The Occupational Attainments of American Jews on the Eve of the Civil War: The Lessons of Hindsight with Comparisons to the Twentieth Century

This paper constructs a sample of American Jewish men from the 1860 Census of Population (microdata files). It analyzes the occupational attainment of Jewish men compared to other white males, and separately for immigrants and the U.S.-born. It compares occupational distributions and reports regression analyses of the determinants of socio-economic status. The occupational distributions for 1860 are also compared to the 20^th-century occupational distributions for Jewish and non-Jewish men.