History of the Jews in Australia

The history of Jews in Australia traces the history of Australian Jews from the British settlement of Australia commencing in 1788. Though Europeans had visited Australia before 1788, there is no evidence of any Jewish sailors among the crew. The first Jews known to have come to Australia came as convicts transported to Botany Bay in 1788 aboard the First Fleet that established the first European settlement on the continent, on the site of present-day Sydney.^[1]

97,335 Australian residents identified themselves as Jewish by religion in the 2011 census,^[2] but the actual number was estimated then to be 112,000.^[3] (An answer to the question on the census was optional.). In the 2021 census 99,956 residents identified themselves as religious Jews but in the same census only 29,115 identified themselves as Jewish by preferred ancestry, so the number of Jewish Australians simply is not known. Given more than two centuries of Jewish migration to Australia and the extent of moving away from or marrying out of Judaism, as many as 250,000 Australian residents may have Jewish ancestries. The majority are Ashkenazi Jews, many of them Jewish refugees, including Holocaust survivor^[4] who arrived during and after World War II, and their descendants. Jews make up about 0.5% of the Australian population.^[2]