r/dataisbeautiful • u/Ok_Zookeepergame768 • 15d ago
OC Jewish population of Poland, c. 1764–2024 [OC]
Poland was home to roughly 3.3 million Jews before WWII, the product of centuries of communities, families, and cultural growth. Within six years, nearly 90% had been murdered. Seeing that loss as a single break in a 260-year demographic trend puts the scale of the Holocaust into a perspective that numbers alone rarely convey.
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u/ManWithASquareHead 15d ago
From the extermination of Poles(Jewish and non Jewish), it wasn't until the 70s until the population recovered to prewar levels
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u/Futonchan-Manchao 15d ago
In addition to the Holocaust, a large-scale anti-Semitic campaign occurred in 1968 during the People's Republic era, leading to population exodus. This dealt a fatal blow to the Polish Jewish community.
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u/uti24 15d ago
Thousands of Jews were forced to leave communist Poland because of "anti-Zionist" campaigns during the 1968 Polish political crisis.
I am curious of where they moved since comminist block was not exactly open for leaving.
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u/Jazzlike-Equipment45 15d ago
Where they could my Grand-Aunt took multiple places to end in the U.S with the rest of my family.
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u/t0t0zenerd 15d ago
"Release" of Jews for Aliyah (emigration to Israel) was one of the pawns the Soviets used in negotiations with the West, so if the US compromised on one issue they'd make emigration a bit more easy, if tensions rose they'd make it harder, and so on.
Some countries had a more openly transactional policy. Romania for instance just asked Israel for a given sum of money per released Jew.
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u/FakeEgo01 15d ago
I guess also emigration of the few remaining after the war towards israel and us.
BTW, 10k seems really low
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u/MiedzianyPL 15d ago
Unfortunately it wasn't that peaceful. Even after the war Jews were still targeted in Poland, and numerous hate crimes, such as the infamous 1946 Kielce pogrom drove the remaining population out.
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u/potzko2552 15d ago
missing an element there, perhaps around 1966-68 or so.
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u/grafknives 15d ago
No, although 1968 was significant on the cultural and political level, it was just a part of migration that was happening all the time.
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u/stoneworther 15d ago
In Eastern Europe the pogroms didn't really stop after WW2 and the holocaust. Most Jews that could quickly vacated.
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u/Hacjul 15d ago
Pogroms were a thing mostly in Russia, and Poland was object to them due to russian partition, post-war jews departed to israel and US due to anti-european sentiment as a whole, and mostly as an opportunity for better life, as these places were in ruin. Interestingly, even after that, soviet union still had over 1 million jews that emigrated after its fall.
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u/ThrowawayAICS 15d ago
>post-war jews departed to israel and US due to anti-european sentiment as a whole
This is incorrect.
Most jews in eastern europe tried to go home, but found that they had no home to go to. It wasn't unusual for them to go back to find someone else in their home, using their furniture, even wearing their clothes. Neighbours and other locals just took the opportunity to take their things and they had no recourse as the local government would never side with a jew no matter how correct it was, often it WAS the local government that had stolen their things in the first place.
And often their families were lost. All were presumed dead and even if they weren't there was no way to find and contact them again.
They left for the US and Israel primarily because they no longer had anything and the places they had lived were actively hostile to them. The US and Israel were the two places it was possible to go where
Worth noting the thievery was not isolated to eastern europe.
Norway for example took over all the property and money that had been taken from jews by the nazis and put it into the war reparations fund, which gave property and money to those who claimed to have been harmed by the war (mostly the friends and family of members of government).
Jews were not eligible for reparations.
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u/krautbaguette 15d ago
There were post-war pogroms against Jews in Poland that had nothing to do with Russia, look it up
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u/Rude_Engineering_629 15d ago
These numbers aren’t completely accurate it’s not accounting for the Jews that where forced to remain in the death camps after ww2 because when they tried to return to their homes they where murdered.
That lasted until 1948, and no they where not allowed to migrate to the US, Uk, or France either
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u/Thelancer112 15d ago
Probably ppl stopped identifying as well...blend in where they could...
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u/Juract 15d ago
It is actually remembered in the speech the SS commander says to his troop before the liquidation of the ghetto in the Schindler list movie.
In 14th century, as entire western Europe persecuted the jews under the false accusation to be responsible for the plague, king Camisir III of Poland, who ruled between 1333 and 1370, welcomed them.
He also fortified the Kingston, unified the law, help the peasants again medieval lords, founded of the first university. He is the only king of Poland to be called the great.
