Jews, Diamonds, and Occupational Mobility: The Amsterdam Diamond Industry, 1873-1940

Joris Kok, International Institute of Social History

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Amsterdam diamond industry was one of the largest industries of the city and the largest diamond production centre in the world. Notably, a majority of its workers were Jewish, representing roughly 70 percent of the city’s diamond workers when Jews made up only 10 percent of the Amsterdam population. Ever since the arrival of the industry in Amsterdam in the beginning of the seventeenth century, the production of polished diamonds was an occupation open to Jews, unlike most other skilled work, where guilds excluded Jews as members. At its peak—the first decade of the twentieth century—30% of Jewish men were employed in, or adjacent to, the diamond industry. Thus, the diamond industry clearly stood at the core of the Jewish economic experience. The industry was also home to the first modern union in the Netherlands, the ANDB (General Dutch Diamond Workers’ Union), founded in 1894. As unorganized workers were excluded from working in the factories, the ANDB was able to unionize virtually every diamond worker in Amsterdam by 1900. An extensive membership administration, starting in 1898, kept track of the number of weeks a member spent employed, unemployed, on sick leave or on strike for each year of membership. Combining this career information from the union’s recently digitized membership administration with additional demographic and occupational information from marriage certificates and population registries, full life courses and careers were reconstructed for representative samples of 400 men and 400 women born between 1873 and 1922. Using a life course approach, this paper studies the individual determinants for occupational mobility for Jewish, non-Jewish, male, and female diamond workers, focusing particularly on differences between the two ethno-religious groups while comparing also with a representative sample of the Amsterdam population.

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 Presented in Session 145. The Impact of Mothers, Neighborhoods and Disability on later-Life Outcomes