Identification, Relations, Trajectories: How to Interpret Silences in Historical Materials? The Case of a Polish Population Register, Lubartów 1930s and 1940s

Anton Perdoncin, CNRS (Cens, Nantes University), ERC Lubartworld
Claire Zalc, CNRS-EHESS

Social scientists are frequently confronted with silence, especially when it comes to telling the stories of people that left few traces in records: gender and sexual minorities, oppressed religious groups, and dominated social classes. These problems assume particular importance when it comes to quantifying observed phenomena: missing values in a dataset are often reputed to be a hindrance to the administration of statistical evidence. But far from being failures, gaps within the trajectories and social profiles of individuals should instead be considered as positive values. Our aim is therefore to take advantage of uncertainty and silences to reflect on the heuristic power of silences to raise afresh general questions of social history as they relate to trajectories, identification processes, and the logic of identity assignment or of passing. This paper focuses on one of the most canonical sources of the “new social history”: a population register for a small Polish town with a population that was half Jewish and half Catholic in the 1930s and 1940s. This register, completed by local officials on the basis of declarations by heads of household, is shot through with blanks and silences. Especially importantly for our effort to understand the logic of persecutions and the survival of Polish Jewry, 911 (out of 11,500) of the town’s inhabitants did not declare or where not identified according to their faith. What did it mean in inter-war Poland to move beyond the usual distinctions between Jews and Catholics? Did this invisibility result from strategies for concealing the stigma associated with being recognized as Jewish, or with fleeing in a context of anti-Semitic persecution? Was this due to the processes used by local officials when reporting information? In order to answer these questions we implement a mixed-method approach, combining historical ethnography and quantification (multilevel logistic models).

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 Presented in Session 127. Class Inequality and Politics