Disciplining ethnicity: Social sorting intersects with political demography in Israel’s pre-state period

Introduction

The intersection between statistics and studies of ethnicity weaves together the performative nature of demographic classification with the measurement of diversity and their ethical implications. Ethnic groups are no longer conceived by social scientists as essential entities grounded objectively in primordial origins but rather as constructed, imagined, and made up by systems of classifications (Brubaker and Loveman, 2004; Kertzer & Erel, 2002; Loveman, 1999; Nobles, 2002). This change has led to reflexive questions about the practice of demographic classification and discourses on race and ethnicity. Questions about whether and how classification should take place, under what conditions, and on what level of social organization have been debated publicly in North America and Europe during the past two decades. Asking such questions in the context of Israel reveals that the politics of large numbers underlies some primary aspects of Israel’s nation-state building practices. In the case of Palestinians, ¹ decisions about timing, methods, and duration of population census and registration defined who would be excluded from the civic body (Leibler and Breslau, 2005, Leibler (2007)). Although demography was employed as a population management strategy to count Palestinians living in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, the classification of ethnic groups within the Jewish community was not common during the pre-state period. It was only after the arrival of mass Jewish immigration from Arab countries that ethnicity become a prominent social phenomenon, one that also dominated social studies of Israeli society.

Assuming that social or ethnic categories neither have their roots in primordial objective reality nor emerge spontaneously, it becomes necessary to locate the historical processes through which ethnic identification became binary, classifying Jews as either Ashkenazi (of European origin) or Mizrahi (from Arab countries). I argue that the emergence of ethnic categorization practices in Israel should be traced to the 1940s, when the popular categories of Sephardim and Ashkenazim had congealed into scientific and political categories. This article focuses on the earliest manifestations of Mizrahim – ‘communities of the East’ in Hebrew, a popular term with political and cultural references – as a coherent statistical group, and uncovers the mechanisms of its consolidation.

The article follows the work of the demographer Roberto Bachi, an Italian professor of demography, who immigrated to Israel in 1939 and worked at the national Jewish institutions of the Yishuv. His demographic work embodied a three-part theme on the future of the Jewish nation-state: (1) identifying a general decrease in Jewish reproduction within Mandatory Palestine, (2) predictions of the continuing demographic imbalance between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and (3) classifying ‘Mizrahim’ as the Jewish group with the highest reproduction rates. This classification was followed by a description of Mizrahim as a unique ethnic group with special cultural, social, and economic characterizations, as revealed by statistical regularities. Bachi’s numerous documents in his personal archive from 1938 to 1948, on which I draw extensively here, reveal his dedication to keeping a historical record of every aspect of his work on the demography of the Jewish community in Palestine. His work during the time he was the head of the Medical Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) at Hadassah Hospital was especially rich and diverse and from this period he kept articles, lectures, and analyses of different demographic phenomena; versions of a book he was writing; and extensive correspondence with major Zionist leaders of the time. Bachi’s role in developing the early state’s statistics was formative. He established Israel’s CBS and led its work until 1972. In 1960, he founded the National Council for Statistics. In his academic career, Bachi became a distinguished professor with an international reputation, founding the Kaplan School of Social Science in 1953, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and serving as its first dean and a prorector of the university. He founded two academic departments of statistics and Jewish demography. For his scientific and social activities, Bachi received the Israel Prize, the most distinguished prize that a public figure can have in Israel.

Seeing Bachi as a ‘boundary actor’ can position his centrality to and the influence he gained in the realm of the state. ² He was neither a technocrat nor merely a scientist who used the legitimacy of science to act in the political field. As a boundary actor, he operated on the interface between political and scientific domains and influenced actors from both worlds (Carr and Wilkinson, 2005; Guston, 1999, 2001). Analogs of Bachi’s mediating position in translating politics to science and science to politics can be found in other countries during periods of structuring the modern state. In Canada and France, for example, technocrats who had command of instrumental knowledge such as statistics saw themselves responsible for national progress and its social modernity. In 1918, Robert Hamilton Coats, the founder of the Canadian Dominion Bureau of Statistics, saw his role as the establisher of a ‘national laboratory … for the prosecution of civil research, conceived from the widest angle and alive to the lines which such research should follow in indicating and assisting the evolution of the nation’s progress’ (Coats, 1929). In early 20-century France, argues Rabinow (1995), some technocrats were ‘technicians of general ideas’; professionals in statistics, economics, hygiene, epidemiology, and the like; inventors and practitioners of practices, discourses, and symbols of ‘social modernity’ whose aim was to understand and to regulate ‘modern society’ (p. 9).

Similarly, Bachi’s work was not merely instrumental but part of a gradually evolving vision of a future society: during his first years in Palestine, he saw in the Mizrahi families a possible means to achieve the political ambition of increasing the ratio of Jews to Arabs. His pro-natal campaign was aimed at making the political leaders as well as Ashkenazi public aware of the need to raise birthrates in general. In the postwar years, when the leadership of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, had to withdraw its plan of bringing one million immigrants from Europe and bring instead immigrants from Muslim countries (Hacohen, 1987), Bachi shifted his focus from calculating birth probabilities to making recommendations for ‘managing’ the Mizrahi population. His fear was that high rates of reproduction by Mizrahim would change the ‘face’ of the country, of its Jewish society.

Bachi developed methods for creating a coherent ethnic classification of the Jewish community in Palestine in order to find the fastest reproducing group in the Yishuv. To promote Jewish reproduction via statistical research, when the national conflict was at the center of his interest, Bachi divided local Jews into two main statistical groups, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. ³ This grouping was based on cultural attributes intersecting with place of birth. Bachi, who would become an eminent figure in the history of statistics in Israel, was able to bring his understanding of the use of statistics to the local community by associating the question of Jewish reproduction with the national conflict. After the establishment of the state in 1948 and the foundation of the state’s CBS, led by Bachi himself for more than two decades, his demographic methods and classifications were formalized and became part of the logic of administration.

