reply to post by AnAbsoluteCreation
From 1882 to 1914 (32 years) Jewish population grew by 6 million.
From 1945 to 2012 (67 years) Jewish population grew by 2.5 million
......
Either Jewish population growth is insanely inconsistent for no obvious reason, or the numbers are fabricated.
I am sorry, but can you show me any nation with such a thing as a consistent growth? Can you bring me just 1 example of this?
Not to mention that Jewish demographics is not like a country demographics. Jew is a person whose mother is a Jew or who converted to Judaism.
Australian is a person of any ethnic background and of any religion who has Australian citizenship. On the other hand Jew with Australian citizenship
and Jew with Israeli one will both be counted in Jewish demographics despite both living in different conditions on different continents.
See, a bit complex.
So what are the possible reasons of changes in Jewish demographics as far as i can see?
a) Births vs deaths variations.
b) Negative assimilation.
c) Positive assimilation (People converting to Judaism).
d) Census error.
e)Wrong estimations data.
f) Fabrications.
Lets check them all,shall we?
a) Birth vs death ratio is not the same. There were clearly more births but also more deaths so i cannot show anything conclusive. I assume that
average faimly was noticably larger an number of deaths was larger then today but still less a factor. Could be wrong,have no data.
b) This is the part that is very important for the issue. In US 54% of Jews marry non-Jews. Lets assume half are man and half are women. So even if
the census will be able to count all kids of Jewish mother as Jews (and this is not a fact because some kids will not be connected to Judaism in any
way) ,you can cut growth rate automatically by 26%. Kids of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers are not Jews. As opposed to kids of Australian and
Swiss who can be Australian or Swiss or both.
Religious convertions from Judaism exist but their are very small so not a factor. I think that those are the reasons for negative assimilation ,maybe
missed something though?
Overall negative assimilation noticably influences the growth.
And in early 1900s it would be less of the factor because both Jews and non-Jews were less prone to marriage outside of community.
c) Religious convertions to Judaism exist but their are also small. No other way of becoming a Jew,so it is irrelevant. Was even less important in
1900s
d) Census error always exists, but it is the same for all the censuses worldwide. I do not think that it is a major factor.
e) Estimations are applied when no real data is known. It has real option of error (like 3% growth calculations
in your post
) but error can go both ways, increasing or decreasing the numbers.
f) Fabrications do happen - look at Stalin's first population census that got its composers killed and a new one was created to hide the dramatic
decline in population. However it is not hard to spot if we deal with large number of data sources. Lots of countries where Jews lived,lots of
censuses,lots of archives. It will be hard to change numbers in all the places without something surfacing somewhere or without someone taking
notice.
Now to the interesting details of your post - 3% growth worldwide(? but lets assume that this is true) does not mean 3% growth everywhere or
everytime. Not to mention that your numbers for 3% growth for 70 years are sompletely wrong, you forgot to multiply the grown population that was
added.
Say, population was 10000000, growth rate 3% ,how many will be after 70 years.
It is 10000000*(1.03)^70
Its going to be 79 million. Hope that you see how rediculous 3% assumption is.
If you are really interested in the subject studying statistics and/or population studies and then giving us a concrete and non-fabricated answer
will be great.