History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Here we come to the second force pushing emancipated Jews to the left: demography. In the period 1800-80, roughly Disraeli’s lifetime, the Sephardi percentage of Jewry as a whole fell from 20 to 10 per cent. Most of them were concentrated in the Afro-Asian Mediterranean area, where standards of hygiene remained primitive throughout the nineteenth century. In Algiers, for instance, where Maurice Eisenbeth carried out a detailed analysis of the Jewish population, he found it rose from a maximum of 5,000 in the sixteenth century to a peak of 10,000-20,000 in about 1700, falling to 5,000 again by 1818.104 In Africa and Asia as a whole the number of Jews did rise, 1800-80, but only from 500,000 to 750,000. In Europe, during the same period, the total leapt from two million to seven million.