title: Education and Learning
Creators: name: Lohmann, Ingrid
Publisher: name: Institute for the History of the German Jews
Year: 2016
Subjects: subject: Education and Learning

description: SUMMARY The development of Jewish education and learning can be divided into three phases. The first of these stretches from the Early Modern period to the beginning of secularization during the age of Enlightenment (i. e. from ca. 1500 until 1800). During this period, the relevant institutions run by Jewish congregations were shaped exclusively by religion: While the cheder offered elementary level instruction in religion in Hebrew, the congregation’s own Talmud Torah schools educated poor children. The sons and sometimes also the daughters of wealthy families received lessons from private tutors. Girls probably received religious education mostly in the form of maternal instruction in the religious practices of domestic life. The Bet Ha-midrash, a study hall that was part of the synagogue, was a place of study and discussion of religious writings for adult men while the Yeshiva was a school where future teachers of religion and rabbis went to study the Talmud. Beginning with the adoption of the ideas of the European Enlightenment in education, the second phase falls into the age of secularization (from ca. 1800 until 1942). Education and learning, both central terms to the political philosophy of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, expressed a specific agenda: to fight superstition and irreligiousness, to liberate from religious paternalism, to reject the common method of religious instruction, to combine religious education with instruction in Hebrew, the vernacular language and the sciences, to teach morality, independent thinking, and the use of reason, and to adopt those convictions and attitudes necessary for a bourgeois profession, mindset and lifestyle. Berlin’s Jewish Free SchoolJüdische Freischule, whose mission was the “education of the human being” according to the abovementioned principles, was exemplary for this concept. At the same time, the process of secularization was characterized by controversies between the adherents to tradition and the proponents of modernization. Thus schools of opposing ideological and religious orientations were founded throughout the 19th century. Despite different attitudes towards the relation between science and religion in the education of young people, the school as an institution functioned as a lever for the Jews’ civic and legal emancipation well as their economic upward mobility in the 19th century; this was especially true in a merchant city such as Hamburg. Thus schools around the year 1800 and those of the 1930s were worlds apart in terms of their number and differentiation, the extent of education for boys and girls, teacher qualification and teaching methods, the relation between languages and sciences in the curriculum and even in terms of religious education. The forced closure of Jewish schools by the National Socialist regime marks the end of this period. The reestablishment of a system of Jewish education and learning in postwar Germany can be considered the beginning of the third phase. In 1966, the first elementary school was opened at the Philantropin, a Jewish school with a long tradition in Frankfurt am Main, followed by another one opened in Munich in 1969. Most of the new school openings occurred after 2000. Among those is Hamburg’s Joseph-Carlebach-School, located in the former Talmud Torah School at Grindelhof.