Rabbinic Support for Elementary Teachers

The rabbis were aware of the significance of the household, and especially of the father, in providing a basic Torah education to sons. They also realized that few fathers would have been able to do so, as they lacked Torah knowledge themselves. Elementary teachers, who are mentioned in amoraic sources from the third century CE onward, could function as substitutes if fathers granted their sons spare time from work and could afford to pay the teacher’s fee.

This text from the Babylonian Talmud refers not to schools as institutions but to individual children’s teachers who would set themselves up in various places. Some Torah scribes seem to have supplemented their income by teaching Torah reading to children. This late text presents more of a rabbinic ideal than a historical reality. It associates this ideal with a high priest from the late Second Temple period and posits an outward expansion from Jerusalem to other towns and districts, a possibility that no longer existed after 70 CE.