shul) where men could join in the collective learning of the religious books; here one could find the books, the study companions, and the teachers needed. In time, the words bet midrash or shul became synonymous with synagogue, bet knesset. The great importance attached to reading and learning the sacred texts made it a religious duty to teach them to the young, and education has been a central institution in each Jewish community. Young boys attended a bet sefer (house of the book), later called heder (room), and older boys as well as young adults attended an institute of higher learning, or a yeshivah (literally, a sitting). The one who excelled in learning, the talmidhaham (scholar), enjoyed the greatest prestige within his community. Indeed, the ideal Jew throughout the ages has been the talmudic scholar.
The texts taught at all these schools were difficult; they were written in either Hebrew or Aramaic, ancient languages not spoken in daily life, and their content was often abstract, enigmatic, and argumentative. Yet Jewish men learned and memorized these texts from early childhood and trained themselves in the arduous argumentations relating to them. The bet midrash, the heder, and the yeshivah were noisy places. Learning took place through chanting, recitation, movements of the body, and lively disputations. But this obsession with intensive analysis and abstract argumentation also helped Jews to excel in abstract thinking and nonconformist theory when they later turned their attention to secular subjects.
The Japanese too have been a people of the book. Although literacy came quite late to Japan, about the middle of the first millennium C.E., and the oldest extant books written in Japan, the Kojiki and Nihongi, date from the eighth century, once the Japanese acquired reading and writing skills, they practiced them avidly. Chinese culture entered Japan in the form of books written in a difficult foreign language and a complex script. But the Japanese exhibited an enormous interest in reading, understanding, and mastering these difficult texts and within a few centuries learned and adopted the Chinese script, absorbed a large number of Chinese words into the Japanese language, and incorporated the great religious and philosophical systems of Buddhism and Confucianism into their own thoughts and beliefs.
Since the eighth century, the Japanese upper classes have been acquiring, studying, reading, writing, and compiling books of enormous variety: histories, novels, poetry anthologies, diaries, political records, geographical observations, administrative reports, holy sutras, illustrated stories, local gazetteers, manuals, almanacs, books on medicine and divination, and various commentaries. The development in Japan of the two kana syllabic scripts in the ninth and tenth centuries enabled the transcription of Japanese words in combination with or entirely without Chinese ideographs. Woodblock printing, a craft imported from China and first used to produce the Buddhist sutras that were in great demand, became from the seventeenth century the means of mass-producing books for a steadily growing reading public.
Japan also adopted the technology of papermaking from China, and improved upon it. Shortly thereafter, Japanese paper reached a comparatively high degree of quality and came to be used for a wide variety of purposes, from sliding doors to folding fans. In Shinto, paper acquired a religious significance: A sacred wand with strips of white paper (gohei) is used in various Shinto ceremonies, especially purification rituals, and slips of paper with auspicious oracles (mikuji) are hung on tree branches around Shinto shrines.
The ability to read difficult Chinese texts and to express oneself in writing in both Chinese and Japanese became the distinguishing mark of the upper classes. In the eighth century an institute of higher learning, or university (daigaku), was established in the capital, and a special government bureau (Zushoryo) was set up to collect, preserve, and copy books. The shrines of the ninth-century official, scholar, and poet Sugawara no Michizane, who was deified after his death as the Shinto god of literature, scholarship, and calligraphy (Tenmangu), are still among the most popular in Japan.
When warriors took over the reins of power from the nobles in the twelfth century C.E., members of the military elite joined the literate classes as readers and writers. In the following centuries, the war epics Heike monogatari and Taiheiki were compiled and copied. Tokugawa Ieyasu, who unified the country in the early seventeenth century, established a large library at his castle in Edo and, following his example, all the great daimyo acquired magnificent libraries and book collections. In the Tokugawa period literacy spread to all samurai, as well as to many town dwellers and farmers. Publishing became an established and profitable business and gifted writers like Ihara Saikaku were very popular.
Although in Japan learning did not become a religious duty as it did for Jews, its prestige was very high. In his rules of conduct for the samurai (Buke shohatto) of 1615, Tokugawa Ieyasu held the study of literature (bun) and the pursuit of military arts (bu) to be the most important duty of the samurai, with bun preceding bu. Every Tokugawa shogun and most of the daimyo kept a Confucian advisor (jusha) to supervise classical education and to handle official correspondence and publications. In the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), schools of various kinds flourished in Japan. Almost all male children of samurai attended government-run schools where they learned the Chinese classics, and about half of the sons of commoners attended temple-schools (tera-koya), where they learned to read and write. There were also many private academies where one could acquire a knowledge in various fields from ancient scriptures to Dutch studies, as Western learning was then referred to. Education could not break class barriers, but it was considered the best way to self-improvement.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jews and the Japanese were probably the two most literate peoples in the world. Although the texts in which they were versed had little relevance to the political and social needs of the day, the long-established practice of the Jews and the Japanese of avidly acquiring knowledge through the medium of printed texts prepared them well for the task of absorbing the civilization of the advanced West.
6
Seclusion and Explosion
THE MASSIVE absorption of Western civilization by both Jews and Japanese in the last century and a half was preceded by a long period of seclusion during which both of these peoples lived in their respective cocoons. In medieval Europe Jews tended to dwell in separate neighborhoods or adjacent streets, in order to maintain their communal life, but it was only in the sixteenth century that they started to be legally restricted to particular sections of town. These areas, designated as their exclusive living quarters, were the ghettos. The first ghetto was established in 1516 in Venice, where it acquired its name (from the Italian for "foundry," because a cannon foundry was located there). Other ghettos then appeared in the rest of Italy, southern France, and parts of Germany. In most Moslem countries Jews were similarly segregated, in quarters such as the mellah in Morocco, established in the fifteenth century.
The expulsion of Jews from most western European countries in the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era brought about their emigration to Poland and to the Ottoman Empire. From this emigration developed the division of the Jewish people into the Ashkenazi (German) branch, which migrated to Eastern Europe and continued to speak a mixture of Hebrew and medieval High German (Yiddish), and the Sephardi (Spanish) branch, which remained in the Mediterranean basin and continued to speak a medieval Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). The rulers of both Poland and the Ottoman Empire at that time desired to attract Jewish capital and skills in order to develop the poor economies of their realms. Consequently, Poland came to hold the largest Jewish population in the world. There, Jews sometimes constituted the majority of the urban population, and there the Jewish shtetl (little town) originated as a place where Jews could congregate and maintain their cultural autonomy. The division of Poland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave Russia, where previously no Jews had been allowed to reside, the largest Jewish population of any country. To prevent them from settling in Russia proper, the Jews were restricted to the Pale, i.e., the western borderlands stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. By the late nineteenth century, out of a world Jewish population of about ten million, more than five million lived in the crowded Russian
