Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History (Global Histories of Education) 3031349253, 9783031349256

Table of contents :
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 The Structure of the Book
Chapter 2: Actors and Networks
2.1 Networks of a Transnational People
2.2 Actors and Networks Directly Involved in Education
2.3 Actors and Networks with an Indirect Connection to Education
Transnational Actors and Education in the Rural Space
2.4 Summary
Chapter 3: The Educational Institutions and Pedagogical Approaches
3.1 The Educational Space
The Entangled Architecture of Modern Jewish Elementary Schools in the Urban Space
The Entangled Architecture of Schools in the Rural Space
From Asile d’enfants to Hebrew Kindergarten
School for the Blind
Secondary Education
Teacher Training
Teachers’ and Kindergarten Teachers’ Training
The Hebrew Seminary
The Levinsky Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary
The Vocational Agricultural School
3.2 The Pedagogical Approaches
Lending and Borrowing of the Naturalistic Humanistic Approach to Education
The Natural Method of Language Instruction Based on Local Conditions
3.3 Summary
Chapter 4: The Portrait of the Graduate
4.1 The Portrait of Modern Jewish Graduate
The Figure of the Evelina de Rothschild School Graduate
The Figure of the AIU Graduate
The Figure of the Hilfsverein Network’s Graduate
4.2 The Portrait of the Hebrew Graduate
The Portrait of the Hebrew Graduate Farmer
Hebrew City Youths
The Formal Layer
The Informal Layer
4.3 Summary
Chapter 5: Between Leadership and Caring
5.1 Not Just a Teacher—The Teacher as an Agent of Culture, a Social Leader, and an Initiator
5.2 Teaching Methods of the “Good Hebrew Teacher”
The Professional Identity of the Hebrew Teacher
The Hebrew Teacher as an Initiator
5.3 Three Models of the Woman Teacher
The Unmarried Female Teacher
The Professional Woman
The New Hebrew Female Teacher
5.4 Summary
Chapter 6: The Body as an Educational Object
6.1 The School as a Medical Site
The School as a Provider of Preventative and Therapeutic Health Services
Public Health versus Pedagogical Considerations
The School as a Branch of the Hygiene Movement
6.2 Corporeal Activity
The Diffusion of the Concept of Turnen
Strengthening the Body
6.3 Summary
Conclusions
Bibliography
Archives
Contemporary Newspaper [Hebrew]
Teacher’s Textbooks and Memories
Books and Articles
Index

Citation preview

GLOBAL HISTORIES OF EDUCATION

Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History

Talia Tadmor-Shimony Nirit Raichel

Global Histories of Education Series Editors

Christian Ydesen Department of Culture and Learning Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark Eugenia Roldan Vera Cinvestav-Coapa Mexico City, Estado de México, Mexico Klaus Dittrich Literature and Cultural Studies Education University of Hong Kong Tai Po, Hong Kong Linda Chisholm Education Rights and Transformation University of Johannesburg Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

We are very pleased to announce the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. The International Standing Conference for the History of Education has organized conferences in the field since 1978. Thanks to our collaboration with Palgrave Macmillan we now offer an edited book series for the publication of innovative scholarship in the history of education. This series seeks to engage with historical scholarship that analyzes education within a global, world, or transnational perspective. Specifically, it seeks to examine the role of educational institutions, actors, technologies as well as pedagogical ideas that for centuries have crossed regional and national boundaries. Topics for publication may include the study of educational networks and practices that connect national and colonial domains, or those that range in time from the age of Empire to decolonization. These networks could concern the international movement of educational policies, curricula, pedagogies, or universities within and across different socio-political settings. The ‘actors’ under examination might include individuals and groups of people, but also educational apparatuses such as textbooks, built-environments, and bureaucratic paperwork situated within a global perspective. Books in the series may be single authored or edited volumes. The strong transnational dimension of the Global Histories of Education series means that many of the volumes should be based on archival research undertaken in more than one country and using documents written in multiple languages. All books in the series will be published in English, although we welcome English-language proposals for manuscripts which were initially written in other languages and which will be translated into English at the cost of the author. All submitted manuscripts will be blind peer-reviewed with editorial decisions to be made by the ISCHE series editors who themselves are appointed by the ISCHE Executive Committee to serve three to five year terms. Full submissions should include: (1) a proposal aligned to the Palgrave Book Proposal form (downloadable here); (2) the CV of the author(s) or editor(s); and, (3) a cover letter that explains how the proposed book fits into the overall aims and framing of the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. Proposals and queries should be addressed to [email protected]. Preliminary inquiries are welcome and encouraged.

Talia Tadmor-Shimony • Nirit Raichel

Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History

Talia Tadmor-Shimony The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Sede-Boqer Campus 84990, Israel

Nirit Raichel Kinneret Academic College Jordan Valley Galilee, Israel

ISSN 2731-6408     ISSN 2731-6416 (electronic) Global Histories of Education ISBN 978-3-031-34925-6    ISBN 978-3-031-34926-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration © Klaus Ohlenschlaeger / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 The Structure of the Book  7 2 Actors and Networks 11 2.1 Networks of a Transnational People 12 2.2 Actors and Networks Directly Involved in Education 14 2.3 Actors and Networks with an Indirect Connection to Education 27 2.4 Summary 32 3 The  Educational Institutions and Pedagogical Approaches 43 3.1 The Educational Space 44 3.2 The Pedagogical Approaches 74 3.3 Summary 90 4 The  Portrait of the Graduate107 4.1 The Portrait of Modern Jewish Graduate108 4.2 The Portrait of the Hebrew Graduate125 4.3 Summary141 5 Between  Leadership and Caring151 5.1 Not Just a Teacher—The Teacher as an Agent of Culture, a Social Leader, and an Initiator152 5.2 Teaching Methods of the “Good Hebrew Teacher”154 v

vi 

Contents

5.3 Three Models of the Woman Teacher159 5.4 Summary168 6 The  Body as an Educational Object175 6.1 The School as a Medical Site176 6.2 Corporeal Activity189 6.3 Summary197 Conclusions205 Bibliography211 Index231

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 1905, David Hayoun, a Jewish teacher certified by the French Ministry of Education, arrived in the moshava (rural settlements, singular— moshava; plural- moshavot) of Petach Tikva in Ottoman Palestine.1 Hayoun was, until then, what Rebecca Rogers calls “a traveling teacher.”2 Born in Damascus, he attended a school of the transnational network Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in his hometown and continued his studies at the network’s teacher training institute, the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), in Paris. After completing his training, he moved to Tunis to serve as a teacher at the local AIU network school. A year later, he was hired by the Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA, a transnational network) to serve as principal of the elementary school in a moshava in Ottoman Palestine. While Yiddish was the native tongue for most students, Arabic, seasoned with Turkish, the language of the authorities, was the language on the street. Hayoun, although a French speaker, fought to make Hebrew the language of study at his school. Hayoun’s efforts in this regard followed from his membership in another network, one of Hebrew-speaking teachers—the Hebrew Teachers. Most of the network’s members felt at home with more than one language, having worked in several cultural spaces and crossed various geographical and national boundaries. They

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3_1

1

2 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

had immigrated to a different political and geographical space to design a new society, with education as its backbone. Hayoun’s school was a rural institution, but its curricula, like that of urban schools in Germany and France, included eight years of study. His curriculum was similar to that of the AIU network and included music, art, and gymnastics. It also included a new subject, introduced by the teachers native to Eastern Europe who had read Pestalozzi’s theory in German and adapted it to local conditions—namely, Anschauung, which translates into English as sense-impression or observation.3 This intersection, wherein various actors entangled pedagogical theories with cultural models, exemplified Jewish educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine, which are at the core of this study, spanning the years from the mid-­ nineteenth century through the end of the Ottoman era. Alongside Hayoun’s school, other educational institutions also served as a “meeting place” for introducing the new Hebrew-national culture of the land to pedagogical theories that had been circulating among networks of European actors in Ottoman Palestine throughout the nineteenth century. Modern and Hebrew education in Ottoman Palestine has been researched by a few historians of education from different angles. Most of the studies focused on Hebrew education only. Rachel Elboim Dror published the first fundamental macro study.4 Her study examined the traditional and modern Jewish education in Ottoman Palestine and emphasized the organization and structure of the various Jewish educational institutions and it is based on a chronological axis. It provides data and primary sources of Jewish educational institutions. Another important macro study is by Yuval Dror, which, unlike Elboim Dror’s investigation, focuses on the policy of modern Jewish education.5 His research focuses on two central issues: The education policy and the curriculum of Hebrew-speaking education. A regional study focusing on the Hebrew rural schools in the north of the country (Galilee) in different aspects is the study of Yair Zeltenreich.6 His research focuses on the physical and budgetary infrastructures and especially on the emotional world of the teachers. Studies dealing with the character of Hebrew school graduates in the Ottoman period were written by Nirit Raichel.7 An introductory survey about the Hilfsverein network was written by Moshe Rinot fifty years ago. His research covered the development of the schools of the H network in Ottoman Palestine.8 Descriptive studies, which deal with the biographies of preschool teachers, are the studies of

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

Tzipi Schori Robin.9 Other descriptive studies that focused on Hebrew-­ speaking teachers are Shlomo Carmies’ work.10 A different kind of study is Reot Green’s, which discusses the architectural aspect of the Jewish educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine.11 This book, which discusses the transition of educational concepts from Europe to Ottoman Palestine is based on and corresponds with various studies that examined modern education among European Jews. The research in modern education among European Jews in the long nineteenth century is classified according to geographical and political standards. The beginning of modern Jewish education started with the Jewish Enlightenment movement at the end of the eighteenth century in German-speaking countries, whose distinguished researcher is Shmuel Feiner.12 The educated German-speaking Jews transferred the principles of modern education to German Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, especially in the Tsarist Empire. Several significant studies discuss the formation of modern educational institutions among the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe, from which most of the teachers mentioned in this book grew. Shaul Stampfer describes the foundation of the modern school in German-speaking Jewish communities in the Baltic States during the first half of the nineteen century and explains the failure of the dramatic education intervention in Jewish education Russian Ministry of Education during the 1840s.13 The historian Ysrael Bartel explains that the new laws that proposed benefits to Jews with a secondary or university education in 1873 attracted Jewish students to schools providing general education.14 Discussion on the modern Jewish curriculum and the new Jewish teacher has been made by Moti Zelkin.15 A formative research that discusses the Jewish girl’s schools in Tsarist Russia is Eliyana Adler’s book.16 A groundbreaking book on the academic education of Jewish Eastern European women is Harriet Freidenreich’s study.17The most significant Jewish educational network was Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), which Aron Rodrigue has examined.18 His research introduces primary resources, including curricula data. The contribution to this book is three folds -conceptual, methodological and the scope of the topics covered. On the conceptual level, the book is an example of a case study using the research category of transnational history to explain the formation of modern schools in a territory that lacks modern education. The emergence of modern Jewish education in Ottoman Palestine was a distinct product of European actors and networks’ infiltration of educational concepts due to several unique elements. The Jewish people are essentially transnational and have developed

4 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

transnational action strategies. One of them was the activity of transnational networks and actors. The other factor is the important place of education in shaping reality and the Jewish and Hebrew discourse in Ottoman Palestine. The teachers of their various currents saw education as a revolutionary ideological tool that sought to create a new society. The contribution of this study is on the methodological level. The area of​​ Ottoman Palestine was almost devoid of modern education, so it is possible to examine the ways of transferring educational concepts. Historians can diagnose the starting point and locate the biographies of all the actors, their journeys, and activity patterns. The third contribution is the scope of the topics covered, which discusses several themes, such as molding five portraits of modern Jewish and Hebrew education graduates. Each graduate figure represents the degree of transferability and adaptation of pedagogical ideas that transferred from Europe. Another significant issue is the function of the school as a medical site due to the shortage of public health policy. The book explores the circulation of European femininity manifested in three models of the Jewish woman teacher: the unmarried female teacher, the professional female teacher, and the revolutionary female teacher who saw education as a national mission as well as a gender-blind profession. The present study examines the essence of this entanglement, and the means by which it came into being within the educational framework, through the perspective of transnational history, which Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake describe as “the study of the ways in which past lives and events have been shaped by processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of nation states history seek to understand ideas, things, people, and practices which have crossed national boundaries.”19 Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs have added that while transnational history refers to a history that crosses boundaries and considers state and non-state actors, it does not deconstruct the nation. Thus, it presupposes its existence and studies its development as a global phenomenon but contextualizes it in a set of transnational relations, entanglements, and dependencies.20 Transnational history has been discussed in many and varied ways, which Roldán Vera and Fuchs classify into five different types of narratives: narratives of divergence, narratives of convergence, narratives of contagion, narratives of systems, and narratives of entanglement. The last category, comprising narratives that “attempt to show the continuous influence exerted by transnational actors, phenomena and processes upon the dynamics of the ‘national’,” is apt to our study.21

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

Three interwoven issues surface throughout this study, which addresses them using the methodological tools of different research fields. One issue centers on how pedagogical theories were transferred from Europe to Ottoman Palestine by the actors who adopted them and the networks both formal and informal, that formed around them. This issue is examined using the research tools of international interactions and networks of educators. Notably, our study also relates to “rank and file” teachers, not only to prominent ones, given the low numbers of teachers in the new location. Also of note is the wide range of active networks at the time, as Jewish life was by nature transnational. The second issue is the entanglement of various educational viewpoints and the meetings between the various actors. This entanglement was especially complex because it resulted from the interaction between immigrant teachers from several cultural milieus in a land with no functioning educational system. We must note and clarify the difference between this case study and studies on the relations between a metropolis and its colonies, which form part of the field of research on colonial and imperial histories of education.22 One of the characteristics of this area of research is the absence of the nation-state; however, in the case before us there are no reciprocal metropolis-­ colony relations of the sort described in Barnita Bagchi’s research on education in India or in research dealing with schools in Algeria.23 This type of power relationship did not exist in Ottoman Palestine, where the privileges of European educational actors resulted from the Capitulations—that is, additional rights granted by the Ottoman authorities to the European powers. These included extensive trading rights and legal rights granted to non-Muslim foreign nationals native to those powers. Citizens of those powers would be subject to the authority of the consul and the laws of the country represented by the consul, rather than Ottoman laws. Thus, the Capitulations became a process whereby foreign non-Muslim citizens residing in the Ottoman Empire came under the protection of European nations and were subject to European rather than Ottoman law.24 We must note that the Hebrew teachers’ network members, most of whom were born in Eastern Europe, were members of a disadvantaged group and suffered legal discrimination in their native land. Another important characteristic of the research on the histories of education in the imperial era is the educators’ “civilizing” mission. From the mid-nineteenth century, this theme characterized various actors and networks that sought to bring Western culture to native societies, which

