Grains of Sand: The Politics of Jewish Surveys

Why are today’s Jews so obsessed with counting themselves?

This is ‘book’ 23 in the series The Impossible Books of Keith Kahn-Harris. The cover was created by Guilherme Gustavo Condeixa. For more on this series, read the introduction here.

What sort of book is it?

Scholarly, but if written and marketed correctly, it would be of interest in the Jewish community.

How likely is it that I will write the book?

It could happen.

Am I happy for anyone else to write the book?

I’m surprised someone hasn’t. There is, in fact, a book on a similar theme, but it deals with the pre-WW2 period.

Synopsis

Jews have a contradictory attitude to counting themselves. The biblical covenant promises that the Jewish people would become great, a multitude, a global power. As Isaiah reminds them, Israel could be as multitudinous as ‘grains of sand.’

Well, it didn’t turn out quite like that. Always a small minority in the global scheme of things, repeated catastrophes — above all, the Holocaust — have always acted as a brake on growth. Jews have also acted to limit their own growth. As prosleytisation became ever more difficult as the first millennia CE developed, so Jews eschewed the aggressive expansionism that allowed Christianity and Islam to flourish. Against this backdrop, counting Jews became frowned upon in Jewish law. As the Talmud says in Yoma (22b):

It is forbidden to count the people of Israel, even for a mitzvah…”And Saul heard the people and he counted them by using lambs” (batla’im; see I Samuel 15:4). Rabbi Elazar said: whoever counts Israel transgresses a negative commandment, as it is written: “The number of the people of Israel shall be like that of the sands of the sea, which cannot be measured”. Rav Nahman bar Yitzhak said: he transgresses two negative commandments, as it is written “which cannot be measured or counted”.

Although this prohibition of counting Jews has been subsequently elided (today, even most strictly orthodox Jews do participate in censuses at some level) it still provokes ambivalence and emotional intensity.

As Mitchell B Hart has shown, in the early twentieth century the discipline of Jewish social science emerged, in part at least, as a response to the perceived ‘sickness’ of the Diaspora Jewish body politic. To count Jews was to diagnose their weakness.

This self-flagellatory tendency in quantitative Jewish social science persists to this day. For decades now, a constant theme in the UK, USA and other Diaspora communities has been the demographic threat of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage. There has rarely been a survey in the Jewish community that wasn’t ‘grim reading’ for those who commissioned it. Surveys have become a way of motivating a productive insecurity designed to generate Jewish renewal.

The desire for more Jews permeates much Jewish social research and communal discourse. At the same time, fundamental questions are rarely asked; in particular: how many Jews do ‘we’ ‘need’? Similarly, the dominance of Jewish surveys has often meant that Jews have been desiccated into grains of sand, with little qualitative curiosity as to the texture of Jewish life.

Grains of Sand recounts the controversies, the ironies and ambivalences, that have accompanied recent and historical attempts to count Jews. Throughout, the book tries to explain why counting Jews is such a fraught activity. What can this fraughtness tell us about the Jewish condition itself?

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this Impossible Book, why not browse through the rest of the series here?

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Many thanks!

Finally, here’s an alternative cover: