Nevertheless, the census responses of the Jews of Bukovina were so overwhelming for the German language that the figures are comparable only to those from the dominant German-speaking regions in the western half of the Monarchy. In the following section, we will go into the causal factors to which this development can be traced. 

In Bukovina in the final days of the Hapsburg Monarchy, the proportion of Jews in the total population reached 12.9%, the highest figure for any Austrian crown land, followed by Galicia with 10.9%; the proportion for the entire Austrian half of the Empire amounted to a mere 4.6% in 1910. The Jews of Bukovina were thus second only to the Greek Orthodox religious community and were numerically stronger than the Catholics. In Czernowitz, the center of political and cultural affairs, the Jews, considered as a religious group, comprised a third of the population and were thus the largest religious group. 
 

1)Education: In the 1871 school year, only 10.9% of all school-aged children in Bukovina attended a public elementary school. By the outbreak of World War I, however, this deficiency had been remedied. In the 1913/14 school year, a mere 3% of all school-aged children were not receiving instruction, and these were mostly the children of Huzuls (Hootsool) in the remote villages of the Carpathians, the mountain range in the southern and western portions of Bukovina⁴². As a result of this structural weakness in the area of education, illiteracy was still widespread among Romanians (60.39%) and Ruthenians (61.03%) in the Austrian half of the Empire as late as 1910⁴³. 

With the founding of the University of Czernowitz in 1875, German efforts to achieve social hegemony had created a key bastion in the extreme eastern reaches of the Monarchy, which assumed even greater significance following the Polonisierung of the University of Lemberg. And the Jews of Bukovina took advantage of the German-language educational opportunities offered there to a far greater extent than any other group. At no other Austrian university did the percentage of Jewish students comprise a higher proportion of the total than in Czernowitz⁴⁴. 

2) Social Stratification: The "elite thesis" can also be observed from a second indicator — occupational structure of the population of Bukovina. Among members of Bukovina's two largest linguistic groups, the Ruthenians and the Romanians, the agricultural sector was dominant, accounting for nearly 90% of each group! 

Although considerable numbers of Jews in Bukovina as well as in Galicia were involved in agriculture, we would like to focus our attention on those sectors which were essential to the process of modernization of the economy. In trade and transportation, Jews made up almost two thirds of all employed persons, and the proportion in trade would be even higher if the figure had been separated from that for transportation. In industry and crafts, Jews comprised almost a third of the workforce and were, along with the Germans, the most numerous and most important group. 

The Disparity Index of 70.6 between Jews and non-Jews with regard to economic classes was nearly the same as that in Galicia and thus extraordinarily high. This was above all attributable to the dominance of the agricultural sector by the non-Jewish workforce⁴⁸. Applied to occupational groups, the Disparity Index, with a value of 39.1, was higher than in Galicia and the Austrian half of the Empire as a whole⁴⁹. 

This elite position can be further illustrated by a few examples, such as one taken from the previously mentioned educational sector: of the 44 faculty 0chairmen elected at the University of Czernowitz between 1875 and 1919, there were 22 Germans, 11 Romanians, nine Jews and two Ukrainians⁵⁰. This elite position is also evident in the sphere of politics. Since the Jewish city council members controlled approximately 20 of the 50 seats in that body, they twice succeeded in advancing a member of their ranks to the position of mayor of the capital city: Dr. Edmund Reiss (1905-1908) and Dr. Salo Weisselberger (1913-1914) who, as a result of his conduct during the period of Russian occupation during World War I, was subsequently raised to the nobility⁵¹. Moreover, according to figures cited by Benno Straucher, Jews paid more than 75% of all taxes in the City of Czernowitz and almost half of all direct taxes in Bukovina⁵². 

It would, of course, be a highly incomplete picture of Jewish society in Bukovina to portray their position as limited to the elite. Their social composition was quite heterogeneous — reminiscences recall all too often only the laborers, innkeepers, artisans and those living on the verge of poverty⁵³. What we have attempted to show here is that the Jews in Bukovina constituted a segment of the social elite and played a significant role especially in the — admittedly not very highly developed — modern sectors of the economy. Since, in contrast to the Polish large land owners in Galicia, there was no traditionally established, non-German elite to speak of in Bukovina and the hegemonial powers of German-Austrian domination in the areas of education and administration still played a leading role, the Jews of Bukovina oriented themselves in this direction. The positions of power of the two large national groups, the Romanians and the Ruthenians, were still too weak to cause a shift in this orientation on the part of the Jews. In their situation as a people living in a Diaspora, the Jews were always forced to rely on the protection of the hegemonial powers and this seemed, as before, to emanate from Vienna.