The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492
Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein
Abstract
In 70 CE, the Jews were an agrarian and illiterate people living mostly in the Land of Israel and Mesopotamia. By 1492, the Jewish people had become a small group of literate urbanites specializing in crafts, trade, moneylending, and medicine in hundreds of places across the Old World, from Seville to Mangalore. What caused this radical change? This book presents a new answer to this question by applying the lens of economic analysis to the key facts of fifteen formative centuries of Jewish history. The book offers a powerful new explanation of one of the most significant transformations in Je ... More
Keywords: Jews, Israel, Mesopotamia, Jewish people, crafts, trade, moneylending, medicine, Jewish history, religion
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 | Print ISBN-13: 9780691144870 |
| Published to Princeton Scholarship Online: October 2017 | DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691144870.001.0001 |
