16
From the Enlightenment to
the State of IsraelThe standard image of a religious Jew remains for many in the modern
world a bearded man in a long black frock coat and wide- brimmed hat,
the respectable dress of the bourgeois in Poland, Lithuania and Hun-
gary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nor would that image
be wholly wrong since, as we shall see in Chapter 19, a section of the
Jewish people has elected to attempt preservation of the practices and
religious outlook of that period as their way to keep the Torah of Moses.
But all Jews, including these preservationists, have experienced extraor-
dinary changes over the two and a half centuries since 1750, and many
have adapted their Judaism to reflect these changed circumstances,
albeit in different ways.
The main centres of Jewish population in the twenty- first century are
the State of Israel and North America (the United States and Canada),
with smaller but still sizeable communities in Central and South America
(Mexico, Argentina and Brazil), in Australia and South Africa, and in
both eastern Europe (especially Russia and Ukraine) and western Europe
(especially the United Kingdom, France and, increasingly, Germany).
Only small groups of Jews are now to be found in most of central Europe
(although there is a substantial community in Hungary), and in the Arab
countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and the pockets to be
found still in Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Morocco are very isolated. Jews
have undergone greater demographic shifts over this period than at any
time in their history, for reasons both sociological and political.
The total number of Jews in the world increased greatly in the nine-
teenth century concurrently with a general population explosion within
Europe. In 1800, the eastern European Jewish population was by far the
largest. There were some 750,000 Jews in Russia, with a further 450,000
in the parts of Poland ruled by Austria and Prussia. There were some
sizeable communities in the main Sephardi centres in North Africa and
the Ottoman empire. Only 3,000 or so Jews lived in North America,