6 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

they perceived as failing.25 Jewish nonprofit and voluntary sector actors saw themselves as spreading the civilizing mission of European bourgeois values, especially the ENIO, which sought to transfer the Third Republic’s cultural codes. At the same time, other actors, the Hebrew teachers, who sought to adopt certain aspects of the civilizing mission such as hygiene, yet rejected other cultural aspects, were also active. The resulting opposition occasionally led to conflicts and power struggles, one of the most public and stormiest being the 1913 language war in the educational institutions. The third issue entails the adoption and adaptation of pedagogical theories to the local realities of Jewish education institutions in Ottoman Palestine, which forms part of the research on the diffusion pedagogical knowledge.26 Gita Steiner-Khamsi, who calls this process lending and borrowing, describes it in terms of three secondary stages—active reception, implementation, and indigenization, which entails reference to an external, local modification of a pedagogical theory and its gradual metamorphosis into a native model.27 One such example is what Noah Sobe terms the process of “Balkanizing John Dewey” in the period between the two World Wars. Dewey never visited Yugoslavia, but his views featured in the Serbo-Croatian discourse. The starting point of Sobe’s research was that the “Yugoslavian Dewey” (i.e., the pedagogy of progressive education according to Dewey’s teachings) is not identical to the American Dewey, but is, rather, the result of many intersecting points of intercultural influences. The question that arises, explains Sobe, is the routes by which the American Dewey “traveled” to Yugoslavia. The meeting between Yugoslavian educators and Dewey occurred via a “third party”—namely the pedagogical circles of Geneva and Czechoslovakia.28 In contrast to Sobe’s research, which focuses on one educational approach and its circulation, this book examines the transmission, circulation, and adaptation of various theories that reached Ottoman Palestine from Europe, transferred by actors who crossed countries’ borders, cultural spheres, and transnational networks. The local conditions of Ottoman Palestine provide a historical laboratory of sorts, allowing us to examine the stages of transnationalism’s impact on Jewish education and the process by which transfer and adaptation produced modern Hebrew (in the sense of Hebrew-national) and Jewish education.

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

1.1   The Structure of the Book The structure of the book -The Growth of Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History makes it possible to understand its goals. The book introduces the network and the actors who drove the growth of modern Jewish and Hebrew education. Later, the book turns to the educational institutions established by the networks and actors and the pedagogical approaches that had been adapted to the local reality. In the next step, the book focuses on the portraits of the graduates of various educational institutions. The book addresses the teachers themselves and focuses on the ways in which the teachers created the various portraits. Two guiding principles were leadership on the one hand and caring on the other. The book ends with a reference to the educational discourse on the students’ bodies and health. The book consists of five chapters following the introduction, and each chapter contains several subchapters. The second chapter, titled Actors and Networks, discusses the Actor-­ network theory used to study transnational phenomena in education. The initial conditions under which Jewish and Hebrew education developed in Ottoman Palestine and the extent of its development provide us with information that encompasses all the actors and the networks they developed and employed. This chapter classified the networks and the actors to direct and indirect involvement in education. The third chapter titled the Educational Institutions and Pedagogical Approaches that deals with the development and growth of schools resulted from the diffusion of educational approaches, the community of students, instructional methods, and curricular objectives. The first chapter discusses the education space and the various educational institutions’ administration. The second subchapter deals with the expansion of the Western-Central European curriculum and its transfer and adaptation to the local conditions in Ottoman Palestine according to the lending and borrowing approach. The fourth chapter ‘The Portrait of the Graduate,’ discusses the transfer of the various pedagogic approaches to the local reality of Ottoman Palestine which generated several examples of graduates of the educational institutions. The degree of transferability and adaptation led, in general, to two main figures of graduate: the modern Jewish figure of graduate and the formation of the Hebrew graduate. Each figure’s graduate includes several sub-figures. The portrait of the Jewish figure of the graduate

8 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

reflects the adaption of the three European Jewish networks to the idea of the civilizing mission of European The Hebrew educational institutions sought to create or shape the new Hebrew graduate to replace their parents’ generation in Eastern Europe by molding the figure of the Hebrew urban graduate and the rural farmer. The fourth chapter, Between Leadership and Caring, focuses on the teachers, who were the main actors in a multi-tonal process involving the transfer of cultures, educational concepts, and pedagogical methods. Many teachers discussed the subject of what is the proper image of a good teacher. Simultaneously, many defined themselves as committed to social, cultural, and national missions. Two guiding principles were leadership on the one hand and caring on the other. Those professional beliefs were the outcome of their personal and educational biographies. They were born in different countries and attended different types of schools. Another angle of debate on the teacher as a social phenomenon is the topic of women teachers. The study of three models of women teachers examines the implications for women’s place in society. The six chapter, The Body as an Educational Object, discusses place of the students’ body in the educational discourse in the Jewish and Hebrew schools. Educational actors have to address the multiple agendas regarding the functions and regulation of the body. In the eyes of medicalization, the body has become a social problem. In the eyes of scientists advocating Darwinism, genetics versus environment, the human body has become a biological individual belonging to a race. Advocates of racial theories, the eugenics movement, and nationalism have seen the body as an essential element in their argumentation. Educators believe that strengthening the body through exercise is necessary for the development of the student on the one hand and an answer to social and personal illness on the other hand. The first subchapter in this chapter discusses the school regulation of the body and the medicalization of the educational site and the second chapter deals with the corporeal activity in Jewish schools.

Notes 1. David Hayoun’s Diary, file 7.33/9, Aviezer Yellin Archive of Jewish Education (AJE). 2. Rebecca Rogers, “Conversations about the Transnational: Reading and Writing the Empire in the History of Education,” in The Transnational in the History of Education Concepts and Perspectives, ed. Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 2019), 101–124.

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

3. David Hayoun, in 100 Years of Schools from Their Establishment by the Baron and the JCA-PJCA Company, ed. Baruch Oren (Petach Tikva: Petach Tikva Municipality Department of Education, 1985), 14 [Hebrew]. 4. Elboim-Dror Rachel, Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel, Volume 1, 1854-1914 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1986) [Hebrew]. 5. Dror Yuval, National Education’ through Mutually Supportive Devices: A Case Study (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). 6. Seltenreich Yair, People from Here: Education and Educators in Galilee Moshavot During the Yishuv Era, 1882-1939 (Jerusalem and Ramat Gan: Yad Ben-Zvi and Bar-Ilan Press, 1914 [Hebrew]: Seltenreich Yair, “The Solitude of Rural Teachers: Hebrew Teachers in Galilee Moshavot at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 5 (2015): 1–16. 7. Raichel Nirit, “The Israeli Pupil at the Beginning of Hebrew Education: The Reality Between Two Ideal Images,” Zemanim no. 72 (2000): 65–75 [Hebrew]. Raichel Nirit, “The Design of the ‘New Hebrew’ between Image and Reality: A Portrait of the Student in Eretz Yisrael at the Beginning of ‘Hebrew Education’ (1882–1948),” Israel Affairs 21, no. 4 (2015): 633–647. 8. Moshe Rinot, Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden in Creation and Struggle (Jerusalem Hebrew university, Ministry of Education and Culture and Haifa University, 1971) [Hebrew]. 9. Shehory-Rubin Zipora, “Hebrew Kindergarten Teachers during the First and Second Aliyot,” Dor LeDor 19 (2002): 153–194 [Hebrew]. 10. Haramati Shlomo, First Three Teachers (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1985), 48–55 [Hebrew] Haramati Shlomo, The Pioneer Teachers (Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 2000), 67–70 [Hebrew]. 11. Gordon Re’ut, “Education, Architecture, Society: The History of School Construction in Israel” Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2013) [Hebrew]. 12. Shmuel Feiner, “Educational Pragmatism and Social Ideals: The Janisch Freyschule in Berlin 1778-1825,” Zion 64 (1995): 393–424 [Hebrew]. 13. Shaul Stampfer. “Traditional Education and the Appearance of New Types of Schools before the First World War.” In Sirutavicius, Vladas, et al. The History of Jews in Lithuania From the Middle Ages to the 1990s. Edited by Martyn Housden and Gustavs Strenga, (Schoningh: Brill, 2019), 202–215. 14. Bartal Israel, Cossack and Bedouin: Land and People in Jewish Nationalism (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2007) [Hebrew]. 15. Mordekhai Zalḳin, Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth Century Eastern Europe : the School as the Shrine of the Jewish Enlightenment. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

10 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

16. Adler R. Eliyana, In Her Hands: The Education on Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011). 17. Harriet Freidenreich, Female, Jewish and Educated (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 1–132. 18. Aron, Rodrigue Education, Society, and History: Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jews of the Mediterranean Basin, 1860-1929 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1991), 49–80 [Hebrew] Rodrigue Aron, Image of Sephardi and Eastern Jews in Transition (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993). 19. Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys, “Introduction,” in Connected Worlds History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2005), 5. 20. Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs, “Introduction: The Transnational in History of Education,” in The Transnational in the History of Education Concepts and Perspectives, ed. Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs (Chicago: Loyola University, 2019), 1–49. 21. Ibid., 12. 22. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ed., Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 23. Barnita Bagchi, “Connected and Entangled Histories: Writing Histories of Education in the Indian Context,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 6 (2014): 1–9; Rebecca, Rogers, “Telling Stories about the Colonies: British and French Women in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century,” Gender & History 21, no. 1 (2009): 39–59. 24. Einar Wigen, “Ottoman Concepts of Empire,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 8, no. 1 (2013): 44–66. 25. Rebecca Rogers, “Language Learning versus Vocational Training: French, Arab and British Voices Speak About Indigenous Girls’ Education in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Algeria,” Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 3 (2012): 369–379. 26. Ibid. 27. Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Thomas S.  Popkewitz, The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending (New York: New  York Teacher College Press, 2004). Eckhardt Fuchs, “History of Education beyond the Nation? Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship,” in Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education, ed. Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 20. 28. Noah W. Sobe, “Entanglement and Transnationalism,” in Rethinking the History of Education – Transnational Perspective on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 93–106.

CHAPTER 2

Actors and Networks

Network approaches examine relationships among actors such as individuals, organizations, or institutions, identify the patterns they follow, and study the impact of those patterns on processes of social change. Actor-­ network theory and social network analysis are specific methodologies that attempt to operationalize the network concept and that have been used to study transnational phenomena in education. The former considers that social relations are articulated in networks of people and objects that spread across space regardless of political boundaries; both people and objects constantly interact with and affect one another, and in that sense, they have agency within the network.1 The latter visualizes social relations as a network of links (friendship, economic relationships, information flows, and so on) among individuals and organizations and on this basis identifies the structure of the network of links (their degree of centrality, density, mediation) and the patterns of relations that exist among the actors. We have to take into account, as Marcelo Caruso notes, “networks are always in space—a space which by no means can be reduced only into its geographical features but also includes power relations.”2 The power relation exists, even if not with the same visibility as formal and informal networks. Formal networks consist of organizations and institutions, while informal networks are basically run by individuals and are not founded on institutions with certain rules.3 Network methods are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3_2

11

12 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

useful in understanding, inter alia, social change, information flows, and the diffusion of educational innovations and models. Since networks do not respect national boundaries, network approaches tend to blur those boundaries more emphatically than others do. However, by abstracting context and the class, culture, and intentionality of the actors, they tend to efface the dynamics of asymmetrical power between regions and groups. Eugenia Roldán Vera and Thomas Schupp remind us that network approaches require a substantial and consistent corpus of data.4 The classification proposed here is based upon the direct and indirect involvement in education of the various actors and networks, and upon the type of formal or informal network that the actors created, as well as its scope and distribution. However, we should begin with a short discussion on the transnational Jewish networks and then we discuss the actors who set up the formal and informal networks designated for education. Later, we shall discuss the actors whose support for and involvement in the educational institutions was a result of the support for the networks they set up.

