The Quality of Vital Registration of the Jews in East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Vital records are one of the main sources providing insight into the demographic past. For most of the nineteenth century, however, the degree of under-registration of vital events among Jews was much higher than among non-Jews. These omissions undermine the credibility of demographic data on fertility and mortality published in contemporary statistical yearbooks. The analysis shows that the male-to-female ratio at birth aggregated on a regional level reveals the highest under-registration among Jews in the Russian Empire, including Congress Poland, until World War I. On the other hand, Prussian registration covers the Jewish population most completely and already in the 1820s shows no signs of under-registration. Despite the general low quality of registration systems, records from selected individual towns still pass quality tests. Top-down imposition of the registration duties, corporatism, defective legal regulations, bureaucratic inefficiency and personal characteristics of civil registrars were the main reasons for under-registration.