European Jewish Sociology

What is it about?

There is wide consensus among historians that European Jewish sociology only comes into being with its institutionalization as a field in the first decade of the 20th century with the establishment of a society, an academic journal, and an office dedicated to the subject. While this institutionalization is recognized to have been advanced primarily by Arthur Ruppin, there is growing agreement among historians that several authors working more or less parallel to Ruppin greatly contributed to the emergence of the field in Italy, Russia, Great Britain, and Germany and to the emergence of a vast body of research in German, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Although the boundaries between European sociological discourses (e.g., Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss in France or Georg Simmel in Germany) and Jewish sociology are not always stable, scholars widely assent that European Jewish sociology denotes the study of contemporary Jewry with the tools of modern social science. Historians have also documented the unstable boundaries between European and American Jewish sociology (e.g., Max Weinreich, Maurice Fishberg, or Joseph Jacobs). Scholars also agree that similarly to broader trends in Europe connected to the emergence of nationalism, its general context was that of attempts to employ scientific tools for the rationalization of society, and more specifically for finding solutions to social tensions and problems. As such, its generators viewed its primary aim to study and understand the condition and future tendencies of Jews in modern non-Jewish-majority societies. In particular, this included degrees of assimilation of Jews into non-Jewish societies and the measurement of anti-Semitic hostility toward Jews. In comparison with other branches of sociology, Jewish sociology tended to focus on empirical questions and showed less interest in general theoretical or methodological concerns. With Ruppin’s immigration to Palestine in 1908 and his position as a professor of sociology (1926–1943) at the newly established Hebrew University, the center of European Jewish sociology shifted to Palestine. Studies in the field were continued by some of Ruppin’s prominent former students.

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