The need for a systematic comparative approach to national population surveys of Jews

Abstract

National counts of Jewish populations have been fraught with unpleas ant consequences for their sponsors since biblical times (see II Samuel 24:1-18). In those times they were unpopular because of the belief that unfair advantages and dangerous unnatural powers were conferred on the initiators of such projects. In the contemporary academic world, social scientists are taught that surveys have to be approached with cau tion because they famously are prone to error because of bad or fluctuat ing design, discrepancies in samples, and poor execution (Kosmin, 1979). Unfortunately, the National Jewish Population Surveys of 1970 01 and 2000-01 brought little naches (satisfaction) to their sponsors in part because they took place in an intellectual vacuum and ignored the historical and international comparative framework that should under pin all major social scientific studies of the Jews. Their sponsors also failed to recognize that the essence of science, especially as applied to national baseline data collection, is replicable data with standardized and detailed classification rules applied consistently. Rabbinical and biblical literature, as well as gentile authorities, tra ditionally viewed the Jews both as a nation and as a religious commu nity. After Emancipation during the 19th century, this fabric of unity began to unravel. In Western Europe, some Jews chose to define them selves solely as a religious group, eliminating the national aspect. In Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia, and also to some extent in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Jewishness was expressed by modernizers, such as the Bundists and Zionists, as a secular national category compa rable to other nationality groups dwelling in these multi-ethnic empires. Internationally, official Jewish population and social statistics reflect these historical developments. For instance, for more than a century the Jews of Switzerland and Ireland have been recorded as a religious or confessional group in their respective national decennial censuses. By contrast, the Jews of the USSR/CIS were recorded as a nationality on the basis of descent in censuses that provide a similar rich time series. North American Jews are heirs to three traditions: the pre-modern religion-nation; the Western modernizers who defined themselves as a group with a distinct religion and who maintained the nationality of their host country; and the East European modernizers who defined themselves as a secular nationality on the basis of Yiddish or Hebrew culture. Though largely of Eastern European stock, American Jews live in a society similar to Western Europe, a society of unitary nationality but with multiple religious groups. Contemporary Jewish identification