Old saying is that he hinereted a kingdom of wood and left a kingdom of stones.
That's why the jewish population of Poland keeps climing from the 14th century and why Poland is, at the start of WWII, the most jewish country in Europe with jews representing 10 % of the total population.
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u/ApexAurajin 15d ago edited 15d ago
This comments section is very messed up. The whataboutism, one-upmanship and attempts at political point scoring are pretty disgusting.
Edit - Thank you for the examples.
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u/HalfHumanHalfFork 15d ago
The same kind of anti Jewish brainwashing that happened in the 1920s Germany is happening now just in larger scale, so yeah those topics do come up
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u/Doubleknot22 15d ago
Til there are 4 times as many Jews living in Berlin today than in all of Poland.
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u/azhder 15d ago
What about that dip after 1946?
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u/qndry 15d ago
Emigration to Israel. Eastern Europe wasn't that welcoming to jews even after the holocaust.
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u/Why_No_Doughnuts 15d ago
A lot of survivors were met with hostility when they went home. The biggest pogrom was the Kielce pogrom in 1946, but it happened throughout Poland. This is why when they passed legislation in Poland making it illegal to say Jews were persecuted by the Poles was met with such anger and feelings of betrayal.
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u/ThrowawayAICS 15d ago
the east gets a lot of focus but a lot of the west and north was really no better.
Jews often got hit with fines for not having paid taxes (on account of having been in a concentration camp).
Funds and property stolen from jews by the nazis were taken by the governments who then handed it out to "the right people" (meaning not jews).
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u/stefan92293 15d ago
Yes, the culture doesn't change just because the war is over - it's not like switching off a light. And I imagine it was like this all over Europe (can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like in Germany - brainwashing is difficult to undo).
All in all, I can understand why it would be politically desirable to create a Jewish homeland (and the Levant wasn't the only option - I recall reading about Madagascar and Australia being floated as possibilities).
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u/AndromedaHereWeGo 15d ago
Immigration to Israel. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah#Historic_data
1948-1951: 106,414
1952-1960: 39,618
1961-1971: 14,706
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u/Berly653 15d ago
The Polish started killing the survivors (1944-1947)
Kielce Pogrom being the most deadly single one I believe in 1946 after which there was a surge of emigration
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u/LeMe-Two 15d ago
The bump is less about returning but them coming out of hiding. Tens of thousands were sheltered out of official data, given false identities or families by the Underground State
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u/TomTomXD1234 15d ago
Creation of israel
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u/ennuitabix 15d ago
And more pogroms in Poland in the 60s. That will also do it.
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u/Deep_Head4645 15d ago
Massive Jewish national consciousness + safety concerns (obviously.) led them to mass migrate to Israel
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u/Remarkable-Oven-2938 15d ago
Because while they might be Jews, they're also Polish - so a history of their persecution is a history of the persecution of (some) Polish people
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u/newgrounds 15d ago
What does that mean
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u/makingthematrix 15d ago
Jews lived in Poland since Middle Ages. Their culture was an integral part of the Polish culture. The Holocaust was like an amputation of an important part of the body. We still feel pain where it used to be.
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u/deadly_fungi 15d ago
how do you square this with how jews were and are treated in poland post holocaust?
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u/cookiesnooper 15d ago
It means that people more often than not say " that many Poles and that many Jews" when the reality is those Jews were Poles. Like for example; when talking about victims of WWII.
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u/crowieforlife 15d ago
Except Jews were brought from all over Europe to be killed in Auchwitz. No one cared which ones were Polish, that didn'tplay a role in their fate.
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u/bitplenty 15d ago
Yeah, but those stats aren't about people brought from all over Europe, but about Polish Jews, so your point is irrelevant
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u/Amfibiannnnnn 15d ago
The Nazis didn't care where the gay folk were from either, doesn't mean they weren't polish or German or French or whatever else
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u/ennuitabix 15d ago
It means a country shouldnt separate themselves from their history.
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u/Buba_Fatt 15d ago
Or on the other hand, WW2 shouldn't be considered as horrific event where only Jews suffered but Poland as a whole because they were polish citizens. Around 2 millions of polish non-jewish people also died.
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u/bitplenty 15d ago
2M is a number of civilians killed by Germans, total human cost of WW2 is closer to 3M of Polish people (excluding Jews).
