Contemporary Jewish worlds — revivals and vitality

There is a powerful temptation, when one evokes twentieth-century Judaism, to reduce its history to a procession of losses: the destruction of the communities of Eastern Europe, the extinction of the Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish worlds, the silence of emptied synagogues. This memory of mourning is legitimate and necessary. But it cannot exhaust the real. For what characterizes the contemporary Jewish worlds, observed from the turn of the twenty-first century, is less disappearance than transformation, recomposition, and sometimes unexpected rebirth. Where an end was expected, stubborn continuities and new creations have arisen.

This Great Book proposes to hold together both faces of this history. It refuses pure elegy as much as naive optimism. It attends to the numbers — demography is here an indispensable anchor — but also to institutions, languages, liturgies, musics, and debates that make up the texture of a collective life. From Jerusalem to New York, from Paris to Buenos Aires, by way of a Berlin that no one, in 1945, would have imagined becoming once again a Jewish home, this book draws the portrait of a people dispersed and yet intensely present to itself. Memory here is not merely the keeper of graves: it is also a project for the future.

Understanding contemporary Jewish worlds requires first establishing orders of magnitude. The work of demographer Sergio DellaPergola, the global reference in this field, offers a precise cartography here. According to his estimates, in 2023, the world Jewish population was estimated at 15.7 million people [DellaPergola, AJYB; MDPI 2024]. This number, considerable and yet lower than the pre-war figure, reflects a slow demographic reconstitution after the catastrophe.

The major feature of this map is the shift of the center of gravity toward Israel. The largest core Jewish population was found in Israel with 7,101,400 people, followed by the United States with 6,300,000 [DellaPergola, AJYB 2023]. These two poles now concentrate the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people. At the same time, the total Jewish population of the Diaspora has declined, falling from a revised estimate of 8,597,100 in 2023 to 8,583,000 in 2024 [DellaPergola, World Jewish Population 2024]. This near-stagnation of the diaspora nonetheless masks contrasting regional dynamics: some communities erode through emigration and aging, while others renew themselves through immigration or birth rates.

This measure of the scale of the loss gives its rightful resonance to any idea of rebirth. The murder of nearly six million Jews during the Second World War led to the loss of 36% of the pre-war Jewish population, and of more than 60% of European Jewry [MDPI, Notes toward a Demographic History of the Jews]. That Europe remains today a place of significant Jewish life is therefore, on a historical scale, a remarkable fact.

The State of Israel, founded in 1948, transformed the contemporary Jewish condition by offering, for the first time since Antiquity, political sovereignty. Beyond its dimension as a state, it became the foremost demographic reservoir of the Jewish people, welcoming successive waves of immigration — the aliyah — from Europe, from the Arab and Muslim world, from Ethiopia, and massively from the former Soviet Union after 1989.

Yet Israeli vitality cannot be reduced to demographics. It lies in the resurrection of a language. Hebrew, long confined to liturgy and study, once again became a vernacular language spoken by millions, sustaining a literature, a cinema, a press, and scientific research of the first order. This phenomenon — which no historical precedent truly equals — constitutes one of the most spectacular cultural renaissances of the contemporary era [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. Israel thus functions as a hearth of cultural production whose effects radiate throughout all the diasporas.

With approximately 6.3 million Jews, the United States is home to the largest Jewish community in the diaspora and the second largest in the world [DellaPergola, AJYB 2023]. New York remains its historical and symbolic heart, but the American Jewish presence extends from Los Angeles to Miami, from Chicago to South Florida. This Judaism is distinguished by its institutional pluralism: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements coexist and compete, producing a theological and organizational effervescence without equivalent.

The American specificity lies in the articulation of an advanced civic integration and a strong assertion of identity. American Jews have fully participated in the intellectual, scientific, artistic, and political life of their country, while developing a dense network of federations, schools, community centers, and universities. This model, made of religious freedom and associative vitality, remains a major laboratory of contemporary Jewish forms, including in its internal tensions between tradition and modernity [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

Within the European continent, France occupies a singular place. France is home to the third-largest Jewish community in the world, behind Israel and the United States, with around 500,000 Jews; France has welcomed Jews since the early Middle Ages. [World Jewish Congress]. This historical depth is combined with a recent reconfiguration, marked by the massive arrival, in the 1950s and 1960s, of Jews from North Africa, who profoundly renewed a French Judaism that had previously been predominantly Ashkenazi.

