Maristella Botticini Wins the 2012 National Jewish Book Award
Maristella Botticini (faculty member in the Department of Economics and IGIER director) won the 62nd National Jewish Book Award in the category "scholarship" for the book The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 (Princeton University Press), written with Tel Aviv University professor Zvi Eckstein (Italian translation: I pochi eletti. Il ruolo dell'istruzione nella storia degli ebrei, 70-1492, Egea Publisher).
The longest running and most prestigious North-American award for Jewish literature, the National Jewish Book Award is sponsored by New York's Jewish Book Council and is given to outstanding books of Jewish interest in several categories. Past winners include Salo Baron, Bernard Lewis, Shlomo Goitein, Michael Oren, Amos Oz, Chaim Potok, Philip Roth, A. B. Yehoshua, and Elie Wiesel. In awarding the prize, the selection committee has written that "The Chosen Few, which is beautifully written, merges economics and history in a fascinating and exciting way".
To understand the spirit of the book, Maristella Botticini suggests borrowing two tools: a magnifying glass and a telescope. With the magnifying glass, the reader will be like a historian, who focuses on a place and a time period, painstakingly digs through the sources, and carefully documents the historical trajectory of the Jews there. A thousand such scholars will offer a detailed description of the history of the Jews in hundreds of locales throughout history. With the telescope, the reader will be like an economist, who assembles and painstakingly compares the information offered by the works of the historians, creates a complete picture of the economic and demographic history of the Jewish people over 15 centuries, and then uses the powerful tools of economic reasoning and logic to address one of the most fundamental questions in Jewish history: "Why are the Jews - a relatively small population - intellectually prominent and specialized in the most skilled occupations, such as entrepreneurial activities, finance, medicine, law, scientific research, literature and the arts?"