JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

EDUCATION, JEWISH
proved an anti-assimilationist force of considerable strength
throughout the 19th century and in the early 20th. Germany
also was a haven for many Jewish young men from Poland and
Russia who, unable to gain admittance into the Russian universities,
came for their higher education to Germany whose
language they partly knew via Yiddish. Waves of emigration
from Russia to the United States likewise passed through Germany.
The students and migrants contributed to an ideological
ferment that made Germany, in spite of the decline of its
Jewish educational system for the many, a forum for live debates
and discussions and study of Jewish religio-cultural life
and Jewish issues.
On the higher level of Jewish studies German Jewry made
a substantial contribution to scholarship through the establishment
in the 19th century of several outstanding rabbinical
seminaries. In 1854 the Jewish Theological Seminary was established
in Breslau with Zacharias *Frankel at its head. It was
a modernly organized institution, open to critical scholarship,
yet traditionally oriented, in accord with Frankel’s theory of
“positive historical Judaism.” The historian Heinrich *Graetz
was one of the institution’s early teachers, and many important
Judaic scholars received their higher education in it.
The Higher School for Jewish Science (Hochschule fuer
die Wissenschaft des Judentums) was opened in Berlin in 1872
and under Abraham *Geiger’s influence came to represent Reform
Judaism. However not all of its scholars were followers
of Geiger’s views, and it included among its teachers strictly
observant talmudists and Zionist nationalists. An Orthodox
rabbinical seminary (Rabbiner Seminar fuer das orthodoxe
Judentum) was also established in Berlin in 1883 by Azriel
*Hildesheimer, and it, too, soon became a school of high scholastic
standing. These three rabbinical seminaries continued
in existence until World War II.
In the German-speaking areas of the Austrian Empire,
Jewish education resembled that of Germany. Although
the Vienna Jewish community became numerically large,
Jewish education declined. Again as in Germany, a rabbinical
seminary was established in Vienna in 1893 which
maintained high standards of scholarship. This, too, existed
until the eve of World War II. The Hungarian part of the
Empire had two paths of development, an assimilationist
tendency in one section of the population and a strong Orthodox
one in another. The latter elements gave their children
an intensive Jewish education of the traditional type, as reflected
in many yeshivot, some in rather small communities.
A modern rabbinical seminary was established in Budapest
in 1877.
The situation was different in Polish-Ukrainian Galicia,
home of about half of the Empire’s Jewish population. Here
developments resembled those in Poland and Russia. Most
of the government schools for Jewish children which were
organized under the directorship of Herz *Homberg at the
end of the 18th century closed in the first decade of the 19th.
The only remaining modern type Jewish schools were the one
founded by the esteemed educator Joseph *Perl in Tarnopol
which was supervised by rabbis and gained the confidence of
many traditional Jews, and a high school in Brody. The number
of Jewish children attending government general schools
increased slowly and reached some 78,000 in 1900. A new
type of Jewish nationalist school (see below, Eastern Europe)
made its appearance in the last decades of the century. However
most Jewish boys continued receiving their instruction
in the old style ḥadarim.
Eastern Europe
Western ideas began penetrating into the Polish-Russian domain
after a lag of some decades. In Poland, contiguous to
Germany and with many German contacts, the “Enlightenment”
first reached the more prosperous and worldly Jewish
circles who believed that talmudic training was obscurantist,
that the educational system maintained by the communities
was backward, and that the cure for these ills was stress on
the Polish language and a school program similar to that in
the Polish schools. The government, too, was interested in this
educational issue, its aim being polonization. A similar situation
obtained somewhat later in Russia where the government
attempted a russification of the Jewish school and tried to destroy
the ḥeder and the yeshivah. Many Jewish assimilationists
in both Poland and Russia supported the government efforts.
Even some of the non-assimilationist maskilim cooperated
with the government, often not realizing its ulterior motives.
Isaac Baer *Levinsohn advocated a revolutionary change in
Jewish life, with return to such occupations as agriculture
and manual trades, and, educationally, a modernization of
the program of Jewish studies, and the introduction of secular
subjects, particularly the Russian language and civics. He
believed that the government intended to improve the status
of the Jews. The government exploited this trend of thought
and tried to change the ḥeder system under the direction of
the rabbi and educator Max *Lilienthal, who was invited from
Germany, first to administer a modern school in Riga (1840)
and soon (1841) commissioned by the government to establish
a chain of modern schools throughout the Pale of Settlement.
Most of the Jewish population opposed Lilienthal’s enterprise.
After a few years Lilienthal himself became convinced of the
government’s ulterior objective of russification of Jewry and
he immigrated to the United States. A number of these new
schools continued to function but the majority of the Jews resisted
the attempt to convert the ḥeder into a school and the
melammed into a teacher and remained faithful to their traditional
style of schooling.
The “enlighteners” nevertheless were gaining ground,
even if slowly. Levinsohn’s ideas of better organized and
graded curricula and Lilienthal’s modern practices and organization
proved attractive to many groups. Westernized
Jewish elementary and secondary schools began to appear in
various communities. In the 1860s the newly formed “Society
for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia” became
influential in limited circles. At first this Society stressed
knowledge of the Russian language and Russian culture, but
182 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6