Dear AH Reddit, I've been reading about this book "The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492" and it challenges a story I'd always read about the distribution of Jewish populations in Europe. I'd always read that Jews were forced into professions like trades and moneylending and away from agriculture due to persecution that prevented them from owning land or otherwise adopting more common agrarian professions.
This book says it's something like the other way around. Jewish literacy emphasized during the 1st millenium CE was incredibly costly, but, having already invested in that for religious purposes, Jews were drawn into professions where that investment was economically helpful, because of the massive investment in becoming literate in a world without modern public schooling.
Does anyone know what the scholarly consensus on this book is? And can you suggest any critiques?
Here is the summary of a review of the text. If you have access you can read the full thing, but the summary there gives a pretty good overview of the problems with it (though it cuts off before it talks about the strengths).
Personally, having read it, my thoughts were similar to that of the reviewer. It's not a bad book, it has insights about Jewish history and texts over a wide range of periods, it's productive to read. While it offers a strong argument, it's a hard thesis to demonstrate conclusively, and as that review says, "they exclude other theses poorly". While the text mentions other possibilities than the thesis, there's some hand-waving in my opinion to exclude them.
Really, like the review says, reducing the huge span of Jewish history to one fundamental cause is going to be a fairly difficult task, and not necessarily one that will hold up to any counter-argument.