Numbers Matter

Joe Rogan’s YouTube channel has more than 16.4 million subscribers. Rogan has stated that Israel is committing “genocide”; he has hosted others who say the same; he has mocked Douglas Murray for his defence of Israel; and he has casually remarked that Jews have disproportionate financial influence. He thinks it is not anti-Semitic to say that Jews love money. Unless he has done a survey that proves Jews love money more than all other communities do or he has evidence that all other communities hate money or are indifferent to money, this statement builds on a very old stereotype about Jews. It is possible that he doesn’t know what a stereotype is but ignorance is not a defence.

The depth of Rogan’s ignorance about Jews was exposed a while ago when Gad Saad asked him how many Jews there are in the world. Rogan said he did not know. When asked to guess, he replied “A billion” and then decided to scale it back to “500 million.” I have received similar answers from random people when I have asked them the same question.

In fact, there are about 15.7 million Jews in the world. Think about that for a moment. Joe Rogan’s channel has more subscribers than there are Jews in the world. That random people do not know how many or rather how few Jews there are in the world is bad enough. That Rogan does not know it is much worse because he spreads lies to more people than there are Jews in the world!

There are over 2 billion Muslims, 2.3 billion Christians, 1.17 billion Hindus, and over 25 million Sikhs. Why are there so few Jews? Because over a period of more than 1500 years, Jews were persecuted in Europe and oppressed in the Middle East. This resulted in many deaths and even more forced or enticed conversions.

Before 1939, the world population of Jews was about 16.5 million. After the Nazis and their collaborators murdered six million Jews, the population shrank. In 1946 there were only 11 million Jews. The numbers have gradually increased but have not yet reached the 1939 level. This, Joe Rogan, is what genocide looks like.

Why do these numbers matter? Let us consider two instructive cases. The first is that of Zoroastrians. Zoroastrianism was the majority religion in Persia. It was the state religion for over a millennium before the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. Following the conquest, most Zoroastrians converted to Islam, just as many inhabitants of middle eastern and African countries converted to Christianity or Islam.

Some Zoroastrians remained in Iran and braved persecution. A significant number migrated to India. They landed in Gujarat on the west coast of India. According to a famous legend, the Gujarati King gave their leader a full cup of milk to politely indicate that there was no room in his land. The leader carefully dissolved a spoonful of sugar into the milk to demonstrate that they would merge with the local population, sweetening but not disrupting the culture. The King allowed them to stay and they were as good as their word.

Zoroastrians, known as Parsis in India (from the word for Persia), are a tiny but highly educated, prosperous, and respected community. India’s largest and most valuable business conglomerate is the Tata Group, founded and led by a Parsi family. Parsis speak the local language, Gujarati. They generally wore Indian dress, and many adopted surnames based on their professions, with the Gujarati suffix wala, meaning “doer.”

Despite their success, the number of Parsis has been steadily declining due to a low birth rate and strict rules of inclusion (one must have a Parsi father to be considered a Parsi). There are less than 60,000 Parsis left in India; this is 0.005 percent of the Indian population. There are about 120,000 Parsis in the world. The community is thus on the brink of extinction.

Let us compare this with the situation of Hindus, who faced similar persecution and forced conversion following Islamic invasions of India from the 11^th century onwards. Many Hindus converted but the majority did not.

Hinduism, like Judaism, is a non-conversion religion. For a variety of reasons, which I will not go into here, these two ancient religions survived and did not undergo mass conversion to Christianity or Islam. Most other ancient religions – the Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman, the Arabic, the Mesopotamian (in Iraq), vanished. Zoroastrianism, one of the most ancient, which shares features with both Judaism and Hinduism, has hung on by a thread.

In the twentieth century, Jews in Israel and Hindus in India have undergone similar demographic change. In 1950, Jews made up approximately 85-88% of Israel’s population. Today, Jews are only 73.2% of Israel’s population, even though their numbers have greatly increased since 1950. The percentage of Hindus in India is also declining, though in a somewhat different fashion. In 1950, Hindus were 84.68 percent of India’s population and in 2015 they were 78-79 percent. The Jewish fertility rate in Israel has not declined but the Hindu fertility rate in India has declined. It is now 1.94, which is lower than replacement level (2.1). The percentages are comparable but the numbers are not.

But because Hindus were larger in number in antiquity and through subsequent history, and because they did not face an overall genocide (although they did, at certain times in history, encounter genocidal enemies in certain regions of India), their overall population has not been reduced numerically over the centuries or in the twentieth century the way the Jewish population has.

This difference in numbers matters hugely. Hindus constitute 15 to 16 percent of the world’s population while Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of world population. Therefore, Israel (where half the world’s Jews live), and Jews in general face an existential threat today in a way that India and Hindus do not.

Both India and Israel are democracies. They face many of the same enemies. I wrote about this here: https://substack.com/@ruthvanita452091/p-179989240 Islamist terrorists, such as ISIS, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and Al Qaeda, aspire to re-establish a global Caliphate, and to reconquer all lands that were once under Muslim control. These lands include both India and Israel.

Jews and Hindus have a lot in common despite major religious differences. In the U.S., for example, these are the two religious minorities consistently ranked as the most prosperous, with the highest household incomes and educational levels. This breeds admiration but also some envy, especially in the case of Jews. This is because there is something almost miraculous in Jewish achievement, for example, Jews have won over 20 percent of Nobel Prizes between 1901 and 2025, despite comprising 0.2 percent of world population.

Conspiracy theorists seize on these achievements to bolster their claims that Jews control the world. We may not be able to convince them otherwise. But what we can do is insist upon just one fact and one number to other, more open-minded people, in order to convince them that the Jews and Israel face an existential threat – there are only 15.7 million Jews in the world.