In what follows, after a short review of the ethnic representation of Israel, the article outlines the history of the campaign, which characterizes Bachi’s early work, to increase Jewish birthrates and convince the public that this increase was urgently needed in view of the demographic imbalance between the two nations, Arab and Jewish. Subsequently, the article demonstrates how the three themes – pro-natalist, ethnicity, and the national conflict with Palestinians – became interwoven in Bachi’s demographic work. Finally, the article deals with the way indicators for ethnicity were conceived and constructed by means of Bachi’s work on reproductive rates.

Into the melting pot

Most of the literature on ethnic categorization of the Jewish society in Israel marks the 1950s, the first decade of the state, as a formative period for ethnic diversity, due to the mass immigration of Jews mostly from Europe and Arab countries. While Zionist settlers had immigrated in several waves from central Europe starting at the beginning of the 20th century, most of the Jews from Arab countries immigrated to Israel during the 1950s. During the tumultuous years of 1948–1952, when most of the Palestinians living in Israel were expelled or fled to neighboring countries, around 700,000 Jews came to Israel. Starting in 1949, official statistics in Israel identified immigrants by broad classifications according to continent of origin – Asia-Africa and Europe-America – rather than by any classifications of ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, or subjective self-identification. When the first waves of immigrants arrived in 1948, the definition of Mizrahim included groups from countries that did not necessarily fit the general profile (Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, and then-Yugoslavia), along with immigrants from countries such as Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Yemen, and created a blend of divergent groups within the Asia-Africa category.

The growing diversity of the local Jewish population on the one hand, and the differences between the new immigrants and the absorbing dominant group on the other, stimulated practices that eventually created a deep ethnic dichotomy between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim and which became a basic element in the identity of many Israelis. Ethnicity was essentialized by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and epidemiology, which studied social and cultural patterns among Mizrahi groups, emphasizing edah as a fundamental predicate used to differentiate between groups within the Mizrahim (Khazzoom, 2008). Although the binary classification was far from representing the country’s diversity, it turned into reality and overcame any delicate, fine-tuned description of the origins of ancestry. Local studies on ethnicity in Israel conducted between the 1960s and late 1980s did not challenge ‘Mizrahi’ as a coherent category of ‘ethnicity’, being more interested in the inequality experienced by Mizrahim as compared to Ashkenazim in the social, economic, cultural, and political strata of society. The empirical richness and scope of these studies, their ties with different practices coming from fields as diverse as epidemiology and hygiene, social work, anthropology, and sociology, are an indication of the centrality that ‘ethnicity’ had as an object of study.

Being a local version of the assimilation approach (Gordon, 1964), such studies shared the ambition of ridding immigrants of their old cultural patterns and resocializing them so that they could be absorbed into the new society. In a comparison with Jews from eastern and central Europe who arrived in the country in earlier decades, immigrants from Muslim countries were described as culturally primitive, uneducated, and lacking necessary skills to be fully integrated in to a modern economy. The melting-pot policy taken by state agents was nurtured by a sociological approach to modernity and social change that laid the epistemological foundation for the binary description of the local Jewish society (Hever et al., 2002). Moreover, critical approaches to Israeli society such as neo-Marxist, post-national, or post-Zionist approaches explained the dichotomization of ethnic categories of Mizrahim and Ashkenazim as a practice of internal colonialism toward Jews from Arab countries, or Arab-Jews ⁴ (Hever (2000), Khazzoom, 2003; Ram (1993), Shafir and Peled, 2002; Shenhav, 2006; Shohat, 2006, 2003).

While these studies rightly maintain that the discursive practices of the early days of the state construed ‘Mizrahism’ as an essential racial phenomenon, they miss an important aspect of the consolidation of the ‘Mizrahi type’ as part of the infrastructural category of ethnicity in the pre-state period. As Bowker and Star (2000) noted, classifications, such as that of ethnicity, are ordinarily invisible:

The formal, bureaucratic ones trail behind them the entourage of permits, forms, numerals, and the sometimes-visible work of people who adjust them to make organizations run smoothly … But what are these categories? Who makes them, and who may change them? When and why do they become visible? How do they spread? (pp. 2–3)

Tracking this bureaucratic trail enables an understanding how these classifications inform social and moral order. Therefore, following Bowker and Star, rather than negating the critical argument regarding race and ethnicity in Israel, this article draws attention to the beginning of the 1940s, as the formative years in which the systematization of the ‘Mizrahi’ category for research and public policy took place.

‘Against the only-child family’

Since its founding in 1948, the State of Israel developed policies to encourage Jewish reproduction, especially among Mizrahi Jews, based on the concern that Israel was confronting a demographic imbalance between the increasing birthrate of its Palestinian population and the decreasing birthrate of the Jewish population. These demographic trends were perceived and conceptualized as a threat to the national plan of establishing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority (Goldscheider, 1992; Portugese, 1998; Yuval-Davis, 1989). ⁵

Already during the 1940s, Bachi ran a campaign for making Jewish reproduction part of Zionism’s political agenda. He set himself the goal of alerting the Yishuv about this subject and making it part of the Zionist ideology; he wanted to bring to public awareness the idea that the endurance of the nation should be the concern of every Jewish resident and develop social policies that would strengthen the size of the local Jewish community. To promote this goal, he wrote in one pamphlet sent to leaders in the Yishuv that the Zionist organizations should be engaged in social welfare policies aimed at increasing Jewish reproduction. ⁶ The term ‘political demography’ was intended to emphasize the existential implications, on top of the political ones, of what he saw in the demographic prognosis of decreased Jewish reproduction. ⁷ As early as 1942, he had warned politicians and the public of a potential disaster and argued that the actual existence of the nation was conditional upon the size of the Jewish population in the country:

