The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History

Suppose you are like one of the three people in the story above and you wonder why you should follow the advice of the two economists. There are many books that have studied the history of the Jewish people and have addressed those fascinating questions. What’s really special about this book? To understand the spirit of The Chosen Few, one should borrow two tools: a magnifying glass and a telescope. With the magnifying glass, the reader will be like a historian, who focuses on a place and a time period, painstakingly digs through the sources, and carefully documents the historical trajectory of the Jews there. A thousand of such scholars will offer a detailed description of the history of the Jews in hundreds of locales throughout history. With the telescope, the reader will be like an economist, who assembles and painstakingly compares the information offered by the works of the historians, creates a complete picture of the economic and demographic history of the Jewish people over 15 centuries, and then uses the powerful tools of economic reasoning and logic to address one of the most fundamental questions in Jewish history: why are the Jews a relatively small population specialized in the most skilled and economic profitable occupations? In doing so, the “alliance” of the historians and of the economists offers a completely novel interpretation of the historical trajectory of the Jews from 70 to 1492. In turn, this may help us understand several features of the history of the Jewish people from 1500 up to today, including the successful performance of the Israeli economy despite the recent economic crisis.

The journey of The Chosen Few begins in Jerusalem, following the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, continues in the Galilee during the first and second centuries, moves to Babylon in Mesopotamia during the fourth and fifth centuries, and then to Baghdad in the second half of the first millennium when the Muslim Abbasid empire reaches its economic and intellectual apex. At the turn of the millennium, the historical voyage reaches Cairo, Constantinople, and Cordoba, and soon after the whole western and southern Europe, then turns back to Baghdad in the 1250s during the Mongol Conquest of the Middle East before ending in Seville in 1492.

During these fifteenth centuries, a profound transformation of Judaism coupled with three historic encounters of the Jews – with Rome, with Islam, and with the Mongol Conquest – shaped the economic and demographic history of the Jewish people in a unique and long-lasting way up to today.

Let’s first start describing the profound transformation of Judaism at the beginning of the first millennium, which has been amply documented by scholarly works. In the centuries before 70, the core of Judaism was centered around two pillars: the Temple in Jerusalem, in which sacrifices were performed by a small elite of high priests, and the reading and the study of the Written Torah, which was also restricted to a small elite of rabbis and scholars. The destruction of the Temple in 70 at the end of the first Jewish-Roman war---the first of the three exogenous events which permanently shaped the history of the Jewish people---canceled one of the two pillars of Judaism, shifted the religious leadership within the Jewish community from the high priests to the rabbis and scholars, and transformed Judaism into a religion whose main norm required every Jewish man to read and to study the Torah in Hebrew and to send his sons from the age of six or seven to primary school or synagogue to learn to do so. In the world of universal illiteracy, as it was the world at the beginning of the first millennium, this was an absolutely revolutionary transformation. At that time, no other religion had a similar norm as a membership requirement for its followers, and no state or empire had laws imposing compulsory education or universal literacy for its citizens. The unexpected consequences of this change in the religious norm within Judaism would unfold in the subsequent centuries.

To understand what happened to the Jewish people in the eight centuries after 70, The Chosen Few makes the reader travel back in time to a village in the Galilee around the year 200. What would the reader see? Jewish farmers, some rich, some poor. They have to decide whether to send their children to primary school as their rabbis tell them to do. Some farmers are very attached to Judaism and willing to obey the norms of their religion, others are not very devote and consider whether to convert to another religion. In this rural economy, educating the children as Judaism requires, is a cost but brings no economic benefits because literacy does not make a farmer more productive or wealthier. If two economists embarked in the same journey back in time and used the economic logic to explain what they see, what would they predict it should happen to Judaism and the Jewish people? Their economic theory would predict that some Jews will educate their children and will keep their attachment to their religion, whereas other Jews will not educate their children and a portion of this latter group will convert to other religions with less demanding requirements. Over time, even absent wars or other demographic shocks, the size of the Jewish population will shrink because of this process of conversions.

But are the predictions of the economic theory set forth by the two economists consistent with what really happened to the Jews during the first millennium? The historical evidence assembled in The Chosen Few says yes. The implementation of this new religious norm within Judaism during the Talmud era (third to sixth centuries) determined two major patterns from the first to the early seventh century: first, the growth and spread of literacy among the predominantly rural Jewish population, and, second, a slow but significant process of conversion out of Judaism, which coupled with war-related massacres and epidemics caused a significant drop in the Jewish population---from 5-5.5 million circa 65 CE to roughly 1.2 million circa 650.

At the beginning of the seventh century, the Jews experienced their second major historic encounter---this time with Islam. In the two centuries after the death of Mohammed, in 632, the Muslim Umayyad and, later, Abbasid caliphs, established a vast empire stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to India and China, with a common language (Arabic), religion (Islam), laws, and institutions. Concomitant with the ascent of this empire, agricultural productivity grew, new industries developed, commerce greatly expanded, and new cities and towns developed. These changes vastly increased the demand for skilled and literate occupations in the newly established urban empire. How did this affect world Jewry?

