Nationalism, War and Jewish Education

From the Roman Empire to Modern Times

David Aberbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429779930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du peuple juif

Nationalism, War and Jewish Education explores historical circumstances leading to the emergence of a Jewish religious school system lasting to modern times and the process by which this system was broken down and adapted in secular form as Jewish nationalism grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Roman period, education became an essential part of rabbinic pacifist accommodation following Jewish defeats, while in the modern period, secular education was associated with nationalism and increasing militancy of emerging states. In both periods there was a revival of Hebrew and the creation of an educational system based on Hebrew texts. Both revivals were responses to anti-Semitism, which pushed large numbers of Jews away from assimilation into the dominant culture to a renewed Jewish national identity.

The book highlights the centrifugal and centripetal shifts in Jewish identity, from messianic militarism to pacifism and back. It shows how changes in Jewish education accompanied these shifts. While drawing on historical scholarship for background, this book is essentially a literary study, showing how literary changes at different times and places reflect historical, socio-psychological, economic and political change.

Nationalism, War and Jewish Education is original in showing how ancient Jewish education affected modern Jewish society, therefore it is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in Jewish history and literature, education, development studies and nationalism.

Part I

Nationalism and Jewish Education in the Roman Era

1 The early Roman background

Jewish education and Jewish/Greek relations

In the Jewish wars against Rome (66–73, 115–117, 132–135 CE), the Romans destroyed the Jewish state and the Temple, synagogues, schools, houses of study and libraries, tortured and executed teachers and scribes and enslaved or exiled many of the survivors; they ploughed Jerusalem over, wiped many Jewish villages off the map, eliminated the Jewish presence in southern Palestine and replaced it with a gentile population.¹ This onslaught had no parallel in Roman history.² Prior to 70 CE, Jewish school education for children seems not to have been widespread except possibly in Jerusalem.³ After 135 CE, the consensus grew among Jews in Eretz Yisrael and the diaspora that systematic school education was essential to Jewish survival; the teacher was, by default, a national leader, and the rabbinic class was committed totally to Jewish survival, to the preservation of Judaism within the protective confines of the Torah, and to Jewish religious education at all levels. Children’s school education was, in the end, the vital advance in Jewish life under Rome, an essential ingredient wherever Jews lived from then on. The rabbis were among the first to create a successful network of schools, offering religious education, free or at minimal charge, to all boys, regardless of their social standing and economic circumstances. Many of the rabbis were themselves poor. The record they left is the most complete by the poor in the ancient world – in the largest slave society in history, which valued above all the wealthy and the powerful.

In pre-modern agricultural societies, the ideal of mass education, however this is defined, was always constrained by social and economic realities. Roman/Jewish conflict held Jewish education back further, because of the havoc it caused, and especially as Jewish education prior to 138 CE was tangled up with anti-Roman militant messianism.⁴ In contrast, post-138 CE Jewish education depended on accommodation with Rome, making possible the editing of the Mishna. Much of the Mishna originates prior to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem: it rarely mentions teachers and schools.⁵ Talmudic discussions of the Mishna, in contrast, include much on teachers and schools.⁶ Prior to the wars of 66–135 CE, Jewish political and religious identity were tied together; by 135 CE, Jewish identity was defined almost exclusively in terms of religious culture. Jewish leaders were no longer kings, priests, politicians and warriors, but masters of halakha (law) and aggada (legend). Rome, by destroying the Temple in Jerusalem, the priesthood and ruling class, purging rivals to rabbinism – Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots – and by facilitating the split between Judaism and Christianity, also made imperial Graeco-Roman culture unpalatable to many Jews. The paradox of defeat was that it ‘led to the triumph of rabbinic Judaism’.⁷

The emergence of free Jewish education for boys can be seen as an indirect consequence of the Roman-Jewish wars and disillusionment with the Greek culture of the empire. The wars ended the internecine conflicts which were most tragically apparent in the civil war during the Great Revolt of 66–73 CE and made difficult, if not impossible, the creation of a widely acceptable system of education.⁸ A people who, as Josephus described the Jews in the Great Revolt, martyred themselves in a futile struggle against Rome,⁹ were not ready to create a stable educational system under Roman rule. After the wars with Rome, there was no return from exile and no rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple, as in the 6th century BCE. The Romans destroyed the Jews’ political independence and state-based national identity as well as their militant, messianic fervor, and banned Jewish proselytizing. They crushed and humiliated the Jews with a ferocity that largely determined the socio-psychological and religious character of the Jews and Judaism until modern times.¹⁰ These defeats contributed to the emergence of Judaeophobia as an important social and political force. Defeat effectively fixed, up to the modern period, the character of the Jews – especially those living in Christian countries – as an oppressed, exploited, semi-pariah people who, nevertheless, had a rich civilization. Defeat labeled the Jews as deviant and amplified their cultural-national awareness, driving them more than previously into their own culture and educational system, sharpening their sense of distinctiveness and separation from the imperial system and their perception of the external world as the hostile impure Other. Defeat also gave the Jews an ‘advantage’ they did not have previously: in their broken, impoverished condition, unable to continue fighting, they could adopt the pacifism enabling them to survive the empire. Defeat set the Jews up as a warning to Rome’s internal enemies: after 135 CE, as pointed out, there were no major internal revolts against the empire. Defeat inclined some Jews to a lachrymose psychology of grief for the lost homeland, even in periods when the Jews were not persecuted. Defeat was decisive in the evolution of the Mishna – the basis of the Talmud – and the traditions of Jewish law and homiletics (Midrash). Defeat gave unprecedented dominance to rabbis who saw education as essential to the survival of Judaism. Organized mass Jewish education from childhood to early manhood and beyond was now at the heart of a new spiritual resistance which fortified the Jews for what became, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, ‘an unbroken struggle against greater odds than any other human community has ever had to contend with’.¹¹