… if a fundamental change will not take place in the demographic process, the existence of our nation in Palestine is in great danger. Indeed, the Land of Israel absorbed immigration in the past and is going to absorb mass immigration in the future, but the critical point of the revival of our nation in this Land should be through natural reproduction (i.e., ‘internal immigration’) … [I]f we want the valuable [Zionist] projects that were created with great efforts in the past 60 years to remain in faithful hands, we should protect the future of our Yishuv through sufficient reproductive rates. ⁸

Only an increase in the reproductive capacity of the Yishuv could strengthen the nation in pursuing its goals, argued Bachi. Reproduction was not a private matter; human conduct was a political task that should be managed by Zionist ideology:

Some think that fertility rates are private matters and if the individual has no interest in carrying the burden of a family there is no need to change the situation [the individual’s position] with moral propaganda … I think differently. Indeed, I do not believe that a sudden revolution in fertility rates can happen only as a result of propaganda, but it seems that in a country that was built mainly on the foundation of the pioneering efforts of those who sacrificed themselves for the rebirth of the nation in its land, we must not be skeptical and think that society has no ability to influence the individual. ⁹

Moreover, he asserted, objections against the intervention of ‘society’ in matters such as reproduction, which belong exclusively to the private sphere, were similar to those heard 100 years ago against state regulations concerning employer–employee relations, or when ‘society’ began to intervene in family life for the sake of public hygiene: ‘Yes, society has the option and the right to intervene in the question of reproduction to prevent the anarchic deed of the individual, which will likely destroy the construction of our country that was built with tremendous efforts’. ¹⁰ The demand to deliver more children was perceived as an ideological imperative rather than something to be forced by the state. Bachi also suggested policies aimed at institutionalizing this imperative, once accepted by the Jewish public, through legislation and regulations of the pre-state Zionist institutions.

Although David Ben-Gurion may be the best-known spokesperson for constructing the female body as a national womb, it was Bachi who provided him with data regarding this issue. In 1943, Ben-Gurion was surprised to find low birthrates at the very heart of the Zionist movement, in the kibbutzim. During a discussion on a severe shortage of labor in the kibbutzim, held at a meeting of his political party, he gave a speech in which he cited the ‘experts’ who supplied him with data about Jewish birthrates, and very enthusiastically made the following collectivist argument:

… We need to demand from the female and male members [of the kibbutzim] that they fulfill a minimum quota of children. I do not suggest legalizing it in the Histadrut [labour union] constitution. The most important, significant, and difficult things we have been doing, and that we are still doing, are not written in any article of a constitution, but with our moral and ideological consciousness we demand of ourselves to do them … Every couple needs to know and feel that if they fail to fulfill this norm, they have not done their duty to themselves, to society, to the nation, to the movement and to the new life we would like to create here. ¹¹

Ben-Gurion’s speech was not about reproduction in the entire nation, but only about the kibbutzim, a closed and homogeneous political group whose members originated mainly from central and eastern Europe. The population of the kibbutzim formed the local elite: these were groups of Zionist pioneers who had arrived from eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century to fulfill the Zionist enterprise of ‘building the Land and being built up in the Land’, and who formed collective agricultural settlements. The next part of his speech makes this explicit:

We can’t always get assistance from other mothers. We will not act in the same way as the voracious capitalist who hires for himself a stomach of a beggar to digest the delights he greedily and continuously eats. We will not hire or ‘draft’ other mothers to nurture their children in anguish so that we will use them to root out potatoes from our gardens. ¹²

In his speech, Ben-Gurion referred to Bachi’s study of the patterns of marriage and reproduction among different groups in the Yishuv. ¹³ In that study, Bachi acknowledged the differences in birthrates between ‘Mizrahim’ and ‘Ashkenazim’. Ben-Gurion had a different view of the human composition of the Yishuv. He considered the population of the kibbutzim as his own group, which did not need to be ethnically categorized under the dichotomous category of ‘Ashkenazim’. For him, they were male and female comrades (haverim and haverot), literally ‘members of the group’. Mizrahi mothers were ‘other’ mothers who had a higher quantitative potential of delivering children, but they were members of neither the Zionist movement nor part of the Zionist settlements; therefore, their children would not be the desirable future generation. ‘We plan to live here more than one or two decades’, asserted Ben-Gurion.

We are not refugees; we have no intention to go back after the war to Germany or to ‘emancipated’ Poland, not even to Soviet Russia … [Therefore] we require youth of our own, children of the guys and girls of our groups … ¹⁴

Clearly, the ‘we’ refers to none other than the pioneers who emigrated from eastern and central Europe, and not to, for example, Yemenite or Kurdistani Jews.

In 1944, Bachi met with Ben-Gurion to give an account of the decline in the Jewish birthrates of the Yishuv and the Diaspora, as well as the birthrate among Arabs. Ben-Gurion seemed interested, although not fully aware of the problem, ¹⁵ and promised to bring the issue to the executive body of the Jewish Agency. ¹⁶ Following this meeting, Bachi wrote a report, The Demographic Development of Jews and Arabs in the Land of Israel, and sent it to Ben-Gurion with copies to the most important Zionist leaders of the Yishuv: Eliezer Kaplan, Moshe Shertok, Abraham Katznelson, and Haim Weizmann. Despite Ben-Gurion’s enthusiasm when speaking about the subject in a closed political meeting in 1944, no urgency was felt to extend this message to the entire Yishuv. ¹⁷ He refused to participate in a conference intended to encourage reproduction, because he did not want to be directly associated with this subject. He also had doubts as to his ability ‘… to do something for the sake of the important matter that is so close to your [Bachi’s] heart’. ¹⁸ Hence, the idea and the initiative for politicizing reproduction and making it part of official policy was not Ben-Gurion’s at all.

