Demographic Knowledge, ‘Race Suicide’ and the Making of Racial Jews in Interwar Europe

Abstract

In their review of the endorsement of the term 'demographic engineering' in Ottoman and Turkish studies, Nikos Sigalas and Alexandre Toumarkine (2008: §12) underscored three reasons why the term particularly gained the favor of some scholars: it supports the idea of continuity between the late Ottoman empire and the Turkish nation-state, it meets with a liberal critique of state planning understood as paving the way for violence against minorities, and it helps in circumventing the taboo imposed by state ideology and apparatus over its own repressive history towards minorities. It is this latter aspect Erik-Jan Zürcher (2008: 1) invokes to explain why he first used the term back in 2005. Fearing to be exposed to state reprisals, Turkish academics invited Zürcher to introduce a collective volume published in Turkish in Turkey in which he used the term demographic engineering (Zürcher 2005). Yet, as Sigalas and Toumarkine remark, state repression alone does not explain why the term took root. Indeed, Zürcher (2008: 1) concedes that it proved to be more than a tactical move, as 'demographic engineering' became a positive source of inspiration he found in a work by two demographers, the late Myron Weiner and Michael Teitelbaum (2001), in their co-authored book titled Political Demography, Demographic Engineering. 2 My contribution to this third issue is on rather than in demographic engineering. I take issue with a narration of the history of humanity as a 'struggle for demographic power' (Bookman 1997) underpinning the category of demographic engineering. I regard demographic engineering as naturalizing the connection between population, territory and security eschewing both the modern codification of the concept of population and its power effect. My argument is that the connection between security and population Demographic Knowledge, 'Race Suicide' and the Making of Racial Jews in Interw...