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Two Peoples of the Book

THE JEWS have long been known as the People of the Book. The book referred to is, of course, the Bible, which for many centuries was the book of Western civilization. As the people who gave the Bible to the world and who played the central role in both the Old and the New Testaments, the Jews held a special position in the Christian world: Although derided as infidels loyal to a mistaken creed, they were allowed to exist and bear witness, through their harsh trials, to the prophesies of that Book. Another reason for the appellation is that writing, compiling, reading, studying, and disseminating books have always been central activities of the Jews. Indeed, Judaism is a religion of books: The Five Books of the Torah, the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible, the six orders of the Mishnah, the two huge compilations of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, the innumerable commentaries, the many compendia and codes, the learned responsa, the collections of stories, the anthologies of hymns and liturgy, the books of prose and poetry, the various manuals, textbooks, and reference books— all these held the content of Judaism throughout the ages.

Judaism considers the most meritorious activity of its members to be neither prayer nor performance of rituals, but rather the intensive study of scriptures, especially the Talmud. Pious Jews spend most of their time in front of religious texts, reading, chanting, reciting, analyzing, discussing, and memorizing the texts and their commentaries. The study of these writings for their own sake is considered more important than the study for any practical purpose, such as becoming a rabbi. Not only the act of learning but also the books themselves have acquired a sanctity. A book written or printed with Hebrew letters should not be thrown away or destroyed because it may contain within it the name of God. When worn by age or use, it must be stored away or buried. Moreover, in the kabbalah, a system of Jewish mysticism, the Hebrew letters themselves assumed occult powers and their secret combinations were often used for magical purposes.

Each synagogue maintained a study hall (bet midrash, or in Yiddish, shul) where men could join in the collective learning of the religious books; here one could find the books, the study companions, and the teachers needed. In time, the words bet midrash or shul became synonymous with synagogue, bet knesset. The great importance attached to reading and learning the sacred texts made it a religious duty to teach them to the young, and education has been a central institution in each Jewish community. Young boys attended a bet sefer (house of the book), later called heder (room), and older boys as well as young adults attended an institute of higher learning, or a yeshivah (literally, a sitting). The one who excelled in learning, the talmidhaham (scholar), enjoyed the greatest prestige within his community. Indeed, the ideal Jew throughout the ages has been the talmudic scholar.

The texts taught at all these schools were difficult; they were written in either Hebrew or Aramaic, ancient languages not spoken in daily life, and their content was often abstract, enigmatic, and argumentative. Yet Jewish men learned and memorized these texts from early childhood and trained themselves in the arduous argumentations relating to them. The bet midrash, the heder, and the yeshivah were noisy places. Learning took place through chanting, recitation, movements of the body, and lively disputations. But this obsession with intensive analysis and abstract argumentation also helped Jews to excel in abstract thinking and nonconformist theory when they later turned their attention to secular subjects.

The Japanese too have been a people of the book. Although literacy came quite late to Japan, about the middle of the first millennium C.E., and the oldest extant books written in Japan, the Kojiki and Nihongi, date from the eighth century, once the Japanese acquired reading and writing skills, they practiced them avidly. Chinese culture entered Japan in the form of books written in a difficult foreign language and a complex script. But the Japanese exhibited an enormous interest in reading, understanding, and mastering these difficult texts and within a few centuries learned and adopted the Chinese script, absorbed a large number of Chinese words into the Japanese language, and incorporated the great religious and philosophical systems of Buddhism and Confucianism into their own thoughts and beliefs.

Since the eighth century, the Japanese upper classes have been acquiring, studying, reading, writing, and compiling books of enormous variety: histories, novels, poetry anthologies, diaries, political records, geographical observations, administrative reports, holy sutras, illustrated stories, local gazetteers, manuals, almanacs, books on medicine and divination, and various commentaries. The development in Japan of the two kana syllabic scripts in the ninth and tenth centuries enabled the transcription of Japanese words in combination with or entirely without Chinese ideographs. Woodblock printing, a craft imported from China and first used to produce the Buddhist sutras that were in great demand, became from the seventeenth century the means of mass-producing books for a steadily growing reading public.

Japan also adopted the technology of papermaking from China, and improved upon it. Shortly thereafter, Japanese paper reached a comparatively high degree of quality and came to be used for a wide variety of purposes, from sliding doors to folding fans. In Shinto, paper acquired a religious significance: A sacred wand with strips of white paper (gohei) is used in various Shinto ceremonies, especially purification rituals, and slips of paper with auspicious oracles (mikuji) are hung on tree branches around Shinto shrines.

The ability to read difficult Chinese texts and to express oneself in writing in both Chinese and Japanese became the distinguishing mark of the upper classes. In the eighth century an institute of higher learning, or university (daigaku), was established in the capital, and a special government bureau (Zushoryo) was set up to collect, preserve, and copy books. The shrines of the ninth-century official, scholar, and poet Sugawara no Michizane, who was deified after his death as the Shinto god of literature, scholarship, and calligraphy (Tenmangu), are still among the most popular in Japan.

When warriors took over the reins of power from the nobles in the twelfth century C.E., members of the military elite joined the literate classes as readers and writers. In the following centuries, the war epics Heike monogatari and Taiheiki were compiled and copied. Tokugawa Ieyasu, who unified the country in the early seventeenth century, established a large library at his castle in Edo and, following his example, all the great daimyo acquired magnificent libraries and book collections. In the Tokugawa period literacy spread to all samurai, as well as to many town dwellers and farmers. Publishing became an established and profitable business and gifted writers like Ihara Saikaku were very popular.

Although in Japan learning did not become a religious duty as it did for Jews, its prestige was very high. In his rules of conduct for the samurai (Buke shohatto) of 1615, Tokugawa Ieyasu held the study of literature (bun) and the pursuit of military arts (bu) to be the most important duty of the samurai, with bun preceding bu. Every Tokugawa shogun and most of the daimyo kept a Confucian advisor (jusha) to supervise classical education and to handle official correspondence and publications. In the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), schools of various kinds flourished in Japan. Almost all male children of samurai attended government-run schools where they learned the Chinese classics, and about half of the sons of commoners attended temple-schools (tera-koya), where they learned to read and write. There were also many private academies where one could acquire a knowledge in various fields from ancient scriptures to Dutch studies, as Western learning was then referred to. Education could not break class barriers, but it was considered the best way to self-improvement.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jews and the Japanese were probably the two most literate peoples in the world. Although the texts in which they were versed had little relevance to the political and social needs of the day, the long-established practice of the Jews and the Japanese of avidly acquiring knowledge through the medium of printed texts prepared them well for the task of absorbing the civilization of the advanced West.