Between 750 and 900, almost all the Jews in Mesopotamia and Persia—nearly 75 percent of the world 1.2 million Jews—left agriculture, moved to the cities and towns of the newly established Abbasid Empire, and entered myriad skilled occupations that provided higher earnings than as farmers. Agriculture, the typical occupation of the Jewish people in the days of Josephus in the first century, was no longer their typical occupation seven-eight centuries later. This occupational transition occurred at a time in which there were no legal restrictions on Jewish land ownership. The Jews could and did own land in the many locations of the vast Abbasid Muslim Empire, and yet, they ceased being mainly farmers. Hence, all arguments that rely on economic or legal restrictions to explain why the Jews became a population of craftsmen, traders, shopkeepers, bankers, scholars, and physicians do not pass the test of the historical evidence. This is one of the main and novel messages of The Chosen Few.

Having abandoned agriculture as their main occupation, many of Jews began migrating to Yemen, Syria, Egypt, and the Maghreb. The tide of migrations of Jews in search of business opportunities also reached Christian Europe. Migrations of Jews within and from the lands of the Byzantine Empire, which included southern Italy, may have set the foundations, via Italy, for much of European Jewry. Similarly, Jews from Egypt and the Maghreb settled in the Iberian Peninsula, and later, in Sicily and parts of southern Italy.

The key message of The Chosen Few is that the literacy of the Jewish people, coupled with a set of contract-enforcement institutions developed during the five centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, gave the Jews a comparative advantage in occupations such as crafts, trade, and moneylending—occupations that benefited from literacy, contract-enforcement mechanisms, and networking and provided high earnings. Once the Jews were engaged in these occupations, they rarely converted, which is consistent with the fact that the Jewish population grew slightly from the 7th to the 12th centuries. Moreover, this comparative advantage fostered the voluntary Diaspora of the Jews during the early middles ages in search of worldwide opportunities in crafts, trade, commerce, moneylending, banking, finance, and medicine.

Why then the Jews, at a certain point in history, became so successful in occupations related to credit and financial markets? Already during the 12th and 13th centuries, moneylending was the occupation par excellence of the Jews in England, France, and Germany, and one of the main professions of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and other locations in western Europe. Why? A popular view contends that both their exclusion from craft and merchant guilds and usury bans on Muslims and Christians segregated European Jews into moneylending during the Middle Ages. The Chosen Few shows with a lot of evidence that this argument is untenable and advances an alternative and new explanation, which is consistent with the historical record: the Jews in medieval Europe voluntarily entered and later specialized in moneylending and banking because they had the key assets for being successful players in credit markets: (i) capital accumulated as craftsmen and traders, (ii) networking abilities because they lived in many locations and could do arbitrage, and (iii) literacy, numeracy, and contract-enforcement institutions which were “gifts” that their religion has given to them. With these assets, a significant number of Jews specialized in the most skilled and profitable occupation---finance---in this sector they excelled for many centuries up to today.

But what if the economy and society in which the Jews lived, suddenly ceased being urban and commercially-oriented and turned into an agrarian and rural world as centuries earlier? The third historic encounter of the Jews---this time with the Mongol conquest of the Middle East---offers the possibility to answer this question. The Mongol invasion of Persia and Mesopotamia beginning in 1219 and culminating in the razing of Baghdad in 1258, contributed to the demise of the urban and commercial economy of the Abbasid Empire and brought the economies of Mesopotamia and Persia back to an agrarian and pastoral stage for a long period. As a consequence, a certain proportion of Persian, Mesopotamian, and then Egyptian, and Syrian Jewry abandoned Judaism—whose religious norms, especially the one requiring fathers to educate their sons, had once become again a costly religious sacrifice with no economic return—and converted to Islam. This process of conversions of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as episodes of persecutions, massacres, and plagues (e.g., the Black Death of 1348) in these regions and in western Europe, explain why world Jewry reached its lowest level by the end of the fifteenth century. The same mechanism that explains the decline of the Jewish population in the six centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, accounts for the decline of the Jewish communities of the Middle East in the two centuries following the Mongol shock.

The rabbis and scholars, who transformed Judaism into a literate religion during the first centuries of the first millennium, certainly could not have foreseen the profound impact of their decision to make every Jewish man capable of reading and studying the Torah (and, later, the Mishna, the Talmud, and other religious texts). However, an apparently odd choice of religious norm—the enforcement of literacy in a mostly illiterate, agrarian world, which was potentially risky if the process of conversions would make Judaism disappear---turned out to be the lever of the Jewish economic success and intellectual prominence in the subsequent centuries up to today. This is the overall novel message of The Chosen Few. Addressing the puzzles that punctuates Jewish history from 1492 to today is the task of the next journey, which the authors will take in their next book---The Chosen Many.

Published in Israel -The Chosen Few (Hebrew edition) TAU Press.

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