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Jews as object of the social sciences

Article proposals should be sent before May 15, 2025

Notes de la rédaction

Coordination of the thematic issue: Sébastien Mosbah-Natanson (Sorbonne Université/GEMASS) et Nicolas Vallois (Université de Picardie Jules Verne/CRIISEA)

The aim of this issue of the Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines is to explore the place of “Jews” as an object of study in the social sciences since the 19th century, both in Europe and in other parts of the world. Although the German “Science of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums) had the ambition, from the beginning of the 19th century, to develop a scientific approach to Judaism, it did so mainly with philological and religious-historical ambitions. The human sciences that developed during this century, and the next, offered other perspectives on this object of uncertain contours. Indeed, the objectification of the Jews by the various disciplines of the social sciences is not self-evident, and it is as if it were never exactly the same object that was being targeted. Do these sciences approach Jews as a people, a religion, a culture, a nation, a minority, a civilization or even a “race” (Mosbah-Natanson, 2024)? Should we talk about Jews, Jewries, or Judaism?

This multi-dimensionality of the “Jews” object is borne out by the polysemy of the term in the social sciences. In Yiddish, for example, the word “Yiddish” means “Jew”, but also designates Yiddish as a language. The Yidisher visnshaftlikher institut, known by its acronym YIVO, founded in Vilnius in 1925, can thus be understood, literally, as both “scientific institute on Yiddish” and “scientific institute on Jews”. In statistical classifications, for example, Jews are sometimes referred to as such, but also as people of the “Israelite faith”, as was the case in French censuses between 1851 and 1872, or as “Hebrews” by immigration authorities in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century. This variety of names is also illustrated by the many expressions used, in the French context alone, to designate Jewish museums: Musée Judaïque, musée d’Art Juif or musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme (Jarrassé, 2015). From this point of view, the most “encompassing”, or generic, term is undoubtedly the substantive form of Jew, Judentum in German, yidntum in Yiddish, Jewry in English, yahadut in Hebrew, whose closest French equivalent is undoubtedly the term “judaïcité” proposed by Albert Memmi to designate “all Jewish people”, the word “juiverie” being loaded with negative, even antisemitic connotations. But the equivocation remains: Wissenschaft des Judentums, literally the science of Jewry, rather than Judaism, is known in Hebrew as Hokhmat Israel, knowledge of Israel. It would therefore be possible to historicize this dispersal of uses of the word “Jew” in the social sciences, in the same way as has been done for the word “diaspora” (Dufoix, 2012).

  • 1 For example, apart from a few major authors such as Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Franz Oppenheimer (...)

Historiography on the subject has tended to focus on the supposedly decisive role of actors of Jewish origin in the emergence and constitution of the social sciences (Karady, 2004). Other works have also attempted to evaluate the role of this specific object in the history of these sciences. In a book published in 2008, Amos Morris-Reich argues that the question of Jewish assimilation is central to the thinking of anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Georg Simmel, and more generally to the intellectual construction of contemporary social sciences in the 19th century (Morris-Reich, 2008). Similarly, in a collective work on antisemitism and the constitution of sociology, Marcel Stoeltzer sees the political problem of Jewish emancipation as a “catalyst” for sociology. More specifically, as a “travesty of a social theory”, antisemitism would have both competed with and stimulated sociological reflection; according to Stoeltzer, the history of the social sciences can seize on antisemitism as a perspective from which the emergence of these new disciplines can be read and interrogated (Stoeltzer, 2014). More recently, in a book published in 2017, Chad Goldberg shows how Jews have been conceived as symbols of social modernity, and for this reason have constituted a privileged object in the German, French and US sociological traditions (Goldberg, 2017). In contrast to these various works pointing to the centrality of the Jewish fact in the constitution of the social sciences, others question this supposed place1. For example, a recent book has demonstrated the difficulty of integrating Jews into French national historiography (Salmona and Soussen, 2021).

This issue proposes to take a step back from this debate. Our hypothesis is that Jews constitute a specific and original object of study within the social sciences. On the one hand, we are interested in the various ways in which the subject matter of these sciences has been defined: what have the terms “Jew”, “Judaism”, “Semitic”, etc. covered and still cover in the various humanities and social sciences? On the other hand, the aim is to question what the object says about their metabolism (diversity, borders, social and political uses). Yet this particularity has been little studied from a reflexive perspective, from the point of view of the history and philosophy of science.

To address this question, it would be interesting to study the ways in which the Jewish fact has been approached in the disciplinary fields mentioned above (economics, sociology, statistics/demography, law, political science, history, religious studies...) but also in other fields of the humanities and social sciences - such as linguistics, philology, psychology, geography, geopolitics, international relations, archaeology, anthropology, gender studies, etc. - and their respective intersections. By varying the levels of observation - disciplinary, national, infra-national, international - this dossier hypothesizes that it might be possible to bring to light the diversity of research fields that are too often amalgamated. From a chronological point of view, the angle is broad: from the beginning of the 19th century to the present day, taking into account the transformations brought about by the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel.

We are therefore inviting historians, sociologists and anthropologists from various humanities disciplines to contribute to this issue on the place of “Jews” in the history of the social sciences. The aim would be to analyze the role and place that this object, or perhaps rather these specific objects, have had, or even still have, in these sciences. Within this framework, which we hope will be attentive to interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary objects, we will analyze the elaboration, transmission and dissemination of representations associated with the Jewish fact within the social sciences. Contributions will need to pay close attention to the institutional and social conditions under which knowledge is produced and transmitted.

