Intellectual and Sociological Profile of the Main Contributors to the ZDSJ

Jewish social scientists came from different countries, had different political views, and occupied different professions. Yet it is possible to identify some more homogenous subcategories within this population. For each subcategory, it will be shown that German economics of the period had a major influence in the intellectual background of these authors.

To further analyze the social and intellectual profile of these authors, we classified each of the 123 contributors to the ZDSJ according to the number of published articles and published pages in the journal. Our sample includes all issues for the entire history of the journal. The ZDSJ relied on a large number of mostly male contributors, but some of them were significantly more prolific than others and the authorship was actually quite concentrated.Footnote ⁵ Out of these 123 contributors, the thirty-one who wrote more than three articles accounted for about 70% of the total numbers of papers published in the ZDSJ, and two-thirds of the total numbers of published pages. We chose to focus on these thirty-one authors, who are listed below in Table 1.

TABLE 1.

LIST OF THE THIRTY-ONE MOST IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTORS TO THE ZDSJ (NUMBER OF PUBLISHED PAPERS >3)

We then retrieved biographical information for each of these authors from the main encyclopedias and biographical lexicons (Winninger Reference Wininger1925; Herlitz and Kirschner Reference Herlitz and Kirschner1930; Hundert Reference Hundert2008; Skolnik and Berenbaum Reference Skolnik and Berenbaum2007) and additional sources from the secondary literature. We did not find any information for six of these thirty-one authors and ended up with a sample of twenty-five authors, of which only one was female (Sara Rabinowitsch). These twenty-five authors were classified into the categories listed in Table 2.

TABLE 2.

SOCIAL-PROFESSIONAL PROFILES OF THE MAIN CONTRIBUTORS TO THE ZDSJ.

It should be noted that each author could belong to several of these categories: an author could be both a physician/doctor and an economist/statistician.Footnote ⁶ The two main professions in our classification are physicians/doctors and economists/statisticians, which provided about one-half (48%) of the total number of authors.

The group of doctors includes authors who were usually described in their biographical entries as being both “physician and physical anthropologists” (e.g., Maurice Fishberg, in Skolnik and Berenbaum Reference Skolnik and Berenbaum2007, vol. 7, p. 60). These authors had medical responsibilities as doctors and therapists but were also interested in anthropology. They played an important role in the collection of statistical material about Jewish populations all over the world. Authors such as Samuel Weissenberg traveled extensively and amassed data for anthropological studies of the Jews throughout the world (Skolnik and Berenbaum Reference Skolnik and Berenbaum2007, vol. 20, p. 738). The statistical studies were frequently commissioned by official authorities: for instance, Fishberg worked as an anthropological consultant for the US Bureau of Immigration (Skolnik and Berenbaum Reference Skolnik and Berenbaum2007, vol. 7, p. 60).Footnote ⁷

The second most important occupation among these authors was economist/statistician. Only two of these economists/statisticians (Arthur Cohen and Boris Brutzkus) had academic careers. The vast majority of them had non-academic positions either in public administration or in Jewish communal and social-welfare institutions.Footnote ⁸ Though they were recognized as economists and statisticians by the German administration and occasionally employed as such, most of these authors did not enjoy academic recognition. Jacob Segall, who was the editor of the ZDSJ between 1923 and 1931 and the most important contributor to the journal, worked, for instance, as a doctor (and belonged thus to both categories of “doctor” and “economist/statistician”). During and after WW I, he directed the German Office for War Statistics, then participated in the 1920s in the foundation of the leading social-welfare institution for German Jews (Herlitz and Kirschner Reference Herlitz and Kirschner1930, vol. 5, p. 340).

Three contributors also worked as lawyers or practiced law (Bruno Blau, Jacob Thon, Arthur Ruppin), a seemingly less important profession among Jewish statisticians. Yet, it should be noted that the distinction between each professional category in our classification is not clear-cut. Segall was known as a statistician, economist, and demographer but worked as a doctor; conversely, Ruppin practiced law before becoming director of the Büro and editor of the ZDSJ. What matters to us here is the intellectual profile of these authors rather than exact proportions of their socio-professional status.

Our argument is that each of these three professional categories included authors whose intellectual background was largely influenced by the economics and statistics of the German tradition, known as the “German Historical School” (hereafter GHS).Footnote ⁹ The vast majority of economists and lawyers had followed curriculum in German universities. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the German social sciences in the late nineteenth century, it can be reasonably hypothesized that most of these authors had at least some courses in political economy, under the various labels in which the discipline was taught (Nationalökonomie, Volkswissenschaft). Statistical courses were also increasingly important in university curriculum at the end of the nineteenth century (Grimmer-Solem Reference Grimmer-Solem2003, p. 49). The case of Ruppin illustrates this close relationship among economics, statistics, law, political science, and other disciplines belonging to what was sometimes referred to as “sciences of the state” (Staatswissenschaften): Ruppin first obtained a law degree, but then continued to pursue a doctorate in Nationalökonomie at the University of Halle; the subject of his dissertation was pure economic theory (Thünen’s theory of value and its relationship to the Theory of Marginal Utility), under the supervision of Johannes Conrad, editor of the influential Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik (JNS).

Jacob Segall also wrote a doctoral dissertation in political economy under the supervision of Georg von Mayr, another prestigious economist and statistician (Segall Reference Segall1908). The fact that both Segall and Ruppin had doctorates in political economy is worth noting, because they were key actors in the Büro: they edited more than half (53%) and themselves wrote about 20% of the total number of articles published in the ZDSJ. The ZDSJ also published doctoral dissertations in political economy on topics pertaining to JSS.Footnote ¹⁰ Even non-German Jewish social scientists had usually studied in Germany, due to the severe restrictions toward the admission of Jewish students in tsarist Russia.Footnote ¹¹

Physicians and physical anthropologists were probably less familiar with the economics of the GHS, but had indirect exposure to it through the new interdisciplinary paradigm of racial hygiene or eugenics, mostly taught and diffused in German universities as “Social Hygiene” (Sozialhygiene) or “Social Medicine” (Sozialmedizin). Basically, the methods of Sozialmedizin consisted in approaching medical diseases as consequences of social and environmental causes, and thus relied heavily on statistics and field surveys. Felix Theilhaber’s dissertation on the incidence of cancer of the uterus among Jews, Protestants, and Catholics combined medicine and confessional statistics (Efron Reference Efron1994, p. 143). Interdisciplinarity and the rise of statistics in German universities thus explains individual trajectories such as Segall’s, who was trained and worked as a doctor but was also a recognized specialist of demography and statistics, which were important branches of German political economy.

