New York Magazine COVER Story:
Excerpts:
Numeracy, literacy, critical reasoning: For millennia, these have been the currency of Jewish culture, the stuff of Talmudic study, immigrant success, and Borscht Belt punch lines. Two Jews, three opinions . . . Keep practicing, you'll thank me later . . . Q: When does a Jewish fetus become a human? A: When it graduates from medical school. Of course, there's another side to this shining coin. Jewish cleverness has also been an enduring feature of anti-Semitic paranoia.
So there it was: a demand and a new supplier. Because of the Christian prohibition against usury, Jews found themselves a financially indispensable place in their new home, extending loans to peasants, tradesmen, knights, courtiers, even the occasional monastery. The records from these days are scarce. But where they exist, they are often startling. In 1270, for example, 80 percent of the 228 adult Jewish males in Perpignan, France, made their living lending money to their Gentile neighbors, according to Marcus Arkin's Aspects of Jewish Economic History. One of the most prolific was a rabbi. Two others were identified, in the notarial records, as "poets."
Success at money-lending required a different set of skills than farming or any of the traditional trades. Some, surely, were social: cultivating connections, winning over trust (or maybe bullying your way there, Shylock's awful pound of flesh). It probably required some aggression, because the field was competitive, with Jews suffering so few professional options. But it also required cognitive skills, or something my generation would call numeracy—a fluency in mathematics, a dexterity with numbers—and my grandmother's generation would call "a head for figures." If you were Jewish in Perpignan in 1270, and you didn't have a head for figures, you didn't stand much of a chance.
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