Roberto Bachi (1909–1995)

Roberto Bachi researched statistics and demography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel, and was the director of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics from 1948 to 1971. The Central Bureau of Statistics was responsible for collecting, analyzing, and publishing demographic and economic data to inform government policy in the new state of Israel. In 1962, Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion established the first committee to address the Jewish birthrate, called the Committee for the Problems of Natality, and appointed Bachi to lead it. In that role, Bachi investigated population growth and demographic trends among Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel and among Jewish immigrant groups. His findings showed that while the overall Jewish birthrate was declining, Arab Palestinian fertility rates remained high, raising political concerns about maintaining a Jewish majority. Through his studies of the fertility of Jewish people in Israel and his comparative data on Jewish and Arab populations, Bachi helped to embed demographic concerns into Israeli national politics and Zionist policies.

1. Zionism: Background and Context
2. Early Life and Education
3. Early Career
4. Later Career
5. Impacts

Zionism: Background and Context

The Zionist movement began in the late nineteenth century, when journalist Theodore Herzl published The Jewish State (1896), calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland as a refuge from antisemitism following the Dreyfus Affair in France. The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain from France was convicted of selling military secrets to Germany. Zion refers to Jerusalem, or, more broadly, the historic Land of Israel, while Zionist refers to a supporter or advocate of the Jewish national movement seeking to establish and maintain a Jewish homeland in that land.

Between 1882 and 1948, successive waves of aliyah, or immigration, transformed Jewish presence in Palestine from small Ottoman-era agricultural colonies into an organized national community. The First and Second Aliyot from 1882 to 1914 brought mainly Eastern European Jews inspired by early Zionist ideals who founded rural settlements and collective farms in Palestine. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, issued by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, provided a legal framework for increased Jewish immigration, establishing Palestine as a national Jewish home. The Third Aliyah, which lasted from 1919 to 1923, added young pioneers who built roads, ports, and institutions of self-governance. By 1923, the Jewish population in Palestine had increased by around 40,000, with a majority being from Eastern Europe. During the Fourth and Fifth Aliyot from 1924 to 1939, middle-class Jewish immigrants from Poland and refugees fleeing Nazism expanded towns, industries, and universities in Palestine.

By 1947, on the eve of Israel becoming an independent country, the Jewish population in Palestine had grown to more than 630,000 from 83,000 in 1922, a shift driven by immigration and fears of persecution. That growing demographic change, and the emerging social differences between Ashkenazi, or European Jews, and Mizrahi, Middle Eastern, and North African Jews, created the social divisions that Bachi later studied and facilitated. His demographic research and advocacy for pronatalist policies, or policies that encourage child reproduction, aimed to preserve a Jewish majority in Israel while encouraging higher birthrates among Ashkenazi families compared to Mizrahi and Arab populations. Following Israel’s establishment as an independent state in 1948, the new nation looked to integrate diverse Jewish immigrant communities and maintain a Jewish demographic majority amid a significant Arab population.

Early Life and Education

Bachi was born on 16 January 1909 in Rome, Italy, to Clelia Lampronti and Riccardo Bachi, a researcher who studied the Italian economy. Bachi and his family were Italian Jewish and Bachi had two brothers, both older than he. Bachi completed his studies in law and statistics at the University of Rome in Rome, Italy, in 1930 where he earned a Doctor of Law degree. According to Bachi in his reflective academic report “Personal Recollections on the History of Research in Jewish Demography,” which he presented at the 11th World Congress of Jewish Studies, his interest in population studies developed under the mentorship of Corrado Gini, a statistician and founder of the Central Institute of Statistics and the Committee for the Study of Human Populations, or CISP, in Rome, Italy. Gini developed CISP in 1928 as a scientific institution with a political agenda, designed to test Gini’s cyclical theory of nations, which linked national vitality to patterns of racial isolation and intermixing. Within that framework, Bachi utilized Jewish demography, or the scientific study of Jewish population characteristics and trends that addresses the changing size and composition of Jewish communities, to study how Jewish populations survived persecution, dispersion, and assimilation.

In 1931, Gini organized a session on Jewish demography at the International Congress for the Study of Population in Rome, Italy. The Italian Fascist government and the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations supported the International Congress for the Study of Population, which according to Francesco Cassata, a professor of Contemporary History at the University of Genoa in Genoa, Italy, and Luc Berlivet, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, became foundational in international eugenic studies. Bachi researched and presented the Jewish demographic trends section alongside Jacob Lesteschinsky and Liebman Hersch, other emerging scholars of Jewish demography. The discussions in that session emphasized demographic isolation and the use of population data to show that Jewish people had been present in Palestine continuously since Biblical times and therefore could stake a claim to the land. According to Bachi, that event influenced his later work on the intersection between Jewish population statistics and politics.

