The stereotype of the scholarly Jew has long been exploited by anti-Semites, not least by Joseph Goebbels, who preferred a "man of character" to a "man of books." But like many stereotypes it has some grounding in truth. Reading and interpreting the Torah has for millennia been an intrinsic part of Jewish domestic life, at least for boys. The needs of small communities struggling to find the requisite 10 men to form a religious congregation helped to ensure that age of Bar Mitzvah, and thus of textual expertise, was set at 13.
Young boys from worlds as diverse as Mishnaic Jerusalem and the 19th-century European shtetl were expected to grapple with the intricacies of the Torah from the age of three. Even today, in many otherwise secular Jewish households, the Bar or Bat Mitzvah remains an important rite of passage, requiring pupils to read and translate Biblical Hebrew.
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