Jews in the social sciences and anthropology

Thinkers of Jewish origin profoundly shaped the birth and development of the modern social sciences. In France, Émile Durkheim, the son of a rabbi, was one of the founding fathers of sociology, and later Claude Lévi-Strauss revolutionized anthropology through structuralism. In the United States, Franz Boas, a German immigrant, founded American cultural anthropology and combated the scientific racism of his time. Psychoanalysis was born from the work of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, while Hannah Arendt elaborated a major political philosophy of totalitarianism and the modern condition. The overrepresentation of Jews in these disciplines has often been linked to their position as "insiders-outsiders," lucid observers of the societies in which they were simultaneously integrated and held at a distance — a condition of fruitful marginality theorized by sociologists such as Georg Simmel. This belonging, sometimes embraced and sometimes held at arm's length, has frequently nourished a particular attentiveness to questions of identity, minority, exclusion, and social violence.

Sources & resources

• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan
• Jewish Virtual Library ↗