Data Reportby The Hanover InstituteSeptember 29, 2026

How Is Jewish Identity Tied to the Land of Israel? Reading the Founding Texts, the Dissenting Platforms, the Statutes and the Population Record

Israel’s founding text, statutes and census tie Jewish identity to the land; 45% of US Jews call caring about Israel essential to being Jewish.

How Is Jewish Identity Tied to the Land of Israel? Reading the Founding Texts, the Dissenting Platforms, the Statutes and the Population Record

In a Pew Research Center survey fielded from November 2019 to June 2020, 45% of US Jewish adults said caring about Israel is “essential” to what being Jewish means to them, and a further 37% called it important. The tie those shares measure is also written into law. Israel’s 1948 founding declaration, its 1950 Law of Return and its 2018 Basic Law all state it, and Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts about 45% of the world’s Jews living in the country. The tie has not always been held this way. An 1885 conference of American Reform rabbis declared that its members expected “neither a return to Palestine,” and the Jewish Labour Bund defined Jewish nationhood around autonomy in Eastern Europe. The Reform movement reversed its position in 1937.

Key Findings

  • 45% of US Jewish adults called caring about Israel “essential” to being Jewish, and 82% gave it at least some importance (Pew Research Center, 2021, survey fielded November 2019 to June 2020).
  • An 1885 rabbinical conference declared that American Reform Jews expected “neither a return to Palestine” nor a restored Jewish state (Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885). The movement reversed that stand 52 years later (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1937).
  • Since 1970, section 4A of the Law of Return has extended a Jew’s rights under the Law to a child, a grandchild and their spouses. Section 4B defines “Jew” by birth to a Jewish mother or conversion (Knesset, 1970).
  • On 8 July 2021, an eleven-justice panel of Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed fifteen petitions against the Basic Law that names the Land of Israel as the Jewish people’s historical homeland (HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, 2021).
  • Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 7.1 million of an estimated 15.7 million Jews living in Israel at the beginning of 2024, about 45%. In 1939 the share was 3% (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025).

How does Israel’s founding document describe the Jewish tie to the land?

Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State was read on 14 May 1948 and signed by 37 members of the People’s Council. It opens by naming Eretz-Israel, the Land of Israel, as the place where the Jewish people began: it “was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped” (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948).

The Declaration is the founding instrument of one party to the conflict. It records what that state asserts about its own origins, and its historical recitals are the text’s own narrative, not independent findings. That narrative runs as a chain of dated steps: the First Zionist Congress of 1897, convened by Theodor Herzl; the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917; the League of Nations Mandate; and the UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947. The Declaration calls the recognition in that last resolution one that “is irrevocable.” The operative sentence then declares “THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.”

The same text makes commitments to people who are not Jewish. In the Knesset’s published English text, the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the same sentence with “all its inhabitants” in place of “all its citizens.” Both are Israeli government translations of the Hebrew original. The Declaration also appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation.”

The founding text therefore does three things in sequence. It places the formation of Jewish identity in the land. It traces a political chain from 1897 to 1947. It pledges equal rights inside the state it establishes. Later sections of this report show how each strand was taken up in enacted law.

Do most Jews say Israel matters to being Jewish?

The Pew Research Center published its survey in 2021, from fieldwork between November 2019 and June 2020. In it, 45% of US Jewish adults said caring about Israel is “essential” to what being Jewish means to them. That share is the measured base rate for the familiar description of Jewish identity as intertwined with homeland.

It is often said that for Jews, peoplehood, faith and homeland are deeply intertwined. The survey supports that description for most respondents. Another 37% called caring about Israel important but not essential, and 16% said it was not important, so 82% assigned Israel at least some importance to their Jewish identity (Pew Research Center, 2021). The share who called it essential, however, is below half.

The same survey measured attachment directly. 58% of US Jewish adults said they were very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel: 25% very and 32% somewhat, as Pew rounds the components. 45% had been to Israel, including 26% who had visited more than once or had lived there. Orthodox Jews were, in Pew’s words, “the only subgroup among whom a majority (60%) say they are very attached to the Jewish state.”

