“I st die Kriminalität der Juden Rassenkriminalität?” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 7, no. 3 (1911): 36–39.
Rudolf Wassermann was a physician and social scientist who lived and worked in Munich. He was associated with the Bureau for Jewish Statistics in Munich and was an authority on crime and criminology.
Over and over again the question of the causes of the criminality of the Jews has stirred debate. Not one year passes that does not bring forth another new work! Most of the opinions revolve around the question whether the criminality of the Jews is predominantly due to occupation or race. Most of this research has already been discussed in this journal. In contrast, the work of the head of legal statistics in Amsterdam, J. R. B. de Roos, “On the Criminality of the Jews” (Monatschrift für Kriminalpsychologie, vol. 6, pp. 193f.) has remained undiscussed until now.
The work brings us new material related to the criminality of the Jews. For it provides us with what we heretofore possessed to an insufficient extent: a vivid image of the crimes of the Jews living in the Netherlands.
According to this, the criminality of the Jews has declined during the period of observation.1
[. . .]
In order to gain a more exact insight into the criminality of the Jews, de Roos then calculated their average participation in different crimes for the years from 1901 up until 1905. Unfortunately, he fails to present his results in the form of a statistical table. To the extent that he provides data, we shall attempt to reproduce it here. Thus, the following picture emerges:
Christians sentenced Jews sentenced [Offense] (out of every 100,000) Obstruction of justice2 20.7 8.4 Light bodily assault 66.8 37.7 Serious bodily assault 1.7 0.5 Willful damage to property 15.3 3.6 Libel 5.2 15.1 Larceny, petty 33.3 17.5 Larceny, grand 16.8 12.4 Poaching (forests and fields) 12.8 0.7 Embezzlement 3.8 6.0 Fraud 2.1 3.1 Receiving stolen property 1.9 6.6 Document forgery 0.8 1.6 Perjury 0.5 1.1 Disturbing the peace 2.4 0.9 Distribution of censored material 0.05 2.2
One can see from these figures that the criminality of the Jews in the Netherlands is extraordinarily similar to that of the Jews in Germany and Austria. As Austria, where three-quarters of the Jews live in Orthodox and impoverished Galicia, represents East European Jewry, and as Germany and the Netherlands represent West European Jewry, we can then use de Roos to formulate and support a notion, already expressed by Ruppin and myself, that the liability of prosecution among Jews is rather consistent, despite numerical variations in frequency of commission, and despite the fact that they live under the most varied conditions in different countries.
Now what significance do these facts have for addressing the question: Is the criminality of the Jews to be conceived as a racial criminality or as the product of social conditions?
It is possible to be of different opinions on this question, and in fact notable researchers can be found on both sides: [Franz] v. Liszt on the one side, [Hugo] Högel and [Paul] Näcke on the other.3 De Roos takes the middle ground. In his view, the criminality of the Jews is a product of a combination of the Jewish Volk’s natural predisposition and the social and economic conditions in which they live at any given time.
De Roos invokes my own work to support his, in particular my article “Critical and Supplemental Remarks on the Latest Literature Related to the Criminality of the Jews,” which appeared in volume 4 (p. 172f.) of this journal. De Roos is right in pointing to this work. There I did indeed explain that, despite the results I achieved through my methods, my position was never that the criminality of the Jews was the product of social conditions alone; but I did not provide there any basis for my position. So I would like to offer here those sections that I devoted to our problem, taken from my work Begriff und Grenzen der Kriminalstatistik [The concept and limits of criminal statistics] (Leipzig, 1909). I reproduce them here:
In the realm of human behavior, no set of conditions could be declared to be necessary or sufficient to compel a particular type of human action or inaction. Through a sharper analysis of final causes one recognizes, though, that the numerically great mass of events ultimately depends on various conditions acting as motivating forces on individuals, which in turn are dependent upon a psycho-physical disposition.
[. . .]
