Eastern europe Quote by Charles Krauthammer

““The process is taking place before our eyes and is already far advanced.” Under present trends, “the number of Jews in Europe by the year 2000 would then be not much more than 1 million—the lowest figure since the last Middle Ages.” In 1900, there were 8 million. The story elsewhere is even more dispiriting. The rest of what was once the diaspora is now either a museum or a graveyard. Eastern Europe has been effectively emptied of its Jews. In 1939, Poland had 3.2 million Jews. Today it is home to 3,500. The story is much the same in the other capitals of Eastern Europe. The Islamic world, cradle to the great Sephardic Jewish tradition and home to one-third of world Jewry three centuries ago, is now practically Judenrein. Not a single country in the Islamic world is home to more than 20,000 Jews. After Turkey with 19,000 and Iran with 14,000, the country with the largest Jewish community in the entire Islamic world is Morocco with 6,100. There are more Jews in Omaha, Nebraska. These communities do not figure in projections. There is nothing to project. They are fit subjects not for counting but for remembering. Their very sound has vanished. Yiddish and Ladino, the distinctive languages of the European and Sephardic diasporas, like the communities that invented them, are nearly extinct.””

— Charles Krauthammer