As Jews Depart, European Civilization Dies

From Investors Business Daily:

After years of hostility, both at the government and personal level, declining fertility rates and growing emigration, Jews now make up their smallest share of Europe's population in hundreds of years, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. 

This is of course tragic for Jewish families that have lived in Europe for generations, but it's especially bad for European culture and science, two areas where Jews have had an especially dominant role. 

As Ethan Epstein of the Weekly Standard wrote: "A Europe without Jews would be almost without precedent; the continent has played host to Jewish communities for millennia. It would also be an immeasurably poorer place, in myriad ways. 

We're talking about the culture that produced Kafka, Freud, and Stefan Zweig — in addition to the bagel." 

Epstein's remarks really understate the contributions to Europe by Jews. 

A list of important Jewish scientists, inventors, industrialists, intellectuals, musicians and artists over the last two centuries in Germany alone would run into the hundreds, if not thousands. 

Same is true of Eastern Europe, France, Britain and Italy, among other nations. So it's no mere demographic curiosity, but a full-blown tragedy. 

But what's behind the decline? Recent murders in Paris, violence against synagogues and ongoing attacks on Jews across the continent, often by radicalized Islamist thugs, have left Jewish citizens feeling vulnerable. 

Anecdotal reports of a flood of Jewish departures from Europe to Israel, Canada and the U.S. are hard to ignore. 

To be sure, Jews have been leaving Europe in droves for decades. Before the Holocaust, in 1939, some 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe. 

By 1991, there were still 2 million Jews there. Today, just 10% of Jews live in Europe — 1.4 million — and that number is shrinking fast. 

As a result, just 0.2% of Europe's population now is Jewish, a tiny remnant of a once-proud, extraordinarily influential European ethno-religious community. 

Calling the dominant culture of Europe "Judeo-Christian" is no exaggeration. Before the Holocaust, in 1939, nearly 60% of world Jewry lived in Europe. 

Today, it's just 10%. Soon it will be neither Jewish nor Christian, but rather something else entirely: secular, socialist, Islamic, materialist. 

And it will be culturally and intellectually poorer for it.