These are shares of US Jewish adults, the population Pew sampled. They are not figures for Israeli Jews or for world Jewry. They also measure how respondents describe their own identity, not the content of Jewish religious texts or practice.

Source: Pew Research Center, 2021. Shares as published; the remainder is non-response.

When did the religious tie become a political program?

The organized political program dates to 1897. That year the First Zionist Congress met under Theodor Herzl, the congress Israel’s 1948 Declaration names first in its recitals of the movement that led to statehood (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948). The movement’s ideological emergence is commonly traced across the 35 years before that congress.

Tyler Weisman’s undergraduate paper at Randolph-Macon College, published in the 2014 proceedings of the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, surveys that span, 1862 to 1897. It reads the essays, memoirs and letters of the period. It describes the first-wave colonists as secular Jews who came “with hopes of establishing independent, utopian communities.” According to the paper, “most of them ended up working on colonies controlled by the wealthy British Jew, Baron de Rothschild” (Weisman, 2014).

Gershon Shafir’s university-press history uses a periodization that overlaps the settlement years, 1882 to 1914 (Shafir, 1989). Shafir locates the origins of the conflict in a struggle over “the land and labor markets on the frontier of Zionist settlement in Palestine,” as MERIP’s 1990 review summarizes the argument. He reads the First Aliyah of 1882 to 1903 as a settlement drive that became a plantation economy employing Palestinian Arab labour. On this record, organized settlement and the organized political congress are two distinct dates, fifteen years apart.

Once Britain held the Mandate, the political program met a competing claim. The Palestine Royal Commission’s report, presented to Parliament in July 1937, concluded: “we cannot, in Palestine as it now is, both concede the Arab claim to self-government and secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home” (Palestine Royal Commission, 1937). The Commission then recommended partition, which was never enacted.

The religious attachment expressed in prayer and liturgy is older than any of these dates. Its conversion into a territorial and diplomatic program is datable to the late nineteenth century. The instruments that recorded the connection before 1948 are examined in the report on the population record behind the foreign-occupiers claim.

Did the 1885 Reform platform reject a return to Palestine?

Yes. In November 1885, a rabbinical conference at Allegheny City, outside Pittsburgh, adopted article five of its Declaration of Principles: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state” (Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885).

The phrase “the Jewish state” in that sentence belongs to the register of ancient Temple restoration, as its middle clause about the sons of Aaron shows. The platform predates the First Zionist Congress by nearly twelve years. The text survives as published by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, a body founded on 9 July 1889 as the successor that publishes it, not the body that adopted it.

The position persisted into the period of the Balfour Declaration. On 23 August 1917, Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu circulated War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868, writing “as the one Jewish Minister in the Government.” In it he argued that “Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom” (Montagu, 1917). The paper answered a draft, ten weeks before the Declaration was issued.

On 4 March 1919, Representative Julius Kahn of California presented “A Statement to the Peace Conference” to President Woodrow Wilson. Two wire reports of that month put its signers at 300 (Douglas Daily International, 1919; Wisconsin Weekly Blade, 1919). Its fifth objection held that “it is an error to assume that the bond uniting them is of a national character,” and it closed: “We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish State” (Berkowitz and colleagues, 1919, as reproduced by Levitas, 1962).

In 1937 the Reform rabbinate reversed course. Its Columbus Platform affirmed “the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland” (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1937). The movement’s 1997 Miami Platform records the change in its own words: “By 1937 the CCAR had reversed its stand on Jewish peoplehood” (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1997).

Source: Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885; Montagu, 1917; Berkowitz and colleagues, 1919; Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1937 and 1997.

How did the Bund define Jewish nationhood without the land?

In April 1901, the Fourth Congress of the General Jewish Labour Bund held that the state must become “a federation of nationalities, with full autonomy for each of them in all questions relating to nationality (language, education, art, etc.).” That position, recorded in the Bund Central Committee’s own report on the congress, defined Jewish nationhood where Jews lived rather than by territory (Bund, 1898 to 1901).

The English renderings in this section are the Institute’s working translations from the Russian documentary edition published by ROSSPEN in 2010.