In his “Personal Recollections on the History of Research in Jewish Demography,” Bachi notes that his scientific training and academic career in Italy in the late 1920s and early 1930s under Gini led to his pronatalist approach to address the population problems in the State of Israel. Pronatalism refers to policies that encourage childbirth and population growth. The problems he sought to address centered around fears of demographic decline among Jews and concerns about maintaining a Jewish majority in Palestine.

From 1932 to 1936, Bachi lectured about statistics at universities across Italy, and in 1933 he published La Mobilità della Popolazione all'interno delle grandi Città Europee (“Population Mobility within the Large European Cities”), a statistical study comparing internal migration in major European urban centers. In it, Bachi analyzed census data to trace how economic conditions, labor demand, and housing shortages influenced family movement between city districts. Bachi found that industrialization and class segregation shaped population density and residential stability across European capitals.

In 1934, Bachi married Vera Colombo, and the couple eventually had two children. In 1937, the University of Genoa appointed Bachi a full professor of statistics.

Early Career

In 1938, following the decree of the Racial Laws by Fascist Italy, Bachi emigrated from Italy to Jerusalem, Palestine, because of the restrictions Jewish people were facing in Italy. The Racial Laws in Italy restricted the civil rights of Jewish people, banned Jewish books, excluded Jews from public office and higher education, and stripped Jewish people of their assets. Bachi went to Jerusalem to work at the national Jewish institution of the Yishuv people, or the collective body of Jewish residents in the Land of Israel prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Yishuv is Hebrew for “settlement.” He became a Labor Zionist, or Mapainik. Labor Zionists believed that a Jewish state in Palestine could only be built by Jewish laborers and the working class. He also began teaching statistics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1940, prior to the establishment of the Israeli state.

Alongside his activism and employment, Bachi conducted independent research from 1939 to 1948 on three topics: the decline in Jewish fertility in Palestine, the demographic imbalance between Arabs and Jews, and the relatively high reproduction rates of Mizrahi Jews, or Jewish people who originated in the Middle East or North Africa. From 1941 to 1945, Bachi worked as the head medical statistician in the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, Palestine. During the early 1940s, Bachi ran a campaign directed at the Yishuv for making Jewish reproduction a part of Zionism’s political agenda. To promote that goal, in 1942, Bachi wrote a pamphlet to the Yishuv leaders detailing social welfare policies aimed at increasing Jewish reproduction in the area. In that pamphlet, Bachi warned politicians and the public about stagnant Jewish reproduction. According to Bachi, the existence of a Jewish nation in Palestine depended on the size of the Jewish population. He advocated for both an increase in Jewish immigration and mass natural reproduction.

In 1944, Bachi collaborated with the Committee for Encouraging Internal Reproduction, which was a Yishuv body that promoted larger Jewish families through propaganda and education campaigns, and organized a campaign titled “Against the Only-Child Family.” As part of that campaign, Bachi staged mock public trials in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv. At those mock trials, judges accused mothers of single children of four crimes, including endangering the existence of the Jewish nation, having an abortion due to economic considerations, putting the population of the Yishuv at risk, and psychologically damaging her only child by making him lonely. At those staged events, Bachi testified as a witness and referenced his studies on the demographic situation at the time, which found that an anticipated 1,000 Palestinian Arabs doubled their fertility in one generation, birthing 2,287 children, while the fertility of Jewish people in Palestine was only just sufficient to cover Jewish mortality rates. Through those above interventions and others, Bachi helped insert demographic concerns into Zionist political debates. By the mid 1940s, Bachi was supplying Ben-Gurion with fertility data to reference in his political speeches, specifically the notion that Jewish demographic growth was essential to achieving and maintaining statehood.

By the end of 1944, Bachi mobilized the National Committee, or the formal government of the Yishuv, to support Jewish reproduction as a political strategy, and in 1945, the Committee published the social program titled The Politics of Endorsing Internal Immigration. The National Committee used the phrase internal immigration metaphorically to mean increasing the Jewish population through natural reproduction, as opposed to external immigration from abroad. Childbirth became equivalent to immigration in the eyes of the National Committee, where every newborn Jewish child was symbolically treated as a new immigrant strengthening the Yishuv.

According to Anat Liebler, a sociologist studying the connections of science and politics in Israel’s early statehood, Bachi’s publications and work influenced that program and suggested ways to encourage the Yishuv to reproduce more. Bachi proposed a pronatalist social program that included creating a trust fund to support large families, raising workers’ salaries with each new child, and offering financial child benefits through a pooled insurance system supported by workers, employers, and Zionist organizations. He also suggested giving fathers of large families priority for jobs, loans, and housing, while reducing their costs for education and health services. He proposed that mothers of multiple children should get access to part-time work and postnatal care. Israel adopted many of those proposals after its founding in 1948, and those became the foundation of Israel’s social welfare policy, which still exists as of 2026.

