Jewish Statistics

1

Jewish statistics began 3,000 years ago. But for the first time since the dispersion of the Jewish people an organization has been formed in their midst that has set itself the goal to produce a survey, to take stock of the entirety of the people and the conditions of all subgroups.

The idea that today became a reality matured very slowly.

Two decades have passed since the moment when, with the reawakening of Jewish solidarity, a renaissance of Jewish national self-awareness was also beginning to stir. And already then, driven by a powerfully felt need, the idea of a statistical account of the Jewish people emerged.

The two phenomena rose out of the same root cause; their psychological connection is clear. The bloody persecutions in Russia woke the Jews forcefully from the short dream of the era of emancipation and assimilation, during which the Jews believed that they had forever merged with the peoples surrounding them, and antisemitism, the new form of the old Judeophobia, which steamrolled from country to country, finally wiped all sleep from their eyes.

Wounds that had long been scarred over reopened. The pain of the entire folk gave rise to a national consciousness. The streams of emigrants that passed before the eyes of their Western European brothers like the phantoms of a sorrowful past forced them to recall their origins and aroused feelings of solidarity. And while the heart followed the new sentiment and the hand opened willingly, ready to give, questions presented themselves involuntarily to the mind, followed by more and more questions. The suppressed voice of the blood made itself heard, and just as a roaming traveler one day begins to yearn for the faraway family he deserted, so the members of the dispersed Jewish people began to yearn for each other. Curiosity about the tribe evolved. In vague terms people said: Yes, I am a Jew—but what does it mean to be a Jew today? Are the Jews a religious community or are they also a nation? How does the majority of Jewry feel? How many Jews are there in the world, where do they live, under what conditions? What do they look like, what are their occupations?