At no time in history, from antiquity to this day, can the number of Judahites, Judeans or Jews, living at any given time, be determined; for that reason the number afflicted in any calamity also cannot be determined, and there are many more reasons why the number of Jewish victims in the Second World War cannot be fixed. The process of mystification begins in Genesis and continues through the Torah (the seventy people taken by Jacob to Egypt, for instance, apparently increased to two or three million within 150 years). At all periods large, and sometimes huge variations occur in the "estimates", and only estimates are possible, as the present term, "Jew", is legally indefinable and statistically elusive.
An eminent Jewish authority, Dr. Hans Kohn, in his article on "the distribution of Jews" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year for 1942, writes:
"In view of the fact that in several of the countries where the largest number of Jews were living in 1941 the census did not contain any questions regarding religion . . . the exact number of Jews in the world in 1941 could not be ascertained. The definition of persons falling under the classification of 'Jewish race' is in no way agreed upon . . . In countries where the census included questions of religious origins, even this religious criterion of Jewish faith is difficult to define exactly.
Thus the assumption which generally varied around the figure of 16 million" (for the entire world) "cannot claim any foundation on exact 'figures. To this uncertainty about the number of Jews in the world was added in recent years a growing uncertainty about their numerical distribution in the different countries and continents. Probably more than 6,000,000 Jews lived in Poland and the U.S.S.R."
A weaker basis than that even for "estimates" (not to speak of "statistics") can hardly be imagined, yet in the ensuing period, when all the additional confusions of war and occupation were piled on this infirm foundation, precise numbers of Jewish casualties were produced day by day, circulated by thousands of assiduous propagandists, and at the end declared to amount to six millions!
Dr. Kohn says that "probably" more than 6,000,000 Jews lived in Poland and U.S.S.R. in 1941. In respect of the U.S.S.R. this might corroborate another Jewish authority (Prof. H.M.T. Loewe), who said in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1937 that 2,700,000 Jews then lived there. Similarly, four years earlier (1933) the Jewish journal Opinion had stated that the Jewish population of the U.S.S.R. was under 3,000,000; and the Soviet official Encyclopaedia in 1953 stated that "the Jewish population of the Soviet Union in 1939 was 3,020,000".
This near agreement among four authorities in respect of the period 1933-1941 might lead the reader to think that the number of Jews in one country at least (the U.S.S.R.) was established with reasonable accuracy at a given time. On the contrary, this is a statistical jungle where nothing is ever established. In 1943 the Jewish Commissar Mikhoels said in London (according to the Johannesburg Jewish Times of 1952), "Today we have in the Soviet Union 5,000,000 Jews". That is two million more than two years before, and if it was true presumably meant that most of the Jews in Poland, after Hitler and Stalin fell out, moved into Soviet territory. However, in the same issue of the Jewish Times a leading Jewish writer, Mr. Joseph Leftwich, stated that the Jewish population of the U.S.S.R. in 1952 was 2,500;000, "a loss since 1943 of 2,500,000". He asked, "where and how did they disappear?"; the answer, in my judgment, is that most of them disappeared into the statistics.
That is not the end of the confusion in this one section of the question. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1937 (in giving the above-cited figure of 2,700,000 Jews in Russia on Jewish authority) said they formed about six percent of the total population. The total population was elsewhere given in the same encyclopaedia as 145,000,000 and six percent of that would be 8,700,000!
The encyclopaedias, statistical yearbooks and almanacs are in this one question all at odds with each other and untrustworthy. I could multiply examples (for instance, the Jewish World Congress in 1953 announced that the Jewish population of the U.S.S.R. was 1,500,000) but wandering in a maze without an outlet is profitless. All published figures are "estimates" made at the estimators' pleasure, and are without value. A professional accountant might write a book on the efforts of the encyclopaedists to make the post-war figure of Jewish population in the world conform with the pre-war "estimates", minus six million.
Figures are tricky things: a few examples:
The leading American reference yearbook, the World Almanac, in 1947 gave the 1939 Jewish world-population as 15,688,259. In later editions up to 1952 it increased this prewar estimate (without explanation) by a million, to 16,643,120. It gave the 1950 population as 11,940,000, which, if subtracted from the first figure given for 1939, gives a reduction of nearly four millions (though not of six). However, it based even this "estimate" on another estimate, namely, that in 1950 the Jewish population of the U.S.S.R. was 2,000,000. This still left unanswered Mr. Leftwich's question in respect of Commissar Mikhoels's statement, that in 1943 the Jewish population of the U.S.S.R. was 5,000,000.
In England Whitaker's Almanac, of similar eminence, struggled with the same problem. In its 1949 and 1950 issues it gave the 1939 "estimated" Jewish world population as 16,838,000 and that of 1949 as 11,385,200, a reduction of nearly 5,500,000. However, the figures given for Jewish population in separate countries added up to 13,120,000 (not 11,385,200). Incidentally, Whitaker's in 1950 gave the Jewish population of the U.S.S.R. as 5,300,000, against the World Almanac's figure for the same year, of 2,000,000.
Both these publications are of the highest repute for painstaking accuracy and the fault is not theirs; in this one matter alone only Jewish "estimates" are available, and for obvious reasons no dependence can be placed on these. I pointed out the discrepancies in a book of 1951 and observed that Whitaker's in 1952 no longer contained these "estimates of Jewish populations"; apparently it had abandoned the statistical quest as hopeless, and was right to do so. Another encyclopaedia in its 1950 edition also dropped the subject.
Finally, the New York Times, which may be described as the world's leading Jewish newspaper (it is Jewish-owned and New York is today primarily a Jewish city) in 1948 published what claimed to be an authoritative statistical article, computing the Jewish population of the world (three years after the war's end) between 15,700,000 and 18,600,000. If either figure was near truth this meant that the Jewish world-population had remained stationary or increased during the war years.
Newspaper articles are soon forgotten (unless some diligent student preserves them) but the great propagandist fabrications are handed on. Thus the historians, those men of precision in other questions, passed on the legend of "mass-extermination" to posterity. At the war's end Professor Arnold J. Toynbee was producing his monumental Study of History and in its eighth volume (1954) said that "the Nazis . . . reduced the Jewish population of Continental Europe, west of the Soviet Union, from about 6,5 million to about l,5 million by a process of mass-extermination". He called this "a bare statistical statement" and then added a footnote showing that it was not a statistical statement: "it is not possible to give exact figures based on accurate statistics and it seemed improbable in 1952 that the necessary information would ever be obtainable". Professor Toynbee explains that his figure was based on Jewish "calculations, in which there were several possible sources of error". He concludes that "it might be estimated" that five million Continental Jews had been done to death by the Nazis.
The estimate is historically valueless. The starting-point for consideration of this question is the fact that six million Jews, or anything approaching that number, cannot possibly have been "done to death" or caused to "perish", for the reasons given at the start of this discussion; the very assertion, made before the Nuremberg court, was an affront to their 825,000 fighting-men, sailors and civilians, killed in all theatres of war, of which only the Western politicians of this century would have been capable.
The number of Jews who were killed or perished will never be known, for the reasons already stated and partly discovered by Professor Toynbee in his footnote to history. The very term "Jew" is indefinable; Jews are often not isolated in statistics; and at no time can the number of living Jews in the world be ascertained with any approach to accuracy. Indeed, any attempt to reach statistical clarity through census or immigration data is attacked as "discrimination" and "anti-Semitism".
