“Occupational distribution of bearers of Jewish rabbinic, craft and other surnames”
Vidgop, A. J., Norton, N., Rosenberg, N., Haguel-Spitzberg, M., Fouxon, I. (2020), F1000Research, 9.
Occupational structure of bearers of Jewish rabbinical, occupational and generic surnames.
Among modern Jews, the representatives of medieval rabbinic dynasties occupy a rather large place. This is not so surprising, because we are descendants of those who survived the Middle Ages and remained Jewish, and for this it was necessary to possess the exceptional devotion to Jewry that we often find among the rabbis.
What does having a rabbinic ancestor, or non-rabbinic ancestor, who lived many hundreds of years ago tell us today? At the level of a single individual, it is not easy to answer this question scientifically. However, if we look today at a thousand descendants of rabbis and a thousand descendants of non-rabbis, for example, craftsmen, the question of their differences becomes a statistical matter and has a definite answer. As such a difference, the “Am haZikaron” Institute investigated the choice of profession of their descendants. It turned out that the occupational preferences of the descendants of rabbis, craftsmen and Jews who do not belong to any of these categories differ in a very specific, statistically significant way.
A database of 9,386 individuals was examined, of whom 858 were members of rabbinic dynasties, 1,057 were bearers of so-called professional surnames and thus descended from artisans, and 7,471 had a surname that did not fall into any of these categories. The statistics of the database were the same as if the representatives of each group had been chosen at random, as for example, if 858 people had been randomly chosen from all the representatives of rabbinic dynasties. The definition of the types of occupations of the individuals studied was harmonized with the International Standard Classification of Occupations.
It turned out that there is a statistically significant difference in the professional structure of the three groups, which is not explained by statistical error. As a result, the magnitude of this difference was quantified. Summarizing the article describing the study, it can be concluded that the descendants of rabbis, artisans, and the rest of the Jews have maintained the difference in their occupational preferences for at least two hundred years. For example, members of rabbinic lineages who abandoned the rabbinic profession itself hundreds of years ago, nevertheless continue to prefer types of activities that differ from those that appeal to the descendants of artisans.