2.1   Networks of a Transnational People The unity of the Jewish people is so basic to their identity that people usually presume it is an innate and immutable feature of Jewishness. However, despite the feelings of mutual responsibility that Jews have always had, it was primarily after the 1940 Damascus blood libel that the term “solidarity” became associated with the Jewish people.5 From that time, private actors and the Jewish voluntary sector maintained diverse networks. Their vision was of Jewish peoplehood as a network of solidarity and philanthropy that transcended ethnic boundaries, with the aim of improving Jewish conditions by providing education, healthcare, and relief. Following the Crimean War (1853–1856), renewed concerns about the fate of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire, including Palestine, led to the involvement of prominent Jewish actors. These included the Board of Deputies of British Jews, headed by Sir Moses Montefiore, the Central Consistory of the French Jewry, an informal network that became increasingly influential, and the Jewish press, which was by nature transnational as well as multilingual.6 Like other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine encompassed a cross-section of different ethnic and cultural groups and, of course, a variety of languages. Turkish, the authorities’ language, was a required language in some of the schools during various periods. In

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

13

addition, the Arabic language, with its various dialects, was widespread. Most of the Jews of European origin spoke Yiddish, while some of the Sephardi Jewish community spoke Ladino. Besides these languages, German and French, which was the language of culture in the Empire, were widespread.7 The primary religion was Islam, and the millet system—a non-Muslim ethnoreligious corporate body—operated in tandem with it.8 The Ottoman authorities categorized all Jews as members of a single millet. The millet system provided Jews and Christians with congregational autonomy, entrusting considerable power to a state-recognized leadership.9 Important non-state actors involved in the lives of Jews included European consuls such as the Russian, Austrian, French, or British consulates. They provided protection to Jews from their own countries, including legal protection from the official Ottoman authority.10 Of the European countries, France had the most significant influence in the Ottoman Empire, having attained the status of the defender of Christianity in the Holy Land. French served as the common European language, and the franc, recognized as legal tender, was common currency in the monetary system of Ottoman Palestine. Germany was the only country with colonies in the country. Within the country’s European Christian community, German was the most common language, and the German consuls enjoyed a secure status. Around 1876, the number of Jews in Ottoman Palestine was estimated at slightly above 18,700; more than half resided in Jerusalem, and the remaining Jews lived in the three other holy cities—Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. In the final decades of Ottoman rule, the Jewish population expanded dramatically, mainly because of European (Ashkenazi) immigration, which intensified after 1881. This wave of migration was driven by economic considerations, fear, and the pogroms of 1881–1882 and 1903; the failed 1905 revolution in Russia; and the emergence of a new national vision of returning to the father land. The national vision was cultivated and disseminated by Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion, also known as Hibat Zion), which established a network of Zionist societies throughout Eastern Europe and collected money for settlement and various educational and cultural undertakings. The Zionist narrative termed Jewish immigration to Palestine—or Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel—“ascent” (aliya), in the twofold sense of a physical move and moral transition. The immigrant, accordingly, is an oleh (plural olim). In this sense, the immigrants did not represent people seeking relief from political persecution or economic

14 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

hardship.11 There is considerable debate regarding the numbers of Jews in late-Ottoman Palestine and their share of the population. Most European Jews held foreign nationalities and were not recorded in the Ottoman census, so it is difficult to arrive at conclusive numbers. Nevertheless, it is clear that by the eve of the First World War, Palestine’s Jewish population was among the largest in the Middle East and North Africa. Estimates for the overall number of Jews in 1914 vary between 65,000 and 85,000. Jerusalem accounted for more than half of the Jews in Palestine. Jaffa had the second largest Jewish population, with 15% of the total, while Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron had smaller populations numbering in the hundreds or thousands. Fewer than 12,000 lived in the Jewish agricultural communities (moshavot) that had been established since the 1870s.12 The Jewish community was very heterogenous and fragmented, lacking the internal characteristics of a single community.13

2.2  Actors and Networks Directly Involved in Education The state actors and networks that established modern Jewish and Hebrew schools in Ottoman Palestine comprised Jewish citizens of France, England, and Austria, as well as Jews from Eastern Europe, mainly Tsarist Russia, active beyond their national borders and the European continent. These non-state actors prompted the transition from religious education, which was single-gendered and aimed at transmitting religious norms, behaviors, and laws, to modern education based on a structured curriculum taught in French, German, and Hebrew. This process included two stages: In the first stage, non-state Jewish actors, having adopted the idea of education for all as implemented in major Central and Western European cities, established vocational educational frameworks in Jerusalem during the 1850s. In the second stage, various non-state actors, three European transnational Jewish educational networks, and informal and formal networks of teachers participated in making a modern Jewish education available in Ottoman Palestine from the second half of the 1880s. The three formal educational networks represented three large Western Jewish communities that believed in the civilizing mission of their culture and the civilizing power of thought in their language. The largest of these was the French network Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), followed by the German Hilfsverein Der Deutschen Juden, and the smallest was the

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

15

Anglo-Jewish Association. The teachers who taught in Hebrew created informal and formal educational and social networks and a trade union. These actors and networks adopted the Humanistic educational approach, basing their curriculum on subjects beyond the three Rs, such as mathematics, a foreign language, history, geography, religious studies, literature, and occasionally music and physical education. Returning to the first stage, the education frameworks established at that time may be seen as reflecting the entanglement between the idea of education that is “accessible to all” and the approach of Jewish Enlightenment intellectuals who believed in the need to “repair” Jewish society. The idea of education for all, which meant making education accessible to weak populations that could not afford tuition, had become acceptable among the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie in the years preceding the pursuit of mass education.14 Within the framework of the reform, vocational schools, intended to provide rehabilitation for the presumably uneducated, were established in order to transform the children of those defined as “useless” into “useful” members of society.15 These ideas stemmed from the German Jewish Enlightenment, itself an outcome of encounters between Jews and their neighbors who had experienced the European Enlightenment movement and emancipation processes. The educated Jews and their associates assimilated this view of education for marginalized children so as to convert them into useful and productive citizens, seeking to adapt it to the “Jewish question”—in other words, into a means of “improving” the Jews.16 The adoption and transfer of these values took place through the establishment of philanthropic entities, which were concerned, inter alia, with educating the children of the weaker classes, discipline, observing the basic religious laws, frugality, hygiene, order and productivity. In this sense, the education of marginalized children to become useful and productive citizens— as adapted to the “Jewish question”—amounted to “repairing” the Jews.17 Some of the Jewish actors had been active in Ottoman Jerusalem since the 1850s. Among them were members of various Jewish and non-Jewish social networks, including Dr. Albert Cohn, president of the Parisian Consistory’s welfare committee, and Sir Moses Montefiore, who was knighted in 1837 by Queen Victoria.18 These individuals founded schools that taught vocational skills, religious writing, and basic arithmetic (the three Rs) and modern Western languages, as well as Hebrew and some Arabic the sake of participating in the local economic life.19 Vocational training was gendered. Girls learned needlework, while the boys learned carpentry, shoemaking, watchmaking, metalwork, and other

16 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

craftsmen’s trades.20 One wealthy non-state actor of standing that contributed to the field of education in Jerusalem was the British Rothschild family, which established a vocational school for girls—Evelina de Rothschild—in 1854. The school operated under the auspices of a hospital within a joint philanthropic framework of medicine and education.21 Two years later, a private actor, Elisa Herz von Laemel, a resident of Vienna, decided to fund the establishment of “a house of mercy where the children of Israel can learn from the time of their youth to go in the path of the Lord, to keep His commandments and to love labor, which supports its craftsman” in Jerusalem.22 The implementation of this initiative, resulting in what became known as the Lemel (Laemel) School, was possible thanks to involvement by a state actor representing his country’s interests, the Austrian Consul in Ottoman Palestine, who saw education as a means of disseminating and transferring power and influence These educational initiatives had to deal with antipathy and resistance from the ultraconservative Jewish communities in Jerusalem, which saw them as transferring the cultural wars of nineteenth-century European Jews to the Holy Land. For them, any alternative to the traditional education of religious studies was a theological and ideological threat to their lifestyle. Thirty years later, however, it became evident that these educational institutions were encountering ever-decreasing resistance from conservative groups. This change, together with the entry of new actors and networks into the educational field, led both schools, the Lemel School for boys and the Evelina de Rothschild School for girls, to proceed to the next stage and offer their students modern education, beginning in the second half of 1880s. The Lemel School merged with an orphanage school run by Dr. Wilhelm Herzberg, an intellectual who had attended universities in Prussia and France and established a social network.23 Herzberg’s school included secular studies and employed credentialed teachers, such as Ephraim Cohen-Reiss, whose life story exemplifies the ability to participate in several networks and cross numerous transnational boundaries. Born in Jerusalem, Cohen-Reiss graduated from the Jewish teachers’ seminary in Hanover (now in Lower Saxony) and taught in England before returning to Jerusalem in 1887 at the age of twenty three as Dr. Herzberg’s deputy. When his school merged with the Lemel School, Cohen-Reiss was appointed principal of the united school and here, he instituted a curriculum that included outdoor activity.24

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

17

The power of a single actor belonging to a transnational educational network to influence the character of a school that does not belong to that network is illustrated by the activities of Fortuna Bachar (1862–1929), who was appointed principal of the Eveline de Rothschild School in 1889. Born in Jerusalem, Bachar graduated from an AIU network school in France and garnered ten years of administrative experience serving as principal of the AIU girls’ school in the Jewish quarter on the outskirts of Istanbul. Bachar was another link in the AIU network, having transferred the administrative practices she adopted in Istanbul to the school in Jerusalem; these pedagogical practices included teachers’ guidance, an insistence on variety in teaching, and a ban on corporal punishment, among other measures.25 Several years after Bachar’s appointment as principal, in 1893, the institution was transferred to the Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA), a network founded in London in 1871. This network dealt with various aid activities for Jews, including the founding and funding of schools for girls in Mogador, Morocco, and two large cities in the Ottoman Iraqi provinces— Baghdad and Basra.26 The Evelina de Rothschild School transferred to the AJA when a graduate of another educational network was appointed principal, creating a cultural clash with the AIU network. In 1900 Annie (Hannah) Landau, a graduate of Graystoke Teacher Training College in England, was appointed principal of the institution. Annie Landau was so prominent an actor in Jerusalem that her school was termed Annie Landau’s school. Indeed, Landau adopted and bequeathed the AJA norms, summarized as Jewish Law with Livelihood. With its emphasis on domestic education (see Chap. 3), the Jerusalem school was the only institution that operated such an educational network. As a formal education network, the Alliance Israélite Universelle operated ten elementary schools in Ottoman Palestine. The AIU network exemplifies the nature and process of circulating and adapting educational ideas and content through a formal network of knowledge with geographical centralization. The AIU network, founded in 1860, was one of the key actors among the Jewish people during the years 1862–1914. As part of their strategy to combat antisemitism, AlU leaders linked Jewish internationalism to the civilizing mission of the French republic. The values and behavioral models of the civilizing mission were transferred by the educational network to Jewish communities located in the Mediterranean basin. The future teachers of the network were students (boys and girls) who had excelled in their schoolwork—in other words, graduates who

18 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

internalized the values of the civilizing mission. They were offered the opportunity to attend boarding school in Paris, with their studies financed by the Alliance.27 The Paris-based institution, Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), was a recognized public educational institution with a four-year curriculum that included a teachers’ accreditation examination from the French education ministry, as required for anyone seeking to teach elementary school. The institution was single-gendered, with separate schools for boys and girls. In this manner, the AIU network trained professional teachers who met French educational standards. These educators came from the very conservative geographic community of their birth to the innately transnational community of Alliance, where they were exposed to the theories of Enlightenment in general, and conservative humanistic education in particular. The AIU network operated in an era that had come to recognize society’s responsibility to ensure the welfare and education of the child.28 The curriculum of the AIU network’s secondary-level institution, which trained teachers, included the subjects studied in comparable educational institutions in France as well as limited pedagogical studies. The Jewish nature of the institutions manifested in several unique subjects, such as Hebrew, Biblical history, and Bible studies.29 Most of the natives of Ottoman Palestine who studied within the network of ENIO returned to teach at AIU network schools in the land of their birth or in other Jewish communities in the Mediterranean basin. Their employment contract obligated them to work for ten years within the network framework, and some continued to do so for many years or even until their retirement.30 Most of the teachers who graduated from the AIU teacher training system worked in the network’s schools, but some taught in the Hebrew schools of moshavot. The AIU network established the first agricultural vocational secondary school, Mikve Israel, near Jaffa in 1870 and the first elementary school in Haifa in 1881.31 The formal German Jewish network that sought to transfer the civilizing mission’s norms was named Hilfsverein. This network was founded in 1902 by a group of Jewish personalities who had achieved their “German Dream” and succeeded in reaching positions of influence in the fields of finance, industry, science, and art. The Hilfsverein network began operating the Lemel School and four more elementary schools, two for girls and two for boys, in 1906.32 The jewel in the Hilfsverein network’s crown was the first teachers’ seminary in Ottoman Palestine, which it founded in 1904. The Hilfsverein network, which had a progressive educational

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

19

outlook, did not consider the German language a necessary socializing agent. Its goal was that graduates of its educational institutions integrate into the economic life of their country, and it therefore aspired to have the local language serve as the language of instruction in the schools it established in Ottoman Palestine and elsewhere. For this reason—that is, because of practical rather than nationalistic motives—the language of instruction in the kindergartens and lower grades was primarily Hebrew. For this reason, too, German was the language of instruction for mathematics and science lessons in the higher grades: the premise was that the dearth of basic terminology and textbooks in Hebrew rendered study in that language impossible. The gap between study in Hebrew for pedagogical reasons and the national expectations that called for teaching in Hebrew at any cost a price to conflict that manifested as the “Language War” and opposition to German as a language of instruction at the Technion.33 The teachers working in the Jewish schools in Ottoman Palestine were actors from various networks, the most notable of which were, as discussed, the AIU and Hilfsverein. These two networks transferred the teacher training curriculum, as formulated in France and Germany, to their actors. Thus, cadet students in the AIU network studied in Paris, while those of the Hilfsverein network studied at the Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem, whose curriculum was largely that of Imperial Germany (see Chap. 5). Alongside the actors from these educational networks, the Hebrew-speaking schools had teachers who belonged to several informal networks and one formal one— the Teachers’ Union. The first informal network comprised teachers with similar pedagogical knowledge and the second one was a social network of people with a vision of a new society. The informal networks of knowledge included teachers who had studied at various institutions. Some had attended formal educational institutions with structured curricula, such as gymnasia or universities. Others had semi-formal training, such as via independent study toward matriculation. Some teachers, especially those who arrived before the twentieth century, were autodidacts without recognized accreditation. Most of the Hebrew school teachers were born and raised in Eastern Europe, and they fell into several subsidiary geographical and cultural groups: natives of the Tsarist Empire, natives of Galicia, which was under Austrian influence, and natives of Romania. They were born in multilingual spaces where the official languages were Russian, Polish, Romanian,

20 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

and German, with various dialects of Yiddish spoken in the Jewish communities. This exposure to the intersection of a number of cultures and languages would filter into their academic and pedagogical knowledge and undergo translation and adaptation to Hebrew education, as we shall later see. The male teachers within this group had, in their youth, received a formal single-gendered Jewish education in a school termed heider (alternatively, heder, cheder, or cheider). Some had also studied in the prestigious educational network of the traditional conservative Jewish society, the higher yeshivas.34 The knowledge carried by those teachers, who had not studied within any official modern educational network, resulted from exposure to and adoption of knowledge that was accessible and available. One of the notable teachers in this group, Yehuda Grazovsky, who later became a linguist, had received a traditional Jewish education in a heider and the formal network of yeshivas. At these institutions, he was exposed to non-religious literature that was formally forbidden, but which students read anyway. Grazovsky, like other yeshiva students who left religious studies, came into contact with informal knowledge, classified or structured.35 He moved to Vilna, studied photography, but did not work in his profession. Two years after arriving in Ottoman Palestine, he began working as a teacher in two moshavot (agricultural communities, singular—moshava). In 1891, with his teaching colleague Chaim Ziprin, he published one of the first Hebrew language textbooks, The School Corridor.36 As Ysreal Bartal pointed out, most of the young Jews who desired a secular education in the Tsarist Empire faced two barriers.37 The first stemmed from the structure of the Tsarist Empire’s educational system. The second was due to the policy of numerus clausus in the state gymnasia and the universities. The expansion and spread of education occurred far more slowly in the Tsarist Empire than in its European neighbors. The Tsarist authorities did not accept the concept of a national welfare state that must provide services to the citizens of Russia.38 The law of compulsory education, though enacted, was not enforced, and in many places, it lacked funding. The result was that only 10% of school-aged children attended school.39 The ineffectiveness of Tsarist Russia’s educational provisions led to the expansion of the private educational institutions, which served the well-to-do urban classes. Because teaching staff and educational institutions were lacking, external studies for matriculation expanded. The students used textbooks that were accepted in the gymnasia, and they studied by themselves or with the assistance of private teachers. In other

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

21

words, the phenomenon of study through a less-than-formal network was widespread and even customary. One consequence of the lack of teacher training programs in the Tsarist Empire was that there was no action for learning through organized methods of transferring knowledge under the auspices of a formal and hierarchal network. Boys and girls who wanted to become teachers acquired the knowledge needed to pass the authorization examinations independently. They took written examinations and were tested on practical aspects by an authorized and official teacher.40 In other words, this formal educational network operated differently from other formal training frameworks where the students would study and take accreditation examinations. Geographically the network spanned Tsarist Russia. In itself, this type of accreditation examination is, perhaps, worth researching; however, for the purpose of our discussion, we may regard it as a formal network for teacher training in which the students studying by correspondence are akin to nodes connected to each other by the curriculum. This study format helped the Jewish youth bypass the policy of numerus clausus in the state gymnasia and universities.41 Indeed, a good number of teachers used this network to qualify for teaching accreditation. Notable among these were Yehiel Yehieli, Mordechai Ezrahi, and Yosef Ozrakovsky (Azaryahu), who taught at the girls’ school in Jaffa.42 A few teachers managed to study within the framework of secondary education but could not proceed to academic studies because of the numerus clausus laws. This was the case for Yitzhak Epstein, a noted linguist and one of the molders of the method of teaching Hebrew in Hebrew. Epstein was born in the 1860s in the Pinsk District of Belarus and he attended a heider and a yeshiva. At the age of fourteen, he moved to Odessa to attend the (secondary) Reali School. He wanted to study agriculture at the university but was prevented by the numerus clausus laws.43 In 1896 Epstein arrived in Ottoman Palestine, worked in agriculture, began teaching in Safed and later in the moshavot. He wrote articles and a book on teaching Hebrew. At this stage, Epstein chose to study for his master’s degree in Lausanne, Switzerland, and later wrote a doctoral dissertation on pedagogy.44 The numerus clausus policy of the Tsarist government led Jewish youths who wished to continue their studies to cross boundaries and break social barriers, break away from their parents’ homes, and undergo vast changes in most facets of their lives. During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, many of them moved in order to join trans-local

22 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

networks of academic education in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.45 These new communities of students were the arenas in which multicultural entanglement and trans-discursive entanglement inflected one another. Some of the teachers studied within a formal system of European universities. After their marriage in 1901, for example, Sarah and Yosef Ozrakovsky (Azaryahu) enrolled at Berne University.46 Among the youths seeking a university education was Nissan Toranov, who was born in Belarus, left home to study pedagogy and psychology at the University of Leipzig, and wrote his doctoral dissertation in literature at the University of Lausanne.47 Toranov worked as a teacher and principal and served as an inspector of Jewish schools in the Petersburg district. In 1907, he arrived in Palestine to serve as principal of the girls’ school in Jaffa, and in 1913, it became the principal of the Levinsky Seminary for Teachers and Kindergarten Teachers. Forced to confront the lack of a formal professional and institutional network, the Hebrew teachers in Palestine created one themselves. The first, hesitant stage entailed five meetings over the course of five years (1892–1896). At these meetings, teachers discussed diverse matters ranging from curricula to the lack of pedagogical aids.48 The activities in which engaged led to the institutionalization of informal networks. In 1903 they succeeded in founding a formal network—the Teachers’ Union. Teachers’ unions or associations existed in European countries as well. One of these was the German Teachers’ Association, established in 1871. Over the years, the German Teachers’ Association in Imperial Germany dealt with educational policy and its actors’ professional profile. It also addressed matters typical of a trade union. The German Teachers’ Association considered it a duty to influence educational policy, which led it to establish the League for School Reform in 1908. Four years later, the Association decided to adopt the New Pedagogy program.49 The Teachers’ Union was both a professional union and a framework for formulating the goals of education. Its members founded a formal network of local geographical branches and held annual conferences where they discussed curriculum design, defining uniform concepts in the various fields of science and recommending suitable textbooks.50 The aspects that changed the network into a formal one point to the revolutionary role played at the local level. One formal and very significant aspect was in the sphere of professional authority, where the network played a role akin to that of a ministry of education (which Ottoman Palestine lacked), shaping

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

23

educational policy with the aim of improving the state of education. A second aspect was network’s concern for the maintenance of teachers’ rights within the framework of a professional union.51 The teachers created two network hubs for the circulation of pedagogic knowledge: a publishing house named Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) and the journal HaChinuch. Kohelet also published a journal that targeted youth through articles in various fields alongside a few opinion pieces that offered different perspectives. The publishing house enabled teachers to publish books, inasmuch as private publishing was too expensive and impractical. The journal HaChinuch, published several times a year and edited by Nissan Turnov, enjoyed many subscribers, including almost all the Hebrew teachers.52 The volume of subscriptions attests to the importance of this communication network and to the teachers’ ability to be active in taking the initiative, creating the professional communication network that they lacked. HaChinuch served as a venue for the of exchange of ideas, as exemplified by its discussion on pedagogical issues and translated articles of Pestalozzi, John Amos Comenius, and others.53 Most of the writers were teachers, some of whom translated articles on educators. Mordechai Kirshavsky, for example, translated an article on Rousseau, and Yehieli translated an article in German by Nelly Wolffheim, a German Jewish psychologist who dealt with kindergartens.54 One notable example of the circulation of pedagogical concepts is a 400-page instruction book for teachers on the subject of Anschauung and knowledge of the homeland, which three teachers from the girls’ school in Jaffa, Yosef Ozrakovsky (Azaryahu), Yehiel Yehieli, and Mordechai Kirshavsky, initiated. The book’s introductory chapter lists a series of thinkers who created observational learning—Aristotle, Cicero, Bacon, Comenius, Rousseau, Von Rochow, and Pestalozzi.55 This list attests to the actorship of these teachers in an informal network based on the pedagogical dialogue dominant in their time, and its dissemination among local educational actors. The book’s structure demonstrates knowledge and the adoption of the curriculum used at that time.56 These three teachers also wrote a dictionary with the Hebrew translation of the three languages of the textbooks and scholarship that the teachers used—German, French, and Russian.57 Yehieli, Ozrakovsky, and Kirshavsky also engaged in translation and, more specifically, in cultural translation, which corresponds Umberto

24 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Eco’s definition as cited by Peter Burke: “Translation is always a shift not between two languages but between two cultures.”58 One such example is the translation of mantodea, an insect. While awaiting its prey, this insect folds its arms (forelegs) and nods its head left to right in a manner similar to a man reading from a prayer book. Because of this similarity, the insect has a name related to prayer in several languages. In English it is called a praying mantis, in French, mantereliieuse, and in Russian, the spoken language of those teachers, bogomol (one who prays), while in German it is Gottesanbeterin. The Hebrew translation chosen by Ozrakovsky, Yehieli, and Kirshavsky literally means “Solomon’s Camel.” They incorporated the visual image of a praying man, as customary the countries where they grew up. At the same time, they adapted it to the Jewish sources of their cultural roots by invoking King Solomon, who had raised his hands in prayer when he finished building the Temple “and he spread his hands to the heavens” (Kings I, Chap. 8, verses 22 and 54). Because of the insect’s long neck, they attached the word “camel”—a familiar animal in Ottoman Palestine—to the name “Solomon.”59 In other words, here we have a case of adaptation and interpretation of the insect’s name into European culture in the local Jewish cultural context.60 These three teachers were engaged actors in the formal Teachers’ Union network, which sought to mold educational policy even though it did not have the legal authority to do so. This network did not depend on sources of funding, in contrast to the Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA) and the Baron’s bureaucracy. In other words, it was an organization whose authority did not derive from its financial capabilities but, rather, from the recognition of its importance. Thus, it had the format of a formal network not defined by any economic component. The relative success of the Teachers’ Union in setting rules and consolidating them in different ways stemmed from a consensus and aspiration that Hebrew education fulfill two functions. The first was to serve as an actor within a wider network for the purpose of instilling a widespread a Hebrew-speaking national identity. The second centered on the professional position of a teacher as someone focused on imparting knowledge and an education to the next generation on the basis of pedagogical rules.61 The sphere of activity that entailed determining educational policy centered on the creation of a modern educational system. The aims of this goal were transferred by teachers and public personalities who had attended modern educational institutions in Europe. These individuals had personally, directly or indirectly, experienced a modern educational

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

25

institution and encountered its basic components. The Teachers’ Union succeeded in setting curricula designed for Hebrew-speaking kindergartens and elementary schools. These curricula were to mold the next generation of graduates and were especially meaningful to those teachers.62 Another important aspect of educational policy was the setting of professional teaching standards, which included supervision over both current teachers and those entering the professional network. The entrance examinations were in essence an educational authorization examination, which drew on an extensive bibliography of the various fields. The bibliography was in three languages: Russian, German, and French. For example, the teachers who took the test on the history of pedagogy were required to read Histoire de l’instruction et de l’éducation by François Guex, professor of education at the University of Lausanne. Another book from the list was Geschichte der Pädagogik (History of Pedagogy) by Theobald Zeiglar, professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. This book was translated to Russian under the title Циглер Т. История педагогики, which also appeared on the reading list.63 In addition to determining the prerequisites for joining the professional network, the Teachers” Union created a series of continuing education courses in various fields of knowledge for summer classes. The practice began in 1905, and after a break of six years, the Teachers’ Union resumed the continuing education courses in 1911. The response among teachers was very enthusiastic, with half the teachers participating in the summer of 1913.64 The distance, transportation difficulties, and substantial lack of professional literature motivated teachers to establish two centers to disseminate knowledge to their colleagues in the network. Teachers recognized the importance and necessity of transferring pedagogical ideas that were practiced elsewhere and discussed in different languages, as one teacher, Aryeh Zuta, described, “Thus, we the teachers can enjoy that which has already been prepared; we can effortlessly harvest what the world’s noted pedagogues in the world of education have planted over many years.”65 Notably, the structure of this network was not very hierarchical. This is evident from the network’s actors’ annual or biannual teachers’ conferences, where curricula and other matters were discussed. In other words, regular teachers were given the opportunity to influence the content of teaching material, even if only theoretically. Another example of the function of the network was the first “Exemplary Summer Courses,” a learning program described as “a minimal school for teachers.” Within this

26 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

framework, expert lecturers and expert teachers provided instruction in their fields of knowledge as well as how to teach those subjects. The second sphere of activity for the Teachers’ Union was ensuring teachers’ rights—in other words, acting as a trade union. As mentioned, both spheres were firmly intertwined in educational work but occasionally they clashed, inasmuch as they had different emphases. One was generally administered by an educational organization such as a ministry of education or an educational department, while the other was run by a professional organization such as a workers’ committee. The goals of the Teachers’ Union, as a trade union, centered on salary concerns, protecting teachers from unjustified complaints by parents and others, and establishing a teachers’ aid fund for old age or illness. These three demands stemmed from the adoption of a socialist worldview and subsequent formation of a workers’ organization to protect their status, salaries, and dignity in the spirit of socialism, which was accepted within wide circles of the Jewish public in Tsarist Russia. Socialist Jewish immigrants transferred these approaches to the United States and Ottoman Palestine. Thus, in 1892, Jewish workers in New  York founded the Workmen’s Circle, which served as a mutual aid society that offered a mutual health insurance fund, among other measures.66 The efforts to improve the state of education benefited from the support of a Jewish network that sought to implement modern education in the moshavot. Inasmuch as there was no active, official government ministry of education with which they could cooperate, these organizations entrusted the Teachers’ Union to address the pedagogical components needed for the existence of their educational institutions. Thus, the organizations strengthened the Teachers’ Union’s authority, which focused upon education and whose activities did not clash with various economic and ideological realms that were the organizations’ main field of activity and source of authority. From the pedagogical-curricular point of view, this cooperation in operating educational systems enabled the Teachers’ Union to maintain a discourse on the protection of teachers’ rights and salaries. Thus a unique organization emerged and developed, with great authority in all matters relating to curriculum, textbooks, teachers’ training, and the maintenance of a didactic-pedagogical discourse aimed at locating and adopting up-to-date teaching methods and improving the quality of education. This organization also coordinated efforts with other organizations and maintained a connection with the Zionist leadership and the leaders of Hebrew-national culture. Thanks to this connection,

