Counting and Encountering the New Subjects: The First Jewish Census in Habsburg Galicia (1773)

After the first partition of Poland in 1772, the new Habsburg administration conducted a census in the newly created province of Galicia. This first census revealed that 224.981 people (or 9,75% of the total population) were Jews. Although these numbers are part of every historical depiction of Galician-Jewish history, the details of the census listings are not.

In my paper, I will present and analyze the only two preserved examples of the individual 1773 census listings. Both lists, conducted in two towns close to the new Russian border, state information on all Jewish residents, their names, ages, occupations, kinship, wealth, place of origin, and others. With this richness in detail, they are a unique, fascinating, and almost unknown source of the Jewish population in the first year of Austrian rule.

In my analysis, my paper has two goals: first of all, to enhance the abstract statistics by making the humans behind the numbers visible. The preserved census listings provide a stunning insight into the every-day life of Galician/Polish Jewry. We learn about the distribution of wealth and poverty, family structures, migration patterns, housing situations, religious life and communal institutions.

The second goal is to highlight the importance of censuses as dynamic sources of interaction. The 1773 census is a document of one of the first encounters between the new state bureaucracy and the local Jewish population. Accordingly, the census does not only provide descriptive information, it also gives – in the sense of a “cultural history of administration” (Peter Becker) – insight into its own creation and implementation (such as which information was considered valuable and which was left out).

My paper aims to demonstrate how a well-known genre of sources such as censuses can be read against the grain and provide insight into the living environments of Eastern European Jewry on the eve of enlightened reforms and the consequent reorganization of their traditional life.