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I've heard that in the original days of Israel, just after the Arab war, the ultra-orthodox who spent all day just studying the Talmud were an extreme rarity because they almost all died in the Holocaust. So Israel gave them funding as a sort of living museum piece/out of pity for an almost lost culture. But then they kept growing since they had such a sweet deal, and what was reasonable when they were a few hundred people was not reasonable when they are a few hundred thousand.
I’m curios what did Hasidic Jews used to do? Well fare is a pretty new invention, where they just like Amish who did subsistence farming?
Yes, like @hydroacetylene said, when the yeshivot were in Eastern Europe back in the day a family might send only their most intellectually gifted son (out of many) to them. Adult study in a full time kollel (for married men) was even more rare, it’s largely an invention of the last 75 years. Previously yeshiva students would graduate, become rabbis, and then marry and have children and become the religious figures in their communities. The idea of a large population of married men who were not community rabbis but who studied all day and were paid for it is modern.
Modern abundance, not just welfare but even the ease with which, say, one very rich Hasid can fund a thousand students indefinitely is a failure state of modernity. Most people don’t want to live off welfare because it provides a much lower quality of life than working, especially if you’re an intelligent people. But if you think Torah study is the highest calling in life then you can override that impulse.
I noticed this tension all the time in old Jewish novels, where characters are very proud his son is studying with the rabbi, and of course everyone else in the family is happy to work extra shifts to pay for it, oy
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Historically? They worked, and the people who studied torah all day were a minority like Catholic priests or nuns. But once you could get paid to do torah studies, an obvious incentive structure developed.
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Yeah, that’s pretty much it, there were a few thousand left between Israel and New York, a few thousand in Britain and the Netherlands together, smaller numbers scattered in some other countries. A remnant population survived in Hungary that left for Israel in 1956, and there were some in the Soviet Union who survived the holocaust. But it’s fair to say likely 90%+ of Hasidic and Litvak Orthodox Jewry was killed in the Holocaust.
Since the 80s a lot of ‘mainstream Orthodox’ Jews and even some secular ones also changed to being ultra orthodox, and there was a purity spiral in Arab/Mizrachi Jewish circles in Israel that led to them adopting a lot of Hasidic customs.
Lastly the Chabad ‘Rebbe’ (Schneerson) became a figure of great importance to the vast majority of religious Orthodox Jews in the late 20th century and he was also responsible for a lot of the Baal t’shuva movement of increasing observance. So what was once a whole spectrum of Judaism with many varying gradations of practice has essentially separated into secular/reform/conservative judaism, “mainstream” and modern orthodox movements which are closely related to religious Zionism, and then ‘ultra orthodoxy’.
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