History of the Jews in Europe
With the modern time and the gradual establishment of republics and constitutional monarchies across Europe, conditions were considered much better for Jews. Some preferred to emigrate to the United States and other American countries, however, including Argentina, which to this day has a large Jewish community. Eventually, the United States gathered the largest Jewish population outside of the Russian Empire. After Poland became an independent country again after the Treaty of Versailles, it had the largest Jewish population in Europe, of about 3,000,000 Jews. The Soviet Union, which came about in 1922, had nearly as many. With Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, there was again increased emigration, to the Western European countries and to the United States, supported by the Germans who did not want Jews in German-governed territory. More Jews emigrated to Palestine, which had been taken from the Ottoman Turks by the United Kingdom in 1917, to establish a Jewish homeland for Jews. Hitler temporarily supported this migration, but the British were sceptic, as the greater number of Jews meant conflicts with the local Arabs, who resisted Jewish immigration, and several bloody rebellions were fought between them and the British troops in the region. With World War II, the Nazi-controlled German armies occupied most of Europe and started to deport Jews east, eventually adopting a policy of mass murder known as the Holocaust. After 1942, all Jews under German control (with very few exceptions) would be sent to Eastern Europe and killed or worked to death. In the end, before Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, this killed about two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe. Only the Jewish communities of Albania, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Ireland were untouched, and those of Italy, Yugoslavia and Romania much less affected. Many remaining Jews migrated to the United States and Palestine, where Israel was created in 1948 as a Jewish-majority state, which resulted in Europe losing most of its Jewish population and the United States becoming the most Jewish country. Also, later persecution in Communist Poland and other countries led to more refugees. Of the 3,000,000 Jews in Poland, less than 3,000 remain today. In France, the United Kingdom and Russia, however, there are significant communities left comparable to before the war.