World Union of Jewish Studies / האיגוד העולמי למדעי היהדות

/ ביבליוגרפיה של החינוך היהודי באירופה בשנים 1914–1962 JEWISH EDUCATION IN EUROPE — ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1914–1962 Author(s): URIAH Z. ENGELMAN and א' צ' אנגלמןSource: Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies / דברי הקונגרס העולמי למדעיכרך ב / VOLUME II ,היהדות, כרך דpp. 85-88 תשכ"ה / 1965Published by: World Union of Jewish Studies / האיגוד העולמי למדעי היהדותStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23528211 .

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JEWISH EDUCATION IN EUROPE — ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1914-1962

URIAH Z. ENGELMAN

JERUSALEM

We shall describe the annotated bibliography and by its light discuss several aspects illuminating the develop ment of Jewish Education in Europe during the period studied.

The bibliography contains close to 1,100 references to

annotated books, articles and reports bearing on dif

ferent phases of Jewish education in Europe, on all

types of Jewish schools: pre-school, elementary and

secondary, which functioned under congregational,

organizational and independent auspices, and under

various socio-political regimes.

The annotations, given in English, form the heart of

the bibliography. They stress the significant in ideas and in information contained in the references. Yet one must

note that the annotations do not exhaust the contents

of the bibliographical references, which are published

in their original languages. However, the name of the

author, the title of the article or publication and the

place and year of publication are given in English for

all references.

The bibliographical references have been classified in six major categories. The first category (IA, IB, IC) includes references to educational publications issued

by institutions, organizations and communities, by in

dividual schools and systems of schools. It also includes

reports on surveys, conferences, conventions, education

al studies and school censuses.

The references in this category were classified ac

cording to whether the publication was sponsored by

a world, regional or local organization. However, the

individual articles in these publications were classified

under the other pertinent categories in the subject areas

listed below.

The second category (IIA) includes references bearing

on the history of Jewish education in Europe as a whole

or on any European Jewish community, or on any

phase of European Jewish educational history.

The third category (IIB — subject areas 1-7) com

prises references to Jewish educational philosophies and

aims and their interaction with the educational philoso

phies and aims that prevailed at the time in general education. In this grouping are also included the re

ferences to sociological factors which helped shape the

substance and direction of Jewish education in Europe

in the last half-century.

In the fourth category (IIC — subject areas 1-6) are

grouped references bearing on school structure, enrol

ment (age, sex, school year), administration, auspices,

governing body, political status, budgets and various

other school statistics. Some of these references reflect

the increased interest in Jewish education in Western

Europe before, during and after the World War II period.

The references grouped under the third and fourth

categories were subdivided into seven and six subject

areas respectively. Five of these areas represent the major

religio-ideological and institutional orientations along

which European Jewry had evolved historically, and

which also characterized the European Jewish commu

nity during the period studied : 1. traditional, Orthodox ;

2. nationalist, Hebrew; 3. Zionism, Keren Kayemeth,

Palestine, the State of Israel; 4. Jewish secular and

Yiddishist education; 5. Jewish schools in Communist countries. The sixth and seventh areas deal with school

systems of multiple ideologies, general Jewish educa

tional pedagogy and psychology or general administra

tive matters.

The fifth category (IID — subject areas 1-4) contains

references discussing the many and various curricula,

courses of studies, specific objectives, methodologies,

extracurricular activities and languages of instruction

used in the different types of schools and school systems

according to the interplay of the philosophical, historical

and sociological factors operative at the time in the

general and Jewish communities.

The fifth category also includes reference to text-books

(also lack of text-books) and other educational materials

in all subjects that were taught in the European Jewish

schools. They point to the evolution of the text-book in

Europe from the aleph-beis blatel to the briefenshteller,

the alphonim (ABCs), the modern illustrated primer, the

* The annotated bibliography was prepared by the author

for the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University

of Jerusalem. Parts were presented to the 1965 World Con

gress of Jewish Studies. For a more detailed discussion of the

bibliography see Introductory Notes; Jewish Education in

Europe 1914-1962 — Annotated bibliography (specimen pages)

by Uriah Z. Engelman, (Jerusalem, July, 1965).

85

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86 URIAH Z. ENGELMAN

graded reader, the ' ChrestomaticC, and the specialized

modern school texts, such as the texts for language and

literature, history, customs and ceremonies, Jewish

values, etc.

The sixth category (HE) contains references to teach

ers : the professional qualifications, experience and eco

nomic positions of the teachers in the European Jewish

Schools, including facilities for teacher education, and

programmes for in-service teacher training.

To make the material more readily usable, all re

ferences under all categories were specified by the

country and city in which they originated.

