A History of Jewish Statistics : Counting Jews in the Early Twentieth Century

From the beginning of the twentieth century, leaders of the nascent Zionist movement saw statistics as a lever for building a Jewish state. This book traces the social and economic history of this field of research analyzing not only its institutionalization and gradual structuring, but also its practical and theoretical objectives.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, leaders of the nascent Zionist movement saw statistics as a lever for building a Jewish state. More generally, other Jewish intellectuals, Zionists and non-Zionists alike, took part in the development of “Jewish statistics” or “Jewish social sciences,” expressions designating all statistical studies and surveys carried out on Jewish populations. This book traces the social and economic history of this field of research up to the outbreak of the Second World War, analysing not only its institutionalization and gradual structuring but also its practical and theoretical objectives. Against the backdrop of rising antisemitism, Jewish statistics were intended to alert world public opinion, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and to coordinate the actions of the major Jewish relief organizations, especially between the wars. Such efforts did not exclude an academic ambition: like the German social sciences of the time, whose methods and organization they adopted, specialists in Jewish statistics sought to combine social reform and the social sciences and attempted to establish the field as an academic discipline in its own right, dedicated to the study of the material and social conditions of the Jews. This book will be of interest to readers in the history of economics and statistics and, more broadly, in Jewish history, Jewish studies and the political history of minorities in the modern era.