Shtetl

Why does it feel like home?

It explains me..the longing, aching. for centuries.
for home.
that perfect fusion of Science and Art. no gods or blind belief. I hate those..
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The Wiki says in part:
A shtetl (Yiddish: שטעטל,"town", pronounced very similarly to the South German diminutive "Städtle", "little town") was typically a small town with a large Jewish population in pre-Holocaust Central and Eastern Europe.
The concept of shtetl culture is used as a metaphor for the traditional way of life of 19th-century Eastern European Jews. The attitudes and thought habits characteristic of the learning tradition are as evident in the street and market place as the yeshiva.

THIS IS THE IMPORANT PART..AND EXPLAIN THE SCIENTIFIC EFFLORESECNCE OF THIS CULTURE..ROOTED IN AN AGNOSTIC RATIONALISM..IF THERE IS SUCH A THING.
The popular picture of the Jew in Eastern Europe, includes the tendency to examine, analyze and re-analyze, to seek meanings behind meanings and for implications and secondary consequences. It includes also a dependence on deductive logic as a basis for practical conclusions and actions. In life, as in the Torah, it is assumed that everything has deeper and secondary meanings, which must be probed. All subjects have implications and ramifications. Moreover, the person who makes a statement must have a reason, and this too must be probed. Often a comment will evoke an answer to the assumed reason behind it or to the meaning believed to lie beneath it, or to the remote consequences to which it leads. The process that produces such a response-- often with lightning speed-- is a modest reproduction of the pilpul process.[1]
.. They also had a unique rhetorical style, rooted in traditions of Talmudic learning:
In keeping with his own conception of contradictory reality, the man of the shtetl is noted both for volubility and for laconic, allusive speech. Both pictures are true, and both are characteristic of the yeshiva as well as the market places. When the scholar converses with his intellectual peers, incomplete sentences a hint, a gesture, may replace a whole paragraph. The listener is expected to understand the full meaning on the basis of a word or even a sound... Such a conversation, prolonged and animated, may be as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as if the excited discussants were talking in tongues.