Judaism: The Chosen Few

With my last post in mind, let me first of all clarify that I am by no means a supporter of Israeli occupation policies - it's just that I am no fervent anti-Zionist either. Israel is a curious phenomenon, with its special relationship to the US particularly in mind. Somehow or other it often appears as the face of the American world order: a place where so many of the world's fears and expectations converge and become visible; a place where the guardians of this order will continue to defend their brand of imperialism with any means necessary. It is easy to condemn a great many things about Israel, but it is perhaps more worthwhile to hold back judgment and observe the unfolding of things before one definitely takes a stand.

A more fruitful attempt to understand the history of the Jews and Judaism than Shahak's is - I believe - the book The Chosen Few by Botticini and Eckstein. For no matter how mysterious Judaism and Jewish success in the modern world appear to some, it can to a great degree be explained through the economic theory of rational choice.

The main argument of the book goes as follows: in ancient times, the Israelite religion had been based on two pillars: first, the temple, which was originally built around 1000 BC, later destroyed by the Babylonians but rebuilt; and second, the Torah, which was in place at least a few hundred years BC although its history is more obscure. In the first century CE, several things happened: Judaism had become splintered into various sects, of which Christianity was ultimately going to be the most successful. The other two most influential sects were the Sadducees, keepers of the temple cult, and the Pharisees, teachers of Torah who, unlike the old-school Sadducees, had started to believe in a life after death. Now, in 64 CE the Pharisee Yehoshua ben Gamla was appointed as high priest of the temple. During his short office, he instituted a rule requiring all Jewish parents to ensure that their boys learn to read the Torah. Shortly therafter, a Jewish uprising against Roman rule took place throughout Judea. The Romans massacred the inhabitants of Jerusalem and destroyed the second temple. With the fall of the temple, the Sadducees disappeared as a faction within Judaism. It remained to the Pharisees to define what a post-templar, post-independence Judaism was going to look like. This they did by - slowly over the centuries - beginning to establish the rule on public education for boys throughout the Jewish community.

This had several consequences. First, many Jews, being farmers and pastoralists, had little use for literacy, and as the cost for remaining inside the Jewish community increased, they increasingly opted out and converted to other faiths: Christianity in many cases, and later also Islam. Over time, this led to a sharp decrease in the number of Jews relative to non-Jews living in the Middle East and elsewhere. At the same time, those who remained within the Jewish fold increasingly began to adopt urban occupations, not least involving trade, but also other kinds of professions that required literacy, numeracy, the ability to communicate by mail, the power to keep and enforce contracts, among other things. Universal male literacy allowed Jews to establish themselves in lucrative, urban niche professions, while also maintaining a network with other Jews abroad. By the Middle Ages, and especially after the rise of urbanisation under Islam, Jews spread widely across the world and started to mark themselves out as educated, affluent and urban.

Thus Judaism had embarked on a great transformation from ancient times; the Pharisees, of course, became the rabbis of Rabbinical Judaism. As for the illiterate Jewish men, trying to stay as part of the Jewish community was usually not an option. They became increasingly marginalized and, since they could not take their bar mitzvah (during which they are supposed to read aloud from the Torah), they could not officially enter Jewish manhood, and so the rabbis advised others against marrying their daughters to such men. Much better then to enter into the fold of the dominant creed, where even the poor and illiterate were welcomed with open arms, and where - at least in Christianity - the ritual demands made on the devotee were much more relaxed than in Judaism.

In line with this pattern, Jews tended to concentrate in urbanized societies: Abbasid Mesopotamia, Iberia under Muslim rule and, later, the Christian polities in Italy and northern Europe. When urbanization took hold of Europe, Jews started to appear in its cities; and when the Mongols wrecked the infrastructure of the Middle East, the Jewish share of the population collapsed drastically, even though they were not targeted by the Mongols, as the Sunni Muslims were. "Can Judaism survive when trade and urban economies collapse?" the authors ask, and the answer is a decisive "No".

By the Early Modern period, a great share of European Jews specialized in money-lending. This was simply the most profitable activity available to them, and one in which they had the comparative advantage of education, so why should they have refused it? Later still, the Jewish tradition of education would pay dividends as new occupational fields opened up from the 19th century onwards.



Botticini and Eckstein overturn many conventional wisdoms regarding Jewish history, perhaps a topic for another time. For now I merely want to say that it is rather frustrating when standard histories of Judaism leave out the decision by Yehoshua ben Gamla about universal education for boys. There is no doubt that this ruling together with the destruction of the temple (only a few years later, oddly enough) constitute a decisive breaking point in the history of the Jewish religion.