Judaism is practiced worldwide, but the global Jewish population is unusually concentrated. Pew Research Center’s latest global religious landscape estimates for 2020 place about 46% of the world’s Jews in Israel and about 39% in the United States; together, these two countries contain roughly 85% of Jews counted by religion in Pew’s global dataset. Spiritual Culture uses a stated definition and reference year because Jewish population estimates vary depending on whether they measure religion, ancestry, culture, or family background.
Israel
Pew estimates about 6.78 million Jews in Israel in 2020 under its global religious-composition method, making Israel the only Jewish-majority country in the dataset.
United States
Pew’s global religion measure counted about 5.73 million U.S. Jews by religion in 2020. A broader Pew definition that includes some people who are Jewish by ancestry or culture produces a larger U.S. total.
France
France had the third-largest Jewish population in Pew’s global 2020 table, about 460,000.
Canada
Canada followed with roughly 350,000 Jews in the same dataset.
United Kingdom
Pew estimated about 300,000 Jews in the United Kingdom in 2020.
Argentina
Argentina remained Latin America’s largest Jewish population center, with roughly 170,000 in Pew’s table.
Russia and Germany
Pew estimated about 120,000 Jews in each country under its religious-affiliation measure.
Australia and Brazil
Australia and Brazil also maintain significant Jewish communities with long histories of migration, congregational life, schools, religious institutions, and cultural organizations.
Numbers depend on definition
Jewish identity can involve religion, peoplehood, ancestry, culture, law, and family. Demographers therefore distinguish a population identifying with Judaism as a religion from broader Jewish populations.
Diaspora is internally diverse
Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Indian, Central Asian, and other Jewish communities have distinct liturgies, languages, foodways, histories, and migration patterns.
Editorial context
The best current demographic summary uses a date and definition: in Pew’s 2020 global religious dataset, Israel and the United States contained about 85% of the world’s Jews counted by religious affiliation.