The position was not present at the Bund’s founding. Arkadi Kremer, who convened the first congress in 1897, wrote in 1922 that “questions of programme and tactics were not discussed.” At its Third Congress, in December 1899, the Bund resolved to demand “only civil, and not national, equality of rights,” and opened a signed discussion column on the national question.

The 1901 report states that the congress debated the national question for more than 12 hours. It records the Central Committee’s account that “we see the only guarantee of national equality of rights in national autonomy, and not in territorial independence.” The territorial model rejected there was the Polish Socialist Party’s reconstruction of historic provinces, which the report identifies in a footnote; it was not Zionism. The compound term “national-cultural autonomy” does not appear in the 1901 text.

Zionism was the subject of a separate resolution at the same congress, which reads in full: “The congress considers Zionism a reaction of the bourgeois classes against antisemitism and the abnormal legal position of the Jewish people. The congress finds the ultimate goal of political Zionism, securing a territory for the Jewish people, insofar as it would hold a small part of that people, a matter of no great importance that does not resolve the ‘Jewish question,’ and insofar as it claims to concentrate the whole Jewish people or even a significant part of it, utopian and unrealisable. The congress considers that Zionist agitation inflames national feeling and may hinder the development of class consciousness. As for the cultural activity of certain Zionist groups, the congress treats it as it treats any legal activity.” In a separate decision, the congress barred Zionists from the party’s economic and political organizations.

The Bund thus held that Jews formed a nationality, a point the congress affirmed unanimously. It rejected the idea that this nationality required the land.

Who does the Law of Return allow to settle in Israel?

Section 4A of Israel’s Law of Return, inserted by the Knesset in 1970, extends a Jew’s rights under the Law to “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.” It excludes “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion” (Knesset, 1970).

The 1950 Law states the core right in its first section: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” The translator’s note defines an oleh as “a Jew immigrating” into Israel (Knesset, 1950). The translator’s note gives the Law’s word for that immigration as aliya.

The 1970 amendment made two changes that work in opposite directions. Section 4B supplied the Law’s definition: “‘Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” Section 4A reached beyond that definition to named relatives who are not Jewish under it. It adds that “it shall be immaterial whether or not a Jew by whose right a right under subsection (a) is claimed is still alive and whether or not he has immigrated to Israel.” The same amendment imported the 4B definition into the Population Registry Law through a new section 3A(b).

The provision has operated at scale. William Berthomière’s peer-reviewed study records more than 500,000 migrants arriving in Israel from the former Soviet Union from 1989 onward (Berthomière, 1995). Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts over 3.5 million immigrants since 1948. Of those, about 1.68 million, 47.8%, arrived since 1990 (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026).

The 1950 page carries the text as originally enacted. The Law was also amended in 1954, and what that amendment changed was not established for this report, so the grounds for refusal in section 2(b) are not quoted here as current law. The wording that the report on the population record behind the foreign-occupiers claim examines is the same “return” vocabulary the statute enacts.

Did Israel’s Supreme Court uphold the homeland clause in 2021?

Yes. On 8 July 2021, Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting as an eleven-justice panel of the High Court of Justice, dismissed the petitions against Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. That left in force a statute whose first clause names the Land of Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people (HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, 2021).

The Knesset adopted the law in 2018 and publishes an English translation it labels unofficial. Clause 1(b) reads: “The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” Clause 1(c) adds: “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People” (Knesset, 2018). Clause 7 states that the State “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.” The text contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause.

Fifteen petitions challenged the law’s constitutionality. The Court dismissed them. Clause 1(a) of the law reads: “The Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish People, in which the State of Israel was established” (Knesset, 2018). In dismissing the petitions, it held that the Knesset acting as constituent authority is “not all powerful,” and that even by Basic Law it may not deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic. It derived that limit from the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation and its own case law. The ruling therefore upheld the law and set a constitutional ceiling in the same judgment.

