JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

EDUCATION, JEWISH
talmud torahs and the yeshivot were often Christian. In affluent
families private teachers also taught music, dancing, and
dramatic reading.
Higher learning was provided in the yeshivot which were
established in the larger Jewish communities, such as Venice,
Mantua, Padua, Modena, Ferrara, Leghorn, and elsewhere.
Jewish students also attended general higher schools, mainly
medical colleges. Reflective of the cultural tendencies among
the Jews of Italy during the Renaissance period is a proposal
circulated in all Italian Jewish communities by one David
Provenzale of Mantua in 1564, to establish a Jewish university.
It was to be a sort of combination yeshivah and university for
advanced study of Hebrew, Bible, the Oral Law, Jewish philosophy,
good speech and good writing, as well as Italian, general
philosophy, mathematics, astrology, and medicine. In such an
institution, the proposal stated, Jewish students would feel at
ease and would not be influenced by their Christian environment,
a comment suggesting that there was at the time some
concern about assimilation and possibly conversion. The stress
on good speech and good language, applied to both Hebrew
and Italian, is particularly illuminating. Good, grammatical,
and well-styled Hebrew seems to have been highly valued.
The period’s Hebrew documents evince great care in writing
and editing. Fondness for Hebrew language and literature was
widespread. Shabbetai Ḥayyim *Marini, a physician, must
have been convinced that he would have a substantial reading
audience when he translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses into
Hebrew. Moses Ḥayyim *Luzzatto, one of the earliest pioneers
of modern Hebrew literature, learned his Hebrew in his native
town of Padua. But, Luzzatto’s work excepted, the bulk of Hebrew
writing in Italy in this period seems to have been that of
poetasters, altogether lacking substance and originality. In the
18th century, with restrictions somewhat relaxed, the Talmud
became once more the main subject of study in the yeshivot,
and there seems to have been a lessening of the emphasis on
general secular studies. But when, toward the end of the 18th
century, new trends in Jewish education rocked Jewish communities
in Germany and Eastern Europe (see next section),
they caused only a ripple of controversy in Italy. When after
the French Revolution emancipation and liberation from the
ghetto came to Italy’s Jewry, it was on the one hand quite ready
for their concomitant educational and cultural “enlightenment,”
and on the other hand quite unable to withstand their
corollary assimilating powers.
East Mediterranean and North African Lands
In the other Mediterranean lands traditional Jewish education
continued in all sizable Jewish communities and moreover
there was some intensification in Jewish life and schooling
due to the influence of the expellees from Spain who settled
in North Africa, the Balkans, and *Turkey. The Turkish cities
*Constantinople and *Izmir had substantial Jewish communities
in the 16th and 17th centuries and there is a reference to
Constantinople as “a city of sages and scribes.” A report from
the mid-18th century by a Constantinople rabbi speaks of about
1,600 children in that city’s talmud torahs of whom about
1,000 received community assistance in the form of clothing.
Izmir had a Talmud Torah Society and a talmud torah in
which *Shabbetai Ẓevi received his schooling. *Damascus in
the first half of the 16th century had about 500 Jewish families
and three synagogues. There was no yeshivah there but several
teachers were teaching 30 or so pupils each. In 17th-century
*Alexandria boys apparently studied to age 13, mostly
the Pentateuch, and at their bar mitzvah they held forth on
the portion of that week. There is reference to a yeshivah in
Arta, Greece, in mid-16th century. *Aleppo in the 17th century
had a ḥeder or ḥadarim maintained by two communities, one
of which was composed of “*Francos,” West European Jews
who settled there. A large and important Jewish community
in the eastern Mediterranean was that of *Salonika, which had
a number of private ḥadarim in the early 16th century. These
were later merged to form a central community school. A
Talmud Torah Society was organized, buildings were put up,
and the institution apparently flourished. In 1564 the talmud
torah opened a clothing manufacturing shop, mainly to produce
clothes for its pupils. In 1694 the Society also opened a
printing press to supply textbooks for the talmud torah and
for the yeshivah. This talmud torah and the yeshivah of Salonika
became popular in the Balkan area and attracted students
from other Greek towns, from Albania, and from some
of the Greek islands. Out-of-town Jews contributed toward
their support.
In the Maghreb countries the Jews spoke Arabic and
Spanish but also taught their children in accord with established
tradition, first at home – various phrases, benedictions,
and prayers, and even reading. Later, in school, they learned
the Torah, prayers, and some of the Oral Law as well. The
Bible was studied much more than in the Ashkenazi lands.
The majority of the Jewish population, however, was very
poor and could not afford adequate schooling. A 1721 document
from *Meknes, Morocco, bewails the fact that poverty
drives many families to send children of six and seven
into trade apprenticeship, appeals for the cessation of the practice,
and enjoins tradesmen from accepting for employment
children below the age of 13. Even under these difficult conditions
Jewish literacy seems to have been impressive to the
non-Jew. A Christian minister, Lancelot Addison, in describing
the life of Maghreb Jews in his book The Present State of
the Jews (London, 1675), states that early in life children are
taught at home some Hebrew terms of daily use and from
age 5 to 13 they attend school. According to Addison, “there
is no boy in the world who can at the age of thirteen give
such an accurate account of the laws of his faith as can the
Jewish boy.”
Bibliography: Dubnow, Hist Russ, 1 (1916), 114–39; I. Fishman,
The History of Jewish Education in Central Europe, from the End
of the 16th to the End of the 18th Century (1944); Graetz, Hist, 5 (1941)
passim; Roth, Italy, index; M. Szulwas, Ḥayyei ha-Yehudim be-Italyah
bi-Tekufat ha-Renaissance (1955).
[Elijah Bortniker]
180 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6