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

Given the horrific legacy of Nazi racial policy, it is not surprising that Jewish historians have been hesitant to investigate how Jews employed racial categories to advance their own ideological and political agendas. The uninformed observer might mistakenly believe that categories of “otherness” based primarily on racial constructs were the exclusive purview of antisemites. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. As a race-based scientific discourse became the normative interpretive paradigm in the late nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals, fully acculturated within the European academic setting, utilized this model to evaluate Jewish society. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing unabated until the 1930s, Jewish social scientists actively contributed to the on-going debates about Jewry’s essential characteristics and the position of Jews within European society. Mitchell Hart’s book on the subject presents a richly detailed account of the “relationship between social science, Jewish scholarship, and Jewish politics” (p. 3).

As social scientists developed “objective statistical criteria” to define the abnormal condition of modern Jewry, Jewish social scientists constructed “their own narratives around the statistics about the Jewish present and future” (p. 8). Rather than completely rejecting the pathological descriptions of Jews attributed to them by their Gentile colleagues, Jewish social scientists explained their origins and offered ameliorative prescriptives. Zionists, in particular, used the tools of modern social science to reject the identification of Jews as solely a religious community and to redefine them as “Volk and nation” (p. 17). For both Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish social scientists, the politics of identity formation occupied center stage of their academic enterprises.

Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity begins by examining the Verein für jüdische Statistik, the institutional basis of Jewish social science. Founded in 1904, the organization was largely, but not exclusively, a Zionist enterprise. The Democratic Faction of the Zionist movement saw the Verein as a mechanism to sub stantiate the “essential national characteristics” of Jews. The organization’s first direc tor, Arthur Ruppin, utilized the Verein to objectify and validate the Zionist discourse.

Once the institutional basis of Jewish social science is presented, Hart turns to a thematic analysis of the debates that pre-occupied European and North American social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fertility, intermarriage, medical imagery, statistics, racial anthropology, iconography, and other topics serve as grist for the social scientific mill. In each case, Jewish social scientists situated themselves within established areas of academic discourse to produce works that addressed specifically Jewish concerns. Each level of analysis reveals the extent to which Jews were completely acculturated within the intellectual environment of the era, but still in need of explaining their foreignness. It is little wonder, therefore, that the Zionists eagerly took up the tools of social science to argue against the continued existence of Jewish life in the Diaspora and to expound on the need to establish a permanent Jewish national homeland. Their depiction of western assimilated Jewry as “sick and degenerate” reversed the enlightened narrative of progress that dominated throughout the nineteenth century (p. 108).

Hart is at his best when explicating the multiple contexts that informed the work of Jewish social scientists. All Jewish social scientists, regardless of national orientation, were members of a single “interpretive community,” one united by “methodology” and “key assumptions” (p. 139). In spite of this common methodology, however, they were also partisans of an intense ideological war that proffered antagonistic interpretations of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Moreover, their analyses were informed by the national contexts in which they worked. Given the politically charged atmosphere in which Jewish social scientists operated, it is proper that the author pointedly challenges the readiness of contemporary historians to rely uncritically on the statistics produced by these “experts.”

My criticism of Hart’s book stems largely from personal historiographical interests and biases. While the thematic organization illuminates “the fundamental discursive concepts . . . through which Jewish social scientific narratives were constructed” (p. 246), I...