In 1945, Bachi became the assistant head in the Department of Statistics of the Mandatory government, and Hebrew University appointed him to senior lecturer that same year. The Mandatory government, or the British Mandate government in Palestine, which ran from 1920 to 1948, was responsible for administering the territory under the League of Nations following the collapse of the Ottoman empire. In 1947, Hebrew University promoted Bachi to full professor of statistics. Before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Bachi organized a centralized statistical service for the Israeli government that the provisional government approved. With the founding of Israel in 1948, Bachi became the first head of the Central Bureau of Statistics, or CBS, directing its work until 1971.

Under Bachi’s leadership, the CBS conducted the 1948 census, which counted the population of the newly partitioned territories and defined citizenship boundaries between Israelis and Palestinians. From 1948 to 1953, he continued his academic career and founded the Kaplan School of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University in 1953. He established two departments, Statistics and Jewish Demography, which professionally trained students in those fields. His research at the Kaplan School formalized the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi dichotomy by classifying Jewish people into two ethnic groups. Bachi’s findings showed that Ashkenazi Jews, or Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, reproduced far less than Mizrahi Jews, or Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. Bachi formalized the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi dichotomy and classifications in his teachings and research. According to Leibler, Bachi developed methods for creating a coherent ethnic classification to find the fastest reproducing group in the Yishuv. Leibler further argues that those categories became institutionalized in Israel’s administrative logic and that Bachi built Israel’s statistical infrastructure through his work on population censuses, and fertility surveys. In 1959, the National Insurance Institute of the Israeli government began distributing child allowances to families with four or more children, as Bachi had suggested.

Later Career

In 1960, Bachi founded Israel’s National Council for Statistics, which further expanded state control over collecting demographic data and coordinated statistical policy across ministries. According to Bachi, in “Personal Recollections on the History of Research in Jewish Demography,” his work became internationally recognized and he became a participant in global demographic congresses and positioned Israel as a center for Jewish demographic research. Because of his work, Israel adopted a mix of policies to encourage Jewish population growth. Those included investment in fertility technologies and programs designed to promote family formation and childbearing.

In 1962, Ben-Gurion established the Committee for the Problems of Natality, or the Bachi Committee, and tasked Bachi with creating a national policy to encourage Jewish fertility. Bachi chaired the committee and researched what he argued were two demographic challenges. First, the Arab birthrate exceeded the Jewish one, and second, within the Jewish population, Mizrahi Jews were reproducing faster than Ashkenazi Jews. Bachi saw that imbalance as problematic, according to Leibler, because it threatened to alter the social and cultural character of the Jewish state, which the Ashkenazi Jews controlled. Limiting fertility was not a policy option due to Zionist goals of population growth and religious injunctions such as to be fruitful and multiply. Therefore, the committee recommended economic incentives for larger families and programs to improve the social and educational status of Mizrahi Jews, while encouraging Ashkenazi families to have more children.

Following the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967, Bachi’s role as CBS director involved him in statistical planning related to newly emerging administrative policies. On 18 and 19 June 1967, Bachi met with representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Military Intelligence, and the Prime Minister’s Office to discuss conducting a census in the territories newly under Israeli control. Israeli officials viewed accurate refugee counts as essential because of ongoing diplomatic debates about Palestinian refugees. Israeli officials argued that organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a relief organization for Palestinian refugees, exaggerated refugee figures. On 1 October 1967, Bachi presented the findings from the census, which reported significantly fewer refugees than UN estimates, strengthening Israel’s position in discussions on territorial and humanitarian issues.

In 1972, Bachi retired from the CBS and from academic leadership in 1977; however, he continued to publish extensively. His later works include “Population Trends of World Jewry” and The Population of Israel, which detail demographic trends and changes in the Jewish populations globally and within Israel. After his retirement, Bachi focused on geostatistics, or the statistical analysis of spatial and geographical data. In particular, he studied population distribution, and the visualization of statistical information. He devised methods for organizing large sets of geographical and demographic data and for displaying them through computerized mapping techniques. Posthumously, Springer published Bachi’s work in that area as New Methods of Geostatistical Analysis and Graphical Presentation: Distribution of Populations over Territories.

Impact

Bachi’s contributions to demography and statistics had a lasting impact on Israeli state institutions. His leadership in founding the CBS and the National Council for Statistics institutionalized demographic analysis in Israel and ensured that population data became a central part of policymaking from welfare to territorial planning. His frameworks for ethnic categorization and territorial planning continue to influence how Israel tracks and discusses population differences. His pronatalist policies, including child allowances, housing incentives, and fertility subsidies, remain embedded in Israeli welfare policy and policies that encourage population growth. That includes Israel’s coverage of in vitro fertilization treatments.

In 1982, Bachi received the Israel Prize, the Israeli state’s highest honor, for his contributions to the social sciences. The award particularly recognized him for his founding of the CBS and for developing innovative methods for geostatistical analysis and the graphical representation of data. His work continues in the institutions he established and in the students who trained under him and carried his approaches into new areas of research.

Bachi died on 26 November 1995 at age eighty-six.

Sources

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