Jakob Lestschinsky

Born near Kiev (now Kyiv, Ukraine) in the village of Horodishche, Jakov (Yankev, Ya’akov, Jacob) Lestschinsky was a pioneering sociologist of East European Jewish economic life and Jewish demography who became the most important scholarly representative of the view that Jewish impoverishment in Eastern Europe was a product of irreversible economic and political developments that would leave no room for Jews as a middleman minority. Raised in a traditional family, he was soon drawn to secular studies and attended universities in Bern and Zurich before returning to Eastern Europe. Politically, Lestschinsky was at first active in Zionist and Hebraist circles, but in the era of Russia’s 1905 Revolution he embraced socialism, Yiddishism, and a nominally territorialist but actually diaspora-centered vision of Jewish national and social reinvention in the modern world. It was in this same period that Lestschinsky first began using sociological and statistical methods in an effort to measure and explain the growing poverty and “declassing” afflicting large swaths of East European Jewry. In 1921, then in Berlin, Lestschinsky began writing for New York’s Yiddish daily Forverts, and in 1925, he cofounded the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Through his work for the Forverts, ORT, and YIVO, Lestschinsky established himself as a leading Jewish demographer, economist, and sociologist. In the 1930s, as his research led him to darkening accounts of East European Jewry’s situation and prospects, Lestschinsky reembraced Zionism. Leaving Warsaw for New York in 1938, he would conduct pioneering research on the Holocaust during and after World War II. He immigrated to Israel in 1959.