How Education Shaped Jewish History (Part 3)
In two previous pieces (1) (2), I discussed The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 701-1492, by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein. They propose a theory that tries to explain both the persistence of the Jewish people (Rabbinic Jews and their descendants) as a high achieving group that nevertheless remains small in numbers and undergoes periodic growth and decline. The author Max I. Dimont described the Jewish people as indestructible. The survival of the Jewish people does seem miraculous, but then, the survival of the Romani people also seems miraculous. The successes of the Jewish people as thought leaders and as crucial actors in world history is what makes the survival of the Jews a source of wonderment. How can it be?
The Chosen Few tries to provide an answer anchored in economics. In the Mishnaic period (70-200 C.E.) as Rabbinic Judaism was forming it became a central value that Jewish fathers would be required to educate their sons beginning at the age of 7. Those who were able to do so were much more likely to remain within the Jewish camp. Some who could not would remain as Jews, but the social stigma of not being able to follow this community value led to assimilation or conversion into the local non-Jewish cultures.
In the Mishnaic period and until the rise of Islam, the majority of Jews were farmers with small holdings. It was hard to come up with the money to pay for education. In the Land of Israel this was a personal expense. In Babylonia education was a public expense. This may explain, according to the argument of The Chosen Few, why that community thrived while the community in the Land of Israel stagnated.
It was easier for Jews who moved to the cities and took up trading, craft and professional activities to pay for education. Even in Babylonia, where the costs of education were borne by the public the loss of the productive capacity of children remained a cost not borne by those of other religions. The pressure away from agriculture remained. In a way, the rise of Islam and the centering of the economic and governmental operations of Islam precisely where the largest Jewish population in the world at the time was gathered was a kind of miracle. But there is a saying, “we make our luck.”
In a rough way, we can say that Judaism has risen and fallen with the strength of civilization itself. The Chosen Few quotes Yuri Slezkine in The Jewish Century:
‘‘The modern age is the Jewish age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century. Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, fastidious,and occupationally flexible. It is about how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields and herds.’’
Botticini and Eckstein, in quoting Slezkine at the head of their afterword, their brief extrapolation of their theory beyond the Spanish Expulsion in 1492, may be drawing their target around their data. I don’t mean to trash their theory. However, their materialist analysis treats the actual content of Jewish learning as an afterthought. Jews have not always thrived economically and they have not always managed to place themselves in the best places to thrive. In the period that followed the Spanish Expulsion there were some bright spots. The Jewish community of Damascus was doing very well, for instance, but for the most part Jews scrambled for a place to be and a way to get by. After centuries of expulsions and readmissions throughout Western Europe the Jews moved east into the Slavic regions and the Ottoman Empire.
The level of despair in the Jewish community generated the fervor that greeted the false messiah Shabbatai Zevi. His conversion to Islam was a breaking point. The Baal Shem Tov and the rise of Hasidism valued joyfulness and ecstatic prayer over rationality and learning. It reintroduced populism into Judaism, precisely at a point where the expense of education was particularly grinding. While not over-writing the value of education it offered another path to Jewish observance without the stigma attached to a failure to provide for education. For those who wanted to apply intellectual rigor to Jewish mystical the study of Kabbalah, in the earlier forms and even more so in the style of Isaac Luria, allowed one to push aside the this-worldly aspects of Judaism.
From the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in the thirteenth century Jews continued to thrive within Islamic lands, but they were subject to rising and falling state of the Islamic world as well as the arbitrary decisions of individual local rulers regarding their status as Dhimmi. The argument of The Chosen Few fits well enough to explain the Jewish situation under Islam. However, for the Jews of Christian Europe, the ever declining status of the Jews in parallel with their rising numbers is puzzling.
While Jews under Islam combined mysticism and the material, Eastern European Jewry seemed to get by more on mysticism. Poverty was widespread and extreme. Conversion was not common before the Twentieth Century, nor was assimilation. As modernity crept eastward they did become possibilities. However, an even stronger option opened up in the late nineteenth-century relocation: to Zion or to America (and elsewhere in the diaspora). All of these fit the argument of The Chosen Few.
However, the Rabbinic leadership in Eastern Europe found both the Land of Israel and America to be unacceptable places for Jews, precisely because they were deserts when it came to quality Torah learning (Their attitudes and the situation itself began to change only in the twentieth century). The internal viewpoint of religious leadership still held the central value pointed out in The Chosen Few, but they opposed having “their Jews” follow the logic of The Chosen Few to its logical materialist conclusion. (In the end, the leaders would be forced to follow their followers.)
As Yuri Selzkine noted in the quote above, the twentieth century saw the developed and developing world catch up with the values within the Jewish idea of education. Public education in America has also been a tool of acculturation, that is, it has sought to teach communal values just as Jewish education has. In the nineteenth century Reform Judaism promoted Judaism as “the highest form of Americanism.” Orthodox Jewry has felt that American values are sufficiently inimical to Jewish values that there is a communal preference for Jewish day schools and yeshivot. Part of the success of the Bais Yaacov schools for girls comes not from the desire to educate girls, but from the desire to prevent them from getting a secular education.
Non-Orthodox Jewish day schools, and the ones founded in the 1960s and after all the more so, are attempts to shelter Jewish youth from the broader community and to provide the benefits of elite education that will improve the ability of the these children to gain, maintain or improve the degree of their social status in American society, while maintaining the aura of the original Jewish values around education. (This is a harsh assessment, but matches my experiences in large urban areas. In smaller cities the need to provide a communal center may be a more primary purpose of the day schools.)
In recent years there has been an interest in Jewish peoplehood among the leaders of the Federation world across the U.S. This has faded a bit in the face of the rise of Antisemitism. What that has to do with educational values is unclear to me. Another emphasis within the Foundation world has been on day schools and Jewish summer camps as well as Israel trips and other intensive experiences. However, the focus of that interest is on communal cohesion. It is more about who marries whom and who affiliates with a synagogue than what is actually learned. Is a day school that allows a student to study Spanish instead of Hebrew expressing Jewish values?
For me, it is unclear if the materialist understanding of the success and failure of Judaism expressed in The Chosen Few is actually helpful to us in our current moment.The actual values of Judaism go well beyond the simple fact that we prioritize educating our Youth (nowadays, finally, both our boys and girls). It lies in what we are teaching. The pillars of our faith are challenged by libertarianism, Jewish chauvinism and the intellectual laziness that is the product of over-reliance on the interest and now A.I. If we do not accumulate within ourselves a body of knowledge, factual, technical, spiritual and emotional our critical faculties will whither away.
And what is the core use of our critical faculties? To Maimonides,and to those who value the spiritual realm, that use is the effort to know God. A.I. will never have a desire to know God and we will never learn to know God from an A.I. What The Chosen Few identifies as a secondary effect of the insistence on Jewish learning, but the endurance of Judaism as a faith and a way of life depends on pursuing the primary purpose of that education.
