The Chosen Few? ~ Explaining Jewish Success...

Fascinating piece in Paul Solman's PBS Newshour Business Desk column on The Chosen Few: A New Explanation of Jewish Success by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein who write...

"Why are the Jews, a relatively small population, specialized in the most skilled and economically profitable occupations? [...] The literacy of the Jewish people, coupled with a set of contract-enforcement institutions developed during the five centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, gave the Jews a comparative advantage in occupations such as crafts, trade, and moneylending -- occupations that benefited from literacy, contract-enforcement mechanisms, and networking and provided high earnings. [...] Jews in medieval Europe voluntarily entered and later specialized in moneylending and banking because they had the key assets for being successful players in credit markets [...] An apparently odd choice of religious norm -- the enforcement of literacy in a mostly illiterate, agrarian world, potentially risky in that the process of conversions could make Judaism too costly and thus disappear -- turned out to be the lever of the Jewish economic success and intellectual prominence in the subsequent centuries up to today."