Reading through history help set Jews apart

Why has education been so important to the Jewish people?

Author Maristella Botticini says a unique religious norm enacted within Judaism two millennia ago made male literacy universal among Jews many centuries earlier than it was universal for the rest of the world’s population.

“Wherever and whenever Jews lived among a population of mostly unschooled people, they had a comparative advantage,” Botticini tells JNS.org. “They could read and write contracts, business letters, and account books using a common [Hebrew] alphabet while learning the local languages of the different places they dwelled. These skills became valuable in the urban and commercially oriented economy that developed under Muslim rule in the area from the Iberian Peninsula to the Middle East.”

Emphasizing literacy over time set Jews up for economic success, say Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, authors of the 2012 book “The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History.”

An economic historian, Botticini earned a B.A. in Economics from Università Bocconi in Milan and a Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University. After working at Boston University, she returned to Italy and works at her alma mater. An economist, Eckstein received his B.A. from Tel Aviv University and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He spent five years as the Bank of Israel’s deputy governor, and is now dean of the School of Economics at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzylia. 

In their book, which they describe as a reinterpretation of Jewish social and economic history from the years 70 to 1492 CE, Botticini and Eckstein say that Jews over those years became “the chosen few”—a demographically small population of individuals living in hundreds of locations across the globe and specializing in the most skilled and urban occupations. These occupations benefit from literacy and education.