What if most of what we thought we know about the history of the Jewish people between the destruction of the Second Temple and the Spanish Expulsion is wrong? This intriguing premise informs The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, an ambitious new book by economists Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein.
Seventy-five years after historian Salo Baron first warned against reducing the Jewish past to “a history of suffering and scholarship,” most of us continue to view medieval Jewish history in this vein. “Surely, it is time to break with the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe, and to adopt a view more in accord with historic truth,” Baron implored at the end of his 1928 Menorah Journal article “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?”
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