Our knowledge of the affiliative community derives in large part if not wholly from the federal census, taken every five years. In each federal census, an optional question of religious identification is asked, and, from these figures, information about the number of Jews in Australia can be ascertained. Unfortunately, the Census data is only a limited guide to the actual number of Australian Jews, or to their group characteristics. The reasons for this is that not all Jews consider themselves Jewish by religion (as opposed to ethnicity or culture), while some Jews will not answer the optional religious question in the Census, fearing the anti-semitic uses to which this information might be put by an extremist government, or viewing it as an invasion of privacy. Moreover, from the 1960s until the 1996 Census, the percentage of the total Australian population giving ‘no religion’ or ‘religion not stated’ as responses to the question on religion in the Census rose steadily, and, since the mid-1980s, has levelled off at about 23-25 per cent of the total population. Since, by definition, no information on the ‘real’ religions of such persons is included in the Census, it is impossible to tell whether Australian Jews have followed these trends or not.
For what they are worth, however, the Census figures for number of Jews in Australia in the table below. In 2001 there were almost 84 000 Jews which represented 0.45 per cent of the total population.

How accurate are these figures and how many Jews were ready to be found in Australia? Several approaches to this question have been suggested by demographers. The most obvious is to assume that the percentage of Jews who respond ‘no religion/religion not stated’ to the Census question on religion is identical to the overall Australian percentage (25.2 per cent). If this is so, the number of Jews in Australia in 1996 was actually 99,915.

If Jews overseas on Census day – who are not included in the Census figure – and who are believed to number about 3 per cent of the total are added in, the actual number rises to over 100,000 (102,912).

A second way to approach this question is by means of an independent count of Jews by the community. In Victoria, the Jewish Welfare Society maintains, and constantly updates, a master list of all Jews in Victoria, including groups such as recent Russian migrants who are unlikely to belong to other Jewish organisations. In 1991 there were about 47 000 names on its list, compared with 33,862 identified in the 1991 Census, suggesting a degree of Census undercounting of no less than 38.8 per cent. If this percentage is applied to the 1996 national total of 79 805 Jews identified in the Census, this would imply that there were about 110 769 Jews in Australia in 1991, or 114 092 if those abroad on Census day are included.

While this is much higher than the Census figure, it will be seen that it is broadly similar to the figure identified by the first method. It might also be noted that the well-known demographer Dr. Charles Price of the Australian National University, working from 6 immigration-cohort records, produced a figure of 120 000 Jews in Australia in 1988 as part of his calculations of the size of Australian ethnic groups for The Australian People project. Part of the reason for these differences stems from the difficulties of clearly defining Jewish identity in the contemporary world. However, a figure of about 105 000 Jews in Australia in 1996 seems to be most accurate, that is, of persons who were Jewish by religion, or were Jewish by ethnicity and practising members of no other religion (although there is still some ambiguity about this last point). A more accurate figure cannot, however, be adduced without information at present unavailable to researchers.