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u/Lwii2boo 15d ago
Have you heard about WWII ? is this a real question ? I am not even jew or from Poland, don't be a dick
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u/hedonistisch 15d ago
There is a masterpiecie of a book in polish about consequences of that chart
"Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej" by Andrzej Leder.
Oh yeah and there is translation: "Sleepwalking the Revolution. An Exercise in Historical Logic" by Andrzej Leder
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u/Sofia_9356 15d ago
Read a story that a polish person finally clicked why their grandma kept candles under the floorboards.
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u/Knick_Noled 15d ago
This is what genocide looks like
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u/phaesios 15d ago
This is what ONE case of genocide looks like.
In Bosnia during the Yugoslav war there was another recognized genocide where "only" 8000 bosniaks were murdered.
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u/HumpyTheClown 15d ago
The Holocaust is the largest genocide in history.
All genocides are horrid, but it’s the example most widely recognized.
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u/TotallyObviousBot 15d ago
The Holocaust isn't even the largest genocide that happened during WW2, let alone all of history. Remember, the definition of genocide doesn't even require people to die.
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u/phaesios 15d ago
I see your name but still ask: What was a larger genocide during WW2?
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u/TotallyObviousBot 15d ago
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u/phaesios 15d ago
Oooooh right, totally forgot about that in the context. Shows you how western centric ones mind can be. Thanks.
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u/Wobbelblob 15d ago
The Holocaust is usually mentioned not just because it was so large, but because it was so industrialized. A genocide through war is one thing. Building large scale infrastructure to maximise the murder per hour on a nation wide level is a whole other thing.
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u/HalfHumanHalfFork 15d ago
We need a new word to describe what genocide used to mean, since the word has lost all meaning
Sadly we will need a new word once Israel is in a war again
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u/Petersaber 15d ago
That word already exists, "Holocaust". Just because other genocides aren't anywhere near as bad as one of the worst evils in human history doesn't mean they aren't happening.
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u/Aquatic6Trident 15d ago
No it hasn't. Genocide has a very clear definition along which countless determinations have been made.
Israel comitted genocide in gaza. They may not have killed as many people as other genocides, but it's still genocide.
Genocide isn't always about killing either.
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u/Kaiisim 15d ago
Oh so there wasn't a genocide in Italy?
It was "only" 20% of the Jews there so I guess that doesn't count?
And that means you believe that when the Nazis were putting yellow stars on Jews and putting them in ghettos - you would have said nope, no genocide. It's only genocide if its 90% of the population.
Or maybe genocide is about the attempt not the result.
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u/impassity 15d ago
The data is about Poland not any other countries. Jews were genocides everywhere. He is just saying that because people call Gaza a genocide when the population grows
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u/AlecTheBunny 15d ago
This isn't beautiful data
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u/INeedChocolateMilk 15d ago
This subreddit is turning into more and more of a mouthpiece for people who need graphs to convince people of their political opinions and it's telling. This comment isn't a dig at this post specifically but more a wider phenomenon I've noticed on this sub.
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u/fitandhealthyguy OC: 2 15d ago
You haven’t noticed the blatant karma farming that has gone on here for years?
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u/saltyAdvert45 15d ago
Ye, it's just a graph. But every sub is already /whoahhowfukinginterestingpeopleareawesome
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u/vanilla_muffin 15d ago
The number of accounts whose ages can be measured in days here is incredible…
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u/clovis_227 15d ago
"You have been liberated by the Soviet Army!"
"Have you been in Poland?"
"I just came from Poland"
"Are there any Jews left?"
"..."
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u/Damnskipp 15d ago
My favorite game to play with people is "Guess what percent of the worlds population Jews make up". The answer is 0.2%, and no one seems to be able to guess to close it.
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u/kevinthebaconator 15d ago
How come so many Jewish people lived in Poland at the time? Were the levels similar in surrounding countries or was this a unique phenomenon to Poland?
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u/Hairy_Drummer4012 15d ago
Poland was very tolerant if you compare with the western Europe.
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u/Wisniaksiadz 15d ago
Poland was one of the most tolerant countries in eu or maybe even in world xd
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u/National_Economist50 15d ago
Poland was the only country in Europe that gave minorities rights to live their religion freely l, and build communities. At that time Jews were the only real people in Europe that came outside of Europe.
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u/Italosvevo1990 15d ago
Did it increase more than tenfold from 1764 to 1939 because of natural increase or immigration from other countries? Also, I supposw that the borders taken in account are the ones of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth?
