Part 3 of 3

A great deal of the answer to the question of the rapid 19th and 20th century technological acceleration has to do with the rapid growth of the European Jewish population in the mid-19th century and more significantly, the growth of the Jewish population within the specific, heterogenous and rich cultural milieu of Western and Central Europe and the remodelling of this environment in America and elsewhere in the New World. The larger part of the answer is essentially that this cultural nexus allowed for the symbiosis and fusion of a stable and advanced civilization with an ascendant and cognitively talented population. 

We view Zionism as very much a part of the clutch of factors spurring European and Jewish “acceleration”. To reemphasize,  mid-19th century intellectual breakthroughs and concomitant technological advances are intricately related to the preeminence and ascendancy of the very high performing “Jewish intellectual fraction’. Our position is that Zionism was an operative and determinative factor in contributing and enabling this  cultural environment. The expectations of Zionism and the possibilities of transit to America, the other promised land, are different sides of the same coin. Both movements are deeply intertwined to a degree that is not fully understood. They are part of the same weltanschauung of hope and promise (and they remain so to this day).

Jewish demographic growth of the 19th century is unique and remarkable and quite possibly unduplicated. European Jewry’s rate of demographic growth far outpaced all other European populations and they did this quite significantly and dramatically. 

The European Jewish population in 1700 was likely less than 1.1 million people. By 1800, the world Jewish population was approximately 2.5 million, with the population reaching the figure of 5 million in 1850 and almost 13.5 million in 1914 on the eve of the First World War. The Jewish population would grow to 16.6 million on the eve of the 2nd World War in 1939 ( a sixteen fold growth over just more than 200 hundred years!).  As the Jewish population growth increased almost exponentially in the late 19th century, Jewish achievements skyrocketed across almost all intellectual, scientific and commercial domains. 

These Jewish achievements are so utterly overwhelming,........

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