Most of the pro-natal campaign was managed in cooperation with ‘The Committee for Encouraging Internal Reproduction’, whose members came from local Zionist organizations. With the support of this committee, Bachi delivered lectures across the country and wrote articles in the popular media. He titled the campaign ‘Against the Only-Child Family’. He attended numerous meetings of different committees, some with top leaders of the Yishuv, ¹⁹ conferred with delegations, and addressed the issue in meetings of communal settlements. The campaign was run as a show to entertain the public: Bachi initiated public trials in the three major cities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Conducted with the participation of the National Committee, these trials were aimed at provoking public opinion about the decreased reproduction rates. ²⁰ At the center of the trial was a mother of an only child, accused of four crimes: (1) having an abortion due to economic considerations, (2) endangering the existence of the future of the Jewish nation in general, (3) putting the existence of the Yishuv at risk, and (4) damaging her only child by making him lonely. These trials were managed by an impresario and were widely reported on in the Hebrew daily newspapers of the time. Expert witnesses such as pediatricians, an economist, a rabbi, a housing clerk, and a teacher gave testimony.

The first witness, who gave a very long expert testimony, was none other than Bachi. His testimony is described in eight pages in which he raised two major arguments: first, he argued for a need to encourage ‘internal immigration’, his term for reproduction, and to discourage Aliyah (external immigration by Jews), assuming that the source of the future immigration would be from Asia and Africa, which put in question the quality of the next generation of the Yishuv. ²¹ Second, demographic imbalance between the two nations was urgent: not only did the Yishuv’s ‘neighbours’ have higher rates of reproduction, but over the previous few years, they had had lower mortality rates. This strengthened the demographic threat of the Arab population to the Zionist state.

Bachi offered a conceptual framework for thinking about the alternative solutions to the ‘demographic problem’. He translated the general political concern about the ‘demographic balance’ into a scientific object of investigation by characterizing the ethnic and national groups in Palestine according to their different stages of social development. Arab Palestinians, according to his analysis, were in a stage where they suffered less from infant mortality, but their birthrates did not drop as had happened with European groups in the 19th century: ‘Prevailing primitive ways of life, associated in many cases with a strong desire for children, bring fertility to a very high level’. ²² The increased rates of fertility, for instance, were not only higher than those of European populations during the 19th century, but also higher than those of other Muslim populations. Bachi predicted that the Muslim population would reach one and a half million by 1960 and mapped the geographical areas in which the demographic growth was higher than average. These predictions were made in 1946, when the Jewish population was 600,000, ²³ one-third of the total population in Palestine. His numerical predictions expressed political pessimism:

According to the current demographic situation, 1,000 Jews entering the age of fertility will have 1,065.5 children; those will eventually reach the age of fertility, too. At the same time, 1,000 Muslims will give birth to 2,287 children with reproductive capability. In other words, the fertility of Jews is sufficient only to cover Jewish mortality, while the fertility of Muslims in Palestine multiplies their number by 2.3 in the short period of one generation. ²⁴

For Bachi, success in the demographic competition depended on the question of what the Zionist leadership would be willing to do in order to change this balance in favor of Jews. ²⁵ Merely talking about increasing Jewish reproductive rates was not sufficient; it also required the institutionalization of practices by the Yishuv’s agencies. Bachi’s 1948 statement of his vision of the state’s role in encouraging reproduction, made several years after he started his campaign against ‘the only-child family’ and just before the Declaration of Independence in May, sheds light on his actions since the beginning of the 1940s:

In order to establish a reproduction regime, we need to place the care for increased reproduction and multiple-child families as a cornerstone of Zionist policy. This is the enduring function of the state as well as of our central and local organizations. ²⁶

In 1944, Bachi had recruited the National Committee, the formal government of the Yishuv, to support the endorsement of reproduction. ²⁷ At the end of 1944, he submitted to the Committee a general plan with suggestions for ‘political demography’. ²⁸ A year later, the Committee published a summary of its activities in which it claimed that Bachi was the one who continuously drew Ben-Gurion’s attention to the subject. Later, after 1945, the Committee published its social program titled ‘The Politics of Endorsing Internal Immigration’, whose objective was to invigorate the Yishuv for more reproduction. It was based on three of Bachi’s publications ²⁹ and on several memoranda he wrote during his work with the Committee on the policy that should be adopted by the Zionist organizations. ³⁰ The program included several steps.

His first two suggestions were to establish a trust fund to help large families and to increase workers’ salaries with the birth of every new child. The mechanism for allocating money was interesting: it would not be given directly to each new parent through the workplace; instead, a special institution would tax workers, regardless of their marital status, as well as employers, and collect this money as insurance for the time the worker became a parent. In addition, the Zionist organizations would add their own money to strengthen this resource. When a worker expanded his family, he would be eligible for financial child support. ³¹ This suggestion was legalized after 1948 and remains one of Israel’s social welfare institutions to date. The third suggestion was to help large families by giving their fathers preference in employment and obtaining loans, reducing their payments for social, educational, and health services, and by canceling tuition for elementary school. These families would be eligible for public housing and financial support to pay their mortgage. Employers would have to create half-time jobs for women who were mothers of several children. In addition, hospitals would send new mothers to special postnatal convalescent homes for a week or two. This comprehensive social program would later constitute the basis for the new state’s social welfare policy. In Bachi’s work toward a pro-natal plan, he characterized the different groups in the Yishuv with different patterns of reproduction. This work led him to create a more systematized classifications of these groups, as discussed below.