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u/kolosmenus 15d ago edited 15d ago
In 16th-17th century it was mostly immigration, as Poland was the only european country which granted religious freedom (Muslims, orthodox christians, lutherans, calvinists, catholics, jews all lived in one country)
Then it was natural growth
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u/ayoo-OwO 15d ago
Why is it going down rn still?
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u/Scrapple_Joe 15d ago
Well for a while there Poland was part of the Warsaw pact which meant heavy Soviet influence. Soviets were also famously pretty bad for Jewish folk. Note the 1968 political crisis where Poland forcibly emigrates 20k Jewish people.
Soviets were pretty famous for blaming the Jews for internal issues.
So Poland wasn't a good place to be Jewish and the state would remove your citizenship to make you stateless and ship you over to Israel. Hence the emigration.
Even after leaving the Warsaw pact the community was very small and it's not like bigotry leaves a society all that quickly. So population trended towards emigration.
However since 2000 it seems like the community has doubled in size according to other sources so it's likely it's just a small community now and growth is slow because of that.
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u/Toroceratops 15d ago
After the war there was significant discrimination against Jews who tried to return including at least one massacre of Holocaust survivors by the Poles. Polish people took the homes and lands of displaced Jews and didn’t want to return it. Coupled that with the absolute devastation of their homes and families and the falling Iron Curtain and most Jews from Poland fled for Israel.
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u/FireHammer09 15d ago
People neglect that these people were refugees who were mass murdered by their neighbors.
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u/terektus 15d ago
Israel. Every Jew has a birthright to become Israeli, and living in a jewish country with your equals is more attractive than living in other countries where you only have small local jewish communities.
This is what is feeding the "israelis are Europeans" argument, which is true regarding Israeli citizen growth but neglects the fact that jews have always been living in the middle east.
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u/CervusElpahus 15d ago
Ashkenazis are genetically also from the Levant and the argument they are just European is kinda problematic
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u/BreadfruitBig7950 15d ago
A lot of spies from polish regions in my camp said they'd been accused of being a jew and their response was to show an ancestry chart. This firmly established they weren't, but because it was against the law to show ancestry in response to such a claim they got sent to a camp as a spy.
They were normal civillians so they often died.
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u/stefan92293 15d ago
I do not believe what I'm hearing.
Just how do they justify the accusation of being a spy from showing your ancestry??
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u/ajuc 15d ago edited 15d ago
Having an ancestry chart was maybe not showing you're a spy, but it's showing you're aristocracy etc, which was the elite of interwar Poland and often working in military/government/intelligence.
Regular people back then (i.e. peasants) didn't had ancestry charts.
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u/dziki_z_lasu 15d ago
Data for the next 6 years would be interesting. I found data, that 9k Israelis applied for the Polish passport in 2024 alone in programs for repatriants and the number is growing rapidly, as Poland is becoming financially attractive and especially safer. However I don't know if they are considered Jewish or just Israeli.
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u/oatmealparty 15d ago
Well, considering one is a nationality and one is a religion, they would be tracked as both.
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u/TightBeing9 15d ago
Its not just a religion. There are plenty of atheist Jews. Jewish laws consider someone Jewish if their mother was a Jew
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u/oatmealparty 15d ago
Yes, there are ethnic Jews. But Jewish is not a nationality. Asking if someone would be considered Jewish or "just Israeli" makes no sense
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u/Blackdutchie 15d ago
But the important part for government statistics is not, a priori, what religious laws consider someone to be.
Does the Polish government get its data from religious institutions (catholic church, chief rabbinate), or from census data where people can self-report as whichever religion they consider themselves to be? In the latter, secular, case, people can say they are 'of jewish heritage' but for their religion indicate 'atheist'.
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u/TightBeing9 15d ago edited 15d ago
Totally, but Jewish is not an ethnicity. I can imagine they base it on how people identify. Israeli or Jewish is also a silly question because there are millions of non Jewish people in Israel. Their nationality would be Israeli, the other categories would be less clear cut. I imagine the amount of Jewish people in a country is based on estimates based on self identification
In stead of ethnicity I should've said nationality
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u/aarocks94 15d ago
I am Jewish and that’s my ethnicity. There are two components to ethnicity - official government sources and self-designation. I am not speaking for the former, what the government chooses to call me is its concern, but for myself my ethnicity is important and that ethnicity is Jewish. I don’t believe in HaShem but I am Jewish.
