Life expectancy across Europe is 81 years. An 81-year-old European dying today would have been born on the day Auschwitz was liberated. It has taken one average European lifetime for us to forget the lessons of the Shoah.
How many Jews do you think there are in the world? Out of 8.1 billion people alive today, we are just 0.194 per cent of the world’s population. There are only around 15.7 million of us.
The worldwide Jewish population has not yet fully recovered to its pre-Holocaust numbers. From 16.6 million before the war, only 11 million remained after. It was a genocide.
In the 81 years since then, we have still not reached the population levels of 1939. We have not recovered from our last major slaughter, and once again we are asking a question no people should have to ask repeatedly: where in the world is safe for us to live peaceful, ethical, cultural and spiritual lives?
Some 7.3 million of the world’s Jews live in Israel. That is 46.5 per cent of us. Outside Israel, only 0.104 per cent of the world’s population is Jewish. Statistically, we barely register. Yet anti-Semitic offences account for 21 per cent of all recorded religious hate crimes in England and Wales. We do not deserve this. As a religion, an ethnicity, a people, our contribution to society is net positive.
The Jewish tradition is widely credited with establishing the enduring ethical form of monotheism that became the foundation for both Christianity and Islam. Our Bible is the most influential book on the planet. The covenant with the Hebrew people established, permanently, the idea of a single, universal, all-powerful God in world history.
Around 20 per cent of all Nobel laureates have been Jewish. In the United States, where Jews make up roughly 2 per cent of the population, we account for about 40 per cent of Nobel Prizes awarded in science and health. Jewish innovators have developed key medical breakthroughs, including the polio vaccine through Jonas Salk, crucial contributions to the discovery of DNA structure through Rosalind Franklin, and the hepatitis B vaccine, collectively saving millions of lives. You and your family may well be alive today thanks to Jews.
Approximately 50 per cent of Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction have been awarded to Jewish individuals.
Consider how much more the Jews might have given to humanity had six million not been murdered, and how much more might be given still if millions of people today were not occupied with imagining how to kill millions more of us. Everywhere on this planet where Jews thrive, humanity thrives. Everywhere Jewish life is extinguished ends in decline or tyranny
We pose no threat to your faith. Ours is a non-coercive, non-missionary system. We do not want you to convert; Judaism actively discourages it. Yet we are not ethnically exclusive. Like Ruth the Moabite in the Bible, Judaism has always recognised and welcomed sincere converts who fully enter the covenant and the Jewish people.
We do not seek to impose laws governing how non-Jews must live, only laws that regulate our own daily conduct, ethics and responsibilities. We have seven suggested universal ethical principles, the Noahide laws, and we do not force them on anyone.
Jews have no grand plan of territorial expansion or colonialism. Israel, the Jewish state, represents 0.015 per cent of the world’s land mass. Since its re-establishment in 1948 and its subsequent defensive wars, Israel has officially relinquished approximately 90.5 per cent of the territory it once controlled at its maximum extent. It did so in pursuit of peace.
Do not remember the Holocaust only for us. Remember it for yourself
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. The number of secondary schools in the UK marking it has fallen from over 2,000 in 2023 to 854 in 2025, a reduction of approximately 57.3 per cent. This followed the genocidal invasion of Israel in 2023 by a group whose own codified charter calls for Jewish annihilation, when 1,200 people were murdered.
Numerically, we are little more than a rounding error. Most people alive today have never met a Jew. Many love us. Many hate us. Many remain indifferent to our existence.
Do not remember the Holocaust only for us. Remember it for yourself.
Let us live our ordinary lives: to act ethically, to contribute, to create, to elevate the societies we inhabit. We ask only for protection from hatred, persecution, slaughter and attack.
And so the question remains. A people less than two-tenths of one per cent of humanity. A population still unrecovered from its last attempted eradication. A community that produces disproportionate benefit, seeks no converts, claims almost no land, threatens no faith and barely registers in global demographics. And yet again, targeted, obsessively, violently.
What are the chances? You do the maths.
