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Tithing will once again become a biblical obligation when the majority of Jews live in the Land of Israel. The sabbatical year and the Jubilee will be biblically mandated when the Land is redivided among the tribes. This raises the question of how we should count the Jews today to determine where the majority are living.
Some say the count should be based upon the number of people who identify as Jewish. This would make it approximately fifteen million today. However, it seems more reasonable to include those whose parents assimilated in the last few generations due to persecutions, revolutions, or the Holocaust. As long as documents or other evidence can prove that someone is matrilineally Jewish, it would seem they should be considered Jewish even if they do not identify as such. (As we said above in 10:4, Jewishness in halakha is determined by the mother’s status.) If we do include them, we can estimate the number of Jews today to be between twenty and thirty million.
Perhaps we should even count descendants of Jews who assimilated hundreds of years ago due to the terrible hardship of exile, as long as they are descended from a direct line of Jewish mothers. The Sages, basing themselves on biblical prophecies about the future redemption, tell us that Elijah the Prophet will return lost Jews to the fold. Today, this group includes at least a hundred million people, maybe more, since millions of Jews were forced to stop practicing Judaism in the course of the long exile, with all the wars, persecutions, and anti-religious decrees. Furthermore, since Jewish law does not recognize conversions to other religions, forcibly converted Jews are still Jewish. It is reasonable to assume the number of those matrilineally descended from forced converts grew at the same rate as the non-Jews surrounding them. Based on this, some estimate that today, at least ten percent of Western Europeans, and ten percent of North and South Americans of Western European descent, should be considered Jewish. There are also matrilineally descended Jews in North Africa, Western Africa, and Eastern Europe. If this is the case, it could be a long time before the majority of the Jews are in the Land.
Ultimately though, the question of who is a Jew can be decided only by the High Court. Its members will include scholars who are experts in the social sciences as well as in Torah. They, together with community representatives, will determine how many Jews there are. They will also rule on how to redivide the Land among the various tribes.
