Americans don’t know much about Judaism – but love Jews, survey shows

BEN SALES

Americans who are not Jewish, meanwhile, don’t know a lot about Judaism. But they like Jews more than any other religious group. And, they think there are more Jews in the country than there actually are.

The data comes out of a new survey on what Americans know about religion published on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. The survey asked a group of diverse Americans a set of 32 questions about religion, ranging from knowledge of the Bible and Christianity to knowledge of Judaism and other religions.

Ten of the questions related to Judaism in some way.

The survey was conducted from 4 to 19 February, and included a total of nearly 11 000 respondents. The margin of error for the whole group was 1.5%. The margin of error for the Jewish sample was 8.6%.

Here are some takeaways:

Americans don’t know a lot about Judaism. Out of four questions on Judaism, non-Jewish Americans got a dismal score. They averaged less than one out of four correct. Besides Jews themselves, atheists did the best on the Jewish questions, averaging 1.3 correct answers.

A total of 29% of respondents knew that Shabbat begins on Friday night; 27% knew Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) is associated with Judaism; 24% knew that Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year; and 13% knew Maimonides was a Jewish scholar.

Jews did much better on these questions than non-Jews, averaging 3.1 correct out of four.

Americans as a whole also didn’t know how many Jews live in the country. Fewer than one in five knew that Jews make up less than 5% of Americans.

Jews didn’t only outscore their non-Jewish counterparts when it came to Jewish knowledge. They outscored everyone when it came to general religious knowledge, too.

Besides the questions on Jewish practice, history and text, seven questions were about Christianity, nine were about the Bible, including the New Testament, nine were about “world religions”, two were about atheism and agnosticism, and two were about religion in the United States.

Jews were the only religiously affiliated group to get a majority of the questions right. On average, Jews got 18.7 questions right out of 32, as opposed to a national average of 14.2. Atheists and agnostics also got a majority of questions right, but the closest religiously affiliated group was evangelical Christians, who got an average of 15.5 correct.

As other surveys have shown, Americans tend to have warm feelings toward Jews. Asked to rate religious groups on a thermometer scale, from 1 to 100, Jews got an average rating of 63, the highest of any group. Forty-one percent rated Jews at 67 or higher, while 8% rated Jews 33 or lower. Atheists and Muslims scored lowest, both with an average thermometer score of 49.