Ethnic Data: Some Lessons From Jewish Experience

Statistics have played a central role in modern attempts to victimize the Jews of Europe—and in living memory, being marked as Jewish has meant loss of employment, enforced emigration, and worse. Small wonder, then, that Jews in Eastern Europe are still commonly reluctant to register as Jewish, with the result that many observers assert that census and survey data under-represents the Jewish population of some countries by as much as one half. At the same time, Jewish communities have often used statistics to combat discriminatory policies, sometimes with great success.

This article examines the Jewish experience of government data collection and ethnic data monitoring in Europe being used to perpetuate institutionalized discrimination and the ways in which the cycle was able to be disrupted.