Economics and statistics at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), 1926-1939

• In Event: Jewish Life in 19th & 20th Century Central & Eastern Europe

Abstract

The Yiddish Scientific Institute, known by its Yiddish acronym YIVO, was funded in Vilna in 1925. Its main goal was to produce scholarship in and about Yiddish, and to promote scientific research about Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The institute had four sections -for Philology, History, Psychology-Pedagogy and Economics-Statistics. Relatively to the existing monograph of the YIVO by Cecile Esther Kuznitz (2014), this article aims to further explore the activities and scholarly production of the Economic-Statistical section, known as the “EKSTAT” section, from its first meeting in 1926 to 1939. My sources include published materials, the administrative records of the YIVO and the personal archives of Yakov Leshchinsky, who was the head of the section.
Historians of modern Yiddish scholarship have mostly devoted their attentions to disciplines such as history and philology. This specific study on economics and statistics thus intends to fill a gap in the existing literature. On the one hand, I will show that the EKStAT section was relatively autonomous from the central headquarters in Vilna in both organizational and theoretical terms. Located in Berlin and then in Warsaw, the Economic-Statistical section managed to published several periodicals in Yiddish, that were the direct inheritors of an older scholar tradition in what is known as “Jewish statistics” or “Jewish social science”.
On the other hand, the Economic-Statistical department had the same motivation as the rest of the institute: use Yiddish as a medium of academic scholarship, and create academic subfields in “Yiddish” economics, history or linguistics. The EKSTAT section thus offers an interesting case-study of the YIVO’s larger scientific agenda. Publishing economics in Yiddish in the 1930s was an important challenge, in a period where economic scholarship was increasingly centered around English and German at the international level. The choice of Yiddish provided nonetheless opportunities and led the section to develop innovative editorial strategies. I document the ways in which this linguistic commitment informed both the scholar output of the section and its day-to-day activities.

Author

• Nicolas Vallois, CRIISEA, Université Picardie Jules Verne