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

27

the Teachers’ Union became the primary actor in the enterprise of advancing and instilling the Hebrew language. As a result, the Union’s authority increased, and its standing as an important partner in the creation of Hebrew culture was ensured. The vision of creating the new generation of Hebrew children was the strongest bond that united the Hebrew teachers in their social network. Deirdre Raftery, in her research on teaching sisters, has noted significance of bonds that unite social networks. María del Mar del Pozo Andrés and Sjaak Braster, in their study regarding the Delton plane in Great Britain, demonstrated the importance of the power of networks in whose ideas its actors believe.67 The Hebrew teachers were actors within a broad network of teachers who saw themselves primarily as molders of the nation and the creators of a new Hebrew culture. This network embodied secondary networks of specific schools or a specific area. One of the prominently active social networks was that of the girls’ school teachers in Jaffa, which was active from the mid-1904 until the First World War. For the teachers who constituted actors in this network, teaching was a mission not limited solely to working hours. In her memoirs, Sarah Azaryahu, who taught in the school from 1907, mentions teachers who decided to hold social gatherings to balance their lives at work. These meetings, however, quickly turned into discussions regarding textbooks or pedagogical matters.68 The school, as mentioned, was for girls. However, sons of the teachers also studied there. Attesting to the close ties among the various actors, some of the teachers decided to collectively purchase the first building lots in Ahuzat Bayit, which was destined to become Tel Aviv in 1909.69

2.3  Actors and Networks with an Indirect Connection to Education The Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine included various networks and actors who influenced education, even though educational matters were not within their purview. Two of these actors who played a significant part in establishing the moshavot and their educational institutions were the actor Baron Edmund de Rothschild and the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA). One Zionist political and ideological network that influenced the worldview of teachers, parents, and students, and even financed a school for girls in Jaffa, was Hovevei Zion. Alongside these

28 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

formal networks, one informal network with an orderly and hierarchical structure was the Jewish press, which disseminated information and provided a platform for varied educational outlooks. Most of the newspapers operated via a transnational network that served Jews in various countries. A majority of the editorial staff resided in one of the Central or Eastern European cities, while the reporters and readers spanned multiple countries, including Ottoman Palestine. Teachers were included among the writers. Several local newspapers in Ottoman Palestine reported on the life of the Jewish public and devoted columns to educational institutions. Transnational Actors and Education in the Rural Space The actor Rothschild and the JCA network, which financed rural education in the moshavot, adopted and implanted the norm of mass education by providing elementary education to all the children living in the community. Rothschild and the JCA’s network administration were proud citizens of the Third Republic, which enacted the Compulsory Education Law in 1882. Importantly, the norm of public education had been recognized since 1867, following Durury’s Law, which exempted parents from tuition and imposed taxes for education at the community or district level.70 Most of the rural schools founded in the 1880s and1890s were funded by Baron Rothschild from Paris. Baron Rothschild’s support for educational enterprises in the moshavot stemmed from his philanthropic support for the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine itself. In other words, this was not support specifically designated for education, but rather funding for the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine, wherein education is one of the supported areas. Baron Edmund de Rothschild was a noted actor on the map of Jewish history of that period and a member of several Jewish networks, including the Alliance network. The cornerstone of the alliance network was, as mentioned previously, Jewish solidarity, which crossed physical and status boundaries, and encompassed Jews in different regions of the world. In the name of this solidarity, Rothschild acquiesced to the request for aid from the small moshava of Rishon LeZion, to provide economic assistance to the community which, in 1882, stood on the brink of financial collapse.71 In the following years, Baron Rothschild continued his support for fourteen moshavot, of which all but one maintained elementary schools and kindergartens.72

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

29

The independent mechanism that served the Baron’s operations was termed “The Bureaucracy” and consisted of four levels. This system was fully implemented in 1887–1888, a year after the first school in Rishon LeZion opened. The first level included the chief clerk in the Land of Israel, subordinate to the Baron himself, and two assistants, who resided in Paris. At the second level were the settlement supervisors who resided at the school in Mikve Israel and Beirut and ran the two countrywide administration centers. The third level included three districts, each comprising a main moshava and those adjacent to it. The fourth level included the chief clerk of each moshava who ran the bureaucratic system. The bureaucracy oversaw all the facets of life in the moshava. It handled legal affairs, including arrangements regarding land and the relationship with the Ottoman authorities, as well as physical planning, agricultural production, agricultural industry, trade, finance, human resources, and public services. Public services, in turn, included education, sanitation, health, and public institutions such as synagogues. The farmers received a per capita monthly stipend, as did all the workers in moshavot including in the field of education.73 Support for education included teachers’ salaries, teaching supplies, and, of course, support for buildings. Investment in schools in the moshavot exemplifies transference of the cognizance of the need to improve rural schools and the implementation of measures to address that need. Such a process was underway at that time in France, and most European countries expanding the scope of popular education and making it available to weaker and rural social strata, particularly after the implementation of compulsory education.74 There was an inbuilt balance of power between the donor (Rothschild) and the recipients (the farmers), which placed the farmers in an inferior position and characterized the discourse of the civilizing mission. Thus, a low yield was attributed to the farmers’ laziness even when caused by factors not under their control, such as drought, locusts, and the like.75 This pattern of relations was compounded by tension between two different groups. The Jews of Central and Western Europe, who enjoyed equal rights and adopted a system of Western values, regarded the Jews of Eastern Europe in negative terms. Eastern European Jews, termed “Ostjuden,” were seen as lacking education, lazy, and unhygienic, among other faults. They were contrasted this advantageously with the image of Jews from countries that enjoyed emancipation. This approach was, of course, related to the way in which Western Europeans perceived the

30 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Mediterranean and Eastern European environments with which they came into contact. It was also reflected in the paternalistic and colonialist perceptions of the French bourgeoisie during the Belle Epoque, as Seltenreich argues.76 This pattern of relations between the farmers and the bureaucracy resulted in a series of conflicts that aroused much anger and resentment. At the time, these clashes were termed “rebellions,” revealing a discourse of clear rulership. In some moshavot, conflict broke out because of matters relating to human relations, autonomy, and economic decisions. The Baron and the bureaucracy’s reactions included various punishments, such as the denial of educational services, as illustrated by an incident during the Sabbatical year (shmita) in the moshava of Mazkeret Batya in 1889. During a Sabbatical year—that is, the seventh year in a seven-year agricultural cycle—the land is left to lie fallow. Yet the farmers of Rishon LeZion and other moshavot feared that not working that year would harm the crop yields, and the Baron also opposed not working the land. The people of Rishon LeZion found a rabbinical exemption that enabled them to continue working the land. The farmers of Mazkeret Batya, however, refused to accept this exemption, for which the Baron punished them, among other means, by suspending community services, including the school.77 In 1899, Baron Rothschild decided to transfer the administrative and economic responsibility over the moshavot that he had supported to the JCA.78 Eleven years later, the JCA was responsible for the fiscal and educational activities of thirteen of the twenty-one schools operating in the moshavot.79 In 1891 Baron Maurice Hirsch founded the largest transnational Jewish network—the JCA—which numbered about ten thousand members and spanned several regions, including South America and Ottoman Palestine in particular. Hirsch and the administrative council of the JCA were motivated by a commitment to the ideal of Jewish solidarity, which crossed territorial and political boundaries. Their worldview rejected the Hebrew-­ national vision. For them, a moshava in Ottoman Palestine was merely another attempt to solve the “Jewish problem” in an agrarian manner, akin to attempts in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and Cyprus. The principles of JCA activity entailed providing the means of production, vacant land, or agricultural equipment to poverty-stricken Jews, so that they could achieve financial independence. They would then repurchase the Association’s means and cut their ties to it. A staff of administrators would plan the projects and was responsible for managing them.

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

31

Rural agricultural settlements of Jewish communities in Canada, Brazil, Cyprus, and particularly Argentina, a preferred destination for migration, were at the heart of this transnational program. The Argentinian government, seeking to signal its vast plains, recognized the JCA as a legal entity, allowing it to benefit from tax relief and obtain permission to establish educational institutions.80 The JCA, headed by a board of directors based in Paris, operated as a centralized hierarchical system. In 1903, it launched a settlement project in Ottoman Palestine, which lasted for nine years and resulted in the establishment of twelve moshavot. The settlers were chosen meticulously, on the basis of their experience in agricultural work, and were designated as sharecroppers.81 The JCA established committees for the moshavot in order to address the needs of local farmers, but in practice, it administered the moshavot from a distance, as did Baron Rothschild. The JCA funded a large portion of the community services, including education, the infrastructure for synagogues, and agricultural and public infrastructures. Education was included among the public services the JCA provided for Jewish villages in Argentina. There, in contrast to Ottoman Palestine, the state authorities had established free compulsory education; yet because of logistical and economic difficulties, only limited education was provided in peripheral areas, where the JCA settlements were located.82 The JCA’s position on subsidizing education in its moshavot in Ottoman Palestine was not uniform across the communities under its supervision. In the moshavot that it established itself, no tuition was demanded. In Kfar Tavor, for example half of the moshava’s budget was directed to education. In the moshavot that Baron Rothschild supported, the JCA funded the educational system only partially and not uniformly. In these moshavot, the parents had to pay tuition, although at varying rates. Thus, in the northern moshava of Rosh Pina, a focal point for new pedagogical methods, the parents paid only symbolic tuition yet still enjoyed generous JCA educational assistance. The JCA customarily paid the teachers’ salary in cash bimonthly.83 An important transnational network that played a key role in Jewish history was Hovevei Zion, or Lovers of Zion, which began to operate in Europe and Ottoman Palestine during the 1880s. The network comprised several dozen Jewish societies in Romania and Tsarist Russia, and a few in central Europe. Its center was in Odessa. The pogroms against the Jews of the Tsarist Empire in 1881–1882, and the tremendous disappointment and fear they generated among Jews provided the impetus for the

32 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

formation of this network. The dawning realization that Jewish emancipation could only be truly achieved in an independent Jewish state provided further incentive.84 An additional reason was the poor socioeconomic conditions faced by Jews at the time, particularly in Eastern Europe. The demographic growth experienced by the Jews of Eastern Europe required a meaningful socioeconomic solution that was nowhere to be found. Proponents of the Jewish nationalist movement argued that the establishment of a Jewish state would also help relieve the Jews’ social and economic plight. Hovevei Zion created a network that underwent institutionalization with the creation of a centralized leadership in 1894, which sat in Odessa (The Odessa Committee). In 1890 it received legal permission as an organization permitted to operate in Tsarist Russia, enabling it to operate overtly. Hovevei Zion formed the basis of the Zionist movement, which was founded at the First Zionist Congress in Basel.85 The societies of Hovevei Zion had an additional function beyond the ideological one. They served as meeting points for the informal transfer of information, especially regarding the Hebrew language and culture. The Hovevei Zion network was involved in the activities of the first moshavot, and in educational processes in Ottoman Palestine. It stood behind the establishment of the school for girls in Jaffa, which was run together with the AIU network. In 1903, it took over the sole administration of the school. A noted Hovevei Zion actor, Menachem Ussishkin, is especially known for his activities as one of the Hebrew teachers. Ussishkin was the spirit behind the teachers’ convention in 1903. Hovevei Zion also established the Herzliya Gymnasium in Jaffa two years later.86

2.4  Summary The process of the growth of a modern educational system in Ottoman Palestine is a unique situation which enables us to understand the importance of the historical-transnational approach. The educational system’s initial conditions created a reality of a kind of cultural social laboratory enabling the tracing of transference of modern pedagogical ideas and outlooks, of curricula, of molding the learning environment, teacher training, and so on from Europe to Ottoman Palestine. Reference to the processes of transferring the various components of modern education to a region which had previously totally lacked it would have been completely impossible without the network and the actors who had actually implemented them.

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

33

The Jewish people, by its nature a diaspora nation, created networks aimed specifically at providing one of the four components Fuchs enumerates, namely, solidarity and a feeling of group membership.87 The various Jewish networks and actors who established the educational institutions, influenced the curriculum, and contributed to the molding of graduates can be classified into a number of types and according to differing criteria. Three networks operated in Ottoman Palestine. These represented large Jewish communities in Western Europe, which believed in disseminating progress through their cultures and the increasing power of thinking in their languages. The largest of the three was the French AIU, which operated parallel to the German Hilfsverein network and the English network, AJA. These networks adopted the humanistic educational approach, while transferring the curriculum with which they were familiar, beyond the three Rs, in mathematics, foreign languages, history, geography, religious studies, literature, and often music and physical education to Palestine by means of kindergartens and schools. In addition to founding and operating basic educational institutions, these three European educational networks worked in two central ways in the field of teachers’ training. The French networks sent promising students to schools they had established in Ottoman Palestine to prepare themselves for teaching in their teachers’ seminary in Paris (ENIO). In contrast, the Hilfsverein established a teachers’ seminary in Jerusalem in 1904. These teachers, together with other teachers who were trained in Europe, formed a substantial part of the process of transferring modern educational ideas from Europe to Ottoman Palestine, processing and adapting them to the education institutions where they taught, and were an integral part of the process of creating and applying modern education in general, and modern national-Hebrew education in particular. Alongside these European networks, other actors (single philanthropists) were active. The most prominent of them was Edmond Rothschild and the JCA network, who funded rural education in the moshavot, adopting and transferring the norms of mass education by means of granting elementary education to all the children living in the rural communities which they supported. Rothschild and the administration of the JCA network were proud citizens of the Third Republic, which, in 1882, had enacted the compulsory education act. The law’s influence was manifested in the establishment of rural schools, most of which were established and funded in the 1880–1890s by the Baron Rothschild from Paris. Baron Rothschild’s support for these educational endeavors in the moshavot was

34 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

not geared specifically toward education, but, rather, funding the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine, where education was but one of the supported areas. Along with the three Western European networks, an additional transnational network held a key position in the development of modern Hebrew education—the Hovevei Zion network in Ottoman Palestine which began in the 1880s. This network, whose center was in Odessa, was comprised of several dozen Jewish associations in Romania and Czarist Russia, as well as several others in central Europe. The Hovevei Zion network, which formed the basis of the Zionist movement, served as a meeting point for the informal transfer of information with the aim of advancing the formation of a national Jewish society, with emphasis on Hebrew language and culture. This network was involved in educational processes in Ottoman Palestine. Menachem Ussishkin, a well-known actor from Hovevei Zion, was the moving force behind the Teachers’ Conference in 1903. They brought about the first Hebrew gymnasium in Ottoman Palestine—The Herzliya Gymnasium. The Hovevei Zion network collaborated with other networks (AIU), and worked to establish the first girls’ school in Jaffa, which led to and influenced the creation of the first modern Hebrew curricula. Its leading teachers composed textbooks and guidebooks based upon modern pedagogy which they encountered during their studies in Europe. The books were distributed among the Hebrew teachers in order to give them modern educational tools, and to advance the Hebrew students in Ottoman Palestine.

