Want to have a discussion on the history of Jewish malfeasance since they rose as oligarchic bankers in 14th century Florence? Do you think you can handle that sentence fragment spewing, ad hominem fallacy engaging in, barely sentient sophist?
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. But our study shows, with evidence we have come upon during more than a decade of research, that this argument is simply untenable.
Instead, we have been compelled to offer an alternative and new explanation, 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:
capital already accumulated as craftsmen and traders,
networking abilities because they lived in many locations, could easily communicate with and alert one another as to the best buying and selling opportunities, and
literacy, numeracy, and contract-enforcement institutions — “gifts” that their religion has given them — gave them an advantage over competitors.
With these assets, small wonder that a significant number of Jews specialized in the most profitable occupation that depended on literacy and numeracy: finance. In this sector they worked for many centuries. As they specialized, just as Adam Smith would have predicted, they honed their craft, giving them a competitive advantage, right up to the present.
But what if the economy and society in which the Jews lived, suddenly ceased being urban and commercially-oriented and turned agrarian and rural, reverting to the environment in which Judaism had found itself 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 began in 1219 and culminated in the razing of Baghdad in 1258. It 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. Its religious norms, especially the one requiring fathers to educate their sons, had once again become a costly religious sacrifice with no economic return. And so a number of Jews converted to Islam.
Once again, persecutions, massacres, and plagues (e.g., the Black Death of 1348) took a toll on the Jewish population in these regions and in western Europe. But the voluntary conversions of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, we argue, help explain why world Jewry reached its lowest level by the end of the 15th century.
The same mechanism that explains the decline of the Jewish population in the six centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, that is, accounts for the decline of the Jewish communities of the Middle East in the two centuries following the Mongol shock.
None of this was planned. The rabbis and scholars who transformed Judaism into a religion of literacy during the first centuries of the first millennium, 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, potentially risky in that the process of conversions could make Judaism too costly and thus 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.”
Maristella Botticini is professor of economics, as well as director and fellow of the Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research (IGIER), at Bocconi University in Milan.
Zvi Eckstein is the Mario Henrique Simonson Chair in Labor Economics at Tel Aviv University and professor and dean of the School of Economics at IDC Herzliya in Herzliya, Israel.
Their current book, “The Chosen Few,” won the National Jewish Book Award for scholarship. Addressing the puzzles that punctuate 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.”
Anti-Semitism, it's sooooo mysterious idn' it?
And the USA is Isreal is the USA is Isreal is....you get the idea.
No that's wrong the Jews are the driver, and have destroyed our repreresentative democratic republic.
educate yourself....good luck
Want to have a discussion on the history of Jewish malfeasance since they rose as oligarchic bankers in 14th century Florence? Do you think you can handle that sentence fragment spewing, ad hominem fallacy engaging in, barely sentient sophist?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-chosen-few-a-new-explanation-of-jewish-success#:~:text=A%20note%20from%20Paul%20Solman:%20Nine
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. But our study shows, with evidence we have come upon during more than a decade of research, that this argument is simply untenable.
Instead, we have been compelled to offer an alternative and new explanation, 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:
capital already accumulated as craftsmen and traders,
networking abilities because they lived in many locations, could easily communicate with and alert one another as to the best buying and selling opportunities, and
literacy, numeracy, and contract-enforcement institutions — “gifts” that their religion has given them — gave them an advantage over competitors.
With these assets, small wonder that a significant number of Jews specialized in the most profitable occupation that depended on literacy and numeracy: finance. In this sector they worked for many centuries. As they specialized, just as Adam Smith would have predicted, they honed their craft, giving them a competitive advantage, right up to the present.
But what if the economy and society in which the Jews lived, suddenly ceased being urban and commercially-oriented and turned agrarian and rural, reverting to the environment in which Judaism had found itself 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 began in 1219 and culminated in the razing of Baghdad in 1258. It 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. Its religious norms, especially the one requiring fathers to educate their sons, had once again become a costly religious sacrifice with no economic return. And so a number of Jews converted to Islam.
Once again, persecutions, massacres, and plagues (e.g., the Black Death of 1348) took a toll on the Jewish population in these regions and in western Europe. But the voluntary conversions of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, we argue, help explain why world Jewry reached its lowest level by the end of the 15th century.
The same mechanism that explains the decline of the Jewish population in the six centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, that is, accounts for the decline of the Jewish communities of the Middle East in the two centuries following the Mongol shock.
None of this was planned. The rabbis and scholars who transformed Judaism into a religion of literacy during the first centuries of the first millennium, 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, potentially risky in that the process of conversions could make Judaism too costly and thus 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.”
Maristella Botticini is professor of economics, as well as director and fellow of the Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research (IGIER), at Bocconi University in Milan.
Zvi Eckstein is the Mario Henrique Simonson Chair in Labor Economics at Tel Aviv University and professor and dean of the School of Economics at IDC Herzliya in Herzliya, Israel.
Their current book, “The Chosen Few,” won the National Jewish Book Award for scholarship. Addressing the puzzles that punctuate 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.”