Jewish Genealogy in the Service of History: Scottish Jewry

The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem conceived an experimental project designed to construct a complete “Family Tree” of a free-standing national Jewry. The project, the first of its kind, was applied to Scottish Jewry for a series of reasons that merit explanation and was carried out successfully over a six year period (2012-18), with the support of the Scottish National Lottery, inter al. In the process, a considerable body of new knowledge was generated on the history of Jews in Scotland over two centuries, from 1818 to 2018.

Dr. Lamdan will discuss the unique concept and the way in which the research was executed. He will illustrate the significant contributions the study to the social history of Scottish Jewry. In particular, he will touch on what was learned about the geographical origins of Scottish Jewry, its growth and population numbers, dispersal throughout Scotland, deployment of the small communities, residential and demographic shifts in the large communities, birth rates and occupations. He will also present the major conclusions drawn from the study, relating primarily to the fluid and transitory nature of Scottish Jewry in the century before World War I, its permanence in the decades from 1920 to 1970 and its steady depletion since then. Finally, he will offer some observations about the validity of the research model and its applicability to other national Jewries of similar age and size.