THE JEWISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY VOLUME XVI NO. 2 DECEMBER 1974 CONTENTS On Morris Ginsberg Julius Gould 123 A Sample Survey onjewish Education in London, 1972-73 S. J. Prais 133 Intermarriage and Communal Survival in a London Suburb Gerald Cromer iE The Reception of Political Zionism in England: Patterns of Alignment among the Clergy and Rabbinate, 1895- 1904 Stuart A. Cohen 17' Trends in Israeli Public Opinion on Issues Related to the Arab-Israeli Conflict Abel Jacob 187 New Evidence on Basic Issues in the Demography of Soviet Jews U. 0. Schmelz 209 Theory and Practice: Ethnomethodology versus Humane Ethnography (Review Article) Howard Brotc 225 Book Reviews . 237 Chronicle 248 Books Received 253 Notes on Contributors 255 PUBLISHED TWICE YEARLY on behalf of the World Jewish Congress by William Heinemann Ltd Annual Subscription £i.io (U.S. $) post free Single Copies 75p ($2.25) Applications for subscriptions should be addressed to the Managing Editor, The Jewish Journal of Sociology, 55 New Cavendish Street, London WiM 8BT EDITOR Maurice Freedman MANAGING EDITOR Judith Freedman ADVISORY BOARD R. Bachi (Israel) Eugene Minkowski (France) 4ndr6 Chouraqui (France & Israel) S. J. Prais (Britain) M. Davis (Israel) Louis Rosenberg (Canada) S. N. Eisenstadt (Israel) H. L. Shapiro (USA) Nathan Glaz& (USA) A. Steinberg (Britain) J. Katz (Israel) A. Tartakower (Israel) 0. Klineberg (USA) © THE WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS 1974 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BUTLER AND TANNER LTD FROME AND LONDON BOOKS REVIEWED Author Title Reviewer Page Nigel Armistead, ed. Reconstructing Social Psychology Beryl Geber 237 Ronald Fletcher, ed. The Science of Society and The Julius Gould 123 Unity of Mankind, A Memorial Volume for Moms Ginsberg Leon Poliakov The Aryan Myth, A History of Maurice Freedman 238 Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe Leon Poliakov The History of Anti-scm itism, Maurice Freedman 238 Volume r, From Roman Times to the Court Jews Leon Poliakov The History of Anti-semitism, Maurice Freedman 238 Volume 2, From Mohammed to the Marranos Samuel J. Roberts Survival or Hegemony? The Michael Leifer 242 Foundations of Israeli Foreign Policy Stephen Steinberg The Academic Melting Pot, Nathan Glazer 243 Catholics and Jews in American Higher Education Roy Turner, ed. Ethnomethodology Howard Brotz 225 Bernard D. Weinryb The Jews of Poland, A Social and Lionel Kochan 246 Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from s,00—n9oo Meyer W. Weisgal, The Letters and Papers of Chaim James Parkes 247 gen. ed. Weizmann, Volume IV, Series A, January 1905—December 1906 121 NOTICE TO CONTRIBUTORS Papers submitted to The Jewish Journal of Sociology should be addressed to the Managing Editor at 55 New Cavendish Street, London WiM 8B T. The papers must be original. They should not have been published previously, or be committed to publication elsewhere, in any language. When a paper has been accepted for publication, the author may not publish it elsewhere, in any language, without the written consent of the Editor of the J.J.S. MSS. should be typewritten on one side only and double-spaced with ample margins. Pages (including those containing illustrations, diagrams, or tables) should be numbered consecutively. 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Each contributor receives thirty free offprints of his article. 122 ON MORRIS GINSBERG Julius Gould ROFESSOR Morris Ginsberg, the Founding Editor of this Journal, was for decades the leading British sociologist. Four years pafter his death Dr. Fletcher, in this commemorative volume,* has now brought together contributions by 13 of Professor Ginsberg's colleagues and associates and republished eight of Ginsberg's own papers together with a most valuable bibliography of his writings from 1914 to 1970 (prepared by Miss Angela Bullard under the aegis of Professor D. G. MacRae). The contributions include a number of memorial essays and addresses—some of them previously published in this Journal1—while the two major sections deal with philosophy and sociology and sociology and society. In the former there is a clear exposition of the philosophical underpinnings of Ginsberg's thought from the pen of the late Professor H. B. Acton—stressing Ginsberg's intellectual debt not only to L. T. Hobhouse (his predecessor and mentor at the London School of Economics) but also to Henry Sidgwick; and Acton concludes with a tribute to Ginsberg's book On Justice In Society (1965) for its 'lack of romanticism and contrived eccentricities'. Acton