Jews and Muslims “Downunder”: Emerging Dialogue and Challenges · 99Demographic Profiles of the Two Communities
The migration patterns of Jews and Muslims to Australia have been very
different. Jews have been present from the start of European settlement,
as there were over a dozen Jewish convicts who arrived with the British
First Fleet in 1788. During the nineteenth century the Jewish population
increased slowly. Jews escaping the failures of the 1848 revolutions in
Central Europe and Tsarist persecution from 1881 to 1920 preferred des-
tinations such as the “goldene medina” in the United States. As a result, by
1933 there were only 23,000 Jews in Australia. The major influx of Jews
occurred immediately before and after World War II with around 9,000
Jewish refugees from Nazism arriving in 1938–39 and 27,000 survivors
between 1945 and 1961. Jewish migration to Australia then leveled off.
While there has been further immigration from South Africa, Russia, and
Israel, Jews in Australia have never accounted for more than 0.5 percent
of the overall population.
In contrast, until 1970 the number of Muslims in Australia remained
tiny. In the nineteenth century, some Muslim Afghan camel drivers ar-
rived to work in the desert areas.^5 From 1901, under the “White Austra-
lia” policy, non-Christian Middle Eastern immigrants were considered
undesirable. After December 1972, people were allowed to migrate from
Asia and the Pacific regions. At first most Muslim immigrants came from
Malaysia and Indonesia, then Pakistan and India, and more recently from
Turkey, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. In all, Muslims have mi-
grated to Australia from 120 countries. Lebanese Christians started to
migrate to Australia in the nineteenth century, but the arrival of Lebanese
Muslims is a more recent phenomenon, and today they form the largest
ethnic group, constituting 10 percent of Australian Muslims, followed
by the Turkish Muslims, constituting around 8 percent. Thus the Muslim
community in Australia is multiethnic with the different ethnic groups
forming their own communities and mosques.^6
While the Jewish community has continued to constitute approxi-
mately 0.5 percent of the total Australian population, the Muslim com-
munity has grown rapidly since 1971, when it numbered only 20,000,
constituting 0.2 percent of the population. A quarter of a century later,
in 1996, Muslims had increased tenfold to 200,000, that is, 1.1 percent of
the population, and by the 2006 Australian census they had increased to
340,000, that is, 1.6 percent of the population. In comparison, the Jewish