הלל ושמאי קבלו מהם
Hillel ve-Shammai kiblu mehem, "Hillel and Shammai received from them" (Avot 1:12). Every sage of the census in one galaxy you can turn in your hands. Hillel and Shammai are at the core, each generation lies one step further out, each school of thought is an arm, and the arms sit above or below the plane by camp: the Chassidic courts rising above it, the Lithuanian yeshivot and Mussar below, the Sephardi line near the plane. Within each arm the stars rise by weight: the great lights and the sages with the most recorded ties stand highest above their plane. Every recorded tie pulls its two stars toward each other, so arms that learned from one another lean together. Dashed arcs between the arms are the lineage of the movements themselves. The scrolling sky these stars come from is The Sky of Sages.
Drawn from the Great Yeshivas Global Historical Enrollment Census (reviewed workbook of 20 October 2026), sheets 06, 09, 11, and 15. Only figures with recorded life dates and a biography are drawn. Where a census row gives only a century or an office window, the star is placed at an approximate lifetime.
Hebrew names follow the census as recorded, generally in the Koren style, with familiar names first and the formal name beneath on the card.
Ḥeshbon
חשבון, an accounting
Evidence where anecdote has been doing the work: what a Jewish household or a Jewish institution actually pays, and who decides. Most of these datasets did not exist until a piece needed them. Each one is published alongside the work, with its sources and its limits, so you can check the arithmetic yourself.
The figures here are estimates built from public filings, published price pages and survey samples, and every piece states its own sources, sample sizes and limits in place. Tax filings run a year or more behind and get restated, posted prices change without notice, and a percentage describes the sample observed rather than the whole field. Several rest on small denominators or on voluntary reporting, noted where they appear. Where a number is our own arithmetic rather than a published one, the piece says so and shows the working.
Nothing here audits an individual institution or a person, and naming an organization is not a finding about its conduct. Ḥeshbon is independent of every body named on this site. None has reviewed, approved or funded the work, and where a ranking uses another organization's published figures as an input, that organization has not endorsed the result.
This is research rather than financial, tax, legal or immigration advice, and no one should decide about their own money on these pages alone. Israeli figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that. Corrections are made on the piece itself and noted there. If something here is wrong, write and it gets fixed.
© 2026 Ḥeshbon, Center on Data and Jewish Life. Research, writing and charts by Gavriel Brown.