comments on the rational egalitarianism which informs that book—an egalitarianism qualified by a belief in the realities of freedom and undistorted by the utopian passions for and against liberty which have abounded in political thought and practice. H. B. Rickman takes up some key questions of moral and linguistic bias in the social sciences, while Professor Bierstedt and Dr. Sklair re-examine (yet again) the idea of progress—the latter stressing the ideological uses of progress (especially what he calls 'innovational' progress) and insisting that specific prob- lems of power and inequality cannot be dissolved by a general meiorist philosophical outlook. In the section on sociology and society there is a robust piece from Paul Halmos which flogs the irrationality of those 'critical' radicals who by 'battering society . claim to be bettering it'. Professor D. W. Harding neatly inverts Ginsberg's work on the Ronald Fletcher, ed., for the British Sociological Association, The Science of Society and the Unity of Mankind, A Memorial Volume for Morris Ginsberg, x + 292pp., Heinemann Edu- cational Books, London, 197, £6.50. 123 JULIUS GOULD causes of war by examining the concept of peace, and Mrs. Floud pioneers an important new enquiry into the use of social background (as distinct from mental abnormality) as excuse for crime. She demon- strates that while the concept of social abnormality can be clearly described, it is hard as yet to see how it can be applied in the courts, let alone predict the political and legal consequences that might attend such application. At a time when sociology had few practitioners in these islands— and, at times, it seemed, still fewer admirers—Morris Ginsberg, as Martin White Professor at L.S.E., pursued the discipline with a rigour and commitment uniting, by great gifts of scholarship and learning, leading strands both in the early British and the contemporary Euro- pean traditions. Many of these virtues are explored by Dr. Fletcher in his introduction to this volume. It is clear that in Ginsberg's breadth of vision Fletcher sees an antidote to the narrowness which he believes disfigures contemporary British sociology (together with British universities and much else in our society). Mordant and personal though Fletcher's reflections are, they should not, by their polemical tone, deflect attention from the truth they contain, nor from a central intellectual issue that reflection on Ginsberg's life is bound to raise. That issue is more easily expressed than solved. How can one man, however gifted, grapple with the sociological dilemma? That dilemma is many-pronged. First, the subject lives by its data—by a sociography that is accurate, and in the changing world, up to date. Second, it needs concepts so that we may judge whether the data are appropriate or whether the 'right' questions are being put (and in the right way) to the material at hand. And third (though far from finally), the 'right- ness' of the concepts is drawn from the framework of ideas (including moral ideas) into which, and from which, they feed. The intdllectual strain set up is hard to support. Indeed, given its complexity it is both intractable and insupportable—perhaps best shared between teams of scholars yoked together by fortune or fate. In such a discipline it is hard to find a completely cumulative focus—one that is perhaps 'properly', perhaps 'narrowly', described as scientific: its frontiers with other social sciences and with history remain fluid and open: the links with philosophy are problematic but important. By many of the tests imposed by this dilemma Ginsberg's own achievement, considerable as it was, is itself problematic. He knew well how to handle certain kinds of data: his early work on anthropological material, his later brief pioneering essay on social mobility, his more frequent analyses of the social composition ofJewish communities—all show a wide-ranging skill. Yet it would not be on his role as a data collector that his major 124 ON MORRIS GINSBERG reputation would rest. Rather it would rest—and for many critics fall— on his role as an exponent of an evolutionary tradition married to a moral concern with rationality, progress, and the unity of mankind (the latter being the subject of his famous Hobhouse Memorial Lecture) —themes which may seem too large or too vague to be 'operationalized' and which (to the hard-boiled youngsters of every generation) seem to raise 'philosophical' rather than sociological problems. Ginsberg originated no new range of concepts; he never made a song and dance about a conceptual framework.