Sachar/Katz Comparison

Early Jewish life in Europe can be explained as bittersweet. There is a great history of the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe going through ups and downs as they settled in Germany and moved throughout the land, with a significant settlement in Poland. In the Sachar reading, he explains how the Jews were originally placed into ghettos. First settling in Jewish ghettos by choice in order to have their own, smaller economy and community. Then later being forced into ghettos with fewer rights by the governments of West-Central Europe. Sachar explains one of the prominent forms of anti-Semitism of the time was that the Jews had much success in surviving the black plague. He writes, “It became the custom to attribute the “Black Death” to the Jews, the “wizards,” the “devils,” who had survived the epidemic in inexplicably greater numbers than their neighbors…” He goes on to say that this could have been possible because of Judaic hygiene regulations. Although at first the Jews prospered in central Europe, they were soon treated almost as poorly as the people stolen from Africa for the slave trade. They moved east and settled in Poland where they lived freely for several centuries. They grew and became one of the largest Jewish settlements in Europe before “class tensions became seriously inflamed.”
Katz takes a different turn in his essay. He describes the differences between conservative and modern societies, more specifically Jewish society and culture. He explains how people can be judged and seen differently when practicing a conservative lifestyle. Just like in the Jewish ghettos of Europe, the Jews were different than their Christian neighbors and treated poorly because of this. Katz states, “Rather than founding their existence and aspirations on values and on knowledge yet to be discovered and developed, people in traditional societies assume that all the practical and theoretical knowledge that they require has been inherited by them from their forefathers, and that it is man’s duty to act in accordance with the ancient customs.” This is why many of the Jews did not want to reform to the modern lifestyle of other Europeans. In Sachar’s reading, he compares the treatment of the Jews to African slaves, the only difference being that Jews were not new to the land nor were they slaves. They had ancestors and family history that reached back generations all over Europe.
Katz’s view on traditional Jews is that religion was everything. There was no other law or high power besides religion. This is what separated the Jews from the Europeans in Sachar’s reading. The Jews had originally requested to live in a ghetto away from the Christians, to live and practice in a traditional Jewish matter, causing isolation and not really fitting in with other Europeans. The Jewish neighborhoods were set up like small communities, Jews ran all businesses and they had their own government and economy. This separation from the rest of the world made them an easy target by the European governments. They were unable to make the switch from traditional to modern Jews as Katz describes in his writing. He means to justify this transition in a legitimate way. The Jews thus suffered because of this and later fled to Poland.