Gerry wrote:
Here is a long and interesting theory of why Jews have been so successful in
many fields:
......................
(Excerpt)
Why are the Jews, a relatively small population, specialized in the most
skilled and economically profitable occupations?
(An) "alliance" of historians and 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 of 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 15 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. (It was the power of this elite that the Jew Yeshua ben
Josef, later know as Jesus Christ, so often decried.)
The destruction of the Temple in 70 at the end of the first Jewish-Roman war
was the first of the three external events which permanently shaped the
history of the Jewish people. Momentously, it canceled one of the two
pillars of Judaism, shifting the religious leadership within the Jewish
community from the high priests in Jerusalem to a much more widely dispersed
community of rabbis and scholars. In so doing, it transformed Judaism into a
religion whose main norm required every Jewish man to read and to study the
Torah in Hebrew himself and, even more radically, to send his sons from the
age of six or seven to primary school or synagogue to learn to do the same.
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
anything like 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......snip
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/04/the-chosen-few-a-new-explanati.html
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