The Paradox of Jewish Innovation AND Diaspora is the Mother of Invention

The Jewish people have always been at the forefront of innovation, especially when it comes to communication and information technology. It’s not surprising that Muhammed named us “the People of the Book.” Of course, the book he was referring to was the book, that is, the Bible.

But here’s the paradox: On the one hand, Jews have been innovators; on the other hand, we’ve prided ourselves on being faithful to the past, to our ancient texts, especially, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.

It’s precisely this tension between stability and change, between preserving old texts and arguing with them, that has made Jewish textual culture so dynamic—and so strikingly modern.

What has made Jews so inventive when it comes to transmitting the written word? The answer is dispersion. We’re a people who have been in exile longer than we’ve lived in any one place. Judaism developed a portable culture, centered on the calendar, not the temple, defined by texts, not territory. What emerged was a culture of shared information, based on concepts strikingly similar to those that characterize Web 2.0: social networking, citations that allowed people to link content from different sources, and collaborative learning.

Welcome to part 1 of a series of 5 blog posts that answers the question, “How did the ancient Rabbis invent Web 2.0 before its time?” These 5 blog posts were adapted from a lecture originally presented by me, Ellen Frankel in March 2009 at the Bible Tech conference in Seattle.