A small number of idealists chose to migrate instead to the backward Turkish region of Palestine. A lively time of change. You could still see the old world but new trends were at their peak. The Moslem world had until the Middle Ages been the vibrant heart of world Jewry but with the decline of their host countries, the Jews of the region also declined. By 1900, Sephardim constituted only 7 percent of world Jewry as a result of a stagnant birth rate and high infant mortality.
Demographers like to shape their predictions by projecting existing trends in a straight line.
That model would have proved useless at the beginning of the century which ends tonight. What happened during the century defied fantasy and wisdom. Not just what happened to the Jews but also to the world system whose transformations were unpredictable. Had it not been for the Holocaust, says Della Pergola, world Jewry today would number 26 million to 32 million. This is a very conservative estimate.