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In addition to rabbis, Lithuania and other provinces furnished teachers for the young, melammedim, who exerted considerable influence upon the people among whom they lived. Their opinions, we are told, were highly valued in the choice of rabbis. It must not be supposed that supremacy in the Talmud was secured at the cost of secular knowledge, or what was then regarded as such.
Like the poimaniki, the poor and the orphaned were compelled, or induced, to fill the class-rooms shunned by the rich and respectable, and though the Government not only condemned the ancient Hebrew institutions, but declared the twenty thousand teachers who imparted instruction in them to be outlaws and criminals, the melammedim pursued their vocation as ever, and the hadarim, Talmud Torahs, yeshibot, and batte midrashim swarmed with students of the prohibited learning.
The melammedim, teachers, were graded according to their ability, and the school year consisted of two terms, zemannim, from the first Sabbath after the Holy Days to Passover and from after Passover to Rosh ha-Shanah. The boy's intellectual capacities were steadily, if not systematically, cultivated, sometimes at the expense of his bodily development.
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