A Kingdom You Could Carry

Third in the series "The Two Thousand Year Argument," on what the Jewish people did with exile. Earlier installments are here: Part 1 | Part 2

Here is a puzzle worth thinking about. For two thousand years, Jewish communities have been scattered from Baghdad to Cairo to Toledo to Krakow to Buenos Aires, under Persian rulers and Muslim caliphs and Christian kings and modern republics, speaking different languages, separated for most of that time by months of travel.

And they have kept the same law.

Not roughly the same law. The same law, in remarkable detail, so that a Jew from Cologne could travel to Cairo in the year 1200 and find the Sabbath kept the same way, the food prepared according to the same rules, the courts applying the same standards of evidence, the marriage documents written in the same formula. Do the same thing today between Antwerp and Melbourne and you will find the same thing.

Modern political thinking has trouble with this, because modern political thinking assumes that law requires a state to back it up. The Jewish experience says otherwise, and how it worked, and still works, is the subject of this article.

The town that ran itself

Start in the medieval world, where the arrangement is easiest to see. A Jewish community of any size, anywhere from Spain to Poland, organized itself around a set of institutions that would have been recognizable in every other Jewish community on earth.

There was a court, staffed by scholars, which handled disputes between Jews: contracts, damages, inheritance, marriage and divorce. There was a fund for the poor, and in most places several of them, distinguishing between the family that needed a weekly food allowance and the traveler who needed a night's lodging. There was a fund for redeeming captives, which mattered a great deal in a world of piracy and arbitrary imprisonment, and which the law treated as the most urgent charitable obligation of all. There was a volunteer burial society. And there was a school.

That last one deserves emphasis, because it was unusual to the point of being strange. Jewish law requires that every boy be taught, and communities were obligated to provide teachers whether or not parents could pay. The result, in an era when reading was a specialist skill confined largely to clergy and nobility, was a scattered minority population with widespread literacy. Visitors noticed.

None of these institutions were improvised for exile conditions. Courts, charity, education, and the redemption of captives are obligations of the Torah itself, and the communities were performing them, in Cairo or in Krakow, exactly as the law had always specified.

What held it together

In those centuries, Jewish communities also had a measure of legal autonomy. Kings and caliphs generally found it convenient to let a minority govern its own internal affairs, so Jewish courts had real jurisdiction, communities could tax their members, and a community could formally exclude someone from its life as a last resort.

It would be easy to conclude that this is the explanation. The law was kept because the community had power to enforce it, and that is the end of the mystery.

Then came the modern era, and the explanation was tested.

The test

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the states of Europe dismantled Jewish communal autonomy. Emancipation offered Jews citizenship as individuals, and took away the community's standing as a legal body. Jewish courts lost their jurisdiction. Communities lost the power to tax. The old sanctions became words without weight. Every external structure that supposedly held the system together was removed, in country after country, within a few generations.

By the logic of enforcement, Jewish law should have dissolved at that point.

It did not. Two centuries later, in countries that would enforce none of it, the same law is kept in detail by communities on six continents. Rabbinical courts sit in London and Lakewood and Jerusalem and hear cases, and the parties come voluntarily, because they still believe a Jewish court applying the Torah is doing God's work. The charity funds not only survived but multiplied: free loan societies, funds that deliver Sabbath food to families who cannot afford it, organizations that furnish a poor bride's wedding, volunteer ambulance corps. Burial societies still wash and prepare the dead, still staffed by volunteers, still unpaid. The schools grew from a communal obligation into a network that educates hundreds of thousands of children, funded by parents and donors with no government compelling any of it.

The scaffolding came down, and the building stayed up. That is the real answer to why anyone listened. Not the courts' power, which is gone, and not the threat of exclusion, which is a memory. People kept the law because they believed it was God's, and that belief did not require a state, which is precisely why removing the state changed nothing.

The network

There is one more institution to describe, the most impressive of all, and it is the one almost no outsider has heard of.

When a difficult question arose that the local scholars could not resolve, they wrote to a greater authority elsewhere. The letter traveled with merchants, on caravans and ships, sometimes for a year or more; the answer traveled the same road home. Both were copied, and the copies circulated and were collected and studied by other scholars facing similar questions. The heads of the Babylonian academies answered questions from North Africa and Spain. From Cairo, Maimonides answered questions from Yemen and from southern France. Tens of thousands of these exchanges survive, and they are among the finest historical sources in existence for daily life in the medieval world, because the questions concern real problems: a partnership gone wrong, a widow's claim, a shipment lost at sea, a question about the kosher laws.

That network is how a scattered people maintained one legal system across the known world. Not by command, since nobody could command anything, but by scholars asking more knowledgeable scholars, and everyone treating the answers as binding because everyone accepted the same source of authority.

And the network never shut down. It runs today at a volume the medieval scholars could not have imagined, by telephone and email, through published volumes of rulings that fill libraries, and through authorities in Jerusalem and New York and London who answer questions arriving from everywhere. The road is faster. The traffic on it is the same.

The book on the shelf

One artifact captures the whole arrangement, and it sits in nearly every observant Jewish home today.

In the sixteenth century, a scholar in Tzfat, in the Holy Land, compiled a comprehensive code of Jewish law, organizing the received tradition into a single work of astonishing clarity. It reflected the practice of the Sephardic world he came from. Shortly afterward, a scholar in Krakow wrote a set of glosses recording where Ashkenazic practice differed, and the two were printed together.

Consider what that means. A code compiled in the Middle East, annotated in Poland, printed and shipped across Europe and the Ottoman world, accepted as authoritative by communities that had no shared government, no shared language, and no way to enforce anything on each other. They accepted it because they recognized in it the law they had all received, from the same source, and had been keeping all along.

No parliament passed it. No army stood behind it. Nearly five centuries later it is still the working reference for Jewish practice everywhere on earth, consulted this morning in a hundred countries by people who could ignore it with no consequence any government would notice.

What the exile was for

Step back and take in the shape of it. A people removed from its land, spread across continents, holding no power anywhere, built and ran a civilization with courts, welfare, universal schooling, international legal correspondence, and a unified body of law. It sustained that for longer than most nations have existed, and when every external support was stripped away, it kept going on belief alone.

Modern nationalism looks at a people with no state and sees a problem awaiting a solution. The Jews of those centuries did not experience themselves as a problem, and their descendants who still live this way do not either. They had an assignment, and the assignment came with detailed instructions, and they carried it out in whatever country they found themselves. They are still carrying it out.