Eric Hobsbawm: Benefits of Diaspora
[Eric Hobsbawm has taught history and written in Britain, the US and elsewhere. His most recent book is an autobiography, Interesting Times: A 20th-Century Life. He is president of Birkbeck College.]
Most work in the field of Jewish history deals with the almost invariably vast impact of the outside world on the Jews, who are almost invariably a small minority of the population. My concern is with the impact of the Jews on the rest of humanity. And, in particular, with the explosive transformation of this impact in the 19th and 20th centuries: that is to say, since the emancipation and self-emancipation of the Jews began in the late 18th century.
Between their expulsion from Palestine in the first century ad and the 19th century, the Jews lived within the wider society of gentiles, whose languages they adopted as their own and whose cuisine they adapted to their ritual requirements; but only rarely and intermittently were they able and, what is equally to the point, willing, to participate in the cultural and intellectual life of these wider societies. Consequently their original contribution to this life was marginal, even in fields in which, since emancipation, their contribution has been enormous. Only as intermediaries between intellectual cultures, notably between the Islamic and Western Christian worlds in the (European) Middle Ages, did they have a significant part to play.
Consider a field of outstanding Jewish achievement: mathematics. So far as I am aware no significant developments in modern mathematics are specifically associated with Jewish names until the 19th century. Nor do we find that Jewish mathematicians made major advances which were only discovered by the wider mathematical world much later, as was the case of the Indian mathematicians whose work between the 14th and the 16th centuries, written in the Malayalam language, remained unknown until the second half of the 20th. Or take chess, the excessive practice of which was actively discouraged by religious authority in general and Maimonides in particular as a distraction from the study of the Law. No wonder the first Jewish chess player to gain a wider reputation was the Frenchman Aron Alexandre (1766-1850), whose life coincided with the emancipation.
This segregation or ghettoisation, both imposed and self-imposed, was at its most stringent between the 14th and the 18th centuries, and reinforced after 1492 by the expulsion of non-converting Jews from the Spanish dominions, including those in Italy. This reduced the occasions for social and intellectual contact with non-Jews, other than those that arose out of the professional activities that linked Jews to the gentile world. Indeed, it is difficult to think of Jews during that period who were in a position to have informal intellectual contact with educated gentiles outside the only major urban Jewish population remaining in the West, the largely Sephardi community of Amsterdam. Most Jews, after all, were either confined to ghettos or prohibited from settling in large cities until well into the 19th century.
As Jacob Katz observed in Out of the Ghetto (1973), in those days ‘the outside world did not overly occupy the Jewish mind.’ The elaborate codification of the practices of Orthodoxy that constituted the Jewish religion in the compendia of the time, notably the Shulchan Aruch, reinforced segregation; and the traditional form of Jewish intellectual activity, the homiletic exposition of Bible and Talmud and its application to the contingencies of Jewish life, left little scope for anything else. Rabbinical authority banned philosophy, science and other branches of knowledge of non-Jewish origin – even, in darkest Volhynia, foreign languages. The gap between intellectual worlds is best indicated by the fact that the rare advocates of emancipation among Eastern Jewry felt they needed to translate into Hebrew work evidently available to any educated person in the gentile print culture – Euclid, for example, or works on trigonometry, as well as on geography and ethnography.
The contrast between the situation before and after the era of emancipation is startling. After many centuries during which the intellectual and cultural history of the world, let alone its political history, could be written with little reference to the contribution of any Jews acceptable as such to the Orthodox, other than perhaps Maimonides, we almost immediately enter the modern era when Jewish names are disproportionately represented. It is as though the lid had been removed from a pressure cooker. ...
Read entire article at NY Review of Books
Most work in the field of Jewish history deals with the almost invariably vast impact of the outside world on the Jews, who are almost invariably a small minority of the population. My concern is with the impact of the Jews on the rest of humanity. And, in particular, with the explosive transformation of this impact in the 19th and 20th centuries: that is to say, since the emancipation and self-emancipation of the Jews began in the late 18th century.
Between their expulsion from Palestine in the first century ad and the 19th century, the Jews lived within the wider society of gentiles, whose languages they adopted as their own and whose cuisine they adapted to their ritual requirements; but only rarely and intermittently were they able and, what is equally to the point, willing, to participate in the cultural and intellectual life of these wider societies. Consequently their original contribution to this life was marginal, even in fields in which, since emancipation, their contribution has been enormous. Only as intermediaries between intellectual cultures, notably between the Islamic and Western Christian worlds in the (European) Middle Ages, did they have a significant part to play.
Consider a field of outstanding Jewish achievement: mathematics. So far as I am aware no significant developments in modern mathematics are specifically associated with Jewish names until the 19th century. Nor do we find that Jewish mathematicians made major advances which were only discovered by the wider mathematical world much later, as was the case of the Indian mathematicians whose work between the 14th and the 16th centuries, written in the Malayalam language, remained unknown until the second half of the 20th. Or take chess, the excessive practice of which was actively discouraged by religious authority in general and Maimonides in particular as a distraction from the study of the Law. No wonder the first Jewish chess player to gain a wider reputation was the Frenchman Aron Alexandre (1766-1850), whose life coincided with the emancipation.
This segregation or ghettoisation, both imposed and self-imposed, was at its most stringent between the 14th and the 18th centuries, and reinforced after 1492 by the expulsion of non-converting Jews from the Spanish dominions, including those in Italy. This reduced the occasions for social and intellectual contact with non-Jews, other than those that arose out of the professional activities that linked Jews to the gentile world. Indeed, it is difficult to think of Jews during that period who were in a position to have informal intellectual contact with educated gentiles outside the only major urban Jewish population remaining in the West, the largely Sephardi community of Amsterdam. Most Jews, after all, were either confined to ghettos or prohibited from settling in large cities until well into the 19th century.
As Jacob Katz observed in Out of the Ghetto (1973), in those days ‘the outside world did not overly occupy the Jewish mind.’ The elaborate codification of the practices of Orthodoxy that constituted the Jewish religion in the compendia of the time, notably the Shulchan Aruch, reinforced segregation; and the traditional form of Jewish intellectual activity, the homiletic exposition of Bible and Talmud and its application to the contingencies of Jewish life, left little scope for anything else. Rabbinical authority banned philosophy, science and other branches of knowledge of non-Jewish origin – even, in darkest Volhynia, foreign languages. The gap between intellectual worlds is best indicated by the fact that the rare advocates of emancipation among Eastern Jewry felt they needed to translate into Hebrew work evidently available to any educated person in the gentile print culture – Euclid, for example, or works on trigonometry, as well as on geography and ethnography.
The contrast between the situation before and after the era of emancipation is startling. After many centuries during which the intellectual and cultural history of the world, let alone its political history, could be written with little reference to the contribution of any Jews acceptable as such to the Orthodox, other than perhaps Maimonides, we almost immediately enter the modern era when Jewish names are disproportionately represented. It is as though the lid had been removed from a pressure cooker. ...