ABSTRACT
Today, more than 6 million of the nearly 13 million Jews in the world, about half, live in Israel. Jews as a people originated in the region, in prehistoric times from the area of eastern Anatolia and northern Syria, while culturally and religiously they had their origin as a civilization in the Land of Israel. For much of the last 2,000 years, there were significant Jewish communities in many Middle Eastern countries as well—especially in Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen—but these had almost completely disappeared by the end of the twentieth century.
