Sachar vs. Katz on Jewish life in Europe

According to Jacob Katz, Professor Emeritus of Social History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem he believes that there are many differences between traditional and modern Jews which can cause many different clashes in different spheres of activity. He discusses the term “traditional society” and they base their existence and aspirations on the values and on the knowledge yet to be discovered and developed. They assume that all the practical and theoretical knowledge that they require has been inherited by them from their forefathers and that it is their duty to act in accordance with the ancient customs. Katz brings up an interesting point that it is difficult for modern man to attribute value to anything just by virtue of its being inherited from the past. The fact that our forefathers acted in a certain way does not provide modern man with the confidence that this is indeed the correct manner. Man in modern society feels compelled to justify his behavior on another level altogether, on a rational, scientific base, that does not rest on the acceptance of the values of the past. Katz discusses different customs such as, dress, language and manners which are all in accordance with traditions. There are two different opinions on the validity of tradition. On the one hand, there is traditionalism based on the direct acceptance of the tradition conveyed through social channels. Then there are the Jewish cultures that have their own local traditions, which were conveyed by generations by unmediated personal contact, rather than through the impersonal and formal literature. The child gets a sense of the tradition not by studying it but by being brought up within traditional society. Katz talks about the social interactions and gatherings in society and he brings up that young men in modern society see no harm in the fact that a man, at the end of his working day, goes out and looks for relaxation in an activity for which there is no explicit religious or moral justification. This is an example of the transition occurring from traditional to modern conditions. To sum Katz’s article a society is classified as traditional, not because it has no future or present. Society can only continue to exist by virtue of the past that molds its present, and each generation adds its particular contribution to the heritage of the past. Traditional society is thus compelled to adjust to changes that occur in its midst and all of this raises problems and inevitable clashes between to two worlds.

In Sachar’s article he discusses how Jews were treated in the 16^th - 19^th centuries. He talks about how Europeans were determined to exploit this Jewish talent for producing liquid wealth, substantial numbers of rulers were willing intermittently to protect their Jews as dependable sources of taxes and loans. Thus, Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II, although a militant early-seventeenth century defender of the Counter-Reformation, was unwilling to dispense with Jewish funds for his military campaigns. Neither would Protestant kings and dukes. It was strictly as a quid pro quo for their money, therefore, that Jewish communities were allowed to revive in a succession of Protestant and Catholic dominions. By the mid-1700s, the Jewish demography in Central and Western Europe may have approached 300,000 - 400,000. For being able to return, the Jews paid a price that transcended loans and taxes. Responding to the demands of clergy and of local guild members, state and local governments limited Jews to vocations disdained by gentiles. For this reason, perhaps as many as three-fourths of the Jews in Central and Western Europe were limited to the precarious occupations of retail peddling, hawking, and street-banking, that is, money lending. Some Jews managed to earn enough to establish small shops but most did not. In their struggle for a livelihood, they generated a sizable underclass of beggars, fencers, pimps, even robbers, thereby creating a self-fulfilling gentile scenario of Jews, one that would be endlessly invoked by Jew-haters throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, there remained constraints on Jewish life that eventually became insupportable. One of these was the ghetto. These walled slum-shanty neighborhoods effectively barred Jews from all but the narrowest, commercial, daytime interaction with the gentile citizens. Although, the first Spanish and Italian ghettos of the late medieval era actually had been requested by the Jews themselves as private, self-governing “territories”. In this new and open terrain, Jews preserved and developed their own religious and cultural traditions even more freely than in the German-speaking world. Jewish settlement was densest in eastern and southern Poland, especially in the Ukrainian and Belorussian areas that had been annexed in the sixteenth century.

After reading both of these articles Katz doesn’t discuss the way Jews are treated as much as Sachar. But Sachar discusses how Jews were exiled and basically pushed around Europe for 3 or 4 centuries until they came to eastern and southern Poland where they were able to start their own tradition. Unlike Katz who discussed the values and where our traditions come from as Jews whether we grow up with them or are they just engrained in us from our forefathers.