JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Jewish occupations and mobility, but also demanded “reform”
of some of their practices including educational ones. The
frank statements or implications that Jews needed “improvement”
in order to merit improved civil status did not seem to
offend and were in fact accepted by many of the Jewish seekers
of emancipation and enlightenment. New schools were established
by them in German and Austrian cities, where things
soon took a very different turn from what Mendelssohn and
Wessely intended, and Jewish studies in them suffered a serious
decline. However, the Jews of Galicia, whose background
and sentiments resembled more those of their fellow Jews in
Poland and Russia to the east of them, remained refractory
to the educational modernization efforts and only a few sent
their children to the many schools opened for them, on government
instruction, by the Jewish educator Naphtali Herz
*Homberg.
Throughout this period, education of the youth in the
Jewries of Poland, Lithuania, and Russia was most nearly completely
traditional. During the period of the kahal’s (“community”)
greatest autonomy, traditional learning flourished. German
cities exploited the scholarship of Polish and Lithuanian
communities by employing rabbis and teachers who came
West upon invitation or on their own. These East European
Jews were influenced much less than their Western coreligionists
by their environment, perhaps because this environment
was much more primitive. Neither political emancipation nor
cultural enlightenment and modern educational ideas had yet
had a serious impact on the Jewries of the Russian lands at the
end of the 18th century.
Italy
After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, Italian
Jewry became the major Jewish community of the Mediterranean
lands. Here, too, education was the earmark of the
Jew. Even towns with only a few Jewish families, or for that
matter a single one, had their local teachers. Nearly all the condottas
(contractual agreements) drawn up with Jewish loan
bankers allowing them to conduct business in towns where
no other Jews resided included permission to have a teacher
brought by the family to instruct their children. In larger communities,
too, there was a tendency by the affluent to engage
private instructors. The talmud torahs, originally established
for the benefit of the poor, eventually as they became well organized
were generally placed in the service of all members
of the community. The management of the schools was left
to Talmud Torah Societies that operated them according to
carefully formulated regulations. The manner and rate of assessment
for the maintenance of the schools was usually distributed
to all community members. In some towns, as in Casale
Monferrato in the 16th century, school funds were raised
mainly from obligatory contributions made by those called
to the Torah. Minimum obligatory contributions were fixed
in Ancona (1644) for those called to the Torah, for men getting
married, for families celebrating the birth of a male child,
and for the School Society members on specified holidays.
EDUCATION, JEWISH
House-to-house collections were practiced in some places, as
in Modena (TT Society, 1597). Schools had overseers and supervisors.
The Talmud Torah Society regulations of Ancona
(1644) and of Verona (1688) specified the physical facilities of
the building, the authority of the trustees, number of teachers,
teachers’ duties and salaries, discipline, the program of studies,
and supervision. The Modena regulations, as well as several
others, state that the school is open to all comers, whether rich
or poor, whether local residents or out-of-towners. A number
of these sets of regulations spell out in detail not only the
manner of collecting funds but also of their disbursement,
occasionally specifying that teachers, both men and women,
must sign receipts for the books given them, that these receipts
are to be handed over to the accountant and must be properly
recorded, and so forth.
While the schools were primarily for boys, it appears that
girls learned a great deal at home through private instruction,
and in the early years some of them seem to have attended
the schools as well. Women were knowledgeable enough to
instruct children of pre-school level, i.e., below age six, and
perhaps some of the school children as well, in reading and
prayers. The woman teacher (melammedet) was popular in
Italy and her functions and salary are set down in some of
the TT Societies’ regulations. David *Reuveni wrote in his
travel notes that in Pisa (in 1524) he met a young lady who
“read” the Bible and prayed daily the morning and the evening
prayers. He also met there a wealthy woman who served
as a schoolteacher. Later, in 1745, a talmud torah for girls was
opened in Rome.
Children attended school generally from age 6 to 14,
a practice that was virtually obligatory. Study to age 18 was
strongly encouraged. The six-year-old who started school
could usually read, having been taught previously by the
melammedet who in some cases was also a community functionary,
like the teachers in the talmud torah.
The program of study in the early grades was the Pentateuch,
the Prophets and Hagiographa, prayers, Hebrew and its
grammar. The weekly portion of the Torah was stressed, and
the Torah with Rashi’s commentary was continued in several
grades. In the third or fourth year, the Code of Maimonides
was introduced or Caro’s Shulḥan Arukh, then Mishnah with
Obadiah of *Bertinoro’s commentaries. The Talmud, burned
in 1553 and by decree not printable in Italy, was for nearly two
centuries practically eliminated from the curriculum and replaced
by the various Codes, particularly Isaac Alfasi’s Halakhot,
a codified compendium of the Talmud.
An important feature of the Jewish schools in Italy, which
distinguished them from the ḥadarim in Central and Eastern
Europe, was the inclusion in the program of general subjects
– Italian, arithmetic, good writing and style. Following
an educational trend that had its origins in the West Mediterranean
European lands in the Middle Ages (see above), the
schools aimed to train individuals to be at ease in Italian life
and society as well as faithful Jews, rather than talmudic or
halakhic scholars. The teachers of the secular subjects in the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 179