A comparative studies perspective

Abstract

The re-publication after nearly half a century of the late Joseph Ben-David's first academic article is a mark of signal recognition, entirely befitting one of the f'mest sociologists to emerge in Israel. In the original version, the paper was couched in a rather forbidding Hebrew-sociologese that was fashionable in Jerusalem in the 1950s; now it is presented in an admirably lucid translation. The work advances two principal arguments: one on the structure and cohesion of the traditional Jewish community, and the other on the vicissitudes of elites, particularly yeshiva scholars, in the context of nineteenth-century transformations. The arguments are stated in the terms of the functionalist sociological theory that prevailed when the author was a graduate student. This led him to pronounce that "far-reaching changes could not take place in part of the system without its effects being felt in other parts of the system" (see above, p. 83). Academic fashion has changed since then, and most sociologists would not now assume such a well-tailored integration of systems. But Ben-David was concerned with the small-scale Jewish communities of pre-modern Hungary, in which he claims, "everybody knew everybody else" (see above, p. 75), and "the community functioned as a sort of expanded primary group" (see above, p. 66). In that setting, if these empirical generalizations are well-founded, the functionalist paradigm was perhaps appropriate. More crucially, the author argues, the social cohesion of the traditional Hungarian communities was built on an interlocking of elites - religious and economic. This interlocking led to mutual responsibility and tight social control. That thesis has wide ramifications for understanding the vitality of traditional Jewry in general, and sociologists and social historians of Jewry on the whole accept and use it. But this generally well-taken ambitious thesis entails a problem. It is so sweeping that it ought to apply to all traditional Jewish communities, not just to the small