Use of classification categories — The aforementioned

classification categories are not mutually exclusive. Most

references to books, articles and reports touch on

several aspects of Jewish education. This made it

difficult to decide under which one category to classify

each item. The alternative to classifying each reference

under only one category would have been to classify

under as many categories as each case would call for.

But this would have greatly increased the dimensions of

the task at hand. It is planned, however, that the in

dexes which will make up a part of this bibliographical study will reveal to the reader other possible references

which were not indicated in the classification.

The value and uses of this bibliography — Research of

modern Jewish education suffers from lack of depth.

The writer on any Jewish educational topic, even if he

is a trained researcher, has to draw mainly on his

professional experience and on the materials appearing

in the current literature of his country. He may fail to

draw on developments in similar and related fields in

his and other countries for the lack of annotated

bibliographies on Jewish education organized by count

ries, years, areas of interest, and adequately indexed.

This lack deprives the educator of the knowledge of new

materials, new experience, new insights which might

shed light on, and offer new approaches to, the problem

he is studying. As a consequence, much of the discussion

of modern Jewish educational problems is conducted

on a horizontal plane.

It is intended that the publication of this annotated

bibliography, followed by annotated bibliographies for the other countries of the diaspora, will constitute a

major research tool in studying in depth Jewish edu

cation in the diaspora.

The annotated bibliography will be of value not only

to the student of Jewish education, but also to the

student of European Jewish political and social history.

The latter may gain new understanding when hitherto

unsuspected facts are revealed. Thus, for instance, the

student of the struggle between the adherents of Hebrew

and Yiddish education will gain a striking new insight into the language problem as he reads the declaration of

the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers' Orga

nization Bund of Warsaw, suggesting that the issue of

whether Hebrew or Yiddish should be the language of

the Jewish school be submitted to the decision of the

International Proletariat. Or the memorandum which

was submitted to Stalin by a distinguished group of

Russian scientists and artists pleading for the recognition

of the Hebrew language as a modern tongue.

Some of the material recorded by this bibliography is

relatively rare, and is found only in old, not readily

accessible magazines, some of which are hectographed

from written scripts.

And now I shall attempt to outline briefly, with the

aid of the annotated references, some of the develop

ments which shaped Jewish education in Europe during

the period 1914-1962. Some of these developments

caused a revolutionary change in the objectives of

Jewish education both in Eastern and Western Europe.

The references which discuss these changes are grouped

in the category IIB (subject areas 1 through 7) and

category IIA.

Among the factors which influenced Jewish education,

mentioned in these references, were: the changes in the

general and Jewish socio-economic, political and religio

cultural enviroments; the rise of general and Jewish

nationalism; the rise of Jewish rationalism; the emer

gence of the Jewish socialist labour movement in

Europe and its incorporation of the Yiddish language

and the Yiddish school as major tenets in its proletarian

outlook and programme; the emergence of the emanci

pated East European people with their incipient national

and local governments, and their new educational sys

terns of which they were very jealous; the head-on clash

between these factors ; and lastly, the advent of Nazism

and atheistic Bolshevism. The latter equated Jewish

education with religious education and as such persecu

ted it ruthlessly.

Jewish education in Eastern Europe prior to the 20th

century meant the study of sacred texts. But as commerce

expanded, there was added to the curriculum, here and

there, the study of arithmetic, the vernacular and some

other secular subjects.

The big change in the objectives of Jewish education in Eastern Europe came with the Haskala, which

shattered the Jewish self-sufficient, intellectually narrow,

pietistic environment, spearheaded the revival of the

Hebrew language and literature, and accelerated the rise

of Jewish nationalism. This was not the case in the

Western European Jewish communities.

The Western European Jewish schools, though con

ducted under Jewish auspices and teaching Jewish

subjects, were in reality, as some references point out,

adjusting and assimilating their students to the culture

of a non-Jewish environment, and for ultimate ab

sorption in it.

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JEWISH EDUCATION IN EUROPE — ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1914-1962 87

