Jews in Belgium: a demographic and social portrait of two Jewish populations

In this report:

Jewish population size estimates for Belgium have not been assessed systematically for many years, and researchers have not had the data to be able to clearly say what the population looks like in terms of its age, education, religiosity, and patterns of migration. This lack of a detailed assessment has meant that community leaders have had no up-to-date demographic information to help inform community planning and that there have been persistent difficulties in assessing the representativeness of surveys of the Belgian Jewish population.

JPR's report, ‘Jews in Belgium: a demographic and social portrait of two Jewish populations’, fills this data vacuum with a thorough assessment of the size and structure of this important European Jewish population, following an extensive demographic data collection project spanning eighteen months.

Some of the key findings in the report:

• About 29,000 self-identifying Jews live in Belgium today, constituting 0.25% of Belgium’s population. Adding people with familial ties to Jews, who are entitled to settle in the State of Israel under its Law of Return, brings the total to 46,000 people (0.4%);
• The Jewish population of Antwerp (56% of the whole) is now larger than the Jewish population living in and around Brussels (39%). 63% of the Jews living in Antwerp identify as Haredi, with a further 19% identifying as Orthodox. In Brussels, Haredi and Orthodox Jews make up only 4% of the Jewish community – the rest are mainly traditional, progressive or ‘just Jewish’;
• At present, the Jewish population of Brussels is experiencing close to zero growth, while the Jewish population of Antwerp has a significant excess of births over deaths;
• The proportion of Belgian Jewish adults with a university education (80%) is twice as high as that found in the general population. This pattern, and scale of difference, are observed in many Jewish populations around the world.
• About half of all Jews in Belgium reported that they had experienced antisemitic harassment over the previous twelve months (48%). About one-third of Belgian Jews reported that they had experienced antisemitic discrimination over the same period. They are much less likely to report antisemitic vandalism (2%) or physical attacks (4%).