Notes 1. Eckhardt Fuchs, “Networks and the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 2 (2007): 185–197. 2. Marcelo Caruso, “Disruptive Dynamics: The Spatial Dimensions of the Spanish Networks in the Spread of Monitorial Schooling (1815-1825,”).” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 2 (2007): 271–282. 3. Fuchs, “Networks and the History.” 4. Eugenia Roldán Vera and Thomas Schupp, “Network Analysis in Comparative Social Sciences,” Comparative Education 42, no. 3 (2006): 405–429, in The Transnational in the History of Education Concepts and Perspectives, ed. Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs (Chicago: Loyola University, 2019), 25. 5. Jonathan Frankel, “‘Ritual Murder’ in the Modern Era,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 1–16.

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

35

6. Green Abigail, “Sir Moses Montefiore and the Making of the ‘Jewish International’,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7, no. 3 (2008): 287–307. 7. Daniel Kessler, “The Jewish Community in Nineteenth Century Palestine: Evidence from the Montefiore Censuses.” Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 6 (2016): 996–1010. 8. Fortna Benjamin, “Education and Change in the Late Ottoman Empire and Turkey,” Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society 10, no. 1 (2018): 44–62; Nicholas Danforth, “Multi-Purpose Empire: Ottoman History in Republican Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 50, no. 4 (2014): 655–678. 9. The millet was especially important when it came to liaising with Imperial authorities over taxation. See Kessler, “The Jewish Community in Nineteenth Century Palestine.” 10. Nahum Gross, “The Land of Israel’s Economy in the Late Ottoman Period,” in The History of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine Since the First Aliyah  – The Ottoman Period, vol. 2, ed. Israel Kolatt (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences, 2003), 279–308 [Hebrew]. 11. Dvora Golden, “Storytelling the Future: Israelis, Immigrants, and the Imagining Community,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2002): 477–508. 12. Kushner David, “Ottoman Rule in Palestine during the Second Aluya Period”, in The Second Aliya-Studies, ed Bartal Israel (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1997) 60–74; Yair Wallach, “Rethinking the Yishuv: LateOttoman Palestine’s Jewish Communities Revisited,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, no. 2 (2017): 275–294; Gur Alroey, “Journey to EarlyTwentieth-­Century Palestine as a Jewish Immigrant Experience,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 2 (2003): 28–64. 13. Wallach, “Rethinking the Yishuv.”; Ettinger Shmoel and Bar-Tal Israel (1981), “The Roots of the New Settlement in the Land of Israel”, In M. Eliav and Y. Rosenthal (eds.) The Book of the First Aliya, (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Yad Ben Zvi, 1981), 5–20 [Hebrew]. 14. Braster Sjaak, “The People, the Poor, and the Oppressed: The Concept of Popular Education through Time,” Paedagogica Historica, 47, no. 1–2 (2011): 1–14. 15. Christine Mayer, “Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow’s Education of the Children in Rural Communities and Its Impact on Urban Educational Reforms in the Eighteenth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 1 (2003): 19–35. 16. Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 1–84. 17. First and foremost, private and public actors offered an alternative to the traditional support (halukkah (that Jews of the four Holy Cities received

36 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

from their brethren in the Diaspora. Modern philanthropists sought, with a certain amount of success, to transform the character of the Jewish population of Palestine into a modernized and productive society. While the halukkah was for individuals who devoted their time to the study of Torah and piety, modern philanthropists acted through institutions: schools for boys and girls, vocational education for adults, hospitals, and various welfare initiatives. 18. Cohn was born in 1784; see Yochai Ben-Gedalia, “Empowerment: Tzedakah, Philanthropy and Inner-Jewish Shtadlanut,” Jewish Culture and History 19, no. 1 (2018): 71–78. Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) was born in Livorno and taken to England as an infant. As a young man, he made a fortune on the London Stock Market. He subsequently helped found the Alliance Assurance Company, the Imperial Continental Gas Association, and the Provincial Bank of Ireland. In 1837 he was elected sheriff of London, the second Jew so honored, and in 1847 he became high sheriff of Kent; see Green, “Sir Moses Montefiore.” 19. Laura A. Schore, The Best School in Jerusalem: Annie Landau’s School for Girls, 1900-1960 (Waltham: Brandeis University, 2013), 7–8. 20. One such example is the vocational school Support for Handicrafts in Jerusalem, a cooperative endeavor of several European Jewish actors and the German Jewish journalist native to Dessau, Ludwig Philipson, editor of the Jewish newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (General Newspaper for Judaism), with support from Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, who raised donations. See Rachel Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel, Volume 1, 1854-1914 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1986), 78–81 [Hebrew]. 21. Schore, The Best School in Jerusalem, 4–5. 22. Ludwig Frenkel, Nache Jerusalem (Wein, 1957(, cited in Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education, 86. 23. See David Tidhar, Encyclopedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel, vol. 1, p.  301, http://www.tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/1/301 [Hebrew]. 24. Shlomo Haramati, The Pioneer Teachers (Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 2000), 67–70 [Hebrew]. 25. Zipora Shehory-Rubin, “Administration and Gender in Eretz Israel: Profiles and Career Paths of Women in Educational Administration during the Late Ottoman Period, 1889-1914,” History of Education Review 44, no. 2 (2015): 253–367. 26. Jonathan Sciarcon, “Expanding the Mission: The Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Jewish Boys’ School in Basra, 1890-1903,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 9, no. 3 (2015): 191–207.

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

37

27. The boys attended the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO) school, while the future female teachers attended corresponding ENIO schools. See Aron Rodrigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring  – Summer 1996): 1–24; Lisa Moses Leaf, “Jewish Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century France: The Evolution of a Concept,” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 1 (March 2002): 33–61. 28. Kathleen Alaimo, “Adolescence, Gender, and Class in Education Reform in France: The Development of Enseignement Primaire Supérieur, 1880–1910,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 1025–1055. 29. Rodrigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities.” 30. Aron Rodrigue, Education, Society, and History: Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jews of the Mediterranean Basin, 1860-1929 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1991), 49–80 [Hebrew]. 31. Ibid., 36. 32. The schools were located in Jerusalem, the coast city of Jaffe, Safed in the north, and the new Hebrew city, Tel Aviv. See Moshe Rinot, “Education in the Land of Israel, 1882–1918,” in The History of the Jewish Community in the Land of Israel from the First Aliyah, the Ottoman Period, vol. 1, ed. Israel Kolatt (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1990), 50–94 [Hebrew]. 33. Rinot, “Education in the Land of Israel.” 34. A small yeshiva is a religious school for youths, aged 14–17, who pursue only religious studies, primarily Talmud; a high yeshiva is designated for graduates of small yeshivas, aged 16–17 and above, who pursue only religious (Torah) studies. See Shaul Stamper, The Lithuanian Yeshiva in Its Creation (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2005). 35. Shlomo Haramati, First Three Teachers (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1985), 48–55 [Hebrew]. 36. This was the first of many textbooks Grazovsky published over the coming years. The scientific “crown jewel” of his work was the Gur Dictionary. Ibid. 37. Israel Bartal, Responses to Modernity: Cossack and Bedouin (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2007), 116–119 [Hebrew]. 38. During the last third of the nineteenth century, in the course of adopting the national welfare state model, most European countries implemented compulsory education within their territory, with the total years of study required varying. Compulsory education was also enacted in remote areas containing a rural population. At the same time, increasing numbers of youth, both boys and girls, from the bourgeois class continued their education in secondary schools. Institutions for teachers’ training were established, the number of students in the universities grew, and pedagogy was recognized as a subject for the receipt of academic degrees. See Robert

38 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Anderson, “The Idea of Secondary School in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 1–2 (2004): 93–106. 39. Alenn Sina, “The Campaign for Universal Primary Education in Russia, 1890–1904,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge 30 (1982): 482–507. 40. Antony Byford, “Turning Pedagogy into Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897–1917),” Osiris 23, no. 1 (2008): 50–81. 41. Bartal, Responses to Modernity, 116–119. 42. Yehudit Shteiman, “Teachers as Culture Entrepreneurs  – A Case Study: Teachers at the Girls’ School in Jaffa in the Early Twentieth Century,” Dor LeDor 36, (2010): 71–124 [Hebrew]. 43. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews 1860-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1986), 6. 44. Haramati, Pioneer Teachers, 53–55. 45. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 6–132. 46. Tali Tadmor-Shimony, Gender, Professional Identity, and Familial Life in the Yishuv Area: The Married Women Teachers Israel 26(2021): 1–19 [Hebrew]. 47. Nissan Turov, “The Teachers’ Teacher,” in Haramati, Pioneer Teachers, chap. 2, 130–140. 48. Shlomo Carmi, First Furrows in Hebrew Education: The Convention of the Hebrew Teachers in the Land of Israel and Its Place in the Annals of Education, 1892-1896, (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass Press, 1986) [Hebrew]. 49. Marjorie Lamberti, “German Schoolteachers, National Socialism, and the Politics of Culture at the End of the Weimar Republic,” Central European History 34, no. 1 (2001): 53–82. 50. Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education. 51. Dov Kimhi, ed., The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1928 (Jerusalem: Teachers’ Union, 1929). [Hebrew]. 52. Protocol of meeting 36 of the Teachers’ Center (January 18, 1918), A/9.1/9/, AJE, cited in Shteiman, “Teachers as Culture Entrepreneurs.” 53. A. Mivshan, “Pestalozzi and His School,” HaChinuch 4, no. 3–4 (1914): 113–123; [Hebrew]; Mordechai Kirshavsky, “Johan Amos Comenius,” HaChinuch 2 (1912): 242–247, 307–319. [Hebrew]. 54. Mordechai Kirshavsky, “Rousseau’s Educational Doctrine,” trans. Prof. Hanzel, HaChinuch 3 (1912) [Hebrew]: 153–165; Yehiel Yehieli, “Nelly Wolffhein  – The Psychological Foundations of the Work Method in Kindergartens,” HaChinuch 1 (1910): 184–186 [Hebrew]. 55. Yosef Ozrakovsky, Mordechai Kirshavsky, and Yehiel Yehieli, Lesson on Observation and Knowledge of the Homeland (Jaffa: Kohelet, 1912), cited in Shteiman, “Teachers as Culture Entrepreneurs.”

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

39

56. Poliakov, HaChinuch (1910): 109–110 [Hebrew]. 57. Miriam Sazmet, “Jewish Pedagogues and the Pedagogical Discourse in Palestine, 1880  – 1935” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017), 56 [Hebrew]. 58. Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modem Europe, ed. Peter Burke and Po-chia Hsia, Cultural Translation in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7. 59. “Gamal Shlomo [Solomon’s Camel] and the Source of Its Name,” Hebrew Language Academy, https://hebrew-­academy.org.il/2012/03/ 2 0 / % d 7 % 9 2 % d 7 % 9 e % d 7 % 9 c -­% d 7 % a 9 % d 7 % 9 c % d 7 % 9 e % d 7 % 9 4 -­ %d7%95%d7%9e%d7%a7%d7%95%d7%a8-­% d7%a9%d7%9e%d7%95/ [Hebrew]. 60. One example of the use of cultural translation in educational material is described in Diana Gonçalves Vidal, “Transnational Education in the Late Nineteenth Century: Brazil, France and Portugal Connected by a School Museum,” History of Education 46, no. 2 (2017): 22–241. 61. Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education. 62. Yuval Dror, National Education’ through Mutually Supportive Devices: A Case Study (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 254–270. 63. The Center of the Teachers’ Union in the Land of Israel, “A Letter of Response,” HaChinuch, 4–5 (2011): 4–5. 64. Aviezer Yalin, “The Teacher Trade Union,” in Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, ed. Kimhi, 672.[Hebrew]. 65. Ibid. 66. Annie Polland, “‘May a Freethinker Help a Pious Man?’: The Shared World of the ‘Religious’ ‘R’ and the ‘Secular’ ‘S’ among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to America. (Essay).” American Jewish History 93, no. 4 (2007): 375–407. 67. Deirdre Raftery, “Teaching Sisters and Transnational Networks: Recruitment and Education Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century,” History of Education 44, no. 6 (2015): 717–728; Maria del Mar del Pozo Andrés and Sjaak Braster, “The Power of Networks in the Marketing of Pedagogical Ideals: The Dalton Plan in Great Britain (1920-1925),” History of Education 47, no. 6 (2018): 840–864. 68. Sarah Azaryahu, My Life Story (Tel Aviv: Neumann, 1957), 79–80 [Hebrew]. 69. Shteiman, “Teacher s as Culture Entrepreneurs,” 71–124. 70. In fact, primary education in rural areas began to become widespread following the 1833 Guzio Law regarding primary school, which led to the construction of schools in most of the rural communities in France. See Sébastien-Akira Alix, “Citizens in Their Right Place: Nation Building and