Yet, very few Jewish social scientists became academic economists in a German university. An obvious explanation for this fact was discrimination against the Jews, and antisemitism, which was widely current in the German academic community of the early twentieth century (Lindenfeld Reference Lindenfeld2008, pp. 283–284; Ringer Reference Ringer1990, pp. 135–136). Conditions became increasingly adverse for Jews in German academia before and during our period of interest (early twentieth century). Fritz Ringer’s sociography of German academics between 1863 and 1938 indicates that the German universities were relatively open to both admission of Jewish students and recruitment of Jewish professors in the decade from 1870 to 1880, but Jews were progressively evicted in the late nineteenth century. In 1909–10, Jewish professors were overrepresented as “instructors” (Privatdozent), i.e., the lowest grade of professorship in the German academic system (Ringer Reference Ringer1992).Footnote ¹² Jewish instructors had to be recommended by (usually non-Jewish) full professors for advancement. Discrimination against recruitment of Jewish professors was therefore not the result of explicit policies but relied mostly on the personal biases of the German academics.

An important exception to this discriminatory pattern was Arthur Cohen.Footnote ¹³ Cohen had a very classical trajectory in the German academic community: he obtained a doctorate in political economy under the supervision of Lujo Brentano in München, started to work as a Privatdozent in 1906 in the Technological University of München, and became extraordinary professor six years later (Wininger Reference Wininger1925, p. 561). The case of Cohen suggests that recruitment as academic economists or social scientists was not impossible for Jewish social scientists, despite the strong anti-Jewish discrimination. It can reasonably be argued that Ruppin, for instance, could have had an academic career, since he seemed to have strong support from his influential supervisor, Conrad.Footnote ¹⁴

Yet, pursuing an academic career in Germany was probably not conceivable for the vast majority of Jewish social scientists. They had one foot outside German academia and one foot inside, because of their academic training. But what matters to our argument is that German “mandarins”—i.e., the prestigious professors who owed their status to educational qualifications (Ringer Reference Ringer1990, pp. 5–6)—were taken as models for Jewish statisticians. Particularly influential for the contributors to the ZDSJ was Georg von Mayr, an economics professor in München, known as a specialist of population statistics. As already mentioned, Mayr supervised Segall’s thesis. He was also regularly cited as an inspirational source by Jewish statisticians.Footnote ¹⁵

There were more than a few occasional references and acknowledgments. Jewish social scientists obviously tried to work and organize themselves as German academic economists. The institutional organization of the Verein, with the Büro in Berlin in charge of the publication of the ZDSJ, and affiliated offices throughout Europe, corresponded to the basic organizational model of political economy in the GHS. Statistical bureaus were indeed “key non-university research institutions of relevance to the mode of production of historical economics”; their connections by a network of numerous links allowed the dissemination of their methods (Grimmer-Solem Reference Grimmer-Solem2003, pp. 62–67). Like the Büro in JSS, the important task of these statistical offices was to edit and publish affiliated journals. The typical career path for a German economist was to combine academic teaching and the practices of official statistics (Tooze Reference Tooze2001, p. 50): in addition to his academic positions, Mayr also directed the Statistical Office of the Bavarian State and funded its affiliated review.Footnote ¹⁶ When Segall, former student of Mayr, was editing the ZDSJ, he was therefore occupying a very similar position to his mentor, though it was transposed into the Jewish intellectual field. Even if Jewish statisticians were mostly excluded from German academia, there was undoubtedly academic and scientific ambition in the ZDSJ.

A Scientific Ambition: The ZDSJ as a Statistical Platform

In his 1903 foreword to the first publication of the Verein, Alfred Nossig explained the purpose and objective of the association. According to Nossig, the main task of the Büro and its affiliated branches was the “processing and editing” (verarbeitung) of statistical sources. Such sources could be found either in “raw material” (typically, official results from public censuses) or from secondary sources, i.e., statistical data that had already been edited and published in other outlets (e.g., academic reviews, private research from communal institutions, publication of various scientific institutes) (Nossig Reference Nossig and Nossig1903, p. 16). The term verarbeitung has to be understood as “preparatory work”: the Büro was meant to provide clean statistical data on the various Jewish populations, which could then be “worked out” for future research. After three years of editorship, Ruppin also claimed that the main objective of the ZDSJ had been to provide to the specialists the reliable yet hard-to-find statistical data, so that Jewish statistics would not be any more a “secret science” (Geheimwissenschaft; Ruppin Reference Ruppin1907, p. 177).

To fulfill this objective, the Verein published in 1903 a systematic “Jewish statistical bibliography,” which listed the existing statistical sources on Jewish populations (Nossig Reference Nossig and Nossig1903). This bibliographic work was continued in the subsequent publications of the ZDSJ. The journal was indeed organized in two parts: beside “articles” per se (Abhandlungen), the “statistical archives” (Statistiches Archiv) were short notices that indicated to the reader the recent publication of new statistical sources (e.g., outcome of a recent census), occasionally with one or a few statistical tables.

The task of verarbeitung was necessary because of the huge growth in the number of statistical sources in the years preceding the creation of the journal. This was due to the introduction and improvement of the modern periodic census in most European countries and America in the second half of the nineteenth century (Porter Reference Porter1986, p. 17). In Germany notably, after the unification of the German States into a single nation-state in 1871, general censuses took place in four- and then five-year intervals (Michel Reference Michel1985; Gehrmann Reference Gehrmann2009. Another important “raw” statistical source for JSS was the 1897 Russian census, which was the first general census in the Russian Empire (Cadiot Reference Cadiot2005). It played a decisive role in the development of JSS, because the majority of Jews lived in Russia and Eastern Europe at the time, and it therefore permitted a significant improvement in the reliability and accuracy in the estimation of the total Jewish population (Ruppin Reference Ruppin1911, pp. 35–36).Footnote ¹⁷

Yet, JSS needed statistical data not only on the general populations of these countries but specifically on the Jewish minorities. In other words, it needed confessional statistics; i.e., statistical variables had to be sorted out according to the different religious faiths. It required that the question about individual confessions had been asked in the census (and their answers recorded). This was the case in most German censuses. No other country in the world provided so much statistical information on religious confessions, and Jewish statisticians considered Germany as the place where confessional statistics were the richest and of the best quality (Segall Reference Segall1912a; Simon Reference Simon1930). An important source for confessional statistics about the Jews were also the Polish censuses of 1921 and 1931.Footnote ¹⁸

Even when confessional statistics were available, the task of verarbeitung was still needed. As Segall pointed out, State confessional statistics usually lacked continuity: for instance, data about different localities, or between different variables, or between different time lapses, were published in separate volumes or issues. The first purpose of the articles published in the ZDSJ was to bring together these scattered pieces of information (Segall Reference Segall1910; Nossig Reference Nossig and Nossig1903). Another problem was that confessional statistics were not detailed enough, and more information could be needed. For instance, in a 1931 article, Yakov Leshchinsky regretted that the Polish census of 1921 did not separate data for each big Polish city; thanks to his relationship with the director of the Lodz statistical institute, Leshchinsky was able to provide the missing information (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1931).

This kind of “insider information” was frequently provided in the ZDSJ. The verarbeitung of Jewish statistics therefore involved personal knowledge and familiarity with State officials in charge of statistics and censuses in the various countries. Establishing such connections with administrations was an important purpose of the Büro. Directors and members of State statistical offices were invited to and regularly did contribute to the ZDSJ.Footnote ¹⁹ Cohen, in a 1914 programmatic article, wrote that the journal was meant to bring together the “producers” of statistics (states, empires, communal institutions) and “consumers” (scholars, reformers, politicians). These two communities should not be separated, because the “production” might not correspond to the “demand,” and statistics should be produced for their future users (Cohen Reference Cohen1914).

In most countries, there were, however, no confessional statistics (notably in the US, in France, England, Belgium), and this was regarded as one of the most important problems faced by JSS (Nossig Reference Nossig and Nossig1903, p. 17). We will see in section IV how the contributors to the ZDSJ were nonetheless able to at least partially overcome this difficulty for non-confessional statistical censuses. Beside public censuses, confessional statistics could also be provided by private statistical inquiries, which were historically the earliest manifestations of JSS (Penslar Reference Penslar2001, p. 217). Hence, an essential task of the Büro was to stimulate the production of these alternative statistical sources, which could be elaborated either from large-scale communal institutions privately funded (e.g., the JCA study mentioned above) or small-scale investigations (e.g., anthropological studies from doctors). Apart from the articles dedicated to the verarbeitung of existing “raw” statistical materials, the ZDSJ also contained more programmatic and methodological papers that encouraged their readers to edit their own statistics (Dreyfuss Reference Dreyfuss1906). A repeated claim was also that Jewish communal institutions should be more oriented toward the production of reliable statistical data about their members and their organizations (Segall Reference Segall1910). Last but not least, the Verein occasionally asked public administrations to run special field surveys.Footnote ²⁰

The ZDSJ operated therefore as a “statistic platform”: it called for the production of more statistical inputs, processed and edited the various existing inputs, and provided “cleaned” data for future research. As such, the ZDSJ was clearly conceived so as to look similar to the major German economic reviews of the GHS: the Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich, known as “Schmoller’s Jahrbuch”; the Jarbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik (JNS); and the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft (Grimmer-Solem Reference Grimmer-Solem2003, pp. 75–86). Both the ZDSJ and these German academic journals were involved in the same type of verarbeitung process on similar sources. For instance, the 1895 German occupational census had been the object of articles in the JNS (Scheel Reference Scheel1898), in Schmoller’s Jahrbuch (Kollmann Reference Kollmann1899a, Reference Kollmann1899b, Reference Kollmann1900a, Reference Kollmann1900b, Reference Kollmann1900c) and in the ZSDJ (Segall Reference Segall1911a, Reference Segall1911b, Reference Segall1911c, Reference Segall1911d). In the same spirit of bringing together the producers and consumers of statistical knowledge, these articles contained long and careful descriptions of the census procedures and its mode of administration. The ZDSJ was therefore conceived as an analog of the German academic literature, though most of its contributors were excluded from the German academy.

Apologetics and Political Commitments: The Value-Laden Content of Jewish Statistics

Contributors to the ZDSJ shared with their German academic counterparts a strong commitment both to reforms and social improvement of the Jewish and German populations. This political role was explicitly assumed by Jewish social scientists (Nossig Reference Nossig and Nossig1903; Segall Reference Segall1910). There was also a close connection between the ZDSJ and other German-Jewish journals oriented toward social welfare and reform, such as the Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik.Footnote ²¹ Lack of commitment toward social reform was precisely an argument against the “Science of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums; Cohen Reference Cohen1914), the prior generation of scholars who had initiated the scientific and historical study of the Jews and Judaism in the early nineteenth century (Dinur Reference Dinur, Berenbaum and Skolnik2007).Footnote ²²

This political commitment involved notably a strong engagement against antisemitism. Providing statistical data about Jewish populations was meant to refute economic prejudice. According to Alfred Nossig, first director of the Verein, an important mission of Jewish statistics was to disprove that Jews were “a greedy and avaricious Nation” (Nossig Reference Nossig and Nossig1903, p. 8). Some articles published in the ZDSJ were indeed motivated by apologetic purposes. For instance, in his 1908 article “The Poverty among Jews in New York,” Fishberg criticized the antisemitic claim that Jews were “economic parasites.” Statistics from the US Immigration Office showed that Jewish migrants—mostly from Russia—were significantly poorer than other migrants to America, while statistics provided by Jewish charities proved that, relatively, they less often asked for assistance and adapted quickly to their new economic situation (Fishberg Reference Fishberg1908).

