What’s in a (Jewish) name? Identifying Jews in Dutch civil certificates, 1811–1932

Representative data on historical minority populations are often absent or costly to collect, while previously used sampling methods have led to small or biased samples. This paper presents a method to systematically identify Jews by leveraging the distinctiveness of Jewish and Gentile names derived from Amsterdam’s mid-nineteenth-century population registers. Using two external sources for verification, I evaluate the efficiency and accuracy of Jewish samples identified through different combinations of given names and surnames. The results show that incorporating additional family names, such as those of parents, substantially increases sample sizes for the Jewish population while simultaneously minimizing errors. Using name distributions by ethno-religious background from mid-nineteenth-century Amsterdam population registers, between 81% and 86% of Amsterdam-born grooms and brides are accurately identified as either Jewish or Gentile on Dutch civil certificates between 1811 and 1932. I further demonstrate that the method is effective across time and across the Dutch provinces, producing Jewish samples that closely match their local population shares. Finally, I illustrate the potential of the approach by documenting the socioeconomic ascent of Amsterdam Jews from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, and discuss ways to extend the method through data linking and the incorporation of additional information.