We can put forth the following claim: the criminality of the Jews corresponds, insofar as the material at hand allows us to generalize, almost entirely to that sort of criminality that one would expect given their occupational position—that is, the criminality of the Jewish businessman in Germany is not essentially different from that of his Christian cohort—nonetheless, there remains a possible objection, which is undoubtedly justified to a degree. The parallel between A and B is explained by stating that B is the product of A or vice versa. It is, however, also possible that this parallel is the result of a third factor, C—or, translated into real-life terms: it is not impossible that in a great number of cases a choice of occupation can be traced back to a personal peculiarity, which later does in fact turn out to be the real causal agent for criminal activity, while social position actually has nothing to do with it. If, however, the correspondence between Jewish and Christian businessmen proves to be complete, then the supremacy of the social factor would have to be granted. The deficiency of such methods, which can never really be entirely denied or avoided, lies in this: that although those causes that have significance for criminality do appear in our results, it might appear to us, by virtue of having posed the wrong question, that certain circumstantial motives or impulses were influential that in fact were almost completely meaningless. In addition to this, that which is absolutely individualistic cannot find [statistical] expression at all.
There are in these last sentences already an intimation of the reasons that induce me to embrace social causality as supreme, and there are further reasons for this choice, too.
De Roos even mentions one of these. It became evident that, in general, where the social standard of the Jews deviates from the norm, their criminality will also conform to this varied level. Thus, de Roos has established in the case of Amsterdam, where the Jews are chiefly engaged as laborers in the diamond industry, that the number of assault and battery cases (on average, between 1901 and 1905, 19 for every 100,000 Jews) nearly reached the same level as those for Christians (23), while those for fraud during the same timeframe was only half as many as for Christians (1.9 versus 3.8 out of 100,000 coreligionists).
I have identified a further argument in my work Beruf, Konfession und Verbrechen [Occupation, religion, and crime]. I said there: if one wishes to connect the criminality of the Jews with their status as pioneers of [a certain form of] economic life, then this will lead to an increasing similarity in the criminality of the Jews and Christians, to the degree that the specific capitalist traits of this economic way of life, which is particularly suitable to the Jewish character, spreads. This now is, as I have demonstrated in that work, indeed the case.
I derive further confirmation for my view from the results of research undertaken on other statistical issues concerning Jewish morality. I am thinking above all of the issues of suicide and population.
The statistics4 show that the Jews, whose negligible tendency to suicide Durkheim5 could still claim to be a “sociological law” at the beginning of the twentieth century, in hardly fifty years have attained suicide levels that significantly exceed those of the Christians.
Inversely, I have shown—as others have already in the Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft (vol. 12, no. 11)—that the birth rate of the Jews, which in the middle of the [nineteenth] century was quite normal, today is only about half that of the Christians.
In both cases I believe I am justified in claiming that the causes of these phenomena can be located only in the fact that the tendency of the Jews to assimilate into their social milieu only significantly manifested itself when a wider sphere of Jews no longer felt themselves under the ban of religious laws.
When this time came, however, it became evident that this tendency was extraordinarily strong. Is not the conclusion quite obvious indeed that a national or racial body (Volkskörper), whose moral orientation with regard to two important questions appears to be decisively influenced by its social standards, will also show itself to be influenced by social conditions in other regards?
I am able, then, to summarize my views on the form and the causes of criminality among the Jews in the following way:
(1) The criminality of the Jews expresses essentially the type of criminality associated with the general strata of the population to which the Jews belong socially.
(2) Therefore, in all probability, it [criminality] is influenced by social class. A series of other considerations supports this.
(3) It is by no means self-evident, however, that other factors—that is, one’s racial makeup—are not involved in contributing to the criminal impulses of individuals; and there is also no denying that in the case of the Jews—and to whom does this not apply?—social conditions in part have to be traced back to racial characteristics.
(4) It would be preferable if de Roos’s statement that “the criminality of the Jews is generally a product of a combination of natural inclinations of the Jewish Volk and their social and economic conditions” had not been formulated in this manner. On the one hand, it does not allow us to recognize that in a particular case, individual causes are also always at work; and on the other hand, such a formulation places two very dissimilar factors on the same [explanatory] plane or level.
1. [What follows is a chart that shows statistics from 1896 to 1906, divided into two main categories: the number of those convicted, and the number out of every 100,000 Jews. The author concludes: “These figures thus are essentially more favorable than those for Catholics and Protestants.”]
2. [Widerstand gegen Beamte—literally, crimes against the civil service.]
3. [On the ideas of these three figures, and for a more general discussion of the history of criminology at the time, see Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).]
4. Compare vol. 6, p. 133 of this journal.
5. [Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) is considered to be the founding father of sociology in France, and one of the most influential figures in the development of sociology as a distinct discipline. His Suicide: A Study in Sociology, translated into English by John Spaulding and George Simpson (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), was first published in 1897.]