JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

(The Occident). Improvements in print technology and the
declining cost of printed material led, at mid-century, to expanded
publications of all kinds, including evangelical literature.
Consequently, Jewish education and Jewish educational
materials were essential both to strengthen the faith and to
protect against proselytizing missionaries.
Even as he expressed the highest regard for the work of
Rebecca Gratz and her assistants, Leeser urged the establishment
of an all-day Jewish school for two basic reasons. First,
it was impossible to achieve Hebrew literacy in “extra” hours.
Second, the public or private schools were, in Leeser’s view,
essentially Christian. Where it was impracticable to conduct
day schools, supplementary education needed to be strengthened
– hence, Leeser’s support of Rebecca Gratz’s Sunday
School initiative.
Educational Currents in the Era of Heightened German-
Jewish Immigration, 1840–1880
During the period 1840 to 1880, the American Jewish community
grew from 15,000 to 250,000, primarily bolstered by the
immigration of Jews from German-speaking lands. German
Jews spread through the length and breadth of the expanding
nation and, with their geographic diffusion, the number of
congregations grew from 18 to 277 by 1877. As in the colonial
and early national periods, congregations typically progressed
from establishing a burial society to forming a synagogue and,
only later, providing some form of Jewish education.
In the 1840s and 1850s, many American schools were still
conducted by churches, and instruction in the Christian religion
was part of the curriculum. Many public schools had
a distinctly Protestant tone. Within this context, Jewish day
schools were established by immigrant Jews in a number of
communities.
By the 1850s, seven Jewish day schools had been established
in New York, enrolling more than 1,000 students. Similar
schools were initiated in other cities, including Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Chicago, Boston, Albany, Cincinnati, Detroit,
Essex County, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.
A typical school of this kind was the one organized by Kehillath
Anshe Maariv Congregation, in Chicago in 1853. The
school was patterned on similar schools in Germany, where
the curriculum included general studies supplemented by instruction
in Jewish religion, Hebrew prayers, and Bible reading
in German translation. At KAM, in addition to English,
German, arithmetic, geography, drawing, and singing, prayers
and readings from the Pentateuch, as well as catechism relating
to Jewish religion and history, were part of the curriculum.
The “common” school branches were taught by non-Jewish
instructors, with a rabbi or cantor responsible for Jewish
studies. The commitment of German-Jewish immigrants to
maintaining German culture is reflected in the fact that of the
17 mid-19th century Jewish day schools with extant curricular
information, all schools included German.
Several private boarding schools teaching Jewish and
secular subjects also operated in the middle of the 19th cen-
EDUCATION, JEWISH
tury. The creation of this variety of day school reflected their
founders’ interest in the Jewish education of their children,
an interest in preserving German culture, a desire for “quality
assurance” in their children’s schooling (the developing
public schools were not, uniformly, seen as centers of educational
excellence), and concern about sectarianism in public
schools. Intensive Hebrew education was, not always, of
paramount interest; often, one hour per day was devoted to
Jewish studies.
In the 1840s, Hebrew literary associations, maintaining
libraries and conducting lectures, were founded in several cities.
From references in Jewish newspapers, it appears that literary
discussion groups typically were conducted separately
by and for men and women. During the 1860s and 1870s, a
new type of organization – the Young Men’s Hebrew Association
(YMHA) – was established in a number of communities
(the first YMHA had been organized in Baltimore in 1854
but suspended its activities in 1860–68). The YMHA aimed
to foster improved knowledge of the literature, history, and
doctrines of Judaism. The “Y” often included a library of Jewish
reading matter and offered lectures and classes for young
men and women in Jewish history and Hebrew language. Y’s
thus met the need of young adults for a congenial social and
intellectual milieu.
During the 1860s, Christian missionaries operating on
New York’s East Side operated a school teaching Jewish children
Bible in Hebrew. Mission schools, with conversionary
aims, appeared in other poor Jewish neighborhoods. In 1864,
several congregations organized the Hebrew Free School, as
a countermeasure. Five branches were established and, in addition
to Jewish education, pupils were supplied with clothing
and other necessities. Similarly, Jewish Y’s introduced gymnasiums
and sports as a counterinfluence to Christian missionaries,
and in imitation of YMCAs.
While, in the development of American Jewry, the period
1840–80 was, primarily, an era of Western and Central European
Jewish settlement and institution building, a trickle of
Eastern European Jewish immigration was already apparent by
the 1850s. New York’s first East European congregation, Beth
Hamidrash Hagodol, founded in 1852, established a talmud
torah (supplementary Jewish school) for the instruction of
children attending New York City public schools. This school
was, in the 1880s, to become a communally supported talmud
torah known as Mahazikai Talmud Torah.
As public schools, through exclusive state funding, came
to be viewed as superior educational settings, Jews (unlike
Catholics) increasingly opted for public education. For the
American-born generation of parents with children of school
age in the 1870s – by which time public education had become
well established throughout the country – public schooling
was a “given.” By 1875, no Jewish day schools remained in
operation.
Though, by 1860, there were 150,000 Jews in the United
States, there was no institution of higher Jewish learning. All
American rabbis were foreign-born and -trained immigrants.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 191