Support for the argument about his centrality in endorsing Jewish reproduction may be found in the following essay on Bachi written in February 1944 by Dorothy Kahn Bar-Adon, an active Zionist from Hadassah, The American Women’s Zionist Association. Written in flowery language, this document describes Bachi’s enterprise and portrays him as a pioneer with a ‘one-track mind’ and the ‘moving spirit’ of the campaign for increased ‘internal immigration’:

While still a young man … he became deeply interested in, and disturbed by, the declining Jewish birthrate. Despite a wide interest in other fields, he has continued to regard as his primary work the bringing of facts and figures to public attention – and ensuring that something was done about it. ‘For some years, I talked to the wall’, says Professor Bachi, the energetic, dark-eyed Italian who lives in a world of graphs, tables, and statistical maps. ‘Then, the idea caught on, was taken up by the Va’ad Leumi [National Committee] and action began to be taken to find ways and means of increasing the birthrates’. He is no longer talking to the wall, but to a substantial slice of the Yishuv. In some respect he is one of the ‘men of the hour’, his name and his ‘mishugas’ [Heb., craziness] sky-rocketing with an almost American virility. ³²

At first, the enormous efforts Bachi invested in making this subject an urgent issue on the national agenda had no impact: ‘Naturally’, Kahn Bar-Adon continued,

the pressing need for rescuing refugees from the clutches of the Nazis to the haven of Israel-Palestine had a more dramatic appeal than dry graphs showing the need for healthy Palestinian immigrants [internal immigration of Jews who live in Palestine]. ³³

Eventually, these efforts were successful, and the writer highlighted some scenes of the social and cultural life of the Yishuv in order to argue that as a result of his campaign, delivering Jewish children became a well addressed theme in the newspapers, theaters, and public discussions. As an example of how deeply this idea penetrated into the Jewish community, the writer cited a female member of one of the kibbutzim who said in 1944: ‘Babies. Everyone is having babies … We’ve stopped taking anything into account. We don’t dare. The Va’ad Leumi edict – it’s in the air’. ³⁴

Solving the numerical imbalance

By conducting constant counting of all Jews in the Yishuv, pre-state demography had major political significance in determining the boundaries of the Jewish population. ³⁵ Population enumeration was practiced by the local Jewish organizations and by the British Mandate, either to justify a Jewish state (Ben-Gurion, 1969: 57; Reuveni, 1993: 205–206), or to determine the exact ethnic composition of the country for administrative reasons (Dotan, 1981: 99; Eliav, 1976: 48). ³⁶ The demographic balance was considered a pivotal aspect of the conflict, and the Zionist leadership headed by Ben-Gurion strove to dominate the country through Jewish majority. Although other solutions to the conflict, such as a binational state, were expressed in opposition to Ben-Gurion, ³⁷ the pro-demographic superiority camp won out in the intra-Yishuv political struggles, and it became the ideological foundation of the policy of ‘population exchanges’ in the 1948 war (Leibler, 2010a, 2010b). Against that backdrop, Bachi sought ways to increase Jewish reproduction through probability calculation.

Adding to Bachi’s intensive involvement in public performances in the matter of Jewish internal immigration described above, his writings about the political consequences of the balance between the two national groups show that he viewed the demographic profile of Jews as internally related to the national conflict and therefore that calculating populations’ capacities is inseparable from the process of nation-building and state formation. In a section headed ‘Political conclusions’, Bachi analyzed reproduction rates among Jews and Arabs. The section aims to offer instructions for state-building based on scientific predictions about the nature of the state in the future, and discusses at length ways to solve the problem of demographic balance, advocating a comprehensive plan for making the numerical ratio between Palestinian Arabs and Jews in the territory of Palestine more favorable to the Jews. ³⁸

The first option that Bachi outlined was to establish a binational legal entity, a confederation that would give both peoples the same rights. In Bachi’s view, that Jews were more economically, socially, and culturally advanced would prevent them from developing a ‘minority complex’ as a result of their numerical inferiority within a binational confederation. This option counseled against relying on Jewish supremacy through external immigration. The second option was even more extreme in terms of the options that were considered legitimate at the time: a democratic Palestinian state of Jews and Arabs. The state would become Jewish when Jews reached the majority. Bachi disapproved of this option, thinking that the free play of birthrates would not work in the interest of Jews. The future Jewish state, he asserted, would need at least 1,000,000 external immigrants to obtain a Jewish majority, although even this would be a narrow majority and probably for a short time only.

The third option to make a Jewish majority in Palestine a certain and grounded fact was to partition the country. His plan included far-reaching steps. Since the aim of Zionism would be to create a Jewish state, with a substantial Jewish majority, and since solutions based on a binational state were not acceptable, a partition plan would be most suited to resolve the political problem. It was feasible only under three conditions:

(i) that it takes out from the future Jewish State a substantial part of the Arab population; (ii) that the present process of attracting the surplus of the Arab population from the internal hills to the coastal plain (Jewish State) is interrupted, and that the surplus of the Arab population in the internal hills is encouraged to settle in other regions; (iii) that a ‘reserve’ of land for the future development of the Jewish population is kept as far as possible in regions where the Arab population is not dense (e.g. the Negev [the southern desert of Palestine] or part of the Jordan Valley, etc.). ³⁹

The last part of Bachi’s program was a political plan of ethnic cleansing, a purification of the country of Palestinians. Although his main concern in this document was the proliferation of the Palestinian population, the areas he suggested as potential territory for settling the future of Jewish immigration (especially from Muslim countries) included areas that geographically bordered the northern and the southern parts of the country. Almost a decade after this document was written, the Mizrahim were settled in these underdeveloped areas, or in cities such as Lod and Ramleh abandoned by Palestinians who were expelled from or fled the country. This settlement policy created the political, social, and economic periphery of the country.

