Slate's Bizbox
everyday economics: How the dismal science applies to your life.

Why Jews Don't Farm

By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Friday, June 13, 2003, at 4:37 PM ET

In the 1890s, my Eastern European Jewish ancestors emigrated to an American Jewish farming community in Woodbine, N.J., where the millionaire philanthropist Baron de Hirsch provided land, tools, and training at the nation's first agricultural college. [Correction, June 16, 2003: The Baron De Hirsch Agricultural College was not the first agricultural college in the United States.] But within a generation, the family had settled in Philadelphia where they became accountants, tailors, merchants, and eventually, lawyers and college professors.

De Hirsch had a vision of American Jews achieving economic liberation by working the land. If he'd had a better sense of history, he would have built not an agricultural college but a medical school, because for well over a millennium prior to the settlement of Woodbine, Jews had not been farmers—not in Palestine, not in the Muslim empire, not in Western Europe, not in Eastern Europe, not anywhere in the world.

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, and moneylenders—the only group to have given up on agriculture. Jewish participation in farming fell to about 10 percent through most of the world; even in Palestine it was only about 25 percent. Everyone else stayed on the farms.

(Even in the modern state of Israel, where agriculture has been an important component of the economy, it's been a peculiarly capital-intensive form of agriculture, one that employed well under a quarter of the population at the height of the Kibbutz movement, and less than 3 percent of the population today.)

The obvious question is: Why? Why did Jews and only Jews take up urban occupations, and why did it happen so dramatically throughout the world? Two economic historians—Maristella Botticini (of Boston University and Universitá di Torino) and Zvi Eckstein (of Tel Aviv University and the University of Minnesota)—have recently been giving that question a lot of thought.

First, say Botticini and Eckstein, the exodus from farms to towns was probably not a response to discrimination. It's true that in the Middle Ages, Jews were often prohibited from owning land. But the transition to urban occupations and urban living occurred long before anybody ever thought of those restrictions. 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—other groups facing similar restrictions (such as Samaritans) went right on working other people's land.

Nor, despite an influential thesis by the economic historian Simon Kuznets, can you explain the urbanization of the Jews as an internal attempt to forge and maintain a unique group identity. Samaritans and Christians maintained unique group identities without leaving the land. The Amish maintain a unique group identity to this day, and they've done it without giving up their farms.

So, what's different about the Jews? First, Botticini and Eckstein explain why other groups didn't leave the land. The temptation was certainly there: Skilled urban jobs have always paid better than farming, and that's been true since the time of Christ. But those jobs require literacy, which requires education—and for hundreds of years, education was so expensive that it proved a poor investment despite those higher wages. (Botticini and Eckstein have data on ancient teachers' salaries to back this up.) So, rational economic calculus dictated that pretty much everyone should have stayed on the farms.

But the Jews (like everyone else) were beholden not just to economic rationalism, but also to the dictates of their religion. And the Jewish religion, unique among religions of the early Middle Ages, imposed an obligation to be literate. To be a good Jew you had to read the Torah four times a week at services: twice on the Sabbath, and once every Monday and Thursday morning. And to be a good Jewish parent you had to educate your children so that they could do the same.

The literacy obligation had two effects. First, it meant that Jews were uniquely qualified to enter higher-paying urban occupations. Of course, anyone else who wanted to could have gone to school and become a moneylender, but school was so expensive that it made no sense. Jews, who had to go to school for religious reasons, naturally sought to earn at least some return on their investment. Only many centuries later did education start to make sense economically, and by then the Jews had become well established in banking, trade, and so forth.

The second effect of the literacy obligation was to drive a lot of Jews away from their religion. Botticini and Eckstein admit that they have little direct evidence for this conclusion, but there's a lot of indirect evidence. First, it makes sense: People do tend to run away from expensive obligations. Second, we can look at population trends: While the world population increased from 50 million in the sixth century to 285 million in the 18th, the population of Jews remained almost fixed at just a little over a million. Why were the Jews not expanding when everyone else was? We don't know for sure, but a reasonable guess is that a lot of Jews were becoming Christians and Muslims.

