JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

EDUCATION, JEWISH
cation and which he served as religious leader, conducted an
all-day school from 1755 to 1776 and, intermittently, through
the early decades of the 19th century. The aim of this initiative
was to provide both Hebrew and general studies under Jewish
auspices, as an alternative to secular training under non-
Jewish, sectarian auspices.
In the early national period, almost all schools in New
York City, as elsewhere, were religious in character. “Common
pay” (i.e., private) schools generally assumed the religious
identity of their headmaster; charity or “free schools,”
supported by churches, could draw funds from the state.
Through a bequest, Shearith Israel established a charity school
named Polonies Talmud Torah, in 1803. Starting in 1811, the
school achieved equal footing with the Protestant and Catholic
schools in the city, benefiting from state financial assistance.
In New York, state support of religiously sponsored charity
schools continued until 1825; public schools were, gradually,
to achieve a monopoly over state funding of education
throughout the country.
Shearith Israel’s inability to maintain a school on a continuing
basis was not only a function of uncertain state financial
support, but of an apparent disinclination of its members
to enroll their children. This may, in part, have resulted from
the lack of educational leadership on a sustained basis. For example,
when Emanuel N. Carvalho, a well-qualified teacher
who had come to New York from London, served as the
school’s headmaster, 1808–11, there was a well-subscribed, full
day instructional program. When Carvalho moved to Charleston,
the school experienced years of intermittent openings and
closings, depending on the availability and ability of teaching
personnel. The Polonies Talmud Torah eventually turned to
the provision of supplementary education, holding sessions on
Sunday morning and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Primary
attention was given to prayers, Bible, preparation for bar
mitzvah, and elements of Hebrew language and grammar.
In Charleston, home to the largest population of Jews
in America in the early 19th century, the Jewish community
allocated no funds for a school – parents had to rely, exclusively,
on private tutors. Savannah’s Mikveh Israel offered no
congregationally sponsored religious education before 1853.
With a modest population, rapid acculturation, and a negligible
educational infrastructure, Jewish learning in the early
national period was at a low ebb.
Emergence of Sunday Schools
As public, non-sectarian schools became increasingly predominant,
many Christian Sunday schools, initially established
by “benevolent societies” to provide poor children
with general as well as Christian religious educational opportunity
– and to keep them off the streets on Sunday – became
strictly religious institutions. By 1838, there were 8,000
Christian schools of this kind in the United States. Consistent
with this trend, American-born Rebecca *Gratz (1781–1869),
member of a prominent Jewish family of merchants and community
leaders in Philadelphia, aided in founding the Female
Hebrew Benevolent Society (1819) and the Hebrew Sunday
School Society (1838). Rebecca Gratz was convinced that religious
instruction for all Jewish children was imperative, particularly
in the face of Christian proselytizing.
One month after securing the approval of the Female Hebrew
Benevolent Society for this initiative, the Hebrew Sunday
School opened with 50 students and six teachers (including
Gratz, who served as superintendent). The volunteer faculty
consisted of women respected for their moral character and
intelligence. From its inception, the Jewish Sunday School
movement was, as its Protestant counterpart, a women’s movement.
Women founded, directed, and taught at the schools,
starting with the Philadelphia prototype, and girls attended
alongside boys. In America, children’s religious education was
considered part of the domain of women, and women thus required
religious education to properly educate their children.
Financial support came from the FHBS, private donors, and
Mikveh Israel (Philadelphia’s well-established Sephardi congregation).
Parents who could afford to do so paid $2 per year,
and an annual appeal was held at a festive public exam.
Gratz’s Philadelphia-based efforts benefited from the assistance
of the ḥazzan of Mikveh Israel, Isaac *Leeser. By 1845,
Jewish Sunday schools had been established in a number of
communities, including New York, Charleston, Cincinnati,
and Richmond. As in the Philadelphia model, Saturday and
Sunday schools established in other locales were conducted
on a coeducational basis. Jewish Sunday schools reinforced
the middle class values of public schools and Protestant Sunday
schools: obedience, order, punctuality, cleanliness, and
self-discipline. They embraced the Protestant division between
universal morality (the domain of public education)
and particularistic forms (the province of supplementary religious
education).
Leeser, who championed Jewish traditionalism throughout
his career, authored a Catechism for Younger Children
(1839), used in many of the schools. The catechism opened
with reflections on religion in general, before turning to the
“Mosaic Religion” in particular. He affirmed the divine origin
of the Torah and its correct interpretation by the sages;
hence, the enduring imperative of both the moral and ceremonial
law. The catechism concluded with Maimonides’ 13
principles of faith.
Leeser also published a Hebrew Reader, “Designed as an
Easy Guide to the Hebrew Tongue, for Jewish Children and
Self-Instruction,” in 1838. The text devotes 23 pages to the development
of skills for Hebrew reading, with the ensuing 25
pages applying those skills to such recurring prayers as Adon
Olam, Shema, Ma Tovu, Modeh Ani, the opening paragraph of
Birkat ha-Mazon, and Yigdal. While the work was reprinted a
number of times, Leeser lamented, in his preface to the 1856
(fourth) edition, that though the book “has met with approbation,
still the sale has been very slow, the demand for the various
schools being quite small.” Leeser, who founded a shortlived
Jewish Publication Society in 1845, produced dozens of
printed works, along with a widely disseminated periodical
190 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6