Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 30; Jewish Education in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Commentators like Nathan Nata Hannover and Abraham Joshua Heschel have famously extolled the East European Jewish emphasis on education. “Throughout the dispersion of Israel there was nowhere so much learning as in the land of Poland,” wrote Hannover in the wake of the 1648 massacres. In Eastern Europe, recalled Heschel in the wake of the Holocaust, even poor Jews were like “intellectual magnates [who] possess a wealth of ideas and of knowledge, culled from little-known passages in the Talmud.” While such posttrauma depictions tend to elide acute problems like limited educational opportunities for women and the widening traditionalist-secularist divide during the twentieth century, there is little doubt that East European Jews placed education at the top of their value system. Despite the centrality of education, argues Eliyana Adler in her introduction to Polin 30, it continues to be treated by scholars “separately or as a symptom or effect rather than a cause of change and development.” The contributors to Polin 30, in contrast, “demonstrate that there is much more to be discovered and provide models of how to integrate the study of education into Jewish history” (p. 6). Indeed, the contributors provide rich insights into the crucial yet underdeveloped subject. What strikes the reader most is the sheer variety of educational experiments during Eastern and East Central European Jewish modernity. Education helps explain the dynamism of these communities on the eve of the Holocaust. As Geoffrey Claussen shows, even traditionalist Jewish education experienced disruption and fracture as new musar yeshivas added secular studies and intensive ethics to the older Talmudo-centric curriculum. The next contributors address Hungarian regions, demonstrating that the secularist-traditionalist divide in education occurred there earlier. These chapters are followed by valuable contributions to the study of Jewish education in the late 19th-century-Tsarist Empire. Vassili Schedrin provides a masterful essay on how the emergence of Russian Jewish historiography was an essentially pedagogical undertaking that sought to inculcate a sense of the “pathos” and a “national Jewish component with universal human civilization” by including rebels and heretics alongside paragons of piety (p. 126). Victoria Khiterer addresses Jewish education in the fraught case of Kiev, highlighting the typical imperial Catch-22: “when the Russification desired by tsarist authorities succeeded among wealthy Jewish circles, the Russian government reversed its policy” by means of higher quotas aimed at “preventing an influx of Jews into secondary schools and universities.” As restrictions on Jewish schools remained in place, “Kiev’s Jews were deprived of the right to either Jewish or general education” (p. 178). Brian Horowitz revisits debates about the heder