More specific contributions could focus, for example, on:

  • The emergence of the field of “Jewish studies”, in France and abroad, its reception within the Jewish and non-Jewish world, and the way it has modified the perimeter of disciplines, generating forms of interdisciplinarity in the manner of “studies” which give priority to the object over the chosen method or approach.

  • The history of the study of Jewish languages in the context of developments in national philologies and the emergence of comparative linguistics, with the creation, for example, of the Yidishe visnshaft, i.e. academic studies on and in Yiddish, and more generally, of equivalent fields for other Jewish languages such as Judeo-Spanish or Judeo-Arabic, etc.

  • “Semitism” in the human sciences: following on from the work of Maurice Olender, we might ask how we can assess the influence of the ‘Semitic languages’ paradigm, derived from linguistics and philology, outside these two disciplines, on anthropology or sociology, history (cf. E. Renan) in particular.

  • The study and categorization of Jews in the history of statistics, demography and law, with the emergence of statistics applied to Jews in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century (Hart, 2000), and more recently in North America.

  • The ambivalence of the figure of the Jews in economic history and economics, to whom often contradictory characters are attributed: enterprising but psychologically unstable, innovative but undisciplined, independent but physically weak, rich and poor, capitalist and communist (Vallois and Imhoff, 2022). These representations, which take up a well-stocked and already existing social imaginary, could also be studied in other social sciences in which they appear, and in classic authors such as Durkheim (Karsenti, 2017)

  • More concrete forms of knowledge, such as publishing projects devoted to Jews and claiming to be social science projects, like encyclopedias such as the Jewish Encyclopedia, the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Yidishe entsiklopedie, or journals of Jewish or Yiddish studies.

  • Analyses of research groups and/or publications on these issues outside Israel, Europe or the USA would be very interesting.

  • The effects produced by the creation of the State of Israel on the production and circulation of knowledge on the “Jewish” object, through the structuring of a national academic field, but also through its constitution as a new object of study and scholarly production.

Instruction for authors

Article proposals (between 4,000 and 6,000 signs, including bibliographical references), in English or French, should be sent by May 15, 2025 to the following addresses: adrhsh@gmail.com, sebastien.mosbah_natanson@sorbonne-universite.fr et nicolas.vallois@u-picardie.fr

The journal accepts articles in English and French, from 40,000 to 70,000 characters (spaces included).

Instructions for authors can be found here: https://journals.openedition.org/rhsh/1273.

Bibliographie

Baumgarten, J., Trautmann-Waller, C. (dir.), 2014, Rabbins et savants au village, l'étude des traditions populaires juives (xixe-xxe siècles), Paris, CNRS Éditions.

Birnbaum, P., 2004, Géographie de l’espoir. L’exil, les Lumières, la désassimilation, Paris, Gallimard.

Bodemann, M., 2014, « Coldly Admiring the Jews: Werner Sombart and Classical German Sociology on Nationalism and Race », dans Stoetzler, M. (éd.), Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, p. 110-134.

Dufoix, S., 2012, La Dispersion. Une histoire des usages du mot « diaspora », Paris, Éditions Amsterdam.

Goldberg, C., 2017, Modernity and the Jews in western social thought, Chicago, Chicago University Press.

Hart, M. B., 2000, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Jarrassé, D., 2015, « Aux origines de la muséalisation des objets d’art juif(s), 1890‑1920 », Revue germanique internationale, 21, p. 99-112.

Karady, V., 2004, « Les intellectuels juifs et les sciences sociales. Esquisse d'une problématique », dans Heilbron, J., Lenoir, R., Sapiro, G., et Pargamin, P. (éd), Pour une histoire des sciences sociales. Hommage à Pierre Bourdieu, Paris, Fayard, p. 159-180.

Karsenti, B., 2017, La question juive des modernes. Philosophie de l’émancipation, Paris, PUF.

Kessler-Mesguich, S., Baumgarten, J. (dir.), 2021, « Dix siècles de linguistique sémitique », numéro thématique, Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 23 (2).

Memmi, A., 1965, « Recherches sur la judéité des Juifs de France – Présentation de l’enquête », Revue française de sociologie, 6, p. 68-69.

Morris-Reich, A., 2008, The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science, New York, Routledge.

Mosbah-Natanson, S., 2024, « Sociology against Zionism? The Thought of French Jewish Sociologist René Worms on Jews and Judaism at the Beginning of the 20th Century », Jewish Social Studies, 29-1, p. 59-86.

Salmona, P., Soussen, C.(dir.), 2021, Les Juifs. Une tâche aveugle dans le récit national, Paris, Albin Michel.

Stoetzler, M., 2014, « Introduction: The Theory of Society Talks Back to Its Travesty », dans Stoetzler, M. (dir.), Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, p. 1-41.

Vallois, N., Imhoff, S., 2022, « “Floating Jews”—The luftmentsh as an Economic Character », Œconomia, 12, p. 275-314.

Zalc, C., 2018, « Passages de témoins », Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire, 139 (3), p. 2-21. https://doi.org/10.3917/ving.139.0002.

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Notes

1 For example, apart from a few major authors such as Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Franz Oppenheimer, German sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century gave only a very secondary place to the study of the Jews, both in its congresses and in its main journals (Bodemann, 2014, p.123-124).

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