40 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Mass Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France,”,in School Acts and the Rise of Mass Schooling, ed. Johannes Westberg, Lukas Boser, and Ingrid Brühwiler (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019); Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon, eds., Mass Education and the Limits of Sate Building c. 1870–1930 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 145–169. 71. Baron Rothschild’s operations drew on his family’s wealth and did not depend on funds from foundations or donations; the Baron himself decided upon the type of investment, the amount, and the duration. The data indicate that he invested a million Pounds Sterling and purchased 500,000 dunams of land valued at more than five million Pounds Sterling. In the Baron’s settlement project, organized legal administration was meticulously observed, including the registration of transfer of ownership and property, which also applied to land. See, Ran Aaronson, Rothschild and Early Jewish Colonization in Palestine (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000). 72. Yossi Ben-Artzi, Early Jewish Settlement Patterns in Palestine, 1882-1914 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997). ]Hebrew]. 73. Ran Aharonson, “Sites from the Past in the First Moshavot,” in Talking Culture with the First Aliya, ed. Yaffa Berlovich and Yosef Lang (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2010), 248–264 [Hebrew]. 74. Brockliss Laurence and Sheldon Nicola, eds., Mass Education and the Limits of Sate Building c. 1870–1930 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 75. Yair Seltenreich, “Cultural Aspects of Philanthropy: Belle E´poque Administrators and Jewish Peasants in the Galilee,” Mediterranean Historical Review 23, no. 1 (2008): 35–51. 76. Ibid. 77. Yosef Salmon, Religion and Zionism (Jerusalem: HaSifriya HaTzionit, 1990), 137–138 [Hebrew]. 78. “What Happened This Week,” HaZvi, 1 September 1892, 1 [Hebrew]. 79. Yosef Azaryahu, Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel (Ramat Gan: Massada, 1954), 12 [Hebrew]. 80. Yehuda Levin, “Labor and Land at the Start of Jewish Settlement in Argentina,” Jewish History 21, no. 204 (2007): 341–359. 81. Seltenreich, “Cultural Aspects of Philanthropy.” 82. Argentina permitted these schools to operate on condition that the core Argentinian studies in Spanish be included. In 1894, The JCA council, with Baron Hirsch’s approval, decided to establish an educational system which would teach Jewish studies in parallel to the core Argentinian studies. The JCA covered the costs of the educational institutions, but demanded a certain amount of financial participation by the parents. See Yehuda Levin, “Education of the Younger Generation in the JCA Colonies

2  ACTORS AND NETWORKS 

41

in Argentina until the First World War,” Dor LeDor, 35 (2011): 179–202 [Hebrew]. 83. Yair Seltenreich, People from Here: Education and Educators in Galilee Moshavot During the Yishuv Era, 1882-1939 (Jerusalem and Ramat Gan: Yad Ben-Zvi and Bar-Ilan Press, 1914), 181–207 [Hebrew]. 84. Yossi Goldstein, “The Beginnings of Ḥ ibbat Zion: A Different Perspective,” AJS Review 40, no. 1 (2016): 33–55. 85. Ibid. 86. Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education. 87. Fuchs, “Networks and History of Education.”

CHAPTER 3

The Educational Institutions and Pedagogical Approaches

The development and growth of schools resulted from the diffusion of educational approaches, the community of students, instructional methods, and curricular objectives.1 This chapter describes the development of modern Jewish and Hebrew educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine, concentrating on two main aspects. The first chapter discusses the education space and the various educational institutions’ administration. This discussion completes the picture presented in the first chapter, which focused on the educational institutions established by the various educational actors and networks. The educational institutions are categorized into several groups. The main criterion for this categorization is the location of the educational institution—rural education in the moshavot, or urban education. The ownership of the educational institution, mentioned in the first chapter, is another criterion that affects the institution’s financing and administration. The second subchapter deals with the medicalization of the educational site. The second chapter discusses the expansion of the Western-Central European curriculum and its transfer and adaptation to the local conditions in Ottoman Palestine.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3_3

43

44 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

3.1   The Educational Space One of the features of modern education was the transition it entailed, from a non-designated space to an educational space in the form of a building of one size or another containing educational accessories and furniture designated for children. This change reflected society’s various demands of its graduates, curricular content, and teachers’ training. In preindustrial Christian society, the curriculum focused on the ability to read holy texts and, sometimes, on knowledge of four arithmetical functions. The studies concentrated chiefly on the building of churches. A special room for studies was designated for children of the nobility who wanted to learn within the cathedrals. Wealthy families hired private teachers for their children (primarily their sons) who expanded their education beyond the minimal knowledge of simple arithmetic and the ability to read. Traditional Jewish education, geared toward ages 3–12, also took place in a non-designated framework termed the heider or kutab (in Arabic), in the teacher’s home. Some communities (especially in North Africa) financed the teachers’ salaries. The studies were focused on Jewish law, rather than on preparing students for a profession. The purpose of the traditional Jewish education was to enable the Jewish child to acquire a basic familiarity with the sacred Hebrew text, which serves to unify the members of this group. Toward this end, there was no need for writing skills, but only for a reading ability; thus, most heiders in Eastern Europe only taught reading comprehension.2 Designated study spaces began operating during the American colonial period in the format of one-room schools and continued operating in this way in the new territories and in rural areas until the inception of mass education.3 In the second half of the eighteenth century, European governments were persuaded by philosophers’ wealth creation theories that there might be material as well as spiritual benefits from schooling the poor. Thus, the first systems of elementary schoolhouses were inaugurated, particularly in the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire.4 An architectural expression of this was the Zwergschule (one-room schoolhouse). In Prussia’s rural areas, stone houses similar to farmers’ houses were erected. These included two multiage classrooms and living quarters for the teacher.5 This model of the educational structure was transferred to Palestine by the Templar movement, which originated in the state of Wurttemberg in southern Germany and emigrated to Ottoman Palestine during the last third of the nineteenth century. Thus, in the

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

45

moshava Sharona (now part of Tel Aviv), which was founded in 1871, a two-story building was erected in 1873, including a meeting room and a classroom, where one teacher taught all the students. A similar two-story structure with a tiled roof was established in the moshava Hamidije Wilhelma.6 During the 1770s, the Philanthropist movement, which operated in the North German principalities, began establishing designated educational institutions. One of the best-known was the Dessau school. The Philanthropist leadership emphasized the importance of developing study areas and encouraging learning through agriculture, handicrafts, and so on. In other words, they formed a large educational space that included a number of varied educational spaces, such as a nature room, a laboratory, and more.7 This type of pedagogy was adopted by a network of Jewish intellectuals who lived in Prussia, other German states, and Austria, who called for a revolutionary change in Jewish education. In 1778, the Jüdische Freischule opened its gate in Berlin. The curriculum included secular studies, some religious studies, and professional training.8 This oppositional school could only exist in the margins of Jewish society. That is to say, poor and/or orphaned children could not participate in the normative framework of learning in the heider, mostly because of financial difficulties. Behind this and other educational institutions were “economic entrepreneurs” on the one hand, and a circle of intellectuals and members of the Enlightenment network, on the other. The collaboration between these two groups stemmed from their both wanting to effect a deep change in the worldview of those Jews and in the lifestyles and daily practices of the entire Jewish society.9 Elementary schooling became a mass institution throughout Western Europe during the nineteenth century as access to student populations expanded, and this trend increased in the last third of the century following the passage of compulsory education laws. This process is evident in the transition from the early industrial model to the late industrial model in the school buildings of Western and Central European cities. Originally, the buildings had several stories with crowded classrooms connected by long corridors. The expansion of the curriculum and enactment of compulsory education raised the planning standards for school buildings, resulting in the addition of designated classrooms for the study of sciences, handicrafts, and the like, and the widening of corridors. 10

46 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

The Entangled Architecture of Modern Jewish Elementary Schools in the Urban Space The affinity between educational viewpoints and the physical organization of the space, as well as the transfer of this affinity by the European educational actors, manifested in the three stages of the development of the Lemel elementary school, recognized as the first modern Jewish school in Ottoman Palestine. As mentioned, Ludwig Frankel, the founder of the Lemel School, sought to establish an educational institution with the curriculum of an urban Austrian school, which included mathematics, geography, movement, music, and the like. However, the local conditions of the conservative, traditional society, where the norms of the ultra-­orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem predominated, posed an obstacle. The rabbinical leadership saw this educational alternative as undermining the theological, social order and waging an all-out war against the school. Following a ban issued by the Ashkenazi rabbis, Frankel signed an agreement with the Sephardi rabbis, who were less extreme in their opposition, promising to approve any curriculum.11 The curriculum therefore included religious studies, Hebrew, and Arabic. The lessons were conducted in Ladino. In other words, at this point the curriculum was not characteristic of a modern school, as reflected in the physical layout of the study space. The lessons were conducted with students seated on a mat surrounding the teacher, as was customary in the heider or kutab. The most significant change was in the sanitary conditions of the structure itself.12 In 1890 the Lemel School moved to a new location, a two-story building in a new street outside the Old City. The reorganization of the school included classroom benches sent from Vienna, on which students sat up straight, and a spatial rearrangement of the classroom into rows.13 The next stage in the development of the school was the designated construction of a large structure built according to the simple modern model. This model included a building with several stories, long corridors that opened onto classrooms, and large windows that allowed for ventilation and natural light. The funds raised to build the designated structure reflected widespread participation by various actors and networks, from diverse countries, in the enterprise of providing a modern Jewish education. David Yellin traveled to Europe and met the leaders of the JCA, the transnational Jewish agrarian network, which contributed most of the sum. The educational network of Hilfsverein also contributed.14 Another contributing

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

47

German-speaking Jewish actor was the House of Rothschild in Vienna and the Lemel fund.15 In 1903 a new school building was inaugurated in one of the new neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and the school then moved to the large and well-apportioned building. The dominant impression that the school building aroused is reflected in the following remark: “The entire building was for the school’s needs and maintained the rules of health and the new European spirit.”16 The speaker was one of the scholars of local geography, Avraham Moshe Lunz, and among the founders of a children’s school for the blind. The architectural style of the school building visually exemplifies the entanglement of various cultures (see the pictures below). The building encompassed an eclectic architectural style, integrating neo-classicism and neo-Baroque elements, which characterized Jerusalem and other cities in Ottoman Palestine, similar to other urban centers in the Ottoman Empire. Various European and even American educational networks copied structures of different styles in the Ottoman urban centers, which reflected the modern educational message of the industrial revolution. For example, the École Sainte-Anne des Sœurs de Besançon and the Lazarist Fathers in Beirut were characterized by several stories, large windows, and the like.17 Ottoman Jerusalem was characterized by the prominence of various European religious communities’ enterprises, and European governments sought to deepen their hold on the city by means of various buildings. The result was an urban landscape that included tiled roofs, onion-shaped domes that indicated a Russian influence, strong fortresses inspired by the Crusaders, and mosques. The Lemel school building, which was inaugurated in 1903, demonstrates the entanglement of styles from different cultures. Its architect was Theodor Sandel, a native of Baden Wurttemberg, who studied architecture in the Polytechnikum School in Stuttgart and was a member of the Templar colony in Jaffa, and later of the colony in Jerusalem.18 Atop the building stands a gable—an inflorescence reminiscent of an oyster, such as those found in Hellenistic remains in Athens and Assyrian remains in Babylon. A clock was placed at the center of the gable as a symbol of the technological progress that permeated government institutions, church towers, train stations, and institutions of higher education throughout Europe. The Ottoman Empire’s administration adopted this symbol and ensured the presence of the clock in its administrative buildings in the cities of Jaffa and Haifa. The first school in Ottoman Palestine to adopt the clock was that of the Templar community in the

48 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Sharona colony back in the 1870s. Sandel designed a unique clock for the Lemel School, with Hebrew letters in place of numbers, thus expressing the entanglement between progress and Jewish tradition and heritage. Above the building’s entrance was an arch with a keystone bearing a carriage, which cast a Baroque shadow. Upon the keystone there was a relief of a well and the outline of a palm tree with walls in the background.7 In Jewish tradition, the well symbolizes the deep well of wisdom of the Torah. The palm tree is actually a date palm, which is viewed positively in Jewish culture, symbolizing abundance and good qualities, as we see in the Song of Songs (7:7), “This, thy stature is like a palm tree,” and Psalms (92:13), “The righteous man shall flourish like the palm.” Likewise, the Talmud states, “Dreaming of palm trees is a sign that one’s sins have come to an end” (Tractate Berachot 57A). The wall symbolizes the ancientness of Jerusalem. An interesting example of a school that relocated from a space designated as a social assistance institute to education-designated spaces was the Evelina de Rothschild School for girls, founded in 1954. The school was initially part of a combined social assistance organization that included medical care and hospital services, schooling, and assistance for women in childbirth. The school itself occupied five rooms in the hospital courtyard in the Old City of Jerusalem. In 1894 the school was transferred to the care of Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA), which was interested in forming a modern school. The AJA purchased a new forty-room building in a new and modern neighborhood outside of the Old City.19 As soon as the new building was opened, a new educational framework started to operate—a kindergarten for girls and boys, the first kindergarten in Jerusalem. The number of students grew, reaching 311 girls in elementary school and 273  in kindergarten by 1903. Over the following years, the number of students increased, and the school had to close its door to 400 girls due to lack of room. In 1911 the school rented the Abyssinian Palace—a magnificent villa. The children had a playground and space for science equipment and a library. Annie Landau and the foreign women teachers moved to the apartment at the top of the building and Landau received the nickname “Queen of Sheba.”20 This practice of having the teachers live adjacent to the school itself is somewhat reminiscent of how teachers live in monasteries. Nonetheless, this living arrangement was acceptable in the Girls’ School in Jaffa. The teachers resided in small apartments on the first floor of the school, and the rent they paid formed part of the school’s income. The classrooms

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

49

were on the upper floor. In other words, there was no separation between the workplace and the living place. The building had large wings attached to it, surrounded by a wide, enclosed, paved courtyard with a well in its center. The central courtyard—termed “Avtonomy”—served as the teachers’ room as well as a spiritual center for the Jews of Jaffa, where weddings were held, holidays were celebrated, shows were performed, political meetings were held, and Hebrew lessons for the students’ parents were taught. Presumably this combination of functions stemmed from a lack of housing, alongside a sense of shared mission and a blurring of the boundaries between the work of teaching and the teachers’ commitment to the community. The Entangled Architecture of Schools in the Rural Space The development of kindergartens and schools in the moshavot was shaped by several factors: the conflict between the religious, educational framework of the heider and modern education in the moshavot, the identity of those funding the educational institutions, and the size of the moshava and the number of its students. These three factors were reflected in the character and size of the educational buildings and their equipment. The moshavot may be classified into two categories. In the first category, education was funded by the philanthropic actor, Baron Rothschild, through his bureaucracy and the transnational Jewish network, JCA. The second group comprised those moshavot that did not receive regular funding from an external factor. These communities were forced to fund modern education through community taxes or parental tuition. In these moshavot, it took years to transfer the site of schooling from a public building, usually a synagogue, to a designated facility. In the moshava of Rehovot, for example, the school was relocated to a stone structure, partially financed by the wine company Carmel, after seven years in a wooden shack.21 In the moshava of Gedera it took thirteen years to transfer the studies from the synagogue to a designated two-room structure with a tiled roof.22 In the first moshavot established in the 1880s, heiders operated during the first two to three years in non-designated structures, solely for boys, yet there were places where heiders included girls or separate heiders were established for the two genders. Reading and writing, religious studies, and basic arithmetic were taught in these heiders. Yiddish was the language of instruction. The heiders operated in the synagogues or in the homes of the melamdim. In other words, the community had transplanted the

