The ‘wisdom of crowds’
THE JEWISH DIASPORA OWES ITS IMPROBABLE SURVIVAL TO A CODE DATING BACK NINE CENTURIES
How have the Jewish people survived centuries of exile and dispersion? In a new book, businessman and activist Tal Keinan suggests the conditions of Diaspora itself, combined with a deep respect for debate, have allowed the Jews to harness what behavioural scientists call the “wisdom of crowds.” In this excerpt from God Is in the Crowd, Keinan recalls a visit to Zippori — the ancient city where the Jews’ culture of questioning first emerged.
Morning had already clanked to life when we walked into town. Tractors bouncing down the gravel main street kicked up dust that churned in the day’s first hot breeze, blending with the scents of Galilean summer rosemary, cypress and lavender, a fusion that has since animated Israel in my mind. I can recall it easily, even from the distance of the United States. As we walked past Tsipori’s northern greenhouses, contemporary and banal, the town gave way, suddenly and unceremoniously, to the ancient plateau itself, its magnificent Roman-era cardo stretching before us, the central boulevard of Zippori.
Nineteen-hundred years before our walk up the cardo on that hot summer morning, the Roman imperial province of Galilee was convulsed in violence, in the final throes of Jewish dominion in the land of Israel. Three successive revolts against the Roman Empire marked milestones on the road from sovereignty to Diaspora. In the first, the Great Revolt of the year 70, the Second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed and, with it, the capital’s status as the physical centre of Jewish worship. Pinhas ben Samuel, 83rd and last in the line of Jewish High Priests, was killed during the sacking of the temple. The institution of Jewish high priesthood ended with his death, and the structure of Jewish governance was demolished. The outlook for the Jewish people was bleak.
Jews who had survived the Great Revolt were now scattered across Judea and Galilee. Disparate synagogues replaced the Great Temple as hubs of Jewish congregation. Local rabbis, in hundreds of small communities, replaced the High Priest. Jewish theology and law until that time had been transmitted to successive generations through the Tanakh, the Old Testament, and through the Oral Law, the indispensable addendum to the Tanakh, handed down at Sinai. Oral Law was the medium through which written law was translated into practice. In the first generations of Judean dispersion, Oral Law, no longer under the singular custody of a high priest, began to evolve in multiple tracks and developed inconsistencies. Independent rabbis
handed down individual interpretations, in often isolated synagogues and schools.
The Second Jewish Revolt (115-117CE) and the Bar Kochba (Third) Revolt (132135CE) ultimately failed. Most of the remaining Rabbis of Judea were killed, enslaved or exiled. The yeshivot were destroyed. Even the compromised Oral Law’s continuity was now in jeopardy. By the year 135, only a few thousand Jews remained in Galilee. Yehuda Hanassi was among these.
As an adult, Rabbi Yehuda lived in Zippori. He, and the city, had not participated in the revolt. This fact, together with his close relationships with the Roman leadership, allowed Rabbi Yehuda to live and prosper as a leader of the surviving Jewish community. Yehuda Hanassi’s defining act of Jewish leadership was the compilation of the Oral Law into a singular written work, which would enable it to survive dispersion. He may have envisioned the boundaries of dispersion ending in Babylon in the East and Rome in the West. He may have envisioned dispersion as a fleeting episode in Jewish history. He may have assumed that sovereignty could be re-established within a generation or two. Of course, his “Mishna” would end up serving as a common code for the next 19 centuries, from Siberia to Mumbai, to Casablanca to San Francisco to Buenos Aires.
Yehuda Hanassi’s prominence in the city of Zippori, and throughout Judea and Galilee, ensured that his Mishna would be widely embraced among the remaining rabbis, and among Jews living beyond the boundaries of rabbinic authority. It sparked a new mode of engagement. Its internal contradictions and omissions, perhaps intentional, invited dissent, debate, and amendment. Debate would often take place in forums as small as two interlocutors, neither of them a rabbi, in a study format which became known as hevruta.
