/lit/ - Literature

Yes, Zvi Eckstein / Maristella Botticini: The Chosen Few. It's a social history of Jewish literacy and basically argues that the "literate urban cosmopolitan Jew" stereotype was selected for during periods of highly networked non-Jewish empires needing literate polyglot elites, both at court and in mercantile professions. During times of disintegration, when urban life, complex trade, and literate professions declined or (crucially) were able to be monopolized by local language speakers, Jews tended to get squeezed out of those trades, and the "reward structure" for being a literate Jew and specifically keeping your kids out of farming by devoting them to study was different, because now it was exclusively an economic malus rather than a bonus: in short, there was no international market for your sons as polyglot educated "go-betweens" anymore, so it was JUST a detriment that they couldn't farm.

In times like that, poorer Jews tended to convert to local religions and absorb into the local majority population for obvious reasons (it made life easier). The idea being, if you take a Jew on the lower end of the economic spectrum of the Jewish community, and ask him whether he'd rather be a second-class citizen spat upon in the Jewish community for "only" being able to send 2 of his 5 sons to study Talmud and never farm, or whether he'd prefer to convert to a Jewish Christian denomination that isn't structured as an oligarchy of rabbis with the wealth and leisure to study all day, OVER TIME those poor Jews would gradually answer the latter, by converting. Obviously many of them "half-converted," but then their sons would be raised mostly in the local majority culture, and over time the family would cease to be Jewish.

The authors note that this is what happened in the time between the destruction of the Second Temple and the rise of Islam. Then Islam came and restored an international imperial structure with complex trade networks, and "literate Jewry" became an international phenomenon again - if you read Pirenne, prior to this they were basically just Mediterranean slave merchants who sold Christian slaves to any buyer. (They seem to have been highly overrepresented in the slave trade, according to Pirenne.)

Things are complicated by the existence of poor stetl/ghetto Jews in Russia, the Pale, and other eastern European countries in early modernity, but even those Jews usually acted as go-betweens and as a proto-bourgeoisie (because urban + trades). Jews had international networks of other Jews so that when they travelled they could find safe harbor, but this also worked to promote business and trade, obviously. You "know a guy" in Bonn or Berlin, because you sent your sons to study Talmud with him, but there's no reason you can't also receive accommodations from him when you go there to establish a lucrative trade deal, and vice versa when he needs to send a son to oversee a deal in Gdansk.

Also The Politics of Nonassimilation by Verbeeten.

>>22987009
Also the following:
https://odysee.com/@Truthishatespeech:e/Rabbi-Yaron-Reuven-gives-a-warning-to-the-Jews-reupload:0

Then read these, a highly nuanced philosemitic take on the Jewish question:
https://counter-currents.com/2018/04/on-the-jewish-question/
https://counter-currents.com/2013/02/change-societys-values/

Some good books:
>David Verbeeten, The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century
>Maristella Botticcini and Zvi Eckstein, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History
>Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

>>22897921
This has been done much better by many others

Watch this first:
https://odysee.com/@Truthishatespeech:e/Rabbi-Yaron-Reuven-gives-a-warning-to-the-Jews-reupload:0

Then read these, a highly nuanced philosemitic take on the Jewish question:
https://counter-currents.com/2018/04/on-the-jewish-question/
https://counter-currents.com/2013/02/change-societys-values/

Some good books:
>Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism.
>David Verbeeten, The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century
>Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Straussian Movement
>Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique
>Pic related
>Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

Incidentally, Arendt's "antisemitism" goes very well with Ludovici's (the two CC links above).

I recommend this in conjunction

Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby

David Verbeeten, The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century
Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Straussian Movement
Pic related

>>22588134
They were, but not intentionally. Pic related. When forced into normal agriculture at the same level of a surrounding peasantry, Jews either convert to local religions or implode over a few generations into a gypsy-style pariah minority. It's only when their literacy and ingroup preference behaviors are selected for by economic circumstance, like in the Pax Islamica or early modern and modern Europe, that they thrive, but then they inevitably become a despised merchant/usurer caste like the Phanariots.

It's pretty simple and doesn't require anything magical about them. In early modern economic conditions, itinerant literate polyglot pariahs who violently despise their host countries simply took over what Medicis and Fuggers already did before them (but with more morality and less rationalization, because they didn't despise other Christians).

https://odysee.com/@Truthishatespeech:e/Rabbi-Yaron-Reuven-gives-a-warning-to-the-Jews-reupload:0

>>22531552
Some people say they are Khazars, a Turkic group in what is now Russia that weirdly converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages, and the idea is that after the kingdom collapsed these Khazars became itinerant and genetically took over European Jewish populations I think. If you want the older writings on it, read the first chapter of Solzhenitsyn's 200 Years Together and Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe, but these days it's FIERCELY, obsessively disputed by Jews and Israelis and of course being Jews they use their influence to smother any mention of it in the mainstream press. Any time something comes out on it there are parallel press campaigns attacking and denouncing it. From what I understand it's a lot more ambiguous and possible than the heavily curated "mainstream" lets on. There was even a controversy in Israel with one Israeli scholar defending it, and if you read between the lines of the controversy, it was very Jewy how they Jewed that Jew, tons of typical litigious weasel words.

