Alleviating Poverty 49

educational system. Despite poverty and the pressure of life in the segregated zone of White Russia known as the Pale of Settlement , where all the Russian Jews were shunted in the nineteenth century, Jewish charitable activities flourished unabated. Some provinces were so poor that more than 20 percent of the residents depended on the largesse of their neighbors to exist, and still money was found to supply poor students with clothes, soldiers with kosher food, the poor with free medical treatment, poor brides with dowries, and orphans with technical education.’ In large measure, therefore, the Torah pioneered, and Jewish communities refined, a societal vision that regarded effectively helping the needy as a sine qua non of a decent society. Conversely, outside autonomous Jewish communities, widespread, systematically organized assistance for those who could not provide for themselves was the exception rather than the rule: Public health programs, free public education, social security benefits, shelters for the homeless, soup kitchens, etc., were virtually unheard of in antiquity— even in the most advanced and well-organized ancient civilizations. Two thousand years ago, Rome— the largest city on Earth at the time— did not have one public hospital, asylum, or shelter. Indeed, two hundred years ago: Paris was not a whole lot better.... . What existed was there by the benevolence of one monastic order or another. Nearly all the government­sponsored welfare programs we are familiar with in the West came into being in the last few hundred years....° Consequently, whereas the welfare systems of the West that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries