{"id":5124,"date":"2015-01-30T14:41:37","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T19:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5124"},"modified":"2015-01-25T22:32:39","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T03:32:39","slug":"why-jews-dont-farm-much-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5124","title":{"rendered":"Why Jews Don’t Farm Much Anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"

I came across two interesting articles recently about why you don’t see all that many Jewish farmers out there. A recent economic study<\/a> points out that back in ancient times (say when Jesus lived or even before), most Jews were farmers just like in most every other human culture. But over the upcoming millennium, they largely left that way of life, mostly moved to the cities, and took up a wide variety of trades and enterprises. <\/p>\n

According to these economists, this was not so much because of laws forbidding land ownership by Jews (although such laws did exist given that Jews were usually a minority group and often treated as outsiders by the powers that were). The main factor was the high degree of literacy promoted by the Jewish culture. I.e., smart people found better things to do in a world where trade was growing than raise crops and milk goats.<\/p>\n

A similar conclusion was reached in a Slate article from 2003<\/a>. Judaism has always emphasized the importance of reading, so as to keep the Torah alive (and thus preserve the Jewish identity). And so, Judaism early on developed a tradition of literacy. This tradition seemed to filter down to the people, it was not just for the rabbis. Compare this with medieval Catholicism, where priests and monks were taught to read, but the feudal peasants were left to being read to by the churchmen. The situation in Islam was pretty similar. <\/p>\n

As to Judaism, we are pretty much talking here about post-Temple Judaism, i.e. the late first century rabbinical era. The motto “go study” was not taken from Torah or from the Prophets, nor from the Davidic \/ Hasmonean nationalists. The urgency of reading came about as part of the “second exile” strategy, once the Roman Empire proved to most Jews that a Davidic kingdom was never going to come back<\/p>\n

How did Jesus relate to this? Jesus was one of the apocalypticists, who arguably became the last breath of the Davidic restoration movement (well OK, there were also the Zealots, the warrior faction). When Jesus didn’t come back after the Roman Wars (when the Zealots got wiped out), the Jews knew it was time to dig in for the long haul, to try to keep the dream alive. That required literacy. It required that everyone in and of himself (and maybe even “herself”) be a little rabbi. The 2nd Century Jews couldn’t depend upon a strong ecclesiastical structure, which Catholic Christianity was just starting to develop at the time. Nor until recently could the Jews access an economically and militarily strong national structure, as could medieval Islam. <\/p>\n

(It could be argued that the lack of a strong, centralized ecclesiastical structure and an historical dependence upon national power leaves the Islam of today with a growing wish to return to a strong and stringent Islamic nation. This wish is mostly shared by peaceful people, but unfortunately inspires a small but persistent fringe to use violent and inhumane means to seek a righteous caliphate. Ironically, in its glory years Islam had a wonderful tradition of learning. However, that tradition never became central to the religion itself. As with Catholicism, Islam came to depend upon an educated elite, e.g. mullahs\/ayatollahs\/sheiks, to lead its ranks of mostly untutored followers. However, Catholicism’s heavily centralized command structure in Rome eventually learned, after its many bad experiences with Crusader military expansionism, to impose a restraining discipline against any radical inspirations on the part of the faithful or their local leaders. By comparison, Islam doesn’t have a pope to keep the extremists in check.)<\/p>\n

It is interesting that the total number of Jews has stayed about steady since 500 AD, while world population has increased many times over. In the annals of history, Catholicism and Islam became “growth industries”, the “disrupters”, to use modern business-talk. They kept the Jewish franchise from growing, by depending on Jews as their recruits (too often by inhumane force). Jews remained in the minority — and thus the Jewish people (is that the best way to put it? are the Jews a religion, a people, a nation, a movement?) retain a family-oriented, education-oriented character. They share a common mythos from the Torah, but for the most part do not overly-fixate themselves on that mythos. They developed a strong, worldly pragmatism; but then again, there is a noticible “this-world” focus in the Torah, which stands in contrast to the Greek \/ Hellenic interest in more ethereal and transcendent realities. <\/p>\n

Once the Constantine co-opted it, Catholicism became heavily infected by Greek mythos. That made for a next-worldly, transcendent strain in Catholic culture; sort of a “live for the next world” ideal. By comparison, the Jewish movement largely retained its “live to make good for yourself and for your kids” ideal, make good right here in the present world.<\/p>\n

But interestingly . . . once the Renaissance came, the Jews were the merchants and financiers, but not so much the early artists and scientists. By the 19th century, that certainly changed; and the Jews turned out great artists and scientists in bulk in the 20th century. <\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Jews were generally not among the leading inventors<\/a> in the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps that was because most inventors, innovators and “disruptors” have little respect for the wisdom of earlier generations. The Jews survived over many hostile centuries largely because they didn’t want to give up the wisdom of their elders. But hey . . . those inventors and innovators weren’t going to get anywhere without financiers and merchants to actually manufacture and sell their stuff. In the end, the Jews and their respect for learning always seem to find a way to float to the top. And to that I say, kol hakavod<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I came across two interesting articles recently about why you don’t see all that many Jewish farmers out there. A recent economic study points out that back in ancient times (say when Jesus lived or even before), most Jews were farmers just like in most every other human culture. But over the upcoming millennium, they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,12,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5124"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5139,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5124\/revisions\/5139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}