Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein. The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492.

Abstract

The exhaustive research of S. D. Goitein, which eventuated in his remarkable five-volume A Mediterranean Society (1967–1993), has proven conclusively that during the first half of the Middle Ages Jews in the sphere of Islam, who constituted the overwhelming majority of worldwide Jewry, were thoroughly diversified in their economic pursuits, with the sole exception of involvement in agriculture. As the vitalization of northern Europe began during the late tenth and eleventh centuries, Jews made their way into this rapidly developing region. There they encountered considerable resistance, which resulted in constriction of their economic outlets. As a result, northern European Jews became heavily concentrated in business and banking, and this early concentration continued to a significant extent in European Jewish life down into modernity, thus creating the misleading imagery of Jews as exclusively business people over the ages. For the Jews of the medieval and modern Christian West, the concentration in business has raised an intriguing question. Was it the result—at least in part—of the emphasis on literacy in Jewish religious tradition? Since the centerpiece of Jewish liturgy involves the regular public reading of the Bible, which listeners were expected to follow closely, and since Jewish oral law is supposed to be studied as well, literacy was an important value in medieval and modern Jewish religious life. Researchers have recently suggested that this religious valorization of literacy may have played a role in Jewish business success during the medieval and modern centuries in addition to fitting Jews for achievement in modern higher education.