How Education Shaped Jewish Society
How important is Jewish education to the Jewish people? Perhaps, it’s everything. This is the theory that Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein put forward to explain the demographic history of the Jewish people from the destruction of the Second Temple through the Spanish Expulsion.
Their book, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, appeared to be a book about the nature of Jewish Education to me when I first saw it. However, it turned out to be an economic analysis. They predict, based on the degree to which a father adhered to the Rabbinic requirement that a father begin his son’s education at the age of six or seven, they could predict who would remain a Jew and what type of profession they would engage in.
In order to seriously consider the validity of their theory, one has to let go of the idea that assimilation and intermarriage are somehow only the product of life in the Post-Enlightenment era. (That is, after Moses Mendelssohn’s philosophy and the French Revolution’s idea of a secular state radically changed the way Jews could potentially mix into early Modern European and American societies.) Botticini and Eckstein insist that membership in a religious group has economic consequences and that those consequences are a strong predictor of whether or not a person born into a specific religious tradition will remain within that tradition.
In this passage from the Talmudic tractate Bava Batra 21A, we see the rabbis reading into Biblical texts the obligation to educate boys beginning at the age of six or seven years of age. The historicity of the Talmud is general and probably not reliable to the standards of modern historical writing. However, whether Yehoshua ben Gamla really did what is said here is less important than the fact there was a tradition that existed in his name that came to be relied on and be foundational.
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‘‘In the latter clause we arrive at the case of schoolchildren who come to learn Torah in his house, and this ruling applies from the time of the ordinance of Yehoshua ben Gamla and onward. What was this ordinance? As Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: Truly, that man is remembered for the good, and his name is Yehoshua ben Gamla. If not for him the Torah would have been forgotten from the Jewish people.
Initially, whoever had a father would have his father teach him Torah, and whoever did not have a father would not learn Torah at all. The Gemara explains: What verse did they interpret homiletically that allowed them to conduct themselves in this manner? They interpreted the verse that states: “And you shall teach them [otam] to your sons” (Deuteronomy 11:19), to mean: And you yourselves [shall teach, i.e., you fathers shall teach your sons. When the Sages saw that not everyone was capable of teaching their children and Torah study was declining, they instituted an ordinance that teachers of children should be established in Jerusalem.
The Gemara explains: What verse did they interpret homiletically that enabled them to do this? They interpreted the verse: “For Torah emerges from Zion” (Isaiah 2:3). But still, whoever had a father, his father ascended with him to Jerusalem and had him taught, but whoever did not have a father, he did not ascend and learn. Therefore, the Sages instituted an ordinance that teachers of children should be established in one city in each and every region . And they brought the students in at the age of sixteen and at the age of seventeen. But as the students were old and had not yet had any formal education, a student whose teacher grew angry at him would rebel against him and leave. It was impossible to hold the youths there against their will.
This state of affairs continued until Yehoshua ben Gamla came and instituted an ordinance that teachers of children should be established in each and every province and in each and every town, and they would bring the children in to learn at the age of six and at the age of seven.”
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Where did this condition and value come from? In the books of Ezra and Nehemia we have the introduction of the tradition of an annual reading of the Torah (Five Books of Moses). Literacy was a skill in the hands of the scribes and the bureaucrats. The public reading was the only way that the people were going to learn the Torah. At that time the population of the land of Israel was very small. The vast majority were farmers.
The next two hundred years are the mostly lightly attested part of the First and Second Temple era in the archaeological record, an indication that the population was small and very poor. However, things did start to turn around eventually. The area became more prosperous. The population increased and became more financially viable under the Greeks, after the Hasmonean revolt, and under Roman rule. Still, the vast majority of Israelites were still farmers.
