 

Christianity remains the largest worldwide religion for now, with just under 2.3 billion believers, but Pew found 40 countries where the Christian population declined by more than 5% and only one, Mozambique, where it increased by that much. 

“Countries where the share of Christians fell are scattered throughout every region of the world, but many are in Europe and other Western or English-speaking places where Christian majorities have been shrinking for decades,” the researchers wrote. 

“This change is largely driven by high rates of Christian disaffiliation,” they said, including “by people becoming religiously unaffiliated as adults after having been raised as Christians in childhood.” 

As a result, religious Christians are no longer a majority in the United Kingdom, Australia and France, with religiously unaffiliated people accounting for more than 40% of the population in each of the three. The religiously unaffiliated are now a majority of the population in the Netherlands and New Zealand. 

‘Change not Evenly Distributed’ 

Despite concerns from some right-wing parties in Europe about mass migration from Muslim countries, the Pew researchers found modest growth of Islam on the continent over the past decade, though it was concentrated in some countries more than others. 

“Overall, the share of Europe’s population that is Muslim grew by less than 1 percentage point, to 6% in 2020,” they wrote, “but the change was not evenly distributed.” 

“In Sweden, where government policies toward Syrian refugees were generous, Muslims grew to make up 8% of the country’s inhabitants,” they wrote, which was “up 4 percentage points, or roughly double the share of Sweden’s population that Muslims had been in 2010.” 

“The Muslim share was more stable in other European countries,” they wrote. “For example, in Germany, where then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming stance toward Muslim refugees in 2015 was highly controversial, Muslims grew by about 1 percentage point as a share of the country’s population, making up 7% of the country’s residents in 2020.” 

Islam is growing faster in North America than any other part of the world, according to Pew, with a 52.3% population increase from 2010 to 2020, though the total population numbers remain small. 

Some 4.05 million Muslims lived in the United States in 2020, up from 2.77 million in 2010, fewer than the number of Buddhists and Jews.