Population size

[lethargic_man]

Modern societies contain truly huge numbers of people, vastly more than in any society of the past. Now, I have a vague impression that in old (pre-twentieth, possibly more pre-nineteenth) century societies, the average citizen was more likely to personally know important or significant people than they are now. This impression is completely subjective, so I may be completely wrong, but that's the way it seems to me.

I was thinking about what it must be like to live in a society that is that much smaller than ours in this respect, and it occurs to me that actually we do have a good model for this: the Jewish population today (there are 263,000 Jews in the UK today, of which two thirds live in or around the same megalopolis as me). That's what Jewish geography is all about, and why none of us Jews is surprised to keep bumping into people we know, and why we're much more likely to encounter machers from the Jewish community than movers and shakers from the wider society, in which we're tiny cogs in a vast, vast machine (just stand in a Tube station at rush hour and watch the number of people that go past, to see this!).

Thoughts, anyone?

Comments

[iddewes]

That's interesting...I hadn't really thought about it before. I have to say, the only famous Jewish person I've actually met was David Schneider, and he isn't THAT famous, but he does sometimes show up at the NLPJC. And at Limmud I met someone who was related to Rachel Weisz. But that's it...

[lethargic_man]

I was thinking more famous within the Jewish community: the way one of the people handing me his business card for me to send him my Limmud talk notes was the President of the Board of Deputies. And I've met Louis Jacobs, who founded Masorti Judaism in the UK, and heard speak Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of Renewal Judaism. But famous in the outside world also applies: I was once boarding a 'plane to Israel and there was Vanessa Feltz a few places in the queue in front of me.

Possibly you simply haven't had that kind of thing happen to you because you haven't been part of the community for long enough.