Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (review)

This important study of Jewish social scientists in the early decades of the twentieth century is not really about "Jewish identity," as the title misleadingly suggests, but about the Zionist effort to use statistics and social scientific measurements to indict Jewish emancipation and demonstrate instead why Zionism alone could solve the Jewish Problem.

Hart recapitulates some of the material covered in John Efron's 1994 Defenders of the Race (New Haven, Conn., 1994), though with less stress on Jewish scientific apologetics and more on nationalist agendas. He locates the broad programmatic aims of Jewish statistics within the project of cultural regeneration initially formulated by the Democratic Faction within the Zionist movement. His subsequent focus on the early career of Arthur Ruppin allows us to glimpse precisely how social science could function to overcome the alienation experienced by acculturated central Europeans, affording them a seemingly objective rationale for engaging with the lives of the East European Jewish masses who, as Ruppin put it, "remain untouched by western culture." Science would bridge the gulf between "degenerate" Western Jews on an assimilatory descent into "race suicide" and Ostjuden seen to embody the national virtues of tribal solidarity grounded in a racially hygienic orthopraxy.

In a series of fascinating chapters Hart depicts Jewish social scientists diagnosing and cataloguing the various ailments of emancipated Western Jews—declining birth rates, increased suicides, physical and moral degeneration, and a host of other Judenkrankheiten, in addition, of course, to intermarriage and conversion. In contrast to the more positive Haskalah evaluations of westernization, social scientists like Ruppin, Felix Theilhaber, Hugo Hoppe, and others evolved a social Darwinian and Volkist idealization of the medieval ghetto, which they depicted less as a locus of physical disease and cultural suffocation than as a salutary laboratory of national survival. Even so, few of the social scientists believed the East European ghetto could long remain viable or favored its restoration in the West. On the contrary, they assumed that ghetto walls would not long withstand the relentless assault of capitalist modernity. Hence, only the reconstituted "healthy" ghetto of the Zionist imagining would effectively stem the further intrusion of "foreign elements" into the national bloodstream.

Hart's superb chapter on "Measuring and Picturing Jews" examines how social scientists made use of eugenic iconography to support their pan-Judaic doctrines. Ruppin's 1930 Die Soziologie der Juden, for instance, included a pictorial collage of contemporary Jews from different lands and backgrounds in which photos of prominent Jews like Albert Einstein were interspersed with images of anonymous "Semites" culled from newspapers and travelogues. The purpose was to make overwhelming the case for a Jewish physical resemblance transcending all distinctions of culture or class. As Hart notes, the presence in the collage of "Einstein—the genius—proves the point that, regardless of intelligence, status, or class, the Jew is above all else a member of a particular and identifiable nation and class" (pp. 191–92). Race served not only to unify contemporary Jews from diverse locales but also to link Jewries separated by epochs and millennia. The Zionist social scientists set out to prove that Jews had remained essentially unchanged (and uncontaminated) from the era of biblical antiquity through the present. The intention, as Hart makes clear, was to substantiate not only the national credentials of the Jews but their racial and historical claims to the land of Jewish origins, Palestine, as well.

Though written with admirable concision, the book occasionally sacrifices analytical coherence in its pursuit of comprehensiveness. A chapter on "Non-Zionist Uses of Social Science," for instance, rather than serving simply to offset and thereby sharpen the book's focus on Zionist anthropological ideologies, strives instead to present a complete picture of contemporary Jewish social science—a task well beyond the scope and evident interest of the text. Similarly, in his conclusion, Hart makes it appear as if the far-reaching significance of his findings is methodological rather than political by appending a polemic against the uncritical faith...