In April 2022, the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics reported that at the end of 2020 — 75 years after the end of World War II — the world Jewish population was 15.2 million, still less than the estimated 16.6 million in 1939 .

While the report received widespread attention in the Jewish media, no doubt because of the linkage to the Holocaust, the wider linkage between Jewish numbers and antisemitism was not addressed.

With the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE, the Christian attitude towards Jews was that “they should survive, but not thrive”; their continued dispersal and fragile existence would provide evidence of Christian triumphalism and the validity of replacement theology. But how do you differentiate between surviving and thriving, and how is that connected to numbers?

When it comes to numbers, the high point for Jews, relatively speaking, was probably the first century CE, when the Jews of Judea, plus those in cities such as Alexandria and elsewhere, represented roughly 10 percent of the Roman Empire.

As a result of failed revolts against the Roman and Byzantine Empires, periodic fundamentalist-inspired massacres of Jews by Christians and Muslims, as well as disease and natural disasters, it was largely downhill from there.

Accurate population figures are not available for much of Jewish history. However, the Spanish Jew, Benjamin of Tudela (1130-1173), visited many Jewish communities in Europe, Asia, and Africa during his extensive travels. By extrapolating from Benjamin’s numerical data, the demographer Sergio Della Pergola arrived at a world figure of 1.2 million Jews for the year 1170, the majority of whom lived in North Africa and the Near East.

By the early 1800s, there were reportedly 2-2.5 million Jews in the world, roughly evenly divided between European Jews (mostly Ashkenazi), and those of Spanish (Sephardi) and Middle Eastern (Mizrachi) origins. While the Ashkenazim were originally concentrated in Western and Central Europe, many migrated to Eastern Europe (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) as a consequence of pogroms and expulsions experienced during the late Middle Ages.

During the 19th century, the Ashkenazi population of Central and Eastern Europe soared, due to very high fertility numbers and improved living conditions. By the start of the 20th century, there were between 10 and 11 million Jews in the world, and a vast majority of them lived in Eastern Europe, primarily Russia (today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania).

But the rise of European nationalism in the 19th century was accompanied by increasing intolerance of the growing Jewish minority. By the outbreak of World War II, Jews constituted roughly 10 percent of the population of Poland, and about five percent in Ukraine. In some of the larger urban centers such as Warsaw, Lodz, Lviv, and Odessa, the Jewish component was 30 percent, or more.

Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an influential official in the Russian government during the late 1880s, has been credited with saying about the Jews that “one third will die out, one third will leave the country and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population.”

The use of chemical terms was common in articulating the “Jewish Problem.” In her book “Free as a Jew” (2021, page 344), Ruth Wisse mentions that the Polish writer Aleksander Świętochowski “compared the irritant Jews with the salt in Polish water, arguing that too much salt could no longer be dissolved and would have to be expelled.”

The establishment of the State of Israel was a better solution to the problem of what to do with an unwanted minority. The Israeli Bureau of Statistics report also notes that more than 45 percent of the world’s Jews, seven million, now live in Israel — a percentage that will increase as a result of aliyah and high birth rates.

The Holocaust was not an aberration, but the result of a deep-seated global unwillingness to tolerate a thriving Jewish minority in its midst. Today, can the world tolerate a thriving Jewish state in its midst?

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of Waterloo.

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