In a similar apologetic tone, some other articles in the ZDSJ documented the various economic discriminations that Ostjuden were suffering from in Russia. In a 1908 article, Boris Brutzkus showed that restrictive measures within the Pale of Settlement had significant effect on Jewish occupational structure and explained why most Jews were occupied in these regions in overcrowded sectors (Brutzkus Reference Brutzkus1908; see also Amin Reference Amin1911).Footnote ²³ Jewish social scientists later on also documented the economic degradation of Russian Jewry after the Revolution (Brutzkus Reference Brutzkus1924a, Reference Brutzkus1924b, Reference Brutzkus1924c; Koralnik Reference Koralnik1925, Reference Koralnik1927), and provided statistics about the economic effects of pogroms on Jewish properties and migrations (Koralnik Reference Koralnik1923, Reference Koralnik1927).

When defending the economic or “racial” worth of the Jews, Jewish social scientists found themselves in the position of taking up a value-laden task. For instance, Segall argued that the respective rise and decline of Jewish participation in industry and commerce in Prussia was “a clear contradiction to the antisemitic … claim that the Jews are a haggling Nation [Schachervolk] and possess a distinct commercial spirit [Handelgeist]”; it rather indicated “phenomenal intellectuality [Geistigkeit], purposefulness, determination, flexibility and adaptability” (Segall Reference Segall1912b, pp. 41–42).

Here Segall was clearly turning a negative stereotype about Jewish economic behavior into a positive one (Jewish intellectuality): pointing out Jewish Geistigkeit instead of calling them a Schachervolk allowed Segall to refute the usual antisemitic claim while presenting Jewish occupational structure in a favorable light.Footnote ²⁴ This was quite typical of JSS: as John Efron argues, many Jewish social scientists and anthropologists accepted antisemitic considerations of the Jews, while eventually trying to transform these considerations as positive assessments, to prove the anthropological worth of the Jewish race (Efron Reference Efron1994; Morris-Reich Reference Morris-Reich2010).Footnote ²⁵

Struggling for Objectivity: Political Tensions in JSS

Such value-laden statements, and more generally political commitments, were of course problematic for the academic ambitions of the ZDSJ. German economists, and more generally statisticians, faced a similar problem at the time. The bureaus of official statistics created in the nineteenth century were indeed characterized by a tension between “objective” and “prescriptive” points of view, i.e., the conflicting demands of the scientific world and those of the modern state (Desrosières Reference Desrosières2002, p. 8).

The issue of scientific objectivity was common to both German economists and Jewish social scientists, but was addressed differently by each of them, because they were engaging with different audiences. Though Jewish statisticians took German academia as a model, Jewish statistics were intended for a (mainly) Jewish audience of social-welfare and communal organizations (Hart Reference Hart2000). Both the ZDSJ and the Büro were largely dependent upon the contributions from these Jewish institutions (Bloom Reference Bloom2011, p. 74; Hart Reference Hart2000). As we shall see later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the journal influenced statistical periodicals in Yiddish, thereby confirming that Jewish social science was mainly intended for a Jewish—at least Yiddish-speaking—readership.

In this particular German-Jewish context, scientific objectivity was mostly understood as political neutrality, and raised the specific issue of non-partisanship toward Zionism. As mentioned earlier, Zionists had a large influence in the creation of the Verein. Out of the twenty-five most important contributors to the ZDSJ, almost half of them (twelve) were committed Zionists. This could raise important political tensions, because all the major central European organizations and communal representative bodies that actively funded the Verein expressed an open hostility to Zionism (Hart Reference Hart2000, p. 46).

The perceived “objectivity” of Jewish social science thus largely depended on its ability to transcend the party politics of its Jewish audience, hence the numerous assessments in the ZDSJ of its on-partisanship. For instance, in a 1914 article, Cohen criticized the metaphor of statistics as a “young girl” to whom everyone was speaking according to their own interests in order to seduce her. Cohen preferred the image of statistics as a “lady” who invites everyone to her table, on the condition that nobody asks for his “favorite dish”; one could therefore approach statistical knowledge with a “pure heart” (Cohen Reference Cohen1914, p. 151; for a similar argument, see Cohen Reference Cohen1905).

Such images were part of what Mitchell Hart calls the politics and “rhetoric of objectivity and universality” in JSS (Hart Reference Hart2000, pp. 53–55). The essential part of this rhetoric was the idea that JSS was in the service of all Jewry, and not merely a fraction. In his 1903 introductory article, Nossig acknowledged the role of Zionism and renewal of the “Jewish national conscience” in the development of JSS, but also stressed that JSS had to serve the whole Jewish community, including the vast majority of non-Zionist Jews, and even humanity and science in general (Nossig Reference Nossig and Nossig1903; Verband 1907). An associated argument was that JSS as an objective scientific endeavor could be worthy of interest for non-Jewish populations having similar socio-economic structures (Simon Reference Simon1930).

Such ideas were, of course, at least partially rhetorical. They were part of a Zionist strategy to prove that Zionism alone could represent the real interests of all of Jewry (Hart Reference Hart2000, p. 54). Yet, it was true that the users of JSS were not exclusively Zionists; non-Zionist philanthropic organizations displayed in particular a great interest in the economic components of JSS (Penslar Reference Penslar2001, p. 217). Inclusion of non-Zionists in the audience was also paralleled within the Verein. Its administrative personnel was almost exclusively composed of Zionists in its early years, but non-Zionists assumed key positions later on (Hart Reference Hart2000, p. 45). The editorship of the ZDSJ was probably chosen so as to maintain this political balance between Zionists and non-Zionists. Ruppin, the first editor of the journal, was a deeply committed Zionist; yet Segall, the last and longest-serving editor of the ZDSJ, was a leading figure of the main liberal Jewish organization in Germany, known for its counter-Zionist position (Herlitz and Kirschner Reference Herlitz and Kirschner1930, p. 340).

