The Sepharadic Jews of Suleiman the Magnificent used to be the majority of the Jews. Nowadays the Ashkenazi Jews are the majority...

Submitted by Petros Houhoulis (Greece), Jan 23, 2014 at 19:46

When the Sepharadic Jews were saved by Suleiman the Magnificent, they used to be the majority of the Jewish people, around 97% but nowadays the Ashkenazi are the majority of the global Jewish population. Why???

http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles3/sephardic.htm

The first of these factors is sheer demography. At the end of the eleventh century, perhaps a century after the emergence of a division between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewry and their two approaches to halakhah, 97 percent of world Jewry could properly be denominated Sephardic, with only 3 percent Ashkenazic, the latter concentrated in a little area in northern France and western Germany. While the Ashkenazic population continued to grow over the following centuries, at the beginning of the modern epoch, the mid-seventeenth century, Sephardim still outnumbered Ashkenazim three to two. However, early in the eighteenth century the two groups became equal in number, and by the end of the eighteenth century Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim three to two, the result of improved living conditions in Christian Europe as against the Muslim world.

During the nineteenth century these improvements led to a population explosion among Ashkenazic Jewry which was only paralleled in the Sephardic world at the very end of the century. The Ashkenazic high point came in 1931 when they constituted nearly 92 percent of world Jewry. As a result of rapid population growth in North Africa and West Asia the percentage of Sephardim began to grow even before the Holocaust. That tragedy, which witnessed the murder of Jews caught in it without reference to Ashkenazi and Sephardi, still affected the Ashkenazi world more than the Sephardi. The Sephardim have continued to gain in numbers and in percentage since 1939, and today constitute approximately twenty percent of world Jewry. Still, the four to one advantage of the Ashkenazim gives the Ashkenazim a sheer numerical advantage that cannot be minimized.

Nowadays the Ashkenazi Jews are the majority, despite a Holocaust which affected mainly their numbers, and at a much lesser degree the Sepharadi and Romaniote Jews, who were living mainly in the Balkans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Jews

Total population Sephardi Jews
2,200,000
up to 16% of world Jewish population

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews

Although it is estimated that in the 11th century they composed only three percent of the world's Jewish population, at their peak in 1931 Ashkenazi Jews accounted for 92 percent of the world's Jews. With 16.7 million Jews prior to World War II,^[13] the number was reduced dramatically as 6 million Ashkenazi Jews were killed in the Holocaust.^[14][15][16]

Figures vary for the contemporary statistics. Some sources place Ashkenazi as making up approximately 83–85 percent of Jews worldwide,^{[17][18][19][20]} while Sergio DellaPergolain a rough calculation of Sephardic and Oriental Jews, implies that Ashkenazi make up a notably lower figure, around 74%.^[21] Other estimates place Ashkenazi Jews as making up about 75% of Jews worldwide.^[22] Ashkenazi Jews constitute around 35–36% of the Israeli population (and 47.5% of Israeli Jews).^[23][24]

So, if the Ottoman administration was so good to the Jews, why did the Sephardic Jews who were living in the Ottoman empire became stagnant, but the Ashkenazi Jews living in Christian Europe blossomed from 3% to over 3/4 of the global Jewish population? Any ideas???

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".