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u/genesandpaws 15d ago
Israelis who apply for a Polish passport are only Jewish, so both. To be eligible they’d need to have a Polish ancestor
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u/YoRt3m 15d ago
You can do this with almost any country where Jews were killed, fleed or left between 1930-1950
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u/PanDzban 15d ago
Poland's demographics is probably best example because the 1930 number of 3mln of Jews was the highest number in the whole Europe (2,5 mln USSR and 0,5 mln Germany). It was also the highest share of population: 10% (<2% USSR and <1% Germany).
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u/Loki-L 15d ago
While it shows the holocaust quite well the rest of the data is mostly useless.
A lot of the demographic changes of Poland are down to what and where Poland is shifting around quite a bit throughout that time. Poland's borders were anything but static before 1945.
Another obvious issue is that the population as a whole changed over time.
It may be more meaningful to look at a fixed geographical area over time, or to look at the percentage of people identifying as Jewish in Poland over time. The drop from the Holocaust will still be there but the rest of the graph will look different.
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u/SirHawrk 15d ago
This uses some sort of static territory. There were multiple timeperiods during this graph where no polish state existed
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u/I_Am_Become_Dream 15d ago
Why did it rise so much in the 19th century?
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u/ComradeGibbon 15d ago
Population in Europe was growing exponentially from the mid 18th to early 20th century.
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u/I_Am_Become_Dream 15d ago
Ok so it's births, not migrations from elsewhere? I was just wondering if there continued to be Jewish migration from Germany and Western Europe to Poland.
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u/Jsaun906 15d ago
The population of Europe in general was booming. Infant mortality fell while fertility remained at the same level
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u/E_C_H 15d ago
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had policies around religious tolerance that made it, particularly their cities, a relative safe haven for European Jews. Like any urban minority community, they grow exponentially as they became known as hubs for the culture, safety in numbers and such; alongside having prosperous success stories and a wider ‘Enlightenment’ movement called the Haskalah. Furthermore, when the Russians took over the bulk of Poland, they had a policy of driving out Jews from the Russian core in pogroms towards the West, the ‘Pale of Settlement’ policy, which naturally drove millions of Jewish refugees into Poland.
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u/Novel-Mission-1920 15d ago
The Polish Lithuanian Common Wealth came to an end in the 1700s though, we see the massive spike in population about 80-100 years after that
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u/a_Bean_soup 15d ago
population growth of the time + some immigration since Poland was unusually jewish friendly for a lot of its history
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u/Both-Guava6261 15d ago
Hm, I wonder what happened in 1940
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u/Eaglise 15d ago
a mad man got power
somehow we don't learn from history, multiple mad men in power today
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u/RevolutionPublic7557 15d ago
He was elected even, on an openly antisemitic platform. Of course most Germans didn't anticipate this, but it's worth an extra though at the ballot.
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u/TheElz 15d ago
The irony being ww2 started to keep Poland independent when the UK and France declared war on Germany for invading Gdansk (formerly German Danzig, the reasoning right or wrong given was to protect Germans help were being abused and killed, after WW1) After WW2 it was handed to the soviet union, along with many other countries. So the UK & France lost WW2, as the reason for fighting failed. Poland lost WW2 and the Soviet Union won (and whitewashed the hundreds of thousands they killed & raped in Poland) And here we are driving into a similar situation to the start of WW1 with treaties intwined between so many nations. It's always about money and power for some.
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u/Jaded_Bookkeeper1609 15d ago
Even more troubling is that killings started prior Nazis conquered Poland and lasted for full 2 years after 1945.
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u/Loko8765 15d ago
If you are looking at the actual numbers, keep in mind that emigration certainly explains decreases outside of the Nazi-organized murders.
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u/lceMat 15d ago edited 15d ago
There were no killing of Jews before the war. Number of homicideof Jews followed standard number for Poland at the time. After the war there were incidents with hate of the war and estimated number of killed Jews were around 2000 which is very bad but not near the war levels
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u/ILovePotassium 15d ago
And even after all of this, YouTube for example still allows an insane amount of antisemitism in their comments. You can report the comments and they don't even get banned. People just don't care.
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u/Noodles590 15d ago
My family migrated to Australia just prior to the outbreak of the war. Unfortunately there was already growing anti-Semitism within Poland and it took my great-grandfather being beaten for his religion for them to pull the trigger and leave. I guess thanks to those thugs they avoided the holocaust.
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u/nebeatsimenu 15d ago
In this case, data is rather terifying than beautiful.