The Mishna, and the generations of debate, commentary, and amendment that would come to surround it, were arranged around specific questions of Jewish law, broken into sections, or orders: Zeraim (seeds) mainly deals with agriculture, property, and the economic sustenance of community; Moed (festival) deals with Jewish ritual and its observance; Nashim (women) deals with Jewish family life, including marriage and divorce; Nezikin (damages) deals with civil agreements, their enforcement and their abrogation; Kodashim (holy things) deals with the Jewish community’s relationship with God, including sacrifice, blasphemy, and excommunication; and Toharot (purifications) deals with both physical and spiritual hygiene, or purity.
Jews throughout the vast, disconnected Diaspora would be debating the same questions, and refining their answers for millennia. In order to prepare for this engagement, Jewish boys would, of course, be taught to read. They would be taught to debate. They would be encouraged to question. In one generation, at Zippori, Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi transformed Jewish identity. It would no longer be defined in territorial terms. It would not depend on any individual’s leadership. It would be imprinted in a code, distributed among all of its adherents. I was not the first to have searched in vain for some sort of identity in the ancient stones. Our identity has really resided in Rabbi Yehuda’s code. Its medium is not physical. It runs in the nation itself, and it has followed us everywhere. This code has a name.
Originally coined as “Vox Populi,” by Francis Galton in a 1907 issue of Nature, the Wisdom of Crowds has been applied successfully to many real-world problems, like predicting election results, professional sports scores, and the commercial success of Hollywood movie releases. It has been used to make complex decisions in large organizations. In his 2004 dissertation on Galton’s insight, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, The New Yorker science writer James Surowiecki asserts three prerequisites to achieving wisdom in crowds: intellectual diversity, independence of contribution, and a mechanism for aggregation and reconciliation. Of course, for the crowd to even function as an intelligent organism, it must be trying to answer a common question, or set of questions.
When considering the unlikely story of Jewish survival in the Diaspora, it is difficult to ignore the neatness of the theory that Crowd Wisdom served as Diaspora Jewry’s method of governance. This was the code. The questions that form the framework of Jewish governance were first drafted intentionally, by Yehuda Hanassi, at Zippori. Dispersion created the condition of independence. Communities in the Russian Pale, for example, were cut off from the ghettos of Western Europe, or the coastal cities of North Africa, or the colonies of the New World. Each interpreted its Talmud independently. Each amended its interpretations independently.
Jewish communities in the Diaspora were culturally diverse, each influenced by its particular surroundings. Bankers in the Venetian ghetto were influenced by their interactions with the Venetian business community, and by the language of those interactions, making their experience distinct from that of Ottoman Jews, for example, or from that of the Jewish communities of Yemen or India. Together, these separated communities formed a mosaic of diversity.
Periodic migrations and expulsions over the centuries forced the aggregation and reconciliation of ideas that had diverged in isolation. Jewish communities from Castilla, Aragon, and Granada, for example, each with its separately evolved traditions, were expelled from their lands in 1492. They converged in Amsterdam, in Istanbul, or in the outposts of the Americas in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Together with the Jews of Portugal, expelled soon after, they were forced to reconcile traditions in their newlymerged communities. If a Jewish community in Amsterdam was to accommodate the refugees of these once-distinct communities, it would have to reconcile their divergent traditions. Five hundred years later, East European Jews of divergent traditions converged on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, beginning a reconciliation among themselves. Within two generations, these communities almost completely merged with the established German Jewish community of New York, which, itself, was still reconciling its traditions with the city’s original Sephardic community.
If the model of Jewish history as an exercise in the Wisdom of Crowds had occurred to me as a teenager admiring the mosaic floors of Zippori, it was only as a vague intuition. I had never heard of Crowd Wisdom. But looking out over the yellow hills of Galilee, from Rabbi Yehuda’s vantage point, I could imagine the moment those hills would become foreign to us for 18 centuries. Even as a teenager, I was overwhelmed by the improbability of surviving exile and dispersion for so long. It could not be arbitrary. The Jewish population was too small. It had never been centrally led. There was no Pope. Too many generations had passed, there had been too many opportunities to evolve separately, to assimilate, or to just die out. We had evolved dramatically, but we had evolved together. Somehow, we still had a coherent identity after 1,800 years. There had to have been a code. As we had evolved in exile, it could not have been in the stones. It was written, instead, in the dispersed nation’s soul.
Excerpted from God is in the Crowd by Tal Keinan. Copyright © 2018 Tal Keinan. Published by Signal/ McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.