The supremacist solution was conditioned by a fourth recommendation: Bachi recommended paying attention to the ‘oriental’ communities of the Yishuv since their numerical ratio was about to increase. But this attention, he alerted the leadership, should be embodied in a general plan of social welfare policy which will help these poor and unskilled immigrants to be successfully absorbed in the new society, as well as prevent a ‘vicious circle of chronic poverty renewing itself generation after generation’.

Political demography, therefore, was not only a technology of governing society; it was the basic science for planning the new state and establishing official social policy toward the population. It is only after 1948 that ‘political demography’ was explicitly translated by Zionist leaders into a view of the Mizrahi woman as the ‘national womb’. It was directly associated in public with concerns about the demographic numerical ratio between Jewish members of the Yishuv and Arab Palestinians living in Palestine. Yet the ‘Against the Only-Child’ campaign showed that the context was wider and included variation among birthrates among different groups within the local Jewish community. This national concern about indigenous Palestinians had a more vocal presence in 1948 and facilitated practices that marginalized Palestinians, such as their exclusion from citizenship through the first census (Leibler, 2004; Leibler and Breslau, 2005). But political demography addressed these inseparable themes, of encouraging internal immigration of Jews as part of nation-building and keeping Palestinians a minority, as part of state formation.

Indicators of ethnicity

While it was clear to Bachi that the science of population could contribute to the ‘national enterprise’ by identifying reproductive regularities, and although ethnic classifications were widely used by bureaus of statistics after World War II, viewing the Jewish population in Palestine as sorted by inner ethnic divisions was unacceptable in the pre-state years. Grouping and classifying Jews according to their ethnic origins was perceived as emphasizing divisions of Jews in Mandatory Palestine. It was ‘… viewed as a product of the long term dispersal of the Jewish people in the Diaspora’ (Goldscheider, 2002a). ‘Return to the Homeland’ means, according to a central imperative in the Zionist ideology, the creation of the ‘New Jew’, the ‘Sabra’, liberated from the culture and psychology of exile. Overcoming the old habits of one’s country of origin was the Israeli Jews’ source of legitimate identity (Goldscheider, 2002a). ⁴⁰ Therefore, naming and characterizing ‘ethnicity’ was perceived as accentuating differences rather than cohesion and solidarity. This ideology was inculcated in educational institutions and could be traced in their political and cultural representations.

In 1944, in a memorandum addressed to Ben-Gurion, Shertok, Katznelson, and Weizmann, the political leadership of the time, Bachi echoed the awareness of the need to comply with this ideological imperative but also challenged it by suggesting the necessity for coexistence between the Zionist ideology and the demographic observation about the natural character of Mizrahim:

The theoretically beautiful position that we are all Jews and do not acknowledge the existence of ethnic groups, a recognition that led us to manage our own social, economic and educational affairs according to unified standards for all the ethnic groups, means, in many cases, neglecting the real needs of these ethnic groups, or pushing the Mizrahim into directions that do not fit their natural character. ⁴¹

Categorizing ethnicity was not a simple task of looking for lawlike regularities among coherent social groups. There was no stable, clear demographic object to observe and measure. Bachi had dealt with a phenomenon whose definition and coherence were yet to be constructed, as he reported in hindsight:

… the irregularity and changing structure of the population; the heterogeneity of the social structure of the Jewish population which renders of little value the use of ‘general average’ for the entire Yishuv; the lack of any complete census of population after 1931, and the consequent necessity of using estimates of population which become more and more unreliable with the lapsing of time …, ⁴² all make the scientific and systematic research of the Jewish population inevitable. ⁴³

The tension between Zionist ideology and the diversity of the emerging new society was resolved through a particular objective category of ethnicity: ‘place of birth’. In its intended use, this was a temporal category, since place of birth applied only to the first generation of Israeli Jews, and father’s place of birth applied only to the second generation; by the third generation, this category was supposed to disappear (Goldscheider, 2002a, 2002b). ‘Place of birth’ reconciled the discrepancies between official Zionist ideology that moved toward rejecting classification of ethnicity and the requirement to study differences among Jewish groups. Moreover, ‘place of birth’ not only solved the contradiction between Zionism and constructing ethnicity, it was also a category that replaced ‘race’ for Mizrahim, who are visible minorities.

Bachi’s first demographic research in Palestine was on the birthrates of women from Haifa and Jerusalem, based on 40,000 cases of infant mortality and live births collected in the 1938 British census (Bachi, 1941). He found that the difference between the birthrates in these two cities was high, with a ratio of 1:1.77. He understood this difference as caused by the fact that most women in Haifa were born in Europe, while Jerusalem was populated by the old Sephardic Jewish Yishuv. A few years later, Bachi divided this data set into three independent variables: mother’s birthplace, father’s occupation, and residence. The number of births was correlated with all of these variables, with country of maternal origin divided between two major groups, Asia-Africa and Europe-America. In a lecture delivered to gynecologists in 1944, he explained the logic behind the ethnic classification and argued that when making comparisons to the ‘average family’, the population of Hebrew women in Israel was divided into three major types: the Asian, the European, and the local Israeli woman. This was due to the exceptional variability among Jewish women in Mandatory Palestine, whose birthrates could not be measured and studied as a coherent group.

