Why Jews Are Fleeing the West

Jewish history has long been defined by migratory movements away from trouble and towards safer places. Over the past half millennia, the safest harbours for ‘the world’s foster children’, as David Mamet put it, have generally been English-speaking countries, first Britain, then especially the US, Canada and Australia.

This is increasingly no longer the case. The British Jewish community is being battered by a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agitation from both the left and segments of the UK’s much larger Muslim population. In Australia, Jewish childcare centres and an MP’s office have been attacked. Even the United States and Canada, where over 70 per cent of the Jewish diaspora resides, are showing signs of increased anti-Zionist and openly anti-Semitic sentiment. Indeed, in the US, anti-Semitic hate crimes now dwarf hate crimes against Muslims, blacks or Asians. No wonder many Jews are thinking of departing for safer pastures new.

The potential decline in the Jewish Anglosphere has been presaged by a more precipitous fall in Europe and throughout Asia. The Jewish population in Europe stood at 3.5million in 1950, after the Holocaust. Today it has fallen to well under 1.5million. France is home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, but it’s shrinking. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 Jews have left France, mostly for Israel. Even more shocking has been the virtual annihilation of Jews in Islamic countries – one million strong until the 1960s, there are fewer than 15,000 Jews living in these places today.

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