In the end, like most German economists of the period, Jewish social scientists saw no contradiction between scientific objectivity, on the one hand, and commitment toward social reform, on the other. This consensus on scientific objectivity was enhanced by a widely shared faith in the objectivity of numbers. Statistics by its very quantitative nature was seen as an objective science. As Cohen argued, politics had to be based on a reliable and objective method, and this method was precisely statistics, the science of the modern state (Cohen Reference Cohen1911). This faith in numbers was “the leimotiv of nineteenth century statistical thinking” (Porter Reference Porter1986, p. 6). The enthusiasm for the power numbers was perhaps even more important for Zionists, who were looking for different ways to promote Jewish national consciousness. Collecting statistical data about Jewish populations was a particularly useful source for this nationalist endeavor (Hart Reference Hart2000, p. 17).

Editing and publishing numbers were thus seen as a valuable task in itself. This is clearly reflected in the form of the ZDSJ. As said earlier, the journal was very similar to the main German economic reviews of the period. Yet, an important difference between the ZDSJ and the two other reviews was that its articles were significantly shorter. The JNS article was seventeen pages long; the paper in Schmoller’s Jahrbuch was published in five different parts, for a total number of 371 pages! This was a regular feature of these academic journals, which published very long articles (more than 100 pages was no exception) and tended to grow in terms of volume throughout the years (Grimmer-Solem Reference Grimmer-Solem2003, pp. 75–86). Table 3 gives more information about the average size of the papers published in the ZDSJ.

TABLE 3.

LENGTH OF ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN THE ZDSJ

As this table shows, the vast majority (about 90%) of articles in the ZDSJ were less than ten pages long. This is associated with a more restrictive ambition. The main objective of the ZDSJ was to edit and publish statistical tables, with some explanations on how to “use” these data. Of course, these explanations were not free of value judgments (cf. supra), but the various contributors strove not to express directly their opinions about the observed trends. In contrast, in an article published in Schmoller’s Jahrbuch, after observing, for instance, that the industry now occupied the largest part of the German population, Paul Kollmann could then spend two pages answering the question of whether this evolution was desirable for German society (Kollmann Reference Kollmann1899a).

Short articles entailed prioritizing publication of statistical tables over interpretation and speculation. There were a few exceptions, and the ZDSJ also occasionally published some more morally engaged articles; but the journal remained committed to its editorial task of verarbeitung and effectively operated so as to smooth out the personal interests and convictions of its contributors about the present and future of world Jewry.Footnote ²⁶ This can be clearly instantiated through the individual cases of Ruppin and Theilhaber. Both authors were known as influential representatives of the so-called literature of dissolution and disintegration (Auflösungsliteratur) in German-Jewish society of the early nineteenth century (Hart Reference Hart2000, p. 144). In 1904, Ruppin published Die Juden der Gegenwart, in which he argued that the Jewish population suffered from a severe demographic decline.Footnote ²⁷ Theilhaber made a similar case in his 1911 book entitled Der Untergang der Deutschen Juden.Footnote ²⁸

Both books were highly controversial and generated passionate debates. Ruppin’s, for instance, was harshly reviewed in the German-Jewish liberal press, while being favorably received among Zionists (though he was not yet a Zionist at the time; see Efron Reference Efron1994, p. 168). Though based on statistical data, Ruppin’s and Theilhaber’s arguments were rooted in Romanticist and Völkisch images. Concentration in large cities was associated in particular with demographic decline and degeneration, i.e., with modern, capitalist economic life, while rural agricultural occupations were idealized (Hart Reference Hart2000, pp. 84–87; Efron Reference Efron1994, p. 148).Footnote ²⁹ Yet, when one reads Ruppin’s and Theilhaber’s articles in the ZDSJ, one is struck by their dispassionate and almost neutral tones, compared with the tones of their respective books. Interestingly, in the first years of the Verein, Ruppin himself criticized Nossig, then director of the association, for his “propagandist approach” and his use of JSS as an “apologetic and defensive weapon in the struggle against antisemitism” (Bloom Reference Bloom2007b, p. 188; see also Bloom Reference Bloom2011). Ruppin was yearning instead for knowledge and expert research; it seems that the issue of the dispute was favorable to Ruppin, since he left his imprint on the ZDSJ during its three-year editorship, while Nossig left the Verein a few years later and never published an article thereafter.

This editorial policy in favor of verarbeitung explains the very few references to other (non-Jewish) German economists writing on Jewish economic history. Of particular interest in this period were the contributions of Wilhelm Roscher (Roscher Reference Roscher1875), and especially Werner Sombart’s influential book The Jews and Modern Capitalism ([1911] 1962), which raised an important polemic within the German Jewish community.Footnote ³⁰ Like Roscher and Sombart, Jewish statisticians were interested in the question of Jewish contribution to commerce, but their method was different. Sombart’s and Roscher’s vision of Jewish economic history was based on far-reaching generalizations about Jewish medieval history, while Jewish social scientists were mostly working on present-day statistics. Sombart was actually quite reluctant about statistical methods.Footnote ³¹ In addition to a few side comments about Sombart, the contributors of the ZDSJ therefore did not engage in a detailed discussion of Roscher’s and Sombart’s works on the Jews.Footnote ³²

We found also no references in the ZDSJ to the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit. This dispute was initiated by the famous historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who argued in several articles published in 1879 that Germany was threatened by massive Jewish immigration from the East. Treitschke started an intense polemic, involving notably the economist Adolph Wagner and the historians Theodor Mommsen and Moritz Lazarus. In 1880, Salomon Neumann, a Jewish doctor and statistician, published Die Fabel von der judischen Masseneinwanderung. Ein Kapitel aus der preufiischen Statistik, a statistical pamphlet that was meant to disprove Treitschke’s claims on the basis of demographic data.Footnote ³³ Like Neumann, Jewish social scientists claimed that statistics might be used to refute antisemitic attacks on Jewish immigrants (e.g., Segall Reference Segall1910, pp. 83–84). Yet, they did not refer to Neumann’s previous demographic studies. This probably reflects a conscious attempt by the editors of the ZDSJ to stay away from polemics, and, more importantly, a fundamental difference in the conception of Jewish statistics. While Neumann was opposed to the introduction of categories such as “Jewish nation” or “Jewish race” in the field of statistics, Jewish social scientists considered the production of specific statistics about the Jews as the best political answer to antisemitism.Footnote ³⁴