The categories Ashkenazim and Mizrahim or Sephardim were partially based on traditional divisions, which had been institutionalized from the beginning of the 20th century and even earlier. But while these divisions related mostly to religious customs, Bachi gave these categories a wider meaning that referred to social, cultural, and economic aspects of people’s lives. The indicators that Bachi used in his studies to determine the cultural distinctiveness of different groups included language, religious cultural traditions, biological traits, geographical location, education, and hygiene. Here, for example, he established a causal explanation for demographic variation:

The demographer who studies the problems of the population seems to think that the Jewish Yishuv is an aggregation of multiple groups that represent the different diasporas and different sociological development stages of the Jewish nation during the last centuries. Many factors cause internal differentiation among these groups: parents’ country of origin or descent, ethnic-religious community, seniority in the country, social, economic and cultural condition, level of religiosity, political view, residence in which type of settlement: big or small city, colony of pioneers (moshava), cooperative or non-cooperative agricultural settlement (moshav), kibbutz (collective agricultural settlement), etc. ⁴⁴

In the effort to describe a coherent statistical object, the natural number of births would enable the statistician to identify the distinctiveness of Mizrahim. If fertility among Jews of European descent was ‘natural’, said Bachi, it was possible that a woman could deliver as many as five or six children. But statistics showed that reality was very far from this prediction, and the average fertility of a European woman was 1.7 children. ⁴⁵

Bachi introduced an analysis from which the reasons for the discrepancy between natural capacity and actual fertility could be derived. The first and major factor that he discussed was the age of marriage: while the Mizrahim tended to marry at a young age, thus lengthening their years of fertility, European women married when older, and hence had fewer potential childbearing years. Level of urbanization was also a predicting factor for birthrates, with differences between those living in the city, on a kibbutz, or in an agricultural settlement. It should be mentioned that while urbanization was an indication of level of modernization, living in a kibbutz meant having fewer children because couples were affected by a strong collective ideology that intervened in their private decisions about childbearing. ⁴⁶

Although he did not use the term ‘ethnicity’ ⁴⁷ in his attempts to define ‘the demographic condition’, he referred to cultural distinctiveness. ⁴⁸ The independent variables that had an effect on the ‘demographic condition’ were edah and birthplace. People belonging to different edot would demonstrate different cultural or behavioral patterns even if they had the same occupation, lived in the same place, or were organized through similar community structures (kibbutz, colony of pioneers, or city). During the 1950s, ethnic community and country of origin became more substantive and essential traits and were even described by geneticists as having a biological distinctiveness in terms of external appearance and genetic profile (Kirsh, 2003).

One of the themes examined by these demographic accounts is the correlation between hygiene and sanitary conditions with infant mortality among Mizrahim. ⁴⁹ This analysis was based on identifying the demographic stage of Mizrahim as similar to the stage of the European nations at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and during the transition to an urban economy. Bachi identified different stages of demographic development and then applied this teleological reasoning to each group he was studying: Muslims, Jews in the Diaspora, Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, and Sephardim. Bachi identified the first stage with the 18th century in Europe when scientific progress, advancement of medicine, and hygiene still had had no significant effect on sanitary conditions in the general population, and thus had not decreased morbidity rates. The next stage was connected with the 19th century, when scientific advancement and the reorganization of hygiene and medicine caused a significant decrease in infant and child mortality. While in the third stage, fertility starts to decrease for reasons that are not entirely clear, in the fourth stage, early morbidity almost stops and fertility drops significantly up to a point that natural reproduction rates becomes negative: in every new generation, fewer children are born. How did this apply to the groups in Israel-Palestine?

Bachi’s argument about the need to trace demographic trends was related to the actual existence of the Jewish nation in its own homeland: ‘It is our desire and in our capability to create a social structure that will contain the capacity for self-preservation’. ⁵⁰ The presence of different Jewish groups and their varying reproductive rates, he maintained, create the capacity to build a state. Interestingly, the idea that the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine has the ‘capability to create a social structure’ contrasted with the usual sociological assumption that social structure is a given, out of which the state arises. While the agency of the Yishuv was a major component of the Zionist ideology, it was new to treat demography not only as the technology of knowing but also as a technology of making the new society. Moreover, the concern about the ability to create a social structure for the new state was not abstract, nor was it focused only on the levels of Jewish reproduction; it was about the quality of the future generations conditioned by which group (Mizrahim or Ashkenazim) would contribute more to the demographic growth of the Jewish community in Palestine:

In spite of the rapid movement of the Mizrahim’s amalgamation into the European groups, we cannot ignore the fact that the Mizrahi community still greatly contributes to the reproduction of the entire Yishuv. This contribution facilitates the declining of the general [demographic] deficit; but, on the other hand, it can also cause a significant change in the quality of our community’s composition. ⁵¹

The demographic studies conducted at Hadassah’s Central Medical Bureau of Statistics laid out the conceptual infrastructure for objectifying the Mizrahi category. ⁵² These studies were based on dichotomies that typically place East and West in opposition. ‘Society’ is presented as a problem due to its problematic groups; the solution to this is to make all aspects of ‘society’ legible through statistics, by offering a technology for making these groups knowable. In a lecture on the ‘demographic problem’, a year before the establishment of the state, Bachi delivered an analysis, based on eugenics, to an audience of health workers:

A few years ago, in a time when the Jewish birth rates of our community were low, I calculated what the demographic consequences would be of the natural reproduction of two extreme groups of Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. For example, if we compare Austrian and Yemenite women, we would get the following: 100 Austrian mothers will have 60 daughters … and 100 Yemenite mothers will give birth to 300 daughters who will take their place in the next generation. We could calculate what the consequences would be of their natural reproduction in the generation of their granddaughters: 100 Yemenite women will have 900 granddaughters, while the Austrians will have only 33. These are, of course, extreme groups. ⁵³

Clearly, this analysis represents a eugenic attitude that was common in those days and went along with the Zionist ideology of other leaders and social scientists. Bachi’s numerical predictions, the like of which had never before been so systematically presented in Palestine by any other professional, were an instrumental framework to understand the complexity of the demographic problems intersecting with threats to the homogeneity and quality of the Jewish society. ⁵⁴

