I received this question during a recent-ish Sunday weekly Q&A, and I love this topic so much that at another follower’s suggestion, I decided to turn it into a whole post.
That’s because I don’t think that literacy saved and preserved the Jewish people. I know that it did.
"Assyria, Babylon, and Rome had better armies, but the Jews had better stories, and these are still read every week."
Matti Friedman, Out of the Sky
THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
Today, Jews are widely known as the “People of the Book,” a descriptor that actually has Islamic origins but has since been embraced by the Jewish community.
The “Book,” of course, is a reference to the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible.
Why have Jews embraced this title?
- In Judaism, reading the Tanakh is considered an important mitzvah, or commandment. In other words, literacy is mandatory.
- For Jews, the Torah is not just a book, but is described metaphorically as a “living, breathing organism,” and Torah scrolls are treated with deep reverence. The Torah is considered dynamic, rather than dogmatic, a continued conversation between the Jewish people and the Hebrew God.
BEFORE THE ROMANS, THERE WERE ASSYRIA AND BABYLON
In 732 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire invaded the Northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria). Between 740-722 BCE, the Assyrians exiled approximately 40,000 Israelites, around 10-20% of the kingdom’s entire population. These exiled Israelites eventually assimilated into Assyrian identities, and they are now known as the “Lost Tribes of Israel.”
Less than two centuries later, in 587 BCE, the Babylonians conquered the Southern Kingdom of Judah, destroying Jerusalem and the First Temple. They, too, exiled some 30,000 Judahites (Jews) to Babylon. Plagued by memories of the Israelites’ loss of identity after the Assyrian Captivity, the exiled Judahites began the process of compilation and canonization of the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible, based on much older written and oral histories.
The Tanakh eventually became something like a tribal charter for the Jewish people, preserving Jewish laws, geneaologies, oral histories, mythologies, and more, even after the loss of the First Temple.
CRISIS IN EXILE
To understand why literacy is so important to Jews, and why it saved the Jewish people from extinction, we must first understand what Jewish life was like prior to the destruction of the Second Temple.
In antiquity, and especially in the ancient Near East, religious and spiritual practices and national identity were deeply intertwined. Each nation dedicated itself to its national gods (or, in the case of the Nation of Israel, its national God). This meant that, like other neighboring kingdoms and empires, Jewish spiritual life was deeply centralized around a specific location, considered part of the nation’s core identity. In our case, this centralized location was the Temple in Jerusalem.
As one empire swallowed another, many, many temples were destroyed in the ancient Near East. Most of those religious practices have since been lost to history. But when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, a group of Jewish sages realized that literacy and Torah could save the future of the Jewish people.
JERUSALEM OR JUDAISM?
Picture this: it’s 70 CE. Jewish rebels have been fighting the mightier Roman Empire for four years at that point. It’s a losing battle. Jerusalem is in flames. So is the Second Temple.
In that moment, Jewish laws, traditions, and religious practices are entirely centralized around the Temple in Jerusalem, led entirely by the Kohanim, or priestly caste. If the Temple is destroyed, Judaism will go with it. Any surviving Jews will Romanize, adopting new customs, belief systems, and identities. The Jewish people will be relegated to the history books, as many other nations have before and since.
Enter: Yohanan Ben Zakkai. He knows that, by then, fighting for Jerusalem is a lost cause. Jerusalem has all but been defeated. So he does something revolutionary: he sneaks out of the besieged city in a coffin, carrying Torah scrolls with him, and ultimately establishes a Torah learning center in Yavneh: the first ever yeshiva.
Ben Zakkai knew that, in order to save Judaism from destruction, Jewish learning would have to democratize. His Yavneh learning academy fundamentally changed the course of Jewish history.
THE FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM
In antiquity, the Jewish people invented many things that are now considered so foundational to our societies that we barely ever think about them: the 7-day week, the weekend, equality before the law (i.e. rulers are not above the law), ethical monotheism (while Israelites did not invent monotheism, they did invent the concept of a single God as the source of all morality), and more.
And, believe it or not, our ancestors also invented universal compulsory education.
- The Torah commands that all parents teach its laws and history to their children, so from the very beginning, all Israelite children had access to education in the home.
- After the Babylonian Exile, Ezra the Scribe performed public readings of the Torah, laying the groundwork for public, universal education.
- In 75 BCE, Shimon ben-Shetach made elementary education compulsory for all children.
- In 64 CE, Joshua ben-Gamla issued a decree creating a universal and compulsory public school system. All villages and towns were appointed teachers for children starting at age 6 or 7. Classes were capped at 25 schoolchildren. Unsurprisingly, the curriculum centered around the Torah, with emphasis on reading, writing, and memorization.
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Around the first century, literacy among men in Judea stood at around 15-20%. Though it seems terribly low by today’s standards, the global average at the time stood under 10%.
Many more Jews had “pragmatic literacy,” meaning that they could recognize basic letters, words, names, and seals, though they could not do more complex reading.
LITERACY AS RESISTANCE
Jewish literacy has been fundamental to the survival of the Jewish people not just in antiquity, but well into the modern era.
- As brutal, borderline genocidal pogroms ravaged the Jewish communities of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews sent letters across cities, towns, and villages, warning Jews in different regions of upcoming rampages, giving them time to prepare.
- Literacy was fundamental to the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, from drafting forged documents to intercepting Nazi broadcasts, to documenting the horrors inflicted upon the Jewish people and smuggling those accounts to the outside world, whether to the Allies or to Jewish counterparts outside of Europe, such as in the United States and Mandate Palestine.
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