JSS grew out of the impulse to collect as much data as possible about the Jews, and out of the sense that this task might transcend political cleavages within Jewish communities. It is in this sense that the ZDSJ is representative of Jewish statistics in general. Located in Berlin, the ZDSJ influenced later writings in Jewish statistics, after its postwar decline. The Büro was indeed mostly active in its first years, notably under the editorship of Ruppin (1904 to 1907). The war caused important difficulties, with the interruption of most public censuses and the modification of national borders, as Bruno Blau, successor of Ruppin as editor of the ZDSJ, complained in a 1919 article entitled “The Future of Jewish Statistics” (Blau Reference Blau1919). Later on, the problem was aggravated by the budgetary restrictions in most German statistical institutions that introduced important delays in statistical publications. The problem was acknowledged by Segall (Reference Segall1930a), who regretted that lack of financial resources could not allow the Büro to continue its pre-war activity, as reflected by the slowdown in the publication frequency of the journal.Footnote ³⁵

In the 1920s, Berlin became briefly an important center of Hebrew and Yiddish publishing (Kuznitz Reference Kuznitz2014, p. 35). Several important monographs in Jewish statistics published in Yiddish came out in Berlin in the period.Footnote ³⁶ From 1923 to 1925, the Bleter far yiddisher demografie, statistik, un ekonomik (Pages for Jewish demography, statistics, and economics) was also published in Berlin. Similar both in form and content to the ZDSJ, the Bleter was a Yiddish statistical periodical that came out in five successive issues. The Economic-Statistical Section at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), founded in 1925, then published the Ekonomishe Shriftn (Economic writings) under Leshchinsky’s editorship. It was meant as the successor of the Bleter and appeared in two volumes in 1928 and 1932. The section also published Di yiddishe ekonomik (Jewish economics), another periodical published from 1937 to 1939.Footnote ³⁷

These periodicals were written in Yiddish, thereby reaching different audiences from those of the ZDSJ. Yet, all these statistical journals had a similar agenda: collecting data in the service of the Jewish community at large. The YIVO was funded precisely to organize this project of collection and recording “from the folk” and “for the folk” (see Kuznitz Reference Kuznitz2014, pp. 71–111).Footnote ³⁸ In this regard, the ZDSJ and later Yiddish periodicals faced the same problem of political neutrality: their editors and many of their contributors were known for their political engagement and/or held strong political convictions, which were potentially problematic for their statistical research. If Ruppin was a controversial figure, Leshchinsky, head of the Economic-Statistical Section at YIVO, was known as a political activist and was among the founders of the Zionist-Socialist Workers Party.Footnote ³⁹ As Cecile Esther Kuznitz points out, political tension “was at the very center of the Economic-Statistical Section’s mandate”—and more generally of JSS (Kuznitz Reference Kuznitz2014, p. 91).

The legacy of the ZDSJ was transmitted to subsequent Yiddish periodicals through a close network of authors. The Bleter was edited in Berlin by Segal, Israel Koralnik, and Leshchinsky. Segall and Koralnik were the two last co-editors of the ZDSJ, and Leshchinsky, who was Koralnik’s brother-in-law, one of its important contributors. Out of the thirty-five contributors to the Bleter, almost half of them (sixteen) had previously written at least one article in the ZDSJ. The Bleter thus functioned as a link between Yiddish-language and German scholarship in Berlin. Leshchinsky played an important role in this regard. He collaborated closely with Koralnik during and after his editorship of the Bleter (Manor Reference Manor1961, p. 48), and was one of the rare Yiddish-speaking authors with extensive contacts in the German Jewish community, a resource that would later be useful in his editorship of the subsequent YIVO-related periodicals (Kuznitz Reference Kuznitz2014, p. 37). Beyond personal networks, the ZDSJ also established common statistical methods for Jewish statistics.

A Descriptive Approach to Occupational Statistics

Economic questions in the ZDSJ were mostly treated through the perspective of “occupational” or employment statistics (Berufsstatistik).Footnote ⁴⁰ A reason for this is that Jewish social scientists did not have many other economic statistics. Occasionally, they could figure out the state of wealth and poverty among Jews through statistics provided by Jewish communal institutions—for instance, on individual contributions to the community (e.g., Thon Reference Thon1907a) or about people in need of charity assistance (e.g., Fishberg Reference Fishberg1908), yet these data were restricted to particular regions or cities. In the ZSDJ, articles on the employment structure (Berufsgliederung) of the Jews usually started with the type of table in Figure 1:

Figure 1.

Jewish Employment Structure in Austria according to the 1900 Occupational Census (Source: Ruppin Reference Ruppin1905e, p. 2)

Most employment censuses (Berufszählung) were based on a similar classification of economic activities among agriculture, industry, commerce and transport, civil service, and liberal professions. Eventually, subsequent tables could detail the subcategories for each sector. The basic method consisted in comparing the Jewish and non-Jewish occupational structures. Almost invariably, such tables showed that Jews were largely overrepresented in the commercial sector (in Austria, 43.7% compared with only 8.3% for Christians) or in specific semi-industrial branches, typically the garment industry in Russia (Koralnik Reference Koralnik1925), while being underrepresented in the agricultural.Footnote ⁴¹

On the basis of such statistics, Jewish social scientists regularly agreed on the “abnormal state” of Jewish employment structure (see, for instance, Ruppin Reference Ruppin1906a), frequently perceived as a sign of economic degeneration. As is well known, the theme of economic degeneration and return to agriculture played an important part in early Zionism (Hart Reference Hart2000). In the ZDSJ, several articles echoed this interest in productivization policies among Zionist goals (Preuss Reference Preuss1927; Menes Reference Menes1931). As noted earlier, Jewish social scientists also used (occupational) statistics to disprove antisemitic claims.