On a milder level, a lot of people don't consider secular European Jews since they increasingly became degenerate secular Talmudists over the centuries. By the 19th century it gets really really bad though as Jewish influence over finance and media becomes astronomical, in the 18th century it was still not too bad. A lot of this has to do with mass population movements of, once again, Russian Jews due to the Russian expulsions. Most of the troubles you hear about in Eastern Europe are due to massive influxes of Jews from Russia who move in and immediately start dominating local trades and stuff. Solzhenitsyn is good on this again. It's inarguable that they really did do things like dominating local trades and especially getting monopolies on alcohol production. They were often kind of like inverted gypsies, being a parasite population but one that dominates the locals and takes over their towns rather than stealing from them and living on the fringes. Plenty of examples of countries with barely developing middle classes, towns etc. having Jewish majorities in all middle class professions and in education.

https://odysee.com/@Truthishatespeech:e/Rabbi-Yaron-Reuven-gives-a-warning-to-the-Jews-reupload:0

Some good books on this:
>Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism.
>David Verbeeten, The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century
>Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Straussian Movement
>Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique
>Pic related

https://www.bitchute.com/video/yQXPuhllx7le/
David Verbeeten, The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century
Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism
Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Straussian Movement
Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique
Pic related

>>20191118
>with complex relations to the Cathar heresies in the same region and time
I've read Scholem speculating about this in one or two places but I've never seen anything concrete on it. Has research advanced since his day? Have people found concrete links to the neoplatonist revival?

McGinn in his histories of Christian mysticism talks about a great revival in Christianity around 1200, and of course the Victorines were translating Eriugena and more particularly Eriugena's versions of Pseudo-Dionysius, but that's probably more effect than cause of the neoplatonic revival.

If there's some credible link to a Provencal "ferment" of mysticism/contemplative traditions that could jointly explain the neoplatonist flowering of the High Middle Ages, both in Kabbalah and in Christian sources, that would be really interesting. But in my experience anything that talks about Cathars or Provencal "gnosticism" is 9/10ths likely to be a crank speculating. Which can be fun sometimes but I really want something solid to build on.

Have you read this book? It plausibly argues that the real watershed in Jewish history, at least from a modern perspective, was them becoming a diasporic people as a result of the Islamic state(s) establishing a new canopy for them to ply professional and mercantile trades in. They use economic and sociological models to argue that rabbinical Judaism tends to wane and assimilate to local religions in conditions where (to sum it up) literacy is a liability rather than an asset, i.e. where "having to" send sons to study Torah to remain respectable in the community is a burden (as it is for subsistence farmers), instead of it being a natural generator of literate professionals in a society that always has a demand for them.

This would dovetail with what I've heard most often, which is that Jewish history really begins with the Islamic states in Spain and then with the diaspora as those states collapse and the Jews are exiled.

This book is amazing. The thesis is basically a modification of the classic Weberian thesis that Jewish overrepresentation in skilled trades, professions, urban life, commerce, and finance is due to their being a self-imposed "pariah people," because of their ritualistic ethno-religion. The authors say that this isn't true, nor is it true that Jews became this "urban-commercial people" or "diasporic people" because of simple Christian and Islamic restrictions on money lending opening a natural gap for itinerant Jews to fill. Instead, the pivotal moment in Jewish history is the establishment of literacy, for Torah and halakha study purposes, as the defining feature of Jewish ethno-religion after the destruction of the Second Temple, when the Pharisees become the sole leaders of Judaism and morph into the rabbinical tradition.

The author proves this by showing with economic analysis that Jews did not become an urban-commercial/diasporic people as a result of being an exclusivist ethno-religion, since the latter predated the former by a thousand years. Jews remained farmers in the Holy Land and actually contracted demographically to almost vanishing, due to conversions and drift away from the faith, until the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates created a new unified commercial space with a single lingua franca (Arabic) in which highly literate and numerate Jews could excel. They then spread to Europe and everywhere else. When the Mongols sacked Baghdad, Jewish presence in the Muslim world declined but the Jews were already a diasporic people in Europe and this has defined them to this day.

Highly recommend this book for anyone curious about how Judaism and the Jewish people actually developed.