Physical stature of Jewish Dutchmen: an overview of three cases from the nineteenth century

I investigated the changes in stature of Jewish and Non-Jewish conscripts in Amsterdam (northern Holland) and Groningen (Groningen) during the second half of the nineteenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century the position of the Jewish population was rather weak from an economic perspective. In the last decades of the nineteenth century there was a general process of convergence in the biological standard of living (height). However, during this period Jewish conscripts in Amsterdam, Groningen the center of agricultural trade and in the parts of Russian Poland did not have the same increase in stature as there non-Jewish counterparts. What caused this striking divergence is rather puzzling. An aspect might be that Jewish conscripts were highly underrepresented in booming economic sectors such as transport, construction and civil service. An explanation could also be that the prices of food products which were allowed by the Jewish food laws did not decrease in the same pace as other foods. Furthermore, non-Jewish conscripts gained less in stature because their morbidity rates declined less than the non-Jewish population. As a result of their religious rules of hygiene they had in the middle of the nineteenth century a relatively low morbidity level