The threat to the survival of Judaism created a demand for school-based education, to preserve (or create) a unified religious-national identity.¹² The Jews retreated from politics and power. Judaism continued to evolve after 70 CE, and some voices opposed the rabbis. Yet, for most Jews until the modern period, education was the new Temple. Study of what was lost replaced what was lost.¹³ The new non-militant form of rabbinic Judaism centered on education could not be construed as a threat to Rome, to be crushed brutally as in the past; on the contrary, faute de mieux, it supported Roman rule.¹⁴ The center of Judaism shifted from the largely dejudaized south to the north, particularly the villages and towns of Galilee, where the Jordan gave a plentiful supply of water and made the land fertile. Here the exiled Judaeans found refuge, relative peace and prosperity. The tannaim guarded the sacred flame of the Hebrew language, the God-given language of instruction unstained by enemy use, unlike Greek, Latin and Aramaic.¹⁵ By the early 3rd century CE many synagogues were built, where prayer replaced Temple worship and schools could be set up at minimal cost.¹⁶ Diaspora Jewry gave much help, in funds and personnel. There was constant interaction between the Jews in the land of Israel and the diaspora, whose Jewish population even before 70 CE exceeded that of the land of Israel. For many Jews, the messianic aspiration, ‘From Zion shall come Torah’ (Isaiah 2: 3), could be a reality even and especially when militant messianism failed.

The evolution of Jewish education in the land of Israel and the diaspora, which underlies talmudic literature, was hard and drawn-out, with no Scriptural precedent or indeed authority. In the Hebrew Bible, no child is ever described going to school. The Bible has no record of schools and curricula, nor even a word for school: cheder, bet sefer, bet midrash, yeshiva, are all postbiblical, as is the unique elevation of study as a religious duty.¹⁷ Fathers are commanded to teach their children, and public readings from Scripture were instituted by Ezra the Scribe after the return from the Babylonian exile in the late 6th century BCE; but observance and ritual, not study, were the essence of Jewish life.¹⁸ In the Hebrew Bible, paucity of writing materials meant that education was chiefly oral. The commandments of the Torah were taught not just sitting at home but also in walking, lying down and getting up (Deuteronomy 6: 7). The essential requirements of faith were not the study of Holy Scripture but the love and fear of God:

‘And now, Israel, what does God want of you, but to fear him, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul’

(ibid., 10:12).

The prophets also stress moral qualities, never the rabbinic concept of Torah study (talmud Torah), as equal to other major commandments combined:¹⁹

‘What does the Lord demand of you – to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God’

(Micah 6: 8)

‘The righteous man shall live by his faith’

(Habakkuk 2: 4).

The rabbinic view on education differs from the Bible in its emphasis on study and on communal responsibility for the education of children. The emergence of an educational system viable for the long term, with schools, paid teachers and a set curriculum, came late to Judaism, after the Greeks, and probably influenced by the Greeks: by the end of the biblical era (c. 2nd century BCE) most Jews lived in a Greek-speaking world and themselves spoke Greek. The aim of mass school education may have entered Jewish life especially after the conquest of land of Israel by the Romans in 63 BCE, whether in imitation of or resistance against Hellenization.²⁰ Decrees on Jewish education are attributed to the president of the Sanhedrin, Simeon ben Shetach in the first century BCE and the High Priest in the Temple of Jerusalem, Joshua ben Gamla, before the Jewish revolt of 66–70 CE²¹ – evidence perhaps of temporary triumphs of hope over experience. After 138 CE, the economic conditions of the Jews improved as well as their political relations with Rome. Peace and relative prosperity allowed the Mishna to be edited (c. 200 CE) in Galilee and increased numbers of synagogues to be built in lieu of the Temple. Synagogues could be used as houses of study and school buildings, and the basic curriculum could be established: Bible, particularly the Five Books of Moses, for young children, Mishna for older children, and Gemara for mostly older, more advanced students.²² Under the leadership of the Patriarch, Judah Hanasi, editor of the Mishna, and his pupil and colleague Rabbi Hiyya, Jewish education was set up on a permanent basis, from generation to generation, to modern times.²³

As a result, the survival of Judaism and Jews through education is the central fact about Roman-Jewish history. Education in the land of Israel was closely linked to the shift from anti-Roman militarism to pacifism and cooperation, as well as to the growth of the economy in Galilee in the 2nd and early 3rd century, when the Jews, no longer in revolt against Rome, could finally benefit from the Pax Roma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Nationalism and Jewish Education in the Roman Era
• Part II From emancipation to political nationalism, 1789–1948
• Bibliography
• Index