Jews still wandering

Editorial

One in four Jews resides permanently in a country other than their place of birth. This 25 percent statistic is much larger than that of other faith communities, according to Faith on the Move, a study released last week by the Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion and Public Life. Just five percent of Christians and four percent of Muslims are international migrants (though this translates into many more people, given the exponentially larger populations of these groups).

Of the 3.6 million Jewish migrants by the Pew report’s calculation, more than half – 56 percent – have left Europe and another 24 percent left North Africa and the Middle East. The vast number, 2.76 million, went to Israel, the world’s highest-proportion immigrant-absorbing nation. The United States is home to 370,000 foreign-born Jews, Canada 140,000 and Australia 70,000.

Interpreting this report requires caution. It reflects people living today, regardless of when they migrated. The Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel account for most of the Jewish migration – those who fortunately fled Europe before and those who survived to start new lives away from the bloody continent. Then there was the almost total evacuation of Jewish communities from Morocco, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, most resettling to Israel, after successive Arab-Israeli wars made “Jew” and “Zionist” equal and equally dangerous even in countries where Jews had lived for millennia.

The end of the Soviet Union freed Jewish people (and others) to leave the Eastern Bloc, which Jews did in waves, bringing a million newcomers to Israel and, as can be seen in New York, Toronto and Vancouver, changing the face and sound of our own Jewish communities.

But, although the Pew report calculates migrants over more than a generation, a new generation of Jews is migrating today. It must be noted that migrating Jews do so on a spectrum ranging from necessity to comfortable choice. While Jews in France and Norway may not be literally fleeing, many are on the move because of notable and worrying trends toward anti-Jewish prejudice and violence, perpetrated, it must also be noted, largely by immigrants from countries where antisemitism is a consensus position. Then there are the Jews of South Africa, leaving because of surging violence not specifically aimed at Jews, and those from Argentina, seeking a better life away from a collapsed economy. There are also Jews moving between Canada, the United States, Israel and Europe, simply because they can and want to, for reasons of career, family or the simple adventure of change.

And, frankly, while Jews may be proportionately more mobile, our co-religionists probably have it better, in many cases far better, than, for example, the Christians of Iraq, Nigeria, Egypt and elsewhere, not to mention the many other groups being persecuted around the world.

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in a Wall Street Journal piece last week that Christian populations throughout the Middle East have fallen to five percent of the total population, down from 20 percent a century ago, while the number of Christians in Israel since 1948 has grown tenfold.

Among the sad footnotes to these statistics is the loss that each of these moves means to distinctive indigenous cultures. In the Jewish context, it is, of course, cause for celebration that there is a homeland where the door is always open to Jews who seek refuge. But, while Israeli culture is not homogeneous, to put it mildly, the number of unique Jewish communities that have disappeared throughout the world in the past century is a tragic and irreplaceable loss to Jews collectively – and, however unappreciated, to the countries that have lost their Jewish communities.

There is, of course, the romantic stereotype of the Jewish immigrant, seeing (if not comprehending) Emma Lazarus’ words on the base of the Statue of Liberty for the first time and, in the movies, striving valiantly and ultimately succeeding in creating second-generation achievers. But that image reflects a reality from the 1880s until the gates were shut in the 1920s. The contemporary Jewish migrants reflected in the Pew study had a far different and often more tragic story of exodus.

The silver lining, of course, is Israel. But even today – this very week – Jews are on the move, fleeing the rockets from Gaza, taking refuge from their imperiled homes in Sderot and Ashdod to centres just out of rocket range. Even as the dream of self-determination is fulfilled, Jews wander still.

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