Before it passed, a jurist commissioned by the government had advised against legislating at that stage. Ruth Gavison was appointed by the Minister of Justice on 12 August 2013 to review the question and submitted her recommendations on 19 November 2014. She recommended refraining “at this stage” from additional constitutional anchoring of the state’s core vision through legislation (Gavison, 2015). Her recommendations were not adopted, and the Knesset passed the Basic Law on 19 July 2018. The dispute over what the text means for equality is examined in the report on whether the Nation-State Law enshrines Jewish supremacy.

What share of the world’s Jews now live in Israel?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 7.1 million Jews living in Israel at the beginning of 2024, 45% of an estimated world Jewish population of 15.7 million, in its 2025 Holocaust Day release (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025). This is the official statistic of the state concerned.

The United States holds the second-largest population in the same release, 6.3 million, or 40%. Other large communities are much smaller. They include France (438,000), Canada (400,000) and the United Kingdom (313,000).

The present share is recent. The same release gives a world Jewish population of 16.6 million on the eve of World War II in 1939, of whom 449,000, or 3%, lived in the Land of Israel. On the eve of statehood in 1948, the world population was 11.5 million, of whom 650,000, or 6%, lived there. Of the 7.1 million Jews in Israel at the beginning of 2024, the Bureau counts 5.7 million as born in Israel.

The totals depend on definition. For every country except Israel, the Bureau uses a “core” Jewish population drawn from the Hebrew University demographer Sergio DellaPergola, a narrower definition than the one it applies inside Israel. DellaPergola’s own estimate for 1 January 2024 is 15,736,800 core Jews worldwide, including 7,153,000 in Israel (DellaPergola, 2025). His US figure of 6.3 million is his reading of Pew’s 2020 study, against Pew’s own net estimate of 7.5 million. A broader definition of the US population would lower Israel’s share of the world total.

Source: Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025, On the Occasion of Holocaust Day.

Which American Jews rank Israel as essential to their identity?

In the Pew Research Center’s survey fielded from 19 November 2019 to 3 June 2020, 35% of US Jewish adults aged 18 to 29 called caring about Israel essential to being Jewish, against 52% of those aged 65 and older (Pew Research Center, 2021).

The composite figure conceals that spread and a wider one. By religious identity the share was 52% among Jews by religion and 27% among Jews of no religion. Across all US Jewish adults, 45% called caring about Israel essential. By denomination, the share was 66% among Conservative Jews, 53% among Orthodox Jews, 49% among Reform Jews and 28% among Jews with no particular branch. Among the youngest adults, 27% said caring about Israel was not important to their Jewish identity, against 8% of those 65 and older.

Emotional attachment follows the same gradient. 48% of adults aged 18 to 29 said they were very or somewhat attached to Israel, against 67% of those 65 and older; the split by religion runs from 67% of Jews by religion to 33% of Jews of no religion. Pew reports that among those who had been to Israel more than once or lived there, 90% felt at least somewhat attached, against 41% of those who had never been.

Two measures should be kept apart. “Essential to being Jewish” records how a respondent defines their own identity. “Emotionally attached” records a feeling toward a country. A respondent can hold one without the other. A single portrait of Israel as a core reference point for Jewish identity describes the older and more religiously affiliated cohorts more closely than the younger and unaffiliated ones.

The survey’s fieldwork ended in June 2020, more than three years before October 2023, so none of these shares measures opinion during the Gaza war. Pew also states that its change of survey mode means it cannot say whether attachment has changed since its 2013 study. It covers US Jews only; the Israeli Jewish population, which the Central Bureau of Statistics counts at 7.1 million, is not in this sample.

Methodology and limitations

This report draws on four types of evidence, each labelled in the text. The first is primary and official records: the 1948 Declaration, the Law of Return and its 1970 amendment, the 2018 Basic Law, the 2021 Supreme Court judgment, a 1917 British Cabinet paper, the 1937 Royal Commission report, and releases of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. The second is survey research from the Pew Research Center. The third is scholarly work: Shafir (1989), a university-press history; Berthomière (1995), a peer-reviewed migration study; and DellaPergola (2025), a demographic yearbook chapter. The fourth is primary historical texts from organizations of the period: the Pittsburgh platform, the Bund’s congress documents and the 1919 Statement.

