Thanks to its high birth rate, Israel is one of the West’s only growing societies. Under the British Mandate, however, the Zionist campaign for large Jewish families largely flopped. What factors outweighed the urgent demographic need for Jewish babies?

The Yahalomi family – husband age 38, wife age 36, came to the [land of Israel] twelve years ago from Poland. The husband started working in construction. The wife – a qualified kindergarten teacher – didn’t work at first because of language issues. Five years after their immigration, their first child was born. Seven years have passed since that first birth. Three years ago, an abortion was performed for economic reasons. 

The [Yahalomis] aren’t interested in more children. Their income, they claim, isn’t enough to support even one child. The wife is also irritable and thinks that at her age she shouldn’t be looking after babies; she’s also concerned about losing her job if she becomes pregnant. 

The National Institutions’ attorney is suing the couple for having too few children, [a situation] that endangers the [Jewish] people’s future. The head of the court asked the defendants if they admit their guilt. They replied in the negative. (Central Zionist Archives [CZA], J1/3717/1 [Hebrew])

This description summarized the prosecutor’s case in a mock trial staged in 1943 all over pre-state Israel by the national Birth Rate Committee, attesting to the early Zionist leadership’s encouragement of Jewish reproduction, even as many couples preferred to think small.

For the Zionist organizations, establishing a Jewish majority in the country was crucial to creating a state. The birth rate was therefore a national priority. Yet these same bodies conceived of a Jewish society along modern European lines – and Europe’s birth rate was declining. This contradiction wasn’t the only one at the heart of the Zionist attitude toward family planning. 

 

The Demographic Threat

During the 1920s, the Jewish birth rate in the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Mandate Palestine) was relatively robust, partly because the ultra-Orthodox averaged five children per family. Toward the end of the decade, as immigration from Europe increased, the overall figure dropped, decreasing even further in the 1930s and ’40s. The average Jewish woman bore 3.7 children in 1927; by 1931, that number had shrunk to 2.8, bottoming out at 2.1 in 1938. Prof. Roberto Bachi, the most senior statistician in the country, declared this birth rate one of the lowest in the world. Bachi also pointed out that among non-ultra-Orthodox European immigrants, the average was a mere 1.7 children per woman – below even replacement rate. 

Among the families of Mizrahim (Jewish immigrants from Muslim and Arab countries), the average number of children matched the ultra-Orthodox norm, but in the early 1940s this birth rate too began to drop, approaching that of the modern Ashkenazic  society forming the Yishuv’s majority. In any case, the Zionist leadership felt that relying on the ultra-Orthodox and the Mizrahim was no way to attain a Jewish majority. Their traditionalism seemed alien to the Zionist ideal, jeopardizing the dream of a modern, utopian society in the Holy Land. Besides, there weren’t enough of them to make a significant difference.