Download Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein. The Chosen Few: How

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only in his fortitude over personal losses in the fire (details of which are fascinating) (p. 259). Mattern has little interest in my interests, the quality of Galen’s pharmacology or the continuing value of his medicine (I
believe his preventive medicine would improve modern
health care), but why should she? She places him beautifully and convincingly in his own world, concluding
that he was arrogant and possibly misogynistic, but also
passionate and a good doctor (p. 289).
JOHN WILKINS
University of Exeter
MARISTELLA BOTTICINI and ZVI ECKSTEIN. The Chosen
Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492.
(The Princeton Economic History of the Western
World.) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
2012. Pp. xvii, 323. $39.50.
The exhaustive research of S. D. Goitein, which eventuated in his remarkable five-volume A Mediterranean
Society (1967–1993), has proven conclusively that during the first half of the Middle Ages Jews in the sphere
of Islam, who constituted the overwhelming majority of
worldwide Jewry, were thoroughly diversified in their
economic pursuits, with the sole exception of involvement in agriculture. As the vitalization of northern Europe began during the late tenth and eleventh centuries, Jews made their way into this rapidly developing
region. There they encountered considerable resistance, which resulted in constriction of their economic
outlets. As a result, northern European Jews became
heavily concentrated in business and banking, and this
early concentration continued to a significant extent in
European Jewish life down into modernity, thus creating the misleading imagery of Jews as exclusively business people over the ages.
For the Jews of the medieval and modern Christian
West, the concentration in business has raised an intriguing question. Was it the result—at least in part—of
the emphasis on literacy in Jewish religious tradition?
Since the centerpiece of Jewish liturgy involves the regular public reading of the Bible, which listeners were
expected to follow closely, and since Jewish oral law is
supposed to be studied as well, literacy was an important value in medieval and modern Jewish religious life.
Researchers have recently suggested that this religious
valorization of literacy may have played a role in Jewish
business success during the medieval and modern centuries in addition to fitting Jews for achievement in
modern higher education.
At first blush, Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein
seem to contribute to this burgeoning sense of the importance of literacy in Judaism and Jewish life. Unfortunately, their book pushes the insight much too far,
and in the process fashions a series of significant distortions. At the outset, the authors indicate that they
intend to answer several pertinent questions about Jewish history. These questions begin with the lack of Jewish farming, proceed to why the Jews became “an urban
population of traders, entrepreneurs, bankers, finan-
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229
ciers, lawyers, physicians, and scholars,” and then move
on to population issues (p. 1). The authors hypothesize
answers that might—they believe—be given by an Israeli Jew, a European, and an economist. Interestingly
and problematically, they do not adduce conclusions
advanced by historians who have investigated these issues. More importantly, they present the questions as
directly linked to one another and proceed to propose
a single development in the Jewish past that explains all
these facets of Jewish experience. This is the first major
flaw in the book, since there is no reason to assume one
unified explanation for what was in fact a protracted
and complex set of historical developments. The evolution that eventuated in Jewish retreat from agriculture and heavy Jewish involvement in business and
banking took place over the course of many centuries
and in multiple venues. It cannot be clarified by one
simple explanation.
After noting the answers to their questions as provided by the hypothetical observers, the authors add
their own response. In their view, “these distinctive
characteristics of the Jewish people were the outcome
of a profound transformation of the Jewish religion after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.” (p.
2). This transformation purportedly “shifted the religious leadership within the Jewish community and
transformed Judaism from a cult based on ritual sacrifices in the temple to a religion whose main norm required every Jewish man to read and to study the Torah
in Hebrew and to send his sons from the age of six or
seven to primary school or to synagogue to learn to do
so” (p. 2). According to Botticini and Eckstein, the
transition took place from the third to the sixth centuries and profoundly affected Jewish life thereafter.
This constitutes the book’s second major flaw. To my
knowledge, there is no authority on late antique Judaism who would subscribe to the authors’ portrayal of the
evolution of Judaism during that period. Contemporary
students of Jewish life in late antiquity do not read rabbinic sources as accurate reflections of reality. There is
deep suspicion of the sources that Botticini and Eckstein treat with utmost confidence. This scholarly restraint in the reading of rabbinic sources from late antiquity has led to uncertainty as to the protracted
process whereby the rabbis came to exercise leadership
within the Jewish world. That rabbis had the authority
to erect the kind of perfected schooling system described in this book is—given the current state of research—unthinkable. It is in fact by no means clear
when such a system might have first been operative
among Jews. Alongside their incorrect assessment of
rabbinic sources, Botticini and Eckstein once again erroneously reduce a lengthy and complicated process to
a single development.
Judaism’s evolving emphasis on literacy surely did
play a role in Jewish business and educational successes
over the ages. A study that charts the evolution of this
religiously valorized literacy and its impact is a desid-
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230
Reviews of Books
eratum. I hope that the insufficiencies of The Chosen
Few stimulate such an undertaking.
