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It makes sense that an insular religious group which refused to do agriculture since ~400AD would own an outsize amount of property in 20th century Slovakia (acquired through moneylending and banking I imagine). It also makes sense the ethnic Slovak farmers would find this annoying and try to take action against that. How much more is there to discuss? There’s no moral quandary or political interest here, just two groups doing what is in their best interests.
They didn't refuse agriculture, they were banned from it in most places.
Of course, it was noted Jews were predominantly craftsmen and other non farm occupations cca year zero.
Pretty sure Jews in the pale of settlement farmed, no?
The Talmud has passages condemning agricultural work and encouraging learned / literate work. According to Solzhenitsyn, the Tsar tried to get Russian Jews to farm but failed. As far as I know there is no example of a Rabbi (the leaders of the Jewish micro-nation) ever asking for farming privileges in any of their negotiations with foreign powers.
If Jews don't farm, why do they have a major holiday for harvest season? Farming may not be the most popular career for Jews, but it appears there's still plenty of Jewish farmers, even before the Kibbutz movement.
I am also highly skeptical of people pulling quotes from the Talmud to try and make a point about the Jews. The Talmud is a large volume containing many contradictory opinions about many subjects from many historical scholars. It's meant to be studied and debated, not read as a literal book of laws. Can you cite the exact passage that you believe condemns agricultural work and why you believe the intent of that section is to order Jews not to perform it?
I have no idea what the relationship of Eastern European Jewish communities was to farming. Certainly they were strongly discriminated against and banned from it in many places. If they refused to try or ask, perhaps they knew they wouldn't get it, or were concerned that they wouldn't be allowed to keep them for long enough for a planting and harvest cycle, or wouldn't be allowed to learn how to do it well. Or maybe it's not very well documented exactly what they did or didn't try to do over the years.
In looking around the net about the subject, I did find this interesting and pretty neutral article about the subject making the case that the root cause of Jews tending away from farming in the pre-historical era was not hostile discrimination or refusal to do farm labor, but instead the religious requirement to be literate (in order to read the Torah) in an era when that was extremely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. It seems likely that many people thought, if you've got to acquire a relatively rare and difficult skill, better to make some use of it rather than continue to farm.
Because Sukkot has its origins in Ancient Israel, and actually before that in ancient Canaan, which was agricultural. Talmudic Judaism came about around the first century, around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. This is where what we call “Judaism” originates.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/20824/1/dp670.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/jewish-occupational-selection-education-restrictions-or-minorities/5B02E978ED1E2F71A331D87CA6DE71D9
These articles go over how the Talmud made those who were illiterate very low status, and those Jews eventually converted to other religions. But farmers were pretty much necessarily illiterate before the printing press. Additionally, scholars had a huge advantage in terms of marriage because of the general praise of scholars. “200 years together” talks about how rabbis took advantage of this. Specifically in the Talmud we read we read that agriculture is the lowest profession and that selling merchandise is better than working the land.
Which just sounds like the Hindu caste system, very broadly, where it's the literate priestly class putting their caste at the top of the pecking order and then those who till the land or engage in work around animals, waste, dead bodies, etc. are put at the very bottom of the social pyramid. This isn't a purely and solely Jewish notion.
In the ideal (as opposed to actual) social system in the Vedic era, the ranks are:
Cows being sacred, farming/dairy herdsmen as occupation would be higher-ranked in India. For the Jewish position, since there weren't sacred animals but were impure ones - and the question of who was raising pigs or keeping pigs at the time - then people who were probably herding non-kosher animals as well as kosher ones would naturally be an occupation giving rise to the attitude "it's better to be a trader than a farmer".
i agree, but we don’t see this kind of anti-agricultural ethic in Christianity. All Christians are of equal value who act Christlike, and the learned class was celibate. So it makes sense for eg Slovaks to rebel against a foreign upper class. And, of course, it also makes sense for Jews to want to make more money in lending and trade rather than farming. All of it makes sense, it’s just competing value schemes.
There might be another push. Since Jews were generally exiles for most of the existence of Talmudic Judaism, they might have been subject to expulsions and attacks. Farming is obviously bound to the land, and if you have to worry about neighbors with pitchforks and torches coming after you or governments getting grabby, Farming is probably a terrible profession. You cannot pack your field in a suitcase or put it in a cart, your fields and barns will be lost if you have to flee or are ordered to leave. Christians were generally dominant in their countries and rulers of those countries so any wealth tied to the land wouldn’t be at risk. If you bought a field, chances are that your kids would be passing it to their kids.
The other thing with literacy is that without literacy, there’s not really a way to preserve the religion. The temple is gone, the priests are gone, you’re surrounded by other peoples. If nobody can read, the religion gets lost or becomes so diluted that it’s lost entirely.
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