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Volume 76 › Table of Contents › Article Abstract
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The Economics of
Jewish Childhood in Late Antiquity
Amram Tropper, Ben-Gurion University |
Jewish children in late antiquity lived in a pre-industrial agrarian society in which
the household served as the primary unit of both production and consumption.
Children were active participants in the strategies families developed to maintain
and care for their members as well as beneficiaries of their household economy.
The current inquiry seeks to contribute to the study of Jewish children and childhood
in late antiquity by exploring numerous ways in which household economics
influenced the lives of children and contributed to the construction of ideas of
childhood. By analyzing the economic setting, the structure of the average Jewish
family, the costs and benefits of rearing children, the beating of children, the distribution
of food within the family, child minding, formal education, professional
training, marriage and parent-child tensions, I have constructed a model of childhood
rooted in household-economics. I compare the features of this model to contemporary
features of the Graeco-Roman world in order to ascertain the ways in
which Jewish childhood was similar or different to the portrait of childhood which
emerges from the evidence left by other groups in the Roman Empire.
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