Such comments were certainly value-laden but not necessarily representative of the methods of JSS. The observation that most Jews were occupied in commerce was usually not conceived as an “essential” and durable feature of the Jewish population but rather a part of a general socio-economic structure. The basic methodological principle of most articles on economic questions was therefore to consider the structure (Zusammensetzung)—i.e., the interdependence between employment structure and other variables (social structure, women’s employment, urban concentration, demographic variables)—rather than solely focus on each dimension separately.

This approach in terms of statistical interdependency appeared in the journal through the frequent use of contingency tables, which articulated two statistical dimensions, typically employment structure and social structure (e.g., Segall Reference Segall1911d, p. 98). Such tables could thus provide an explanation of Jewish participation in a certain sector on the basis of their social composition. For instance, Koralnik observed that Jews in Prussia were heavily concentrated in the garment industry. While arguing in an apologetic tone that this does not result from a specific Jewish inclination toward this profession, Koralnik suggested an alternative explanation on the basis of a similar contingency table: the garment industry was relatively less concentrated (both in size and in geographical terms), thus requiring a large number of independent workers and business owners, who were overrepresented in the Jewish population (Koralnik Reference Koralnik1931).

Yet, this approach in terms of structure and interdependence remained descriptive in the sense that it did not entail a theory or a conception of statistical “causality.” Jewish social scientists very rarely used the word “cause” in their articles. For instance, Koralnik did not say that the participation of Jews in the garment industry was “caused” by their social structure; rather, both dimensions (occupational and social structure) were said to be corresponding, while not necessarily specifying any particular sense of causality (Koralnik Reference Koralnik1930). We spoke until now of “interpretations” and “explanations,” but in most articles on Jewish occupational structure, contributors to the ZDSJ considered their contingency tables as part of the work of verarbeitung, i.e., as the “correct manner” to describe the data, not as a personal hypothesis on observed tendencies.

Of course, verarbeitung was not entirely neutral. Some particular ways to “edit” and describe statistical tables were used to argue in favor of a specific political agenda for social reform. For instance, a recurrent theme was the association of Jewish poverty in eastern Europe to both overcrowding in some economic sectors and small-scale businesses, thereby arguing for a “proletarization” of Jewish workers, eventually through emigration (e.g., Margolin Reference Margolin1910; Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1913; Koralnik Reference Koralnik1925).Footnote ⁴² Yet, at the methodological level, such arguments were not grounded in complex models or speculative theories but on what seemed a mere accumulation of data.

The Qualitative Knowledge of JSS: Mathematical Sophistication versus Statistical Rigor

In the early twentieth century, techniques of statistical sampling based on error theory in mathematics were being developed in the works of Sir Francis Galton, among others (Porter Reference Porter1986). Though they were familiar with eugenics (and thus with Galton’s works) and race theory, Jewish social scientists largely ignored these techniques and did not use them in the articles of the ZDSJ. This preference for descriptive methods can be related to the well-known strong empirical and qualitative focus in the German statistical tradition. The notion of statistics as a technique of estimating probabilities remained largely alien to German economists and statisticians (Lindenfeld Reference Lindenfeld2008, pp. 131–132). In the second part of the nineteenth century, apart from a few exceptions (Wilhelm Lexis), most German statisticians ignored the technique of sampling.

The mentors of Jewish social scientists were themselves known for their preference for empirical analysis over mathematical sophistication. Conrad, Ruppin’s supervisor, provided detailed quantitative investigations of local conditions, and thus “continued the idiographic strand of German statistics,” rather than the mathematical treatment advocated by Lexis (Lindenfeld Reference Lindenfeld2008, pp. 239–243). Such authors are usually considered as having an almost excessive empirical focus. According to Erik Grimmer-Solem, Mayr, Segall’s supervisor, embodied the type of statistical analysis “giving way to the narrow accumulation of data” (Grimmer-Solem Reference Grimmer-Solem2003, p. 276).

It would be wrong, however, to consider JSS as being mathematically “unsophisticated.” It should be noted first that inductive statistics based on probability theory were not really influential in economics until the 1970s (Biddle Reference Biddle2017). More importantly, the idea of mathematical unsophistication does not reflect adequately the statistical methods of the GHS. German statisticians of the late nineteenth century were interested in what Theodore Porter calls “systematic covariation”: the “proper statistical procedure” was “to fracture the population into tiny pieces, and then regroup these in various ways” (Porter Reference Porter1986, p. 184). These “tiny pieces” had to be chosen as the specific subgroups that were homogenous and coherent according to the main variable of interest, thus illustrating the main differences in the general population. “Systematic covariation” meant, basically, paying attention to the details and statistical rigor. Statistical ability largely consisted in the deep empirical knowledge that was necessary to identify coherent subgroups: for instance, a statistician working on the occupational structure in Austria had to know how this structure varied and should be then “fractured” among geographic (cities versus countryside, or specific regions such as Galicia), demographic (e.g., gender, age), or temporal (e.g., specific periods) lines.

An important corollary of “systematic covariation” was a general skepticism and suspicion toward statistical aggregates and averages. Such a skepticism played an essential part in Segall’s harsh critique of Theilhaber’s book on German Jewish demographic decline (Theilhaber Reference Theilhaber1911a). The ZDSJ published a short version of Segall’s review (Segall Reference Segall1911e).Footnote ⁴³ Segall did not and could not reasonably disagree with Theilhaber’s general claim that German Jews were demographically declining; the bulk of the controversy was about statistical rigor.Footnote ⁴⁴ A repeated claim in Segall’s review was indeed that Theilhaber paid insufficient attention to the details of the data. For instance, Theilhaber compared the statistics on birth between 1871 and 1905 to substantiate his thesis that the German Jewish population was declining, but did not look at what happened between these two dates—i.e., the statistics on birth in the 1880s and 1890s—which were strongly affected by emigration and immigration. In doing so, Theilhaber could not understand properly the relationship between migration and demographics (Segall Reference Segall1911f, pp. 491–494). Through his meticulous review, Segall also uncovered that Theilhaber wrongly reported census statistics (Segall Reference Segall1911f, p. 496), and even invented numbers in a subsequent article (Segall Reference Segall1911f, p. 494).

