Racial Science, Social Science, and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation

Abstract

This essay examines the work of Jewish social scientists who in the first decades of this century analyzed modern Jewish life from the perspective of anthropology and medicine. While the historiography of the social and racial sciences has focused almost exclusively on the Jews as objects of these sciences, scholars have begun to explore the degree to which Jews themselves were involved in social and racial scientific research about their own people. Trained in the natural and social sciences, Jewish researchers shared the same conceptual and methodological framework as their non-Jewish counterparts. Yet they had their own social and political agendas, and they used their research to achieve these. This essay demonstrates that Jewish social scientists, while united in their desire to counter scientific anti-Semitism through the use of social science, nonetheless were divided in the political or ideological conclusions they drew from their findings. More specifically, the essay shows how anthropological an...