Each region is shaded by the share of the world's Jews living there at the chosen date, not by how Jewish the region was. Drag the slider or press play; the events row jumps to the turning points.
under 0.5%0.5–22–55–1010–2020–40over 40%
How to read this
The numbers are reconstructions, and the further back you go the wider the error bars. Before 500 BC they rest on archaeological survey estimates of the population of Israel and Judah, which are far below the biblical census figures; for the Roman period scholars disagree by a factor of two or more; for the Middle Ages the only broad source is Benjamin of Tudela's travel account of about 1170; real censuses begin in the eighteenth century. Regions are modern borders, so "Poland" in 1900 means the territory of Poland today, not the Russian province, and "Ukraine" in 1939 includes the Galician and Volhynian districts that were then in Poland.
The "Americas" and "Rest of world" rows in the panel are for Jews living beyond the map, and the map's colours are shares of the whole world, so as the United States fills up after 1880, Europe fades even where its numbers are still rising.
Sources
Sergio DellaPergola, Some Fundamentals of Jewish Demographic History (Hebrew University, 2001): world and regional estimates for 1170, 1300, 1490, 1700, 1825, 1880, 1939, 1948, 1995, and the Eastern European series 1300–1900.
Sergio DellaPergola, Notes toward a Demographic History of the Jews (Genealogy, 2023) and Daniel Staetsky's summary of the same series: peaks of about 4.5 million in the Hellenistic-Roman period, 1–1.5 million after the Roman wars, 2.5 million in 1800, 16.5 million in 1939, 11 million in 1945.
Magen Broshi and Israel Finkelstein, The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II (BASOR 287, 1992): about 400,000 people in the whole country in the eighth century BC, and much smaller figures for the tenth century and the Persian period.
Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), "Statistics": the country-by-country table for about 1900, plus the expulsion figures for England (1290), France (1306) and Spain (1492).
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia: Jewish population of Europe by country in 1933 and 1945, and losses by country.
American Jewish Year Book / Berman Jewish DataBank, World Jewish Population reports (DellaPergola), for 1950–2020.
Ancient sources as filtered through modern scholarship: Philo and Josephus on Egypt and Judea, Cassius Dio on the Bar Kokhba war, Benjamin of Tudela for the twelfth century.
The full table behind the map, in 50-year steps, is on the data page, with a CSV download.