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If you were to ask an average Jew, say, fifty or a hundred years ago, what made Jews different from others, you would almost certainly get an answer that had something to do with education. Throughout history, the conventional wisdom has always gone, Jews have placed a greater emphasis on literacy and intellectual mastery than any other people—and as a result have had a vastly disproportionate impact on a great many fields, from physics to economics to psychology. Education, which had always been a priority in classical Jewish life—Jewish children were trained in analyzing texts in even the poorest of Jewish communities over a period of many centuries—continued to be a mainstay of a Jewish upbringing even in the modern period, after most Jews abandoned their connection to other classical modes of Jewish life. The People of the Book was in fact a people of many books, and of the mind more generally.