The final years of the Second Temple period saw a wide variety of manifestations of Israelite religion. The Sadducees were a class of priests who dominated Israelite society based on their control of the Temple. The Pharisees had a strong hold on the common people. They met in synagogues and study halls where literacy was taught outside of professional circles. They were developing a Jewish practice that could be performed outside of the Temple and the sacrificial cult. There were the Samaritans who believed only in the Five Books of Moses and rejected the Prophets and the Writings. There were Christian-Israelites who believed in Jesus while maintaining their relationship to Jewish Law, and there were the Essenes, an apocalyptic cult that rejected urban Israel and lived in ascetic isolation. There were also fanatical groups of Israelite nationalists called the zealots and the sicarii.
The lore related to Yehoshua ben Gamla placed his statement before the destruction of the Second Temple. This assertion, historical or not, is meant to indicate that Rabbinic educational values were derived from the earlier rabbis of the Pharisaic era.
How did the requirement to begin educating one’s son at six or seven become a core value of Rabbinic Judaism and how did that determine the demographics of the adherents to Rabbinic Judaism?
The sicarii and the zealots were wiped out by the Romans. The Samaritans revolted against the Romans later and were massacred in great numbers. The Sadducees collapsed as a class when their status at the top of the social order was destroyed. Some believe that they constitute a portion of the Rabbinic Jewish group. The disappearance of the Essenes is unexplained. Paul abrogated the obligation to Jewish Law for Jewish-Christians. The obligation placed on the Rabbinic Jew, putatively by Yehoshua ben Gamla, remained on the books only for the those who took on the evolving Pharisee mantle.
In the Land of Israel, the obligation to educate sons was not taken on as a communal responsibility (as it would be later in the Babylonian Jewish community). This meant that following the law came with a substantial financial burden. This is where the predictive theory of The Chosen Few kinks in.
At the time of the destruction of the Second Temple the world Jewish population has been estimated to have been between 2.5 and 8 million. By 650, the general consensus is that that population had shrunk to about 1.2 million. The variance in the early estimate is related to the various demographers' disagreement on how horrible the massacres of the Israelite population were in 70 CE and at the time of Bar Kokhba’s revolt. (Talmud’s estimate of the numbers massacred are such that the poisoning of the rivers with blood is apocalyptic).
Botticini and Eckstein privilege an estimate of the initial population and the ultimate decline that rests towards the middle range of the estimates. By their math (which is beyond my abilities to judge) the Roman depredations were insufficient to account for all of the decline. Their theory aims to explain the remaining gap.
They make the following observations: The obligation to educate sons falls very unevenly across all households. A wealthy farmer could afford to educate their son(s) if they chose to. The sharecropper or poor farmer could not. Because of this, the poor farmer would bear the onus of negative judgements of their worthiness as a member of the Jewish people. They could remain as part of the Jewish community if they wanted to, but their situation would be far from ideal. If they abandoned their heritage they might not have been better off financially, but they could live without being judged as moral inferiors within the Christian community. Thus only those poor farmers who placed a very high value on their Jewishness would remain.
Of course, the rich farmer might not place a high value on their Jewishness, and since the utility of education was still low for them, they might choose to avoid both the expense of educational costs and the stigma that came from not educating their sons and convert.
The only other way out for the poor farmer would be to get out of the farming game, but this wasn’t an easy path to get on. It would require taking on punishing debt that could only be repaid if the farmer’s son was able to stop farming and find some kind of skilled employment - a long shot. However, if everything worked out, the son would be able to enter a cycle of generations where literacy would be in reach and become a familial norm and raise the likelihood that the family would remain Jewish. These mechanics, as they played out, predict the decline of the Jewish population in the land of Israel and the growth of the Babylonian community where the costs of education were borne by the community collectively.
Next week, I will describe how education affected the Jewish population over the next millennium, according to the theory of Botticini and Eckstein, through to the Spanish expulsion. It is unclear whether or not their theory holds from that time through the present. There are many significant changes in technology and Jewish theology that need to be considered that occurred between then and now. Perhaps, after next week’s column, I will be able to question what their theory might predict about the immediate future.