The kind of statistical rigor and thoroughness displayed by Segall was one of the important strengths of both the German tradition in statistics and JSS. For economists of the GHS and Jewish statisticians, such knowledge resulted from the production of monographs. Writing about specific areas and specific periods allowed statisticians to develop their sensitivity toward internal differences within statistical aggregates. As said earlier, Segall’s dissertation was on the demographics of the Jewish community in München, and was published as a separate booklet by the Verein (Segall Reference Segall1908). The ZDSJ occasionally published monographs on Jewish populations in particular cities (e.g., Weiner-Odenheimer Reference Weiner-Odenheimer1915, Reference Weiner-Odenheimer1916; Unna Reference Unna1925).

Another important critique in Segall’s review was that Theilhaber lacked the qualitative knowledge about the production of statistics: “Theilhaber sees only numbers, not the way they came to existence” (Segall Reference Segall1911f, p. 487). In other words, Theilhaber did not know how censuses were conducted and what were their shortcomings, and therefore probably could not fully understand and properly interpret the resulting statistics. Gross misunderstandings of data occurred when, for instance, Theilhaber compared the population in Prussia over the periods 1866 to 1871 and 1871 to 1876 without taking into account that the Prussian borders had moved in 1871, therefore invalidating the meaning of his comparison (Segall Reference Segall1911f, p. 493).

As seen in section II, a significant part of the articles published in the JNS or in Schmoller’s Jarhbuch were dedicated to the presentation of censuses and to the description of the various procedures for data collection. This surrounding qualitative knowledge about quantitative knowledge can be regarded as the second important strength of the German statistical tradition and JSS.

As far as JSS is concerned, this qualitative knowledge consisted, first, in knowing the shortcomings of public censuses or field studies. One of the important purposes of verarbeitung was precisely to indicate to the reader and/or future user of statistics such shortcomings. These could relate first to missing data. For instance, Koralnik mentioned that in the 1920 Soviet Russian census, several regions were not included because of war (Koralnik Reference Koralnik1927). More frequently, contributors to the ZDSJ indicated to their readers the several biases that might have occurred during the collection of data, notably an occupational distortion known as “Columbus tailors” (Lederhendler Reference Lederhendler2009, p. 18): according to Leshchinsky, when questioned about their professions by US immigration officials, Jewish migrants were inclined not to answer “commerce” but rather any craft, because of its better reputation, hence the overrepresentation of tailors among Jewish migrants (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1910; for another example about liberal professions in Germany, see Koralnik Reference Koralnik1930). Jewish statisticians also pointed out that some specific part of the employment and social structure was not adequately reflected in a census—e.g., the distinction between employees and workers in commerce (Ruppin Reference Ruppin1905b) or in the industry (Segall Reference Segall1912b).

Beyond signaling lacunae, authors of the ZDSJ proposed ways to amend the existing statistics in order to get the adequate information, notably methods to identify Jews in public censuses. When data about confessions were not directly available, Jewish social scientists developed alternative empirical techniques to trace indirectly the Jewish subgroups in the general population. For instance, in US immigration statistics, Jews could be identified on the basis of mother tongue (i.e., Yiddish; Ruppin Reference Ruppin1906c). In other countries such as Rumania where Jews were not citizens, they could be indirectly identified as foreigners without citizenship in a foreign state (Ruppin Reference Ruppin1905d).

Jewish social scientists did not only know the techniques; they were also aware of their relative advantages and shortcomings, and discussed these. For instance, Harry Lindfield, director of the statistical department of the American Jewish Committee, published an article in the ZDSJ in which he criticized (with regard to the US) the identification method based on mother tongue, and proposed to estimate the number of Jewish children on the basis of the number of pupils who were not present at school on the day of Yom Kippur (Lindfield Reference Lindfield1930). Similarly, Ruppin engaged in a discussion in the ZDSJ with Philip Cowen, an official at the US Bureau of Immigration, on the proper method to identify Jewish migrants (Ruppin Reference Ruppin1908). Once again, strong qualitative knowledge of the data was needed to properly use these techniques. As the ZDSJ also published articles on, for instance, the literacy of Russian Jews in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian (Rabinowitsch Reference Rabinowitsch1913), other contributors to the ZDSJ knew quite accurately the proportion of Yiddish speakers among Russian Jews, and thus the accuracy of the “mother tongue” technique.

In the end, it could be argued that it was not despite of but precisely because of their empirical rigor and their qualitative knowledge of statistics that Jewish social scientists, just like German economists of the same period (Grimmer-Solem Reference Grimmer-Solem2003, pp. 276–277), used descriptive methods that could not lead to far-reaching theories. This interpretation corroborates both our hypotheses that JSS was intellectuality grounded in the GHS and that the ZDSJ operated as a “statistic platform” whose main purpose consisted in the verarbeitung of statistical data.

The large amount of economic data produced by the ZDSJ can be regarded as its “statistical legacy.” This legacy is visible through the multiple use and reuse of the data, which were edited. When it comes to Jewish economic history of the nineteenth century, most economists and historians relied on sources that were compiled in the ZDSJ. It was indeed difficult to edit its own data, for the various reasons that were previously explored (original sources are hard to read, scattered across different volumes, or without direct identification of the Jewish population). We shall briefly mention here two revealing examples. Interestingly, Werner Sombart himself heavily quoted articles from the ZDSJ in The Jews and Modern Capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁵ In his subsequent 1912 book entitled Die Zukunft der Juden, Sombart relied almost exclusively on the “reliable compilations” provided by Ruppin (Sombart Reference Sombart1912, p. 10). Later on, when Simon Kuznets wrote several essays on Jewish economic history, he borrowed statistics from the ZDSJ and acknowledged his intellectual and empirical debt to Leshchinsky and Ruppin.Footnote ⁴⁶