The people of the book, the Jews, were the first to introduce not only the alphabet (in the proto-Sinaitic form) but also compulsory schooling – related to the need to read Holy Scripture and extended to women as well – as early as the time of Moses and the Judges. The Jews, even after the destruction of the temple and in the Diaspora, continued to be literate even in the dark ages when illiteracy prevailed in Europe, thanks to the transcription of the Mosaic law, the Torah, which also made it possible to preserve the Hebrew language as a living fossil. Their identity for centuries is defined not by a land, but by a book.
In the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, on the other hand, before Gutenberg’s printing press and the Lutheran Reformation, only priests have the right to read sacred texts, and the reading of Greek texts has long been forbidden.
This explains why still in the 20th century as many as 193 people known to be Jewish or of Jewish descent were awarded a Nobel Prize, which represents 22 percent of all recipients of the honor worldwide between 1901 and 2014, despite the fact that they made up only 0.23 percent of the world’s population.
The cognitive effect of the alphabet has persisted throughout history, through several waves of literacy, fostered in part by the introduction of printing in the modern age and mass schooling in the 20th century. In 1948 only 45 percent of the 2.4 billion inhabitants of planet Earth were schooled. By 2022 this percentage had reached 95 percent of nearly 8 billion people.
In the 1900s, James R. Flynn observed the increase in the value of the average IQ of the population over the years, in a variety of countries (more than 20 or so) and regardless of the culture to which they belonged. Flynn notes how, over the years, the IQ value has increased gradually, with an average growth of about 3 points per decade. The U.S. population, for example, gained more than 13 points from 1938 to 1984.
Among the hypotheses by which this increase in IQ has been attempted to be explained prevails the progressive growth of the years of schooling and, therefore, the spread of a greater ability to solve logical and abstract problems, inevitably linked to the use of letters and numbers.
Born more than 3,000 years ago, the alphabet has not yet ceased to exert its effect on human intelligence.
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