“ Because Jews were required by doctrine to read the Torah four times a week, Jews tended to learn and read at a much higher rate than other ethnic groups in the centuries just after Christ. As a consequence they all but abandoned farming much earlier than the rest of humanity began to drift away from agriculture – they began the process around AD 200, and by AD 700 about 90 percent of the Jews had moved into other trades, long before the medieval laws that forbade Jewish farming. The Berkeley professor argued that the rabbinical culture that developed in the Roman Empire involved a version of manhood at odds with the dominant Roman one. The Roman gender constructs associated masculinity with aggression and femininity with reception, whereas one rabbinical masculine ideal was a man who read the Talmud and understood it, declining contests of strength, declining nonintellectual professions.
— from American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent (via sharingtime)