ROBERT CHAZAN
New York University
JANNEKE RAAIJMAKERS. The Making of the Monastic
Community of Fulda, c. 744 –c. 900. (Cambridge Studies
in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series.) New
York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. xix, 357.
$99.00.
In The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda,
Janneke Raaijmakers offers her readers a multidimensional portrait of an influential monastery in the early
medieval era: the Abbey of Fulda, situated in the eastern zone of Carolingian power in what is today Hesse
in Germany. Raaijmakers zooms in on this impressive
abbey using archaeology, architecture, wall paintings,
book inventories, charters, vitae of abbots, epistles, monastic commentaries, miracle tales, Easter tables, relics,
poetry, inscriptions, monk lists, annales necrologici, and
historical chronicles. The book is structured around the
tenure of various abbots, from the “founder” Sturmi (d.
779) through the rulers of the late ninth-century community, Hatto, Thioto, and Sigihard. The abbacy of
Carolingian luminary Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) receives two full chapters, marking his rule as essential
both in the Carolingian era and in this book. The ordering of each chapter, however, goes beyond a simple
chronological listing of abbot after abbot: certain chapters highlight the sources under investigation, including
architectural diagrams, necrologies, or inventories of
relics, while others focus on historiographical issues,
such as the alleged primacy of the Rule of St. Benedict,
the relationship between court and cloister, and the
supposed deterioration of Fulda at the end of the Carolingian age.
Raaijmakers centers her investigation of Fulda on
the collective memory of its monks, a historical consciousness evolving over the course of two centuries and
inscribing itself onto textual, liturgical, and material
media. Specifically, Raaijmakers argues that the monks
of Fulda created a number of strategies for representing themselves to the world outside of the cloister and
to the sometimes contentious community within. In
fact, this theme of “inside/outside” is a controlling one
in the book, inviting audiences to peer into the ritual
core of the abbey from a number of perspectives: from
the monastery’s far-flung estates to the royal court,
from its satellite houses to the dwellings of lay donors,
from its strategic positioning of the relics of martyrs
amid the sacred terrain in and around Fulda to the
paths traversed by Roman relic dealers who moved
back and forth across the Alps on a seasonal basis distributing their wares. The eight chapters provide an institutional history of a vigorous early medieval monastery, offering insight into the actual practices of abbey
management. Fulda boasts one of the largest collections of charters from the early medieval era, some
2,000 documents in total covering fifteen regions of the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
empire. These charters (along with other sources) open
a window into the economic realities facing a Carolingian monastery like Fulda. Raaijmakers reminds her
readers that even a powerful and wealthy abbey could
experience periods of economic depression: gifts to the
abbey could decline during political upheavals both inside and outside of the cloister, and abbots, even the
illustrious Hrabanus Maurus, could find themselves in
situations where they could not afford to light lamps
with oil, having to resort instead to pig fat.
The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda is
more than an institutional or economic history of one
abbey, however. Raaijmakers pursues her theme of
Fulda’s self-representation down different paths of inquiry. Particularly fascinating is the way in which the
“motherhouse” interacted with its numerous satellite
cells (cellae) scattered across the region and beyond,
creating a system in which the cellae could be more
open to the laity, providing pastoral care and proximity
to relics for women and men alike without compromising the ritual purity of the main cloister. Raaijmakers
synthesizes classic and more recent work on the abbey’s
famous and controversial building projects, especially
the monumental program of Abbot Ratger (r. 802–
817), which sparked the best-documented monastic
strike in Carolingian history. Yet the abbey’s collective
memory could recall—and then forget—points of controversy such as the tumultuous tenure of Ratger. Far
from being disgraced, the former abbot died in the cella
on the Frauenberg, a short walk from the motherhouse,
and his body was buried in abbatial style only to be discovered incorruptus in 1525 by the prior of another
Fulda cell, the Petersberg.
In addition to showing how community identity works
both inside and outside the cloister, the book’s eight
chapters stress the fluidity of ritual practices at major
monasteries like Fulda, and how textbook narratives
about the hegemony of the Benedictine Rule or the primacy of Roman liturgical styles in the Carolingian Empire simply break down upon a careful consideration of
the evidence. Raaijmakers demonstrates how the program of royal reform (correctio) played out on the
ground level in the eastern half of the empire. She also
uses Fulda as an example of how Christianization of the
countryside worked less through the baptism of pagans
and more through the “pastoralisation of landed property” (p. 225). Her work builds on existing scholarship
on history and memory in the Carolingian era, but adds
something new: the role of material culture, especially
reliquaries and sacred spaces, in the production of monastic memory. The theory of collective memory at
Fulda, however, could have been pressed more
throughout the eight chapters and particularly in the
conclusion.
The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda represents a significant contribution both to Carolingian
history and to the broader history of Christian monasticism, a field which typically overlooks this complex yet
crucial period. Moreover, this monograph brings together for the first time the massive amount of Euro-
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