De joden in Amsterdam

Daarnaast lezen wij in een Engelse publicatie¹ :

„What is strikingly lacking are sociological studies of the present. To the best of our knowledge only two field studies have been carried out, and one of these was by a foreigner. Dr. Howard M. Brotz, an American sociologist, now teaching at Smith College, Northampton, Mass., did a field study in North London which was embodied in a Ph. D. thesis in the University of London, 1951. An Analysis oj Social Stratification within Jewish Society in London. Mr. Ernest Krausz, now working in the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics, carried out a field study of the Leeds community.

Nearly ten years ago one of us was responsible for putting together a provisional survey of what was known about Anglo-Jewish society. A Minority in Britain, social Studies oj the Anglo-Jewish community (ed. Maurice Freedman, London 195s) consisted of four papers. The first was an historical sketch by Dr. James Parkes and the second a demographic and statistical survey by Dr. Hannah Neustatter. The third paper, dealing with Jewish society in London, was by Dr. Brotz; it built upon the field research already referred to. The final piece was written by the editor of the collection; it was based on no systematic field research whatever, but attempted to outline the problems of analysing the position of the Jews in British society. Apart from the papers by Brotz and Krausz (and an additional paper by the latter on Anglo-Jewish occupational structure to be published in Vol. IV, No. 1, 1962, of The Jewish Journal of Sociology) virtually nothing has appeared since a Minority in Britain to take its tentative analysis a step further.

Why? The question is itself a sociological one. If it can be answered it will help us to be realistic in our planning for the future. The first point to be made clear is that sociology in this country is underdeveloped. It is starved of money both for the training of research workers and for research. This has a direct impact on the study of Jewish questions - as on most other fields of study. At some time or other every Jewish sociologist and anthropologist in Britain must have had the experience of being consulted by a well-meaning young man or woman about the chances of conducting research into an aspect of Jewish life. The aspirant may have had no education in the social sciences ; he will have needed to be told what training he must undergo before being able to do something useful; he will almost certainly have departed stunned. He may have been a student of sociology or anthropology; he will then have been warned about the slender opportunities open to him and then either gone out into the world to earn his bread or turned to some aspect of sociological research for which money was available. In this way talent, trained and untrained, is lost to us. It is important to underline the fact that, unlike history, which is taught universally in the schools and widely in the universities, sociology can hardly be done by amateurs. Sociologists are sociologist de carrière. It follows that people who are concerned with developing a sociology of Anglo-Je wry must face up squarely

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