How Education Shaped Jewish Society (Part 2)
As a rabbi I feel the need to defend the value of the Jewish tradition as a spiritual and religious tradition. I feel some pressure to defend the idea of Jewish peoplehood which some would claim exists in a set relationship to Jewish spirituality and religious practice. This is not an unpleasant or punishing task, but it is more challenging for me than for some others because I try to eschew a dogmatic approach.
Because of the long history of Jew Hatred and the modern incarnation of it, Anti-Semitism, I am loath to talk about the Jewish relationship towards money, and all the more so the relationship between Jewish beliefs and money. Given that, you can see why I would have some discomfort discussing the book, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, by Maristella Botticine and Zvi Eckstein.
Their theory is this: the insistence, from the early era of Rabbinic Judaism, that fathers begin to educate their sons at 6 or 7 years of age, led to either assimilation or urbanization. Farmers, without a strong commitment to Rabbinic Judaism, particularly if they were poor, would likely drift away from Judaism and mix in with the other local populations that didn’t have the educational expectation. Rabbinic Jews would tend, as a whole, to become urbanized and professionalized, as this is a much easier way to make good money than farming and provide the funds needed to educate their sons. (This is discussed in greater detail in my column from last week found here).
Their theory explains the degree of demographic decline in the Jewish population unexplained by other reasons, like massacres after the revolts against the Romans. By the sixth century the Jewish population of the world was not much more than a million souls. Although the percentage of them who were farmers was lower than it had been, the societies that they lived in were still predominantly agricultural. One thing had changed was that the Babylonian community had eclipsed the community in Eretz Yisrael in size and talent.
The theory of Botticine and Eckstein was not only a theory of decline. It also explains the Jewish response to the rise of Islam and the change in fortunes for Babylonian Jewry. Persia through most of the Talmudic era was on the edge between the Persian and Roman spheres and was subject to military incursions. With the rise of Islam and the Abbasid caliphate, the need for professionals and skilled workers rose dramatically. This rewarded the type of mindset that education focused Jews thrived in. Between 750-900 Jewish urbanization became the norm. Despite the strong push from Islam that everyone convert, space was kept for those who did not, as Dhimmi, or those who were not pagan and accepted the political authority of Islam.
Since the largest population of Jews in the world lived at the center of the most progressive and expansive civilization of the time, they were able to develop vast trading networks that ran from China to Spain. The type of learning that went on within that vast geographic range changed from the sort of work that created the Talmud. In the Geonic period, when Rabbinic authority was still entirely centered in Babylonia, interest shifted to the process of making practical ruling on Jewish Law rather than theoretical discussions that could shade into possible legal rulings. The Geonim also began to create practical texts that allowed Jews to be guided by fixed written texts. The siddur of Rav Amram Gaon is a foundational text that laid out the order of Jewish prayer in an authoritative way.
Over time the strength of the academy in Babylonia faded despite the material success of the Jewish population and their adherence to the values of Jewish education. Botticini and Eckstein don’t deploy their theory to explain this. One possible explanation is that the pursuit of material success might have become so open and accessible that it overtook the pure value of education as the highest good that one could achieve in that society. Or it could have been that the effort to maintain the high standard of living that the community had become accustomed to made demands that took the focus away from education for those who were no longer young. In The Chosen Few, a quote from Moses Maimonides is presented that might be construed as supporting this theory:
“The greatest misfortune that has befallen me during my entire life… was the demise of the saint… who drowned in the Indian sea, carrying much money belonging to me, to him, and to others… How should I console myself? He grew up on my knees, he was my brother, he was my student: he traded on markets, and earned, and I could safely sit at home. He was well versed in Talmud and the Bible, and knew Hebrew grammar as well… Whenever I see his handwriting or one of his letters, my grief awakens again….” [c. 1170]
This period was decisively concluded by the shock of the Mongol invasion from the East that led to the sacking of Baghdad in 1258. This ended the Golden Age of Islam. [This is more than a bit of a simplification.] Jews were massacred along with the rest of the population and the trading networks that they had created lost their eastward connection. Far to the west the Jewish population in Spain would become the center of the Jewish world. While the overall decline in the economy of Persia mostly did away with the type of opportunities that Jews needed, Spain, at the time, had the largest cities in the world and was the ideal. Medieval Spanish Jewry was a Jewish Golden Age. Botticini and Eckman’s theory explains the Jewish attraction to Spanish and the material success that they had there.
The theory of The Chosen Few, that links education to Jewish identity and that identity with certain economic imperatives has, as a theory, a degree of broadness that appears to fit well and be predictive of what the conditions are under which Rabbinic Judaism can thrive. It does not explain Jewish culture itself. Why does one thriving Jewish community create deep Jewish culture and another only folkways? What is the relationship between technology and Jewish thriving? How close does the community have to keep to traditional forms of practice to thrive in this model? Can traditional Jewish practice go so far that it suppresses the virtuous circle between education and material success? What lessons should we draw from this analysis regarding the ways that we provide Jewish and general education today? Is there something specifically Jewish in all of this at the end of the day?
I will try to answer some of these questions next week.