Weisman (2014) is an undergraduate paper, not peer-reviewed, and is cited for its survey of the founding-period literature only.

Translations vary, and the variation is stated where it matters. The Declaration exists in two Israeli government English texts that differ on “citizens” and “inhabitants.” The Knesset labels its Basic Law translation unofficial. The Bund quotations are the Institute’s working translations from Russian. The Bund’s statement on national autonomy comes from the Central Committee’s report on the 1901 congress, not from the resolution’s operative text. The 1919 Statement states no signatory count of its own; the figure of 300 comes from two contemporaneous wire reports.

Survey figures are self-descriptions by a sample of US Jewish adults and carry sampling error. The world population figures depend on the definition of Jewish population, which differs inside and outside Israel. No single dated document publishes the widely repeated figure of an uninterrupted 3,000-year political claim to the land. The textual, liturgical and historical claims that figure compresses are distinct from one another.

Conclusion

How, then, is Jewish identity tied to the land of Israel? It is tied in writing, in law, in population and in the self-description of a majority of American Jews. It has also changed over time.

Israel’s founding text calls the land the birthplace of the Jewish people. The Law of Return extends a right of settlement to a Jew’s grandchildren and their spouses. An eleven-justice court left the homeland clause standing. About 45% of the world’s Jews now live in Israel, against 3% in 1939. Among US Jewish adults, 45% call caring about Israel essential, and the young are less attached than the old. The record also contains organized Jewish dissent. In 1885 Reform rabbis expected no return. In 1901 the Bund defined a nationhood without territory. In 1919 some 300 signers opposed a Jewish state. Reform Judaism reversed its own position in 1937. On this record, the tie has been widely held but never uniformly held.

The 1919 signers had a specific fear. They wrote that Jews “repudiate every suspicion of a double allegiance,” and they worried that a Jewish state would invite exactly that suspicion. A century later, most American Jews describe the tie as important to who they are. When outsiders read that attachment as allegiance to a foreign government, is that reading one of the inputs that turns a tie of identity into the old charge of divided loyalty? It is a question for the reader, and for anyone who repeats the charge.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the Law of Return’s definition of “Jew” apply outside immigration?

The 1970 amendment inserted section 3A into the Population Registry Law. Section 3A(b) gives “Jew” the same meaning as section 4B of the Law of Return for registry purposes (Knesset, 1970). The definition therefore reaches Israel’s population register, but section 4B itself opens with “For the purposes of this Law.”

How are marriages of Jews in Israel governed?

Section 2 of the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law of 1953 states: “Marriages and divorces of Jews shall be performed in Israel in accordance with Jewish religious law” (Knesset, 1953). Section 1 gives rabbinical courts exclusive jurisdiction over such matters for Jews in Israel. The statute does not define who is a Jew.

What share of Jews in Israel were born there?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts 5.7 million of the 7.1 million Jews in Israel at the beginning of 2024 as born in the country, about 80%, and 1.4 million as born abroad (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025).

Is Israel’s share of world Jewry still growing?

On Sergio DellaPergola’s estimates for 2023 to 2024, Israel’s core Jewish population rose by 92,100, or 1.30%, while the diaspora population fell by 13,300, or 0.15% (DellaPergola, 2025). Both movements are the author’s own estimates, not an official count.

Why did the 1937 Royal Commission recommend partition?

The Palestine Royal Commission concluded that Britain’s obligations to Arabs and Jews “have proved irreconcilable” and described partition as “the only method we are able to propose for dealing with the root of the trouble” (Palestine Royal Commission, 1937). The partition plan was a recommendation and was never enacted.

Did Montagu oppose all Jewish settlement in Palestine?

No. His 23 August 1917 paper asked that the government work to obtain “for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs” and “go no further” (Montagu, 1917). His objection was to recognizing the Jews as a nation with a claim to the land.

When did Israel’s population reach its current size?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 806,000 residents at the establishment of the state in 1948 and 10.244 million on the eve of its 78th Independence Day in 2026, more than 12.5 times as many (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026). These are preliminary estimates based on the 2022 census.

Sources

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