438 A History of Judaism
problems, since intermarriage with gentiles and assimilation into the
host culture raises acute questions as to who is a Jew. For the offspring
of mixed marriages, it has become a matter of choice in many societies,
and most notably in the United States, whether to describe themselves
as Jewish. Many Jews retain a strong cultural affiliation to their heritage
without belonging to any synagogue or other religious community,
although they may find new forms of engagement in secular organiz-
ations. Some may choose to identify as Jewish in one context (perhaps
when subjected to some form of antisemitism) but not in another, when
alignment with the mainstream culture may be more attractive. Thus
estimates of the total Jewish population in the world today vary between
twelve and eighteen million, depending on the definition used. Of these,
some 5,700,000 are from Israel and 5,275,000 from the United States;
compared to these huge centres of Jewish life, the 483,000 Jews in the
next most populated country, France, are much less significant. On the
other hand, even the very small Jewish communities in Azerbaijan, Bela-
rus, Iran and Turkey may preserve some distinctive forms of Judaism, as
do the 1,818 Jews in Tunisia, the 1,500 Jews in China and 15,000 or so
Jews in India.^2
These demographic shifts in Jewish population over the past two cen-
turies have taken place against a backdrop of the transformation of the
societies in which Jews have found themselves. Some Jews in the settled
communities of Germany, Holland, France and England in the eighteenth
century were able to participate in the Age of Enlightenment, which
placed faith in the power of human reason alone to reform society and
advance knowledge of the world and its purpose – indeed Baruch Spinoza
(see Chapter 14) may be seen as one of the philosophers whose question-
ing of received truths began the Enlightenment, which culminated in the
political ideals of the French Revolution and the United States Bill of
Rights in the late 1780s. Jews were affected also by the concomitant shift
towards secularism, and scepticism about the role to be played by religion
in society, as manifest in the breaking of the link between Church and
state in some parts of Europe and (at least in theory) in the United States
from its foundation. So, too, Jews were affected by the growth of Euro-
pean nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In more
recent times, Jews in Europe and Israel and the United States have been
learning how to adapt to newer cultural trends, such as gender issues, a
greatly increased concern for animal welfare and ecology, and a tendency
to promote multiculturalism as a good in itself.