How Tall Were the Jews? Anthropometric Data on Income Inequality between the Jews and Non-Jews in Hungary from the Mid-Nineteenth Century until World War I

Abstract

The widespread belief that the Jews were far more affluent than the non-Jews in Hungary in the decades before the Holocaust lacks sufficient empirical corroboration. The present study aims to present the income disparity between Jews and non-Jews in the light of anthropometric data. A review of the physical anthropological literature concerning height and menarcheal age of Jews from the 1850s until World War I, together with an analysis of height data from the 1913 conscription and measurements of physical fitness involving schoolchildren between 1886 and 1916, suggest that the Jews’ biological standard of living was higher than that of non-Jews, although the inverse was true in the upper stratum of society.