JEWS AS FARMERS
You have to go back almost 2,000 years to find a time when Jews, like virtually every other identifiable group, were primarily an agricultural people. Around A.D. 200, Jews began to quit the land. By the seventh century, Jews had left their farms in large numbers to become craftsmen, artisans, merchants, etc., the only group to have given up on agriculture. Jewish participation in farming fell to about 10 percent through most of the world. It’s true that in the Middle Ages, Jews were often prohibited from owning land. However, in the Muslim world, Jews faced no limits on occupation, land ownership, or anything else that might have been relevant to the choice of whether to farm. Moreover, a prohibition on land ownership is not a prohibition on farming. So, what’s different about the Jews? Why didn’t other groups leave the land? The temptation was certainly there. Skilled urban jobs have always paid better than farming. But those jobs require literacy, which requires educatio...