How many Jews lived in Palestine and the United States in 1939 compared to Europe?

1. Palestine: hundreds of thousands, grown rapidly in the 1930s

Mandate-era statistics and later United Nations summaries place the Jewish community in Palestine in 1938–1939 at roughly four hundred thousand people: British government figures used by U.S. diplomats put Jews at about 400,000 as of June 1938 and cited the roughly 70:30 Arab–Jewish ratio based on that count ^[1], while the UN Question of Palestine document summarizes the Jewish population in 1939 at about 445,000 out of a total population near 1.5 million ^[2]. These figures reflect a rapid increase in the prior decade driven by legal and clandestine immigration—between 1932 and 1939 Palestine absorbed on the order of a quarter of a million newcomers, with one factsheet citing about 247,000 arrivals in that span—changes that in turn produced political reactions such as the British White Paper of 1939 limiting future immigration ^{[5] [6]}.

2. Europe: the largest pre‑war Jewish center, but figures differ by dataset

Multiple contemporaneous statistical compilations and later summaries agree Europe was the principal center of world Jewry on the eve of war, but they do not offer a single unanimous headcount: one Jewish statistical survey pegs the pre‑war European Jewish population at approximately 9,740,000 (a “pre‑war” total referenced in a mid‑1940s compilation) ^[4], while another authoritative survey of world Jews estimated about 7,428,000 in a contiguous European region when the world total was listed at roughly 16.18 million ^[3]. The discrepancy reflects differing geographic definitions (which countries are counted as “Europe”), the inclusion or exclusion of border regions and emigrants, and the turmoil of the late 1930s that made precise accounting difficult ^{[3] [4]}. Contemporary scholarly and archival work therefore reports a European Jewish population on the order of many millions—clear evidence that, before the Holocaust, Europe was the largest single reservoir of Jewish life ^{[4] [3]}.

3. The United States: important diaspora hub, but 1939-specific totals not provided in the supplied sources

The documents provided do not give a definitive standalone figure for the Jewish population of the United States in 1939; they do, however, indicate the broader North American community became numerically dominant after the war, with the United States and Canada together home to roughly 5,176,000 Jews in the immediate postwar period according to a mid‑1940s summary ^[4]. A separate contemporary study focused on “The Jews of the United States” is cited in the material (preliminary 1937 data are noted), but those detailed U.S. counts are not reproduced in the supplied excerpts, so an explicit 1939 U.S. number cannot be asserted from these sources alone ^[3].

4. Synthesis, sources and caveats

Taken together the sources show a clear pattern: by 1939 Palestine’s Jewish population had grown to several hundred thousand amid waves of 1930s immigration ^{[2] [5]}, Europe remained the largest center of Jewish population though exact tallies vary by dataset and by definition of Europe ^{[4] [3]}, and the United States was already a major diaspora homeland whose precise 1939 headcount is not explicitly supplied in the excerpts here though North America as a whole contained over five million Jews in the post‑war accounting ^{[4] [3]}. Discrepancies among the sources stem from differing cut‑offs (1937 vs 1939 vs “pre‑war”), inconsistent geographic boundaries, and the chaotic migrations of the late 1930s; where the supplied material does not furnish a single definitive number—most notably for a standalone U.S. 1939 figure—that absence is reported rather than filled by extrapolation ^{[3] [4]}.