Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Spotify. Photo: Screenshot.

I am not a fan of podcasts, mainly because they can be very time consuming. But when a friend recommended one, I decided to have a look.

The podcast consisted of a long interview/discussion involving Joe Rogan and Gad Saad, a professor of Marketing at Concordia University in Montreal. Saad, a Canadian Jew from Lebanon, recently published a book, Suicidal Empathy, describing how too much empathy can lead to civilizational decline. He is also an outspoken supporter of Israel.

To me, the key point of interest in the podcast was Rogan’s response when Saad asked if knew how many Jews there were in the world. After musing about a total world population of about seven billion, Rogan’s initial guess was one billion Jews.

He then backed off and said he would be conservative, and guessed there were 500 million Jews in the world. A fact checker then displayed a slide with figures from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, showing that the world Jewish population is about 15.5 million — still below the pre-Holocaust number of somewhere between 16 and 17 million.

Rogan certainly isn’t the only one to overestimate Jewish population numbers, although his estimate may take the prize. Arno Rosenfeld reported the results of a recent survey in 2022, indicating that Americans think 30% of the country is Jewish, a sum 15 times the actual proportion of only 2 percent.

In fact, the American author and humorist Samuel Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, remarked on Jewish population numbers in an article he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 1899 titled “Concerning The Jews.”

The article was written in response to a letter he received from an American Jew, after Harper’s published an earlier article of his called “Stirring Times in Austria,” describing the events surrounding a parliamentary crisis in Vienna. The only thing all parties involved in the crisis could agree on was that the Jews were at fault, in spite of the fact that they were the only segment of Austro-Hungarian society that had nothing to do with it.

The American Jewish letter writer asks Twain to comment on the causes of antisemitism and whether anything can be done to correct it. Twain’s response, over 7,000 words long, consists largely of a tabulation of Jewish achievements, particularly in business (including comments on questionable Jewish business practices). He also lists contributions to literature, science, art, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning, pointing out that these are way out of proportion to the size of the Jewish population.

When it comes to the number of Jews in various parts of the world, Twain recalls an Encyclopedia Britannica entry. It must have been an older edition, for he mentions a US Jewish population of 250,000, a value true for 1880. By 1899, as a result of anti-Jewish violence (pogroms) in Eastern Europe, the Jewish population of the United States had increased to about one million.

In typical Twain tongue-in-cheek style, Twain explains that he wrote to the Britannica’s editor saying that he himself was personally acquainted with more Jews in the US, and the number 250,000 must be a misprint for 25,000,000.

Studies like the one described by Rosenfeld show that humans consistently overestimate the size of minorities. Why should Mark Twain, or Joe Rogan, be any different? However, such overestimates can contribute to a lack of sensitivity to the vulnerabilities experienced by minorities, such as the Jews.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.