A matter of scale
There are almost none of us.
Roughly fifteen and a half million Jews are alive today — about two people in every thousand on earth. Fewer than live in a single Chinese city most of the world has never heard of.
15.7m
Jews worldwide
DellaPergola's estimate for the start of 2024.
0.2%
Of the world's people
About two in every thousand.
1939
Still below that year
Around 16.6 million then; the number has not recovered.
That last figure is the one that stops people. Eighty-odd years after the Holocaust, there are still fewer Jews in the world than there were before it. Almost every other population on earth has doubled or trebled in that time.
Percentages are hard to feel, though. So the point of this page is comparison: to set the whole Jewish world beside a single city, or a mid-sized European country, and let the sizes do the arguing.
Every Jew alive, next to …
Shenzhen, China
A city that barely existed in 1980. Now larger than world Jewry.
~17.5 million
Kinshasa, DR Congo
One city on one river, and it outnumbers every Jew alive.
~17 million
The Netherlands
A country you could drive across in an afternoon.
~18 million
Romania
Comfortably more people than the entire Jewish world.
~19 million
And yet
Here is the other half of the arithmetic. Two tenths of one percent of the world's people have been awarded a fifth of its Nobel Prizes.
Share of the world's people
0.2%
About two Jews in every thousand people alive.
Share of Nobel laureates
22%
220 of the 965 individuals awarded a Nobel Prize between 1901 and 2025.
Both bars are drawn to the same scale. The first one is not a rendering error — it is roughly a hundred and ten times smaller than the second.
By field
Share of each prize's laureates, and the number of them.
| Prize | Share of laureates | Number of laureates |
|---|---|---|
| Economic Sciences | 40% | 40 |
| Physiology or Medicine | 26% | 61 |
| Physics | 24% | 56 |
| Chemistry | 19% | 37 |
| Literature | 14% | 17 |
| Peace | 8% | 9 |
The laureate count includes people who were Jewish or had at least one Jewish parent — a deliberately broad definition, and the one the source uses. Several of those counted were secular, and some were raised in no tradition at all. Read it as a fact about a population, not about a faith.
Sources
- Sergio DellaPergola, World Jewish Population 2024
- List of Jewish Nobel laureates (1901–2025)
- Pew Research Center, Jewish population change (2025)
City and country figures are approximate and pending a citation pass.