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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.
I interpret the posts you started this thread with as making the claim that Jews as a group categorically refuse to do agricultural work because the Talmud says they aren't allowed to. But the articles that you posted seem to basically agree with the one I posted - that Jews mostly moved away from agriculture because the religion did mandate that they become literate in an age where that was rare and difficult, and there were more lucrative jobs available for those who were (though usually not lucrative enough versus farming at the time to persuade people of other religions who did not have a religious mandate for literacy to take them up). So agreed on that I guess?
This is also evidence that the mandate for literacy is actually real and recognized as so and obeyed by the great majority of Jews throughout history. You seem to be attempting to claim there is a mandate to not do agricultural work, which I can't see any evidence of historical or near-modern Jews actually perceiving, recognizing, or obeying. It may not be super-popular, but there definitely are substantial movements around Jewish Farming, and I've never heard of any Rabbis or Talmudic scholars making a claim that those movements are wrong. And you'd think they'd get rid of Sukkot too if they really did hate farming.
(this probably deserves an effortpost of its own, but indeed literacy is rare and expensive in the pre-industrial age, which includes not only the printing press, but a power source for it, plus decent-quality long-lasting paper and ink in industrial quantities, plus a way to transport large quantities of all of those supplies and the resulting books around a country)
The Talmud is a pretty complex and obscure subject. You pretty much never hear any Jews who are not Talmudic scholars talking about it or basing their lives around it. Indeed, there are college degrees for reading and interpreting it. I am not at all a Talmudic scholar myself, but all of the commentary in the site you posted on the section you linked says it's mainly about marriage and relations between men and women. It seems nobody else thinks the bit that you say forbids agriculture work (or rather, quotes a "Rabbi Elazar" as claiming it's "low") actually does so. It's a book that's existed for thousands of years and had many tens of thousands of people spend years of their life reading and interpreting, if it's actually meant as a prohibition, surely there must be more people talking about that, but I can't seem to find any.
Yes, this is the most surreal part of anti-Jewish discourse, remnant of premodern villager mind floating around in post-post-post modern cyberspace.
Medieval Jews indeed avoided peasant farm labor, just like medieval Christian nobility, clergy, merchants, craftsmen, town dwellers in general and everyone else who could.
If you ever did even a day of manual field work, you would understand why.
"The Talmud" is not a book, it is a library. The full edition in printed form weighs impressive 330 pounds.
Imagine, for example, treating 217 volumes of the Church Fathers as "one book."
Just like all traditional religious works, Talmud is full of stuff extremely unsavory for modern audiences.
If you listen to people who are not fond of Jews, they have idea that Talmud is some sort of encyclopedia of crime, grand manual how to cheat, rob, deceive and manipulate the goyim, they make Talmud much cooler that it is in reality (extremely dreary discussions about minutiae of religious laws).
As you said, only religious Jews are studying Talmud for real, even people who are really not fond of Jews are not interested in learning the "Jewish secrets" and are satisfied with copying and pasting of short list of mostly fabricated "Talmud quotes".
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