An appreciation of the contribution of Egon Mayer to Jewish population, community, and family studies

Abstract

The key to good, relevant social science, and especially sociology, is asking the right questions at the right time. One of the reasons advanced for the prominence of Jews among the leading lights of sociology has been the notion that as quintessential outsiders, Jews could ask the awk ward questions in Western society. However, there are other intellectual as well as social-psychological reasons for this trend. The fact that many of academic sociology's most prominent figures emerged from the tradi tional Jewish communities of Europe was no accident. Jewish religious scholarship incorporates a similar ethos and mindset to social science, whereby asking questions—shaylehs—is de rigueur. The ability to frame the correct question is as important as finding the right answer. Egon Mayer, as a quintessential European Jew, had strong roots in this heritage. No small wonder, then, that he was constantly framing and refining his questions about how society worked and developed. The overarching question he posed for himself and for us lies at the foundation of the discipline of sociology. How do human beings cope with modernity—the transition from traditional, communitarian, feudal, agrarian societies to individualistic, urban, industrial, and post-indus trial societies? This transition from a Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft that occurred across Europe between the close of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the end of World War II in 1945 was a traumatic episode in history during which the Continent almost self-destructed in a series of revolutions and wars of unprecedented savagery. Europe's Jews stood at the center of this maelstrom, buffeted by overwhelming and destructive historical forces. They were blamed and made scapegoats for the crisis of modernity and identified as the blockage for the attainment of Utopian dreams by the totalitarian ideologies of both the right and the left. There was a general consensus with the German historian Von Treitschke's statement of 1879: "Der Juden sindunser unglueck"—"The Jews are our misfortune."