Welcome to the demographic jungle

According to the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, the Holy See has just realized that there are more Muslims in the world than Catholics.

The compiler of the Vatican's yearbook, Monsignor Vittorio Formenti says that there are 1,322 billion Muslims living in the world and only 1,130 billion Catholics. So it's now official, the followers of Mohammed are winning the numbers game. But at least there is still some comfort, he says, if you add on all the different kinds of Christians, there are over 2 billion of them, still a wide enough margin. Never, it seems, has the Vicar of Rome been so favorable to his Protestant brothers.

I would offer the good priest some more consolation: why lump all the Muslims together? If you break them down to the main groups, Sunni and Shi'a, and add on the Sufis and even the Alawites, then they might actually seem smaller and the Catholics will back on top again.

But this all too ridiculous. The church venerates the martyrs who were persecuted and slain in the days when Christianity was a small underground sect, is it so insecure today that being number 2 in size makes it feel less divine? So what if there are more Muslims than Christians? It's not as if we're about to have world elections to decide which is the only true religion. Is that why the Pope went out of his way to stick his finger in the collective Muslim eye by personally baptizing journalist Magdi Allam?

I used to think that all this demographobia was only a Jewish syndrome, but it seems that other religions can get caught with the illness just the same. Being Jewish, it's almost amusing to see how the Vatican is all worked up by the Muslim demon, but perhaps this should give us cause to reconsider some of own pet concerns. How many times have we heard sentences like, "imagine how many Jews there would be in the world if wasn't for the pogroms/Spanish Inquisition/Holocaust/assimilation etc" or read threatening statistics about the disappearance of Jews from various corners of the globe and of course, the "nightmare scenario" when there will be more Arabs than Jews in the land of Israel.

And of course there are the schemes whereby we overturn the demographic balance by welcoming back in to the fold the long-lost Ten Tribes or the descendants of the Spanish Marranos. Of course every Jew lost, both physically and spiritually, is a tragedy, and a mass movement of returnees is an intriguing prospect (though the Orthodox rabbinate would never let that happen).

But would the fact that all of a sudden, there were in the world, twice as many as the current 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 million Jews (we don't the real figure and perhaps that's a good thing), change us in any drastic way. Would the Jewish identity of a new generation be any stronger for it? Would the state of Israel be more secure? Would we be more capable of fulfilling those much vaunted, yet so ill defined, Jewish ideals? Let's give the numbers game a rest.