So—which Jews stuck with Judaism? Presumably those with a particularly strong attachment to their religion and/or a particularly strong attachment to education for education's sake. (The burden of acquiring an education is, after all, less of a burden for those who enjoy being educated.) The result: Over time, you're left with a population of people who enjoy education, are required by their religion to be educated, and are particularly attached to their religion. Naturally, these people tend to become educated. And once they're educated, they leave the farms.

Of course there are always exceptions. My great-grandfather raised chickens. But he did it in the basement of his row house in north Philadelphia.

[Correction, June 16, 2003: The Baron De Hirsch Agricultural College was not the first agricultural college in the United States. At the time the college opened in 1894, there were dozens of agricultural colleges in the United States. Most were established through the 1862 Morrill Act, which had given states land grants to fund public agricultural and mechanical colleges.]

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. You can e-mail him at .
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks from the Fray:

So the Jews of Woodbine, New Jersey stopped farming in a generation. At the same time Woodbine (and Brotmanville) were founded for Jewish farmers, another ethnic group founded nearby Chessilhurst and Lawnside, planned farming towns on the very same rail line as Woodbine in South Jersey. Guess what? Within a generation, the descendents of the Chessilhurst and Lawnside farmers weren't farming any more, and most were moving to larger cities. Millenia of book learning had little to do with the abandonment of farming by the children of the freed slaves. And while we're at it, let's move over a county and see what the descendents of the settlers of Swedesboro, also in South Jersey, were doing. By the early twentieth century, they'd stopped farming too! And by now, so have almost all of the Italian Americans who bought the farms around Swedesboro.
Today almost all of the work of farming in South Jersey is done by immigrants from Mexico and recent arrivals from Puerto Rico, and you can be certain that their kids won't follow them into the family business. Leaving the farm for the city is the American way, and has been for centuries. Most Americans who have been here for three or four generations have some ancestors on a farm, and aren't there any more. For that matter, it's been the way of the world in all periods of growing population, which is the majority of the past few thousand years. It isn't just a Jewish thing.

--historyguy

(To reply, click here)


Landsburg's thesis is persuasive, but I'm not sure it takes account of the dispersion of Jews after the failed revolt against Rome in the first century. The one constant about farming is that it requires land, and people uprooted from their land either need to find somewhere else to farm or get into another line of work. The greater emphasis on education in Jewish culture likely led to a keen sense of history -- specifically to the knowledge that Jews had been driven out of Israel before -- and this may have reinforced the idea that Jews needed to have assets not tied to the land. This is a commentary on Jews, of course, but it may also be a commentary on agriculture, a profession many peoples stay in for a long time, but when they do leave it generally leave for good.

--Zathras

(To reply, click here)


I have heard the religion/education argument before as a reason why Jews slip on the white collar more than they do the blue one, but this has often made little sense to me, in medieval days or today. Can anyone seriously suggest that the majority, or even a substantial minority, of Jews in Medieval Europe could actually read and write? It may (or may not) have been true that a higher percentage of Jews were literate, but still the great majority would have been illiterate. This remained true up until the nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries….The hypo falters further when viewed after the sixteenth century, when the growth of Protestantism brought to Christianity the same priority to reading the original scriptures, and the beginning of a dramatic growth in literacy. And of course in this modern world, it seems to hold even less foundation. It would be hard to argue that Jews in America have a substantially greater literacy rate than the Christian majority. True, Jews do tend to go on to higher education more often than Christians, but this seems to be a symptom of a desire for higher education, not a rationale for it. The answer, one suspects, lies elsewhere.

--Larry2

(To reply, click here)


This article is interesting, and I'm sure there's a lot of background info that wasn't fit to print. But I have 2 problems with it:
1 - How was an ability to read Hebrew helpful in any urban profession? Was Hebrew the language of business? Did literacy in Hebrew translate naturally to - or arrive concurrently with - literacy in dominant languages of commerce?
2 - Is it true that Christians and Muslims weren't similarly obligated to read the Bible and Koran? I keep reading about Muslims who can recite the entire Koran word for word. Islam is the most medieval monotheistic religion, so I have to assume that Muslims have been memorizing the entire Koran for centuries. And it was Muslims, not Jews, who were culturally and economically dominant for centuries on end, so presumably those literacy skills were more easily applied to business than Hebrew literacy skills.

--SlipperyPete

(To reply, click here)

(6/10)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
The Audacity of Vanity
Krauthammer | How does Obama love himself? Let us count the ways.