“Professional Distribution of Bearers of Jewish Rabbinical, 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, representatives of medieval rabbinical dynasties occupy a fairly large place. This is not so surprising, because we are the descendants of those who survived in the Middle Ages, remaining Jews, and for this it was necessary to have that exceptional devotion to Judaism that we often find among rabbis.
What does the presence of a rabbi ancestor, or a non-rabbi, who lived many hundreds of years ago tell us today? It is not easy to answer this question scientifically at the level of one individual. However, if we look today at a thousand descendants of rabbis and a thousand descendants of non-rabbis, for example, artisans, then the question of their differences becomes a subject of statistics and has a very definite answer. As such a difference, the “Am haZikaron” Institute investigated the choice of profession of their descendants. It turned out that the professional preferences of the descendants of rabbis, artisans, and Jews who do not belong to any of these categories differ in a very specific, statistically significant way.
A database of 9386 individuals was studied, of which 858 were representatives of families originating from rabbis, 1057 were bearers of so-called professional surnames, and therefore originated from artisans, and 7471 people had a surname that did not belong to any of these categories. The statistics of the database were the same as if representatives of each of the groups were selected randomly, for example, if 858 people were randomly selected from all representatives of rabbinical dynasties. The definition of the types of professions of the studied individuals was consistent 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, a quantitative assessment of the magnitude of this difference was given. Summarizing the article describing the study, it can be concluded that the descendants of rabbis, artisans, and other Jews retain the difference in their professional preferences for at least two hundred years. For example, representatives of rabbinical families, who left the profession of rabbi itself hundreds of years ago, nevertheless continue to prefer types of activities that differ from those that attract the descendants of artisans.