Abstract

"Jews, Northern Europe, and the Synthetic Data in Business History "

Laura Ekholm, University of Helsinki (laura.k.ekholm@helsinki.fi)

In the context of Europe in October 2023 the release of any data, such as the Jewish roots of families, that might help people to identify, for example, places of importance to contemporary Jewish communities, raises ethical concerns. As long as the sources required burdensome archival work, the question was on what right and for what purpose would a business historian “reveal” the Jewish origins of local businesses. The answer naturally depends on the research questions such as how “Jewishness” is defined and what importance it has for example for understanding family networks across national borders. Scholars could however decide what information was relevant and what would not need to be published. With online datasets and digitalized material, and also due to the fact that more and more research is open access, the ethical setting is more complex. The aim of this paper is to discuss the ethical aspects of digitalized archives and AI methods in profiling past business-owners by their family origins. I use examples from research projects concerning the small Jewish communities in Finland. The paper draws from the `economic turn´ in Jewish studies. While most of the research concerns larger Jewish communities of the world, I want to pinpoint how difficult it is to do research on communities so small that practically all members could be easily identified with a little knowledge on the subject and local history, while at the same time, I aim to show why it is important for business historians to discuss these topics. I am particularly interested in the idea of using synthetic data that would mimic past business networks without revealing any data that would allow readers to identify the data points with individuals.