The community's geography reflects this density. Paris and its suburbs are home to the vast majority of this population (350,000). Other significant communities include Marseille (70,000), Lyon (25,000), Toulouse (23,000), Nice (20,000), and Strasbourg (16,000). [European Jewish Congress]. This collective life relies on a structured institutional network, among which the Fonds social juif unifié (FSJU) funds the community's needs [European Jewish Congress].

However, French vitality is also crossed by concerns. France has the largest minority Jewish population in Europe, estimated at around 500,000 people; a significant number of French Jews leave the country each year. [Minority Rights Group, Refworld]. French Judaism thus experiences a tension characteristic of contemporary diasporas: great cultural and religious richness, coupled with questions about security and the future.

No case better illustrates the theme of rebirth than that of Germany. On the very land where destruction was planned, a Jewish community reconstituted itself at the end of the 20th century. The engine of this renewal was immigration from the East. Today, between 80 and 90% of Jews in Germany are Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union. [History of the Jews in Germany, Wikipedia].

This movement transformed a residual presence into a living community. Many Israelis also settle in Germany, particularly in Berlin, for its relaxed atmosphere and low cost of living. The end of the Cold War contributed to the growth of the Jewish community in Germany. [History of the Jews in Germany, Wikipedia]. These newcomers profoundly altered the communal landscape. As the Jewish Museum Berlin notes, since the 1990s they have transformed and enriched the Jewish communities in Germany, which have experienced major growth but have also faced significant challenges. [Jewish Museum Berlin].

This rebirth is not without internal tensions. The relationship between long-established residents and newcomers has not been simple [Jewish Museum Berlin], particularly because, in the Soviet Union, Jewishness was a matter of nationality more than religion, which raised unprecedented questions of identity and religious belonging.

The contemporary Jewish world cannot be reduced to the Israeli-Western axis. Latin America constitutes an essential center, with Argentina at its heart. According to Sergio DellaPergola's 2024 estimates, Argentina is home to approximately 173,000 Jews, making it the largest Jewish community in Latin America and the sixth largest in the world. [World Jewish Congress]. Buenos Aires concentrates the bulk of this population, heir to an Ashkenazi immigration to which were added, in the period preceding the First World War, Jews from the Levant. [World Jewish Congress].

This community has paid a heavy price to terrorism. The attack on the AMIA struck at the heart of Argentina and its Jewish community — the sixth largest in the world and the largest in Latin America. [American Jewish Committee]. The 1994 attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina remains an open wound. Yet, far from collapsing, the community has made resilience a collective virtue. Observers emphasize that it has never been so vibrant [American Jewish Committee]. Buenos Aires thus illustrates the paradox of contemporary Jewish vitality: a memory of violence inseparable from an affirmation of life.

At the end of this journey, an image emerges: that of a people at once marked by loss and inhabited by an astonishing capacity for renewal. The figures of demography speak of the scar — more than 60% of European Jewry annihilated in the middle of the 20th century [MDPI] — but they also speak of the patient reconstitution of a group of some 15.7 million people [DellaPergola]. Between the two great poles of Israel and the United States, the diasporas of France, Germany, and Argentina each bear witness to a distinct trajectory: Mediterranean and North African density in Paris, an improbable rebirth in Berlin, militant resilience in Buenos Aires.

The theme of rebirth is therefore not a rhetorical consolation. It describes a verifiable historical fact: the reinvention of a language in Jerusalem, the reconstruction of a community on the ruins of Berlin, creative persistence despite terror in Buenos Aires. Contemporary Jewish memory, in this sense, is not turned solely toward the graves: it is presence, debate, transmission, and future. To hold together mourning and vitality — such is perhaps the particular wisdom of the Jewish worlds of the 21st century.