Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine

Abstract

Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, by Catherine Hezser. TSAJ 81. Tubingen: MohrSiebeck, 2001. Pp. ix + 557. $187.50. From the standpoint of the study of early Judaism and Christianity, it was a misfortune that William Harris's book, Ancient Literacy (Harvard University Press, 1989), said very little about literacy among Jews, either in the Diaspora or in Palestine. Catherine Hezser aims to fill that lacuna with the present work and does so exhaustively. Beginning with a major section, Conditions for the Development of Literacy, which touches on education, the various functions of literacy, and language used in Palestine, she continues with a lengthy treatment of artifacts that employ writing: everything from literary texts to labels on jars, documentary evidence, epigraphic remains, wills, divorce proceedings, amulets, graffiti, and so on. The comprehensive scope and meticulous attention to nearly every imaginable instance of writing are among the chief merits of the book. Finally, she concludes with a section on Participation in a Literate Society, where the emphasis shifts to the users of texts. The main result is easily stated: Jewish society in Palestine, in both the early and late imperial periods was characterized by lower literacy and more restricted use of texts than the Greco-Roman society of which it was a part. Rabbis can certainly be classed as literate intellectuals, though Hezser believes that this intellectual effort took place more on the oral than on the written level. The Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrash, and Jerusalem Talmud contain fewer remarks about quotidian textual usage than might have been expected. And beyond the religious sphere, she finds a surprising dearth of evidence for the use of texts in business transactions, in familial and amical relations, and in public display. Well aware of the hazards of making claims based on the presence or absence of surviving evidence, she nevertheless finds it significant that tens of thousands of inscriptions have survived in Roman Italy but only a few hundred in (p. 488). Likewise for the documentary evidence: the Bar Kokhba letters, the Babatha and Salome Komaise archives are rather thin pickings when compared with the thousands of documentary papyri yielded by the Egyptian desert. Conclusions about educational practices follow in tandem with these results. While certain hellenized elites in Palestine would have schooled their children broadly, after the Greco-Roman model, education among Palestinian Jews generally was a very spotty affair. Hezser finds very little evidence of systematic attempts to educate children from an early age (b. B. Bat. 21a and y. Ketub. 8:11, 32c notwithstanding) and she considers views by an earlier generation of scholars-Aberbach, Safrai, among others-as much too optimistic about the existence of Jewish schools. Even when such education did exist, emphasis was placed on reading the Torah, and this narrowly focused skill would have had less utility for participation in literate society than a more general education that included attention to writing and calculating skills (p. 74). Taken together, these results must lead to a new assessment of our understanding of ancient Judaism as a religion and a greater emphasis on other, nontextual forms of religious expression (p. 503). Beyond these main conclusions, the reader will find a wealth of fascinating material. Hezser's treatment of inscriptions, for example, is remarkably thorough. Rabbinic literature is an undiscovered country for many, and among the best parts of the book are those where the author mines the rabbinic literature for texts relevant to the study of literacy. On several occasions, the texts adduced invite reflection even beyond that which the author provides. For instance, the story of R. Meir (t. Meg. 2:4), who did not find an Esther scroll in the village of Asya and so produced one from memory in order to read it (p. …