The cited lecture also highlights the process of dichotomizing two groups, making the one a dark reflection of the other. By opposing the two ‘extreme’ groups of Yemenites and Austrian Jews, the dichotomy represents the ‘great divide’ between the two ‘pure’ and opposite social groups of which the Israeli–Jewish society was created. Moreover, by using probability, the demographer can anticipate the future, that is, demographic tendencies which will have impact on the quality of society and, therefore, require a social intervention. Later in the article, Bachi discusses the differences between the two ethnic groups in a more comprehensive way, constructing Mizrahim as the major object of statistical inquiry, as well as of other disciplines:

While Ashkenazim have one bed per person on average, the Kurds and Sephardim have one bed for 2.5 persons on average. Ashkenazim have on average one window per person, while the Persians and Kurds have one window per four persons … Sephardim have a 54% level of good hygiene, while Ashkenazim have 98%. ⁵⁵

The same goes for the possession of a bathtub, water, and electricity, the indices on which Mizrahi households were measured in comparison with Ashkenazim. Quantification is the technology of objectifying the Mizrahi as a statistical category. It is no longer described with adjectives but becomes a measurable object. The Ashkenazim were not measured in the same way, but were the norm from which the Mizrahim were the deviant. ‘It is clear’, concluded Bachi based on these examples, ‘that if we want to have any idea of the sociological profile of our community in the next few years, we have to have a special interest in the social problems of the Oriental Ethnic Group [edot hamizrakh], of Mizrahim’. ⁵⁶

This interest in the Mizrahim is noteworthy because their proportion of the population and of immigrants, far from being high, was in fact very small before 1948: between 1919 and 1948, they comprised only 10 percent of the total Jewish immigration, although in the years 1948–1951, the first 3 years of the new state, their proportion of Jewish immigrants increased to 49.9 percent, a trend that became even more marked in the years 1952–1954, when they comprised 76.4 percent of total Jewish immigration. But Bachi was writing in the pre-1948 period. Why, then, this incessant attention to calculations and predictions regarding the Mizrahim?

The point of Bachi’s calculations was to provide a scientific warning of a cultural threat. He measured the Mizrahim and their demographic characteristics to show that if nothing was done, the face of the Jewish community in Israel would be changed and the future would be bleak. His statistical explanations of the greater fertility of the Mizrahim with reference to young marriage age and short intervals between children served not only an explanatory but also a definitional purpose. They contrasted the Mizrahim with European women married to white-collar or academic professionals, not so much to explain anything as to set the two ethnic groups in relational binary division. This is comparable to the way in which the apparent equality of statistical categories in the 19th century replaced the old social statuses like class, family, and religion with objective and scientific categorization – but simultaneously permitted the measurement and stigmatization of deviant groups that behaved differently from the ‘average’ or ‘statistical man’. Such individuals were measured as equals, but then regrouped and redefined scientifically as a ‘social problem’ (Hacking, 1990: 118–119), paving the way for the rise of the ‘social question’ (Rabinow, 1989: 169).

Bachi’s role as a boundary actor

While most readers would see the demographic divide between Jews and Arab Palestinians as obviously relevant to the political narrative of state-building, the division of Jews into subgroups complicates it. The Zionist enterprise was articulated through demographic practices of population management, but it also had a role in shaping the Zionist ideology as one of internal colonialism: Zionism was not only a project of ‘white settlers’ who colonized the country and its indigenous Arab population, they also colonized the population of Mizrahi Jews. Demographics was done not only in relation to national competitors but was also aimed at describing and shaping Jewish society. Practices such as constructing demographic regularities of weak populations, developed during the 19th century, brought ‘society’ into being; that is, they brought to the public’s awareness the existence of an entity that was larger than the small communities where people lived (Wagner, 2000). The different activities in which Bachi was engaged during the pre-state period portrayed ‘society’ with the intention of making social reforms possible. Without Bachi’s reworking of the popular category ‘Mizrahi’ into a scientifically systematized category, the binary depiction of Israeli Jews could not become strong or attain legitimacy. Bachi was, therefore, a key figure in promoting the ideology of reproduction through statistical analysis, motivated by a national conflict to which he wanted to contribute. Broad though his work was, how could a statistician who was not an active member of any political organization play such a central political and social role?

Obviously, Bachi was not a ‘lone actor’. He acted with and through a diverse network of politicians of different levels of seniority, as well as medical doctors and nurses who were enrolled in the project and other people interested in birthrates and population management practices. On the national level, he provided numerical data to Ben-Gurion on a regular basis and presented his calculus in numerous public activities and political and professional committees. In a different vein, his work at Hadassah Hospital, assessing probabilities and correlating variables, was connected to reformist practices of studying and diagnosing certain populations and intervening in their hygiene habits. His classifications traveled well and became the infrastructure of Hadassah’s projects, which were then assembled into his network.

While Hadassah’s projects were limited in their scope and interest, Bachi’s statistical work offered a comprehensive epistemological tool to identify an essential ethnic group by intersecting ethnicity with the ‘national demographic problem’. His acts of persuasion with main leaders of the Yishuv translated national concerns through scientific investigations. Bachi’ success was related to his ability to provide a new way of understanding the present in terms of the future. His numerical predictions on the nature of the development of the population made statistics and demography a necessary technology, indispensable for public policy and social planning. Demography in the years before 1948 was technology for imagining an unknown future when one million Arab-Jew immigrants were at the country’s doorstep, threatening to change its profile.

The scope of Bachi’s statistical and demographic work and his involvement in social and political policy from the point of his arrival to Mandatory Palestine until his retirement in 1971 cannot be underestimated. Under his stewardship as chief statistician, the CBS solidified its credibility as an impartial scientific organization, and grew to become a political Leviathan governing and monopolizing the collection, calculation, publication, and distribution of official statistics. In 1948, with the establishment of the CBS, Bachi’s demographic approach was institutionalized and became the statistical gaze of the state.