Family Systems of the Jews in Early Modern East-Central Europe. A Big Data Perspective

Many historians tend to frame social developments which shaped families of the Ashkanzi Jews as a dichotomy of tradition and modernisation or "east" and "west" divisions. The paper challenges the simplified narrations with systematic analysis of eighteenth-century census data on about 70000 of individuals from over one hundred Jewish communities in Poland, Lithuania, Courland, Bukovina, and Bohemia. The newly coded and harmonised microdata from nominal listings shows surprising regional variability of family patterns across early modern east-central Europe, which is difficult to explain just with laws of Judaism or "tradition". Although the available empirical material is not fully representative for the whole area, it highlights patterns of early and late marriage, co-residence and domestic service — the key characteristics defining a family system, as described by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett. Application of machine learning methods provides evidence for.basic clustering of the regions into south-west group with relatively high age at marriage, simple family households and widespread domestic service and north-east group with low age at marriage, rare domestic service and prevalence of multiple family households.
The paper contextualises research result through comparison with the prevalent family forms in urban non-Jewish population. The observed inter-dependencies of age at marriage and familial complexity seem to be universal both for Jewish and non-Jewish families. What makes, however, Jewish families distinct for most of the regions in both clusters is particular configuration of complex families. Regardless of the extent of prevalence of complex families, in most of the regions Jews showed equal preference towards co-residence with daughters- and son-in-law. Co-residence with married daughters, a form resembling kest arrangement was the aspect almost universally distinguishing Jews from non-Jewish families, which, in turn, strongly preferred co-residence with married sons.