Quote:
Originally Posted by Docere
As a general rule, in the Northeast and Midwest (as well as Toronto and Montreal in Canada), there were large Jewish immigrant populations a century ago.
In the South and West - DC, Florida, California etc. - Jewish populations are not usually the product of direct immigration, and were greatly outnumbered by domestic migration. Hence only a small minority of Jews in L.A., say, can trace their roots to Boyle Heights, for example.
In Britain, meanwhile, the Jewish population is much more concentrated in London nowadays than it was in the early 20th century. Manchester, Leeds and to some extent Glasgow had good sized Jewish populations.
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Are there many places in the US at all (be they in the south, the west or other newer locale), that have a new enough Jewish community that it was the result of direct immigration after the Ellis Island period and not domestic movement from the east coast (or midwest)?
The 19th century and early 20th century emigration wave was probably so much larger than the post-war or Soviet Union emigration wave, that it's probably unlikely that there's many cities or towns whose Jewish community is completely numerically dominated by post-war or Soviet Union immigrants without having the earlier Jewish population having a presence there. Probably the odds are more likely in Canada but still I think even still, most Canadian cities had far more earlier 20th century than mid- to late 20th century Jewish immigration.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jonesy55
I'm not sure why people are that surprised at cities having low Jewish populations, there are only 14 million Jewish people in the whole world, less than 0.2% of the global population.
Compare that with 2.5 billion Christians, 1.5 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus, 0.5 billion Buddhists and you can see it's a tiny religion. There are even twice as many Sikhs as Jews in the world.
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But Jewish communities have been a part of the West for generations in a way that most Hindus or Buddhists, and to a lesser extent Muslims (who still had more interaction with the European/Western world of course) haven't. For many generations, the Jewish religion was the second religion that Christian Americans and Europeans would have familiarity with or personal contact with, not these other religions.
People seem to love to compare Asian and Jewish populations in the west but I think it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
First, Jewish populations are mostly not from new immigrants (though of course new immigration does happen as discussed in this thread with say European Jews moving to the US, or Israelis moving to the US and vice versa), but most Hindu and Buddhist populations have the bulk of their population from the post 1960s and 1970s wave of immigration in most western countries (Canada, the mainland US, Europe, Australia, etc.). Earlier waves of these groups existed of course in the 19th century (there are Sikh temples dating back over a century in the north American west) but were small compared to later. I'm not counting places like Hawaii or Suriname or Guyana that had lots of Asian Buddhist/Hindu emigration much earlier in colonial times, though technically they're in the "western world" too in the sense of being in the Western Hemisphere and products of western/European colonization.
Secondly, the Jewish diaspora was traditionally the archetype of the term diaspora (which only later became popularized for other diasporas like the Armenian, Irish, Chinese, African, etc.).
Most Jews are diasporic, most Hindus/Buddhists are not.
The Chinese diaspora and Indian diaspora might look huge in absolute number but in percentage terms, the diaspora, even if it numbers in the millions (or even tens of millions depending on how you count), it still small compared to the population of India or China, of which the diaspora's population then pales in comparison, not like the Jewish case, where the millions of US plus other western countries' Jewish populations outnumber Israel's, and of course for previous generations, the population was pretty much only diasporic.
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