A sharp break in the objectives of the West European

Jewish school came with the Nazis. The West European

Jewish educational objectives of assimilation and ad

justment proved utterly ineffective against Elitler's offen

sive to reduce the Jewish child to a pariah status. The

objectives were now to give the child a deep pride in his

Jewishness and a vision of a new and grand purpose in

life in Israel. The impact of these developments on European Jewish

education is told partly by references of the second

category (IIA) and also by references in the fifth

category (IID — areas 1 through 4) which describe the

prevailing Yiddish and Hebrew school curricula and the

changes they underwent in the past half century. These

curricula, some references point out, reflect the double

Yiddish and Hebrew language stream which fed both

the Jewish religious and the Jewish secular culture of

Europe. But of the two languages, a reference notes,

'history has willed that Hebrew be the main medium of

the Jewish Renaissance', and the reference objectively

concludes that 'there is not in this phenomenon an iota

of insincerity'. The references of category IIB area 4, and category

IIC area 4 trace the developments of Yiddish education

as a folk movement from the illegal workers' school

associations, the socialist Jargon school circles in which

Yiddish with arithmetic and other subjects were clandes

tinely taught, and down to the modern folkshule. From

modest beginnings there developed within a generation

networks of modern Yiddish kindergartens and Yiddish

elementary and secondary schools. The rapid develop

ment of the Yiddish school movement was probably an

expression of the democratization of Jewish community

life as well as an indication of the strength of Jewish folk life.

Right from the early emergence of the Yiddish school

movement, Yiddishist educators and lay leaders chal

lenged the supremacy of Hebrew. Yiddish European

leaders and writers rejected Hebrew as the national

language and asserted with deep conviction and great

fervour that only through the cultivation of Yiddish and

the Yiddish school would the Jewish people gain personal

dignity and survive as a nation. In the words of a Shalom

Ash reference, 'only the Yiddish school is capable of

saving the Jewish people from degradation and Jewish

life from extinction'.

Jewish education in Eastern Europe, both the Hebrew

and the Yiddish branches, during and after the First

World War tended religiously and ideologically toward

separatism and organizationally toward consolidation

and centralization. As a consequence, Jewish educational

initiative was taken over by specialized organizations

such as Zycho, organized by Bund and left Poalei Zion;

Agudath Israel ultra-religious with Horeb schools for

boys and Beth Jacob schools for girls; Mizrahi Yavneh

schools whose aim was to achieve integration of re

ligious and nationalist elements in education; and

Tarbut: extreme Hebrew nationalist schools under the

auspices of the General Zionists.

The bibliography tells of the legal struggle Jews

carried on in Poland, Latvia, Rumania, Estonia, Li

thuania and the Ukraine, during and after the First

World War, for cultural autonomy and for equal

citizenship rights in education : the right to conduct their own educational systems; government financing of their

schools on a par with other non-government schools; the acceptance of Hebrew or Yiddish, or both, as the

language of instruction; and academic recognition of

their high school diploma for university admission (Category IIB area 4, and Category IIC area 4 and

area 6).

The bibliography records that a lively discussion was carried on in the early decades of this century whether

the revival of the Hebrew language would bring about

the revival of Hebrew culture and the survival of the

Jewish people.

Bialik, in a learned, long essay, maintained that

Western Jewry was dead because it had forsaken the

Hebrew language. Hayim Greenberg retorted that the

cause of the death of the Western Jewry was not the

loss of the Hebrew language. The demise of Hebrew in

the Western countries was a natural consequence of life

in the diaspora. The fate of the Hebrew culture and the

Hebrew language which served it as a means of com

munication would depend not on the diaspora, but on

the fate of political Zionism with its wide social vision and its far seeing conception of Jewish history.

Zionism — According to the annotated bibliography,

Zionism was before and after the First World War a

major spiritual force in the development of modern

Hebrew education in the countries of Europe. Zionism's

contribution to the development of Jewish education in

Europe calls for a special documented study. Here I

shall mention but two or three items bearing on the

subject. At the first World Zionist congresses, appeals

were made to 'establish institutions for the instruction in

the Hebrew language'. In response to the appeals the

associations Ivriah and Hovevei Sfat Ever were organized

for the promotion of Hebrew education. In 1902, at the

Minsk Zionist Conference, Ahad Ha-Am proclaimed the

famous motto 'capture the schools'. In the spirit of this

challenge, in many cities local Zionist groups became

active in establishing Hebrew schools. At the initiative

of Poland's National Zionist Organization, the first Hebrew central, coordinating, standard-setting and

supervisory organization, Tarbut, was formed in 1921,

and functioned as an umbrella organization for the

Hebrew school movement of Poland. In these Tarbut

affiliated schools, the Jewish renaissance found its

complete expression. The schools were conducted en

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URIAH Z. ENGELMAN

tirely in Hebrew and the students and the teachers were

deeply a/y'a-oriented and committed. The degree of

their commitment is indicated by the annotated re

ferences telling of schools declining because the teachers

and principals had left for Palestine.

Yet despite the early Zionist active interest in Hebrew

education, only at the 19th Zionist Congress (in 1936)

was a resolution finally adopted, against the opposition

of the Orthodox delegates, to organize a department

for education and culture for the diaspora. The Orthodox

delegates did not wish to involve the Zionist organization

in any educational and cultural programmes for fear

they would not be carried out in the spirit of strict

Orthodoxy.

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