JPR News Release
2011 Census: Project update
Tuesday 19 Feb 2013
Significance of the Census and JPR's role
Whether we realise it or not, the 2001 Census marked a major turning point in the way we understand ourselves as a community. For the first time, we were able to make direct, national comparisons between Jews in Britain and Britain’s population as a whole, as well as between Jews and other minority groups. This included comparisons based on a wide range of variables from age and geography, to health, education, and employment. Also, for the first time, we were able to map the whole Jewish population to within a few tens of metres, and to develop an understanding of Jewish communities holistically, including those who were engaged and unengaged in Jewish communal life, and the young and the old.
Issues of major importance to communal leaders, such as ageing, intermarriage, education, changing religious dynamics and so on, for which we had previously only been able to produce estimates of varying degrees of quality, suddenly had highly accurate numbers placed on them. For example, the 2001 Census revealed that 30,000 Jews aged over sixty-five had some form of limiting disability or long-term illness (and, to illustrate how this could be broken down further, that 505 of these were men living in Leeds); the average age of Jewish women (forty-five years) was six years older than women in general (although for Jewish women in Hackney it was thirty-four, and in Harrow it was forty-eight); and almost one in six married Jewish men had a non-Jewish spouse, rising to almost one in four in the case of men in their thirties and forties. From 2001 onwards, such information was on a far firmer and more detailed grounding than had ever been the case in the past.
The Census also helped the research community, and thereby the whole community, in a second important respect. By delivering highly accurate and detailed estimates of key baseline figures such as the size, location and age structure of the Jewish population, researchers have been able to improve the robustness of communal survey data by weighting it against the Census data.
Thus, the 2001 Census amounted to nothing short of a data revolution to the benefit of the whole Jewish community. And now, in 2013, we stand on the cusp of a second revolution—but this time we will also be able to chart change as never before in addition to all the other benefits a census provides. This is unprecedented, and is already beginning to shed light on the social processes affecting us. It is an extremely significant time to be involved in census data analysis and the potential benefits to communal planning and policy development are enormous.
However, it is also true that as a community, we were slow to report on the 2001 Census findings and we never took full advantage of its potential benefits. Some distrusted the data, but for the great majority it was simply a matter of ignorance: relatively few organisations were even aware of the existence of the data, and of those that were, most had only a vague understanding of how to access it and how it could be used to the advantage of their organisations and communities.
This time though, things are already different. As a community, we are used to the idea of questions about religion being asked, not just in the census, but also in the many surveys we undertake in our daily lives such as at the doctor’s surgery. And we now have over a decade of experience in the procurement, analysis and dissemination of census data. With the aid of online reporting, data will be delivered more speedily, to more people and at lower cost.
JPR promises to be at the forefront of this second data revolution. It has already put in place the resources required to fund the researchers who will analyse and report on the data this year, and provide the community with the figures it needs in multiple formats. JPR is also about to launch a nationwide study—the National Jewish Community Survey (NJCS)—in partnership with most of the major communal charities, to provide additional data that will be presented alongside census data to give the fullest possible picture of the key issues facing the community as it moves forward.
Reports to date
JPR has produced two short reports that draw on the 2011 Census data and make comparisons with the 2001 data. The first of these, published in December 2012, examines the geographical data at Local Authority District (LAD) level and offer our initial insights on the first data release. The second, published in February 2013, also focuses on geography, but at the more refined “ward” and “output area” levels. We will be publishing further similar reports as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) releases more data.
Languages spoken
Whilst some language data have been released and some commentary about them has been offered in the Jewish press, there is not much that can be said just yet about them, as the latest figures do not relate specifically to Jews. However, the 2011 Census data do suggest that the vast majority of haredim (the strictly Orthodox) in Britain do not speak Yiddish as their main language. English is almost certainly the haredi mother tongue, but we await further census releases to establish this conclusively.
There are over twenty-five times as many Arabic speakers as there are Hebrew speakers (as opposed to ten times as many Muslims as Jews).
Beyond this, there is little more to be said conclusively at this stage. Language is a new census variable, so there are no comparisons to be made with the 2001 Census. Future releases will enable us to cross-tabulate the language figures by key variables such as religion, geography and age. Right now, the data tell us nothing about other main languages spoken by Jews, such as French and German.
It is also difficult to say what the number of Hebrew speakers means, either in terms of the size of the Israeli population or the nature of that particular population. It is unlikely to reflect the number of Israelis in Britain. We must await more detailed data releases about nationality, country of birth, passports held and ethnicity, all broken down by religion, before any serious conclusions can be drawn about language.
Next steps
The ONS only provides details of rather broad data delivery windows, so it is difficult to provide a precise timeframe for our output. We expect some data on age and sex to be released by June, and most of the remaining key Census variables about Jews to be published by October. JPR will be producing further short reports (as it has done in its initial findings and neighbourhood statistics reports) as soon as the data become available. By October we should also have data from the NJCS to place alongside the Census output. However, it will be well into 2014 before the commissioned material will be available (providing details on intermarriage, Israelis, migration and so on). Indeed, new Census data is likely to trickle out well into 2015.
Media contacts at JPR
All media enquiries should be directed to:
Judith Russell
020 7436 1553
jpr@jpr.org.uk