Patterns of Upward Social Mobility and Integration among the Jewish Dutch Elite

An overview of my nodegoat database with Dutch Jews born between 1850 and 1920.

Sietske van der Veen (University of Amsterdam, previously Utrecht University / Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)

For my PhD research into Jewish members of the Dutch political, financial, and cultural elites between 1870 and 1940, I used nodegoat to analyse the lives of over seven hundred people in a systematic way. The life stories of these Dutch Jews were documented in the Dutch Biography Portal, an online database that holds several dozen reference works, each containing a few hundred to thousands of biographies.

Whereas nodegoat is particularly appropriate for network analysis, I was also grateful for its efficiency in serving as a digital repository for large quantities of data. My nodegoat database served as a modern sort of card index, enabling me to flip through my data and sort information quickly and accurately. In this way, I was able to see at a glance which topics deserve further inquiry, such as, for example, the high levels of decreasing religious affiliation and increasing intermarriage with non-Jews among Jewish members of the upper middle and upper classes. With nodegoat, I could discern patterns in the lives of a large and diverse group of Dutch Jews. Moreover, manually building a data structure enabled me to have control over all the devised dimensions and variables, while it also required a very specific formulation of research questions. I listed information on the occupations, education, places of residence, religious affiliations, marriages, and association memberships of Jews in the data set in numerous ‘Objects’ and ‘Sub-Objects’. By employing a mixed-methods approach, with a qualitative study which includes quantitative elements, I was able to verify scholarly notions about Jewish social mobility and integration in a fresh way.

Acknowledging the vulnerabilities in ‘counting Jews’, the agency of its central characters lies at the heart of my dissertation, and next to discerning larger trends, nodegoat provided a suitable digital environment for close reading of the biographies as well. Numbers can reveal things easily overlooked in traditional qualitative analysis, because it lacks an overview, or depends considerably on existing expectations. Without a digital humanities approach, I would never have been able to investigate such a large group of people, and numerous aspects of their lives, in the aggregate.

Geographical visualisation of Jewish country houses in the Netherlands, 1870-1940.