50 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

familiar study patterns from the villages of Eastern Europe to the local reality. The transfer of moshavot to the patronage of Baron Rothschild and his system of bureaucracy had an impact on the structure of teaching and the subject matter. The bureaucracy strove to place public buildings near each other along the main street. Thus, in Zichron Ya’akov, the school was set up as one of four public buildings on the village’s main street in 1884, two years after the village was established. The same structure also housed the local pharmacy, which Baron Rothschild financed as well. During the first winter, rain penetrated the house, and the school was moved to another stone structure further up the road. The community at the time saw the school structure as an evolutionary step, part of moving away from an old and outdated system of education, from education under unsuitable conditions to an advanced system of education operating “as is customary in a European school.” The following article from 1887, describing the school in the northern moshava of Rosh Pina, attests to this view: Internally and externally, the school has a look of beauty and charm. The hall is large, wide, and full of light, while rows upon rows of wooden benches and a wooden table stand within, and maps of land regions hang upon the walls. The students sit in their places in awe, standing upon their feet when they speak to the teacher, all as is customary in the European school, and of the antiquated heider, there is not even a memory here.23

The furniture and teaching aids point to the replication and implementation of a European classroom in a Jewish village in Ottoman Palestine. In 1899 an enormous two-story school was erected in the moshava of Rishon LeZion, which had a large population and sizable number of students, at the cost of ten thousand francs.24 The JCA network established thirteen of the twenty-one schools that were operating in 1910, and was responsible for their upkeep and for funding all that was needed for the educational activities in the moshavot. In some of the moshavot, the JCA initially built multi-windowed one-story schools, modeled after farmers’ houses, and a few years later would expand the building or build a new one.25 For example, the first school in the moshava of Kfar Tavor was established in 1903. The schools were built in stages. Initially, the basic structure was set up, and later rooms, gardens, and other structures and elements were added. In contrast to the Baron’s period, the village

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

51

planners ensured that the schools had their own separate buildings. In some of the moshavot, such as Kfar Tavor, the schools were built in the center of the village. In others, such as Metula and Menachmiya, they were built at the edge of the moshava, in a fenced area that included a schoolyard and a garden.26 In 1907, in the small moshava of Melachmiya, the JCA built a school with six rooms, which served as classrooms/kindergarten, a teachers’ room, and administration. Notably, the classrooms were quite large—24 sq. meters. The structure’s architectural style was an intertwining of Eastern building styles, reflected in arched entrances and roofs, while the wooden frames reflected European design.27 In terms of size, there were large, medium, and small schools. Thus, for example, the four largest moshavot had relatively large schools.28 They operated as a grade school, that is, that the children were divided into classes based upon their ages and studied a variety of subjects. The staff of these schools included a secretary, janitors, and occasionally additional administrative functionaries. In the medium-sized moshavot such as Kfar Tavor, medium-sized schools operated, with few teachers, one of whom served as the school principal. The school was biennial, and the educational program spanned four to eight years. The small moshavot with very few students had one teacher who served as principal, aided by a kindergarten teacher, or an additional teacher. The limited number of students in the medium and small schools had certain ramifications, such as a lack of gender separation and classes with children of different ages. Yosef Azaryahu’s 1910 report reveals that the average teacher/student ratio was one teacher per twenty-four students.29 An additional consequence was a lack of pedagogical uniformity regarding the transition from kindergarten to school, which resulted from organizational considerations such as the lack of a kindergarten teacher, the necessity to expand a small first grade, or the need to avoid having too large a class. A turning point, in the form of a new policy whereby the financing organization sought to determine the image of the desired graduates, or at least some of their characteristics (see Chap. 3), came with the establishment of the school for girls in the moshava Rishon LeZion. Initially, its curriculum was based on that of the AIU schools, the concept of core studies (an extension of the three Rs), and the teachers’ capacities. Another factor was that the curricular policy was set only gradually in all of the moshavot under the Baron’s auspices. Two subsidized kindergartens were added to these, one where the language spoken was French, in Zichron

52 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Ya’akov, and the other, a Hebrew-speaking one, in Rishon LeZion. The Baron’s bureaucracy, and later the JCA network, de facto created public education, granting all the community’s children tuition-free schooling as the teachers’ salaries were paid by the organization that ran the village. The parents were not required to finance the costs of the building, furniture, or teaching equipment.30 The attempt to create a bureaucratic framework characteristic of the organization of a welfare state manifested in education as well, with the establishment of regional supervision by the Baron’s bureaucracy and the appointment of Mordechai Lubman, teacher, as the inspector of three schools, one in Rishon LeZion, and the other two in Mazkeret Batya and Petach Tikva. This framework continued operating during the JCA period. Yitzhak Epstein, who was the principal of the school in Rosh Pina, was appointed as the inspector in the Upper Galilee. He traveled to Switzerland in 1902 for doctoral studies. His replacement was Simcha Wilkomitz, who created a reporting format that included organized reports on the state of the educational institutions. These formats were adopted by the JCA as a model for supervision.31 In 907, Jules Rosenhack, the JCA official, stipulated that these principles of mutual inspection be instituted to enable school principals to evaluate the achievements of the students in neighboring moshavot.32 The next stage in the construction of the JCA network’s educational hierarchy was the appointment of an inspector for all ten educational institutions in the Galilee. This was Aharon Karon (1881–1954), a native of Vilna, who was known for his pedagogical abilities.33 The inspection framework gave rise to a hierarchal-pedagogical system, where the head was the inspector, and beneath him were the school principals to whom the teachers were subordinate. The educational system of the JCA colonies in Argentina had a similar system.34 The First World War severed the activities of JCA’s educational inspection system. Although the Baron’s bureaucracy and the JCA’s administration funded and enabled free education, they did not have the tools, ability, or in most cases, the determination to enforce participation in the moshava’s school— in contrast to the situation in places where a law of compulsory education was in force. Many farmers were vehemently opposed to the school and preferred the traditional heider. The heiders and schools in the moshavot have been widely discussed through ideological prisms, as Elboim-Dror and others have demonstrated, pointing to this competition as another arena in the cultural war between ultra-orthodox and nationalist circles.35 There was a clash between those who desired to mold adult Jews who

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

53

adhered to the commandments and those wishing to mold adults on the basis of a modern education. An additional aspect is the balance of power between the body with economic power (the bureaucracy and the JCA) and those dependent upon it (the farmers). One of the first power struggles—in which farmers announced that they were relinquishing subsidized education and the bureaucracy attempted to torpedo the alternative, the heider—was in the moshava of Mazkeret Batya. The Baron’s bureaucracy used its power and forbade the leasing of a building for heider studies. The residents’ response was to utilize one of the school’s classrooms as a heider.36 In 1892, the Jerusalem heider operators convinced farmers to boycott the school. Moreover, the institution itself became a target of violence acts of destruction and vandalism. Most of the farmers of Petach Tikva continued to reject subsidized education because of its messages, preferring to pay for the known, traditional education. In practice, public education in the moshava of Petach Tikva became the realm of the poor, as reflected in a 1901 article in the newspaper HaMelitz: “In Petach Tikva, only a small number of the poor, who cannot afford to pay a melamed, send their children to the school.”37 This depiction is reminiscent of the low ranking of public schools for the poor in the social hierarchy toward the end of the nineteenth century. In other words, the modern, subsidized school was the last resort of the community’s economically marginalized. The people’s lack of desire to send their children to the schools reached its peak in 1904, when the students in the local school in Mazkeret Batya left. As a result, the school was closed. In other words, most of the parents preferred private education, as long as it fulfilled their expectations. In 1905, the JCA bureaucracy sent Yitzhak Cohen, an experienced teacher, to run the school. His residence was changed to the house of the former clerk, Brill. This was a larger and better-apportioned structure than the previous one.38 One of the means used to deal with the bureaucracy’s demand to send the children to the schools was gender selection. The girls were sent to the schools to satisfy the bureaucracy, while the boys were sent to the heider.39 The familial split also reflects the place of the daughter, on the one hand, and the advantage of being marginalized, on the other, even during the JCA period. Thus, for example, in 1903, in the moshava Yavne’el, the farmers of the moshava chose open conflict with Haim Margalit Klavrisky, the JCA’s educational inspector for the Lower Galilee, and demanded that

54 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

he fire the schoolteachers in the moshava and, instead, open a Talmud Torah (religious elementary school). Klavrisky opposed this initiative. In his refusal, he represented the ethos of modern education, which was the common denominator between the Hebrew teachers and the approach of the JCA, the body funding what could be defined as public community education. The farmers, who feared JCA’s response, decided to continue sending the girls, who constituted a third of the students, to the school. In other words, most of the boys attended the heider.40 Because private education placed a heavy burden on the farmers, they chose to pay by means of barter with the melamdim who came from Jerusalem. The melamdim received an apartment, tobacco, and sustenance, with their actual salary covered by their general fund. This arrangement did not last long, as the melamdim found the rural conditions distasteful and returned to Jerusalem. The boys then returned to the public school.41 The involvement of the ultra-orthodox communities of Jerusalem is in itself interesting.42 The number of students who attended the school in Mazkeret Batya in 1906 offers a quantitative illustration of this choice: only fifteen of the sixty-six students were boys.43 The JCA bureaucracy would occasionally thwart the gender selection between the heider and the school by refusing to admit girls to the school if their brothers were sent to the heider, as in the moshavot of Mazkeret Batya and Yesod Hama’aleh. In 1908 the educational inspector decided to combat the gender selection in Mazkeret Batya by imposing tuition costs on any family that sent their son to the heider and daughter to the school. Thus it happened that Zipora Miller was forced to abandon her studies at age 12 because she had another sister in school and a brother in a Talmud Torah. Her parents, who could not finance two daughters in school, decided that the older daughter would leave school and the younger would remain.44 Zipora’s brother studied in the Talmud Torah of the Shomrei Torah network. The same means of punishment was applied in the moshava Yesod Hama’aleh as well, where entry to school was barred to a girl whose brother attended a heider (which was not a part of the Shomrei Torah network). In this case, however, the mother, who was shocked by the melamed’s extreme strictness, removed her son from the heider and sent both children to the school.45

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

55

From Asile d’enfants to Hebrew Kindergarten One of the most important changes in children’s placement during the nineteenth century was the transition from children’s shelters to designated places of study, which eventually became kindergartens. Initially, such a place served as a children’s shelter for children of the weaker classes. It later became an educational institution that operated according to Pestalozzi’s doctrine—learning by head, hand, and heart.46 The concept of the kindergarten is an example of what Roberta Lyn Wollons terms “the global diffusion of an idea.”47 Miriam Laxer, a teacher, was the first to transfer the new children’s institution to Ottoman Palestine, in 1882. Laxer was a young woman, a resident of the community of Zichron Ya’akov. She was exposed to the idea of a kindergarten through the network of AIU, where she was sent by the representative of Baron Rothschild in Ottoman Palestine and with his financing. The administration of Baron Rothschild supported the institute. Its Hebrew was a translation of the phrase “Cultural House for Little Children,” corresponding with the historical development of this institution during the years preceding its appearance in Ottoman Palestine. This translation, however, was replaced with the Hebrew translation of the German word kindergarten, as determined by the noted linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.48 The name change does not indicate a linguistic choice alone, but the adoption and implementation of a different kindergarten model, the Froebelian kindergarten. The spoken language in the first modern kindergarten in Ottoman Palestine was French, as were the cultural elements surrounding the toddlers there.49 Like Miriam, several dozen other Jewish girls were sent from Palestine for studies in France by Baron Rothschild’s representative, and upon returning some of them were integrated into modern schools and kindergartens that the French-Jewish philanthropist had built in Ottoman Palestine. During her training period, Miriam encountered modern European culture, expanded her knowledge, dealt with daily life in a foreign country, and returned to Ottoman Palestine to establish a kindergarten based on the modern French model.50 Laxer ran the kindergarten for seven years. She had to balance the picture of a French kindergarten with the demands of the parents and the financer. The kindergarten served as the first model of a modern European kindergarten, inspiring educators and parents to learn and make an effort to establish other kindergartens.51

56 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Miriam’s kindergarten illustrates the implementation of the Jewish-­ French model, with practically no change or adaptation. Miriam used the tools given to her, including the model for administering a kindergarten proposed in the seminary, without changing the language, curriculum, songs, or games.52 Alongside this kindergarten in Zichron Ya’akov, another model was put into operation—the mixed model of a pre-school preparatory program for toddlers based on the developmental theories of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Gesell together with Froebel’s method.53 The Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls in Jerusalem implemented this model in 1896.54 Emma Jungjekel, a Christian teacher, was selected for the position on the basis of her professional knowledge. She had studied at the Froebel house in Berlin before traveling to Jerusalem. The preparatory class, which met within the school grounds, aimed to prepare the young students for school. Two factors stood behind the implementation of the preparatory programs in Ottoman Palestine. The first was structural-administrative, namely, the administrative convenience of establishing a class for 4–5-year-old toddlers on school grounds. Under Froebel’s approach, the novice teachers received training and then attempted, within the existing framework, to mold a small, autonomous educational institution adapted to local conditions. The second factor behind establishing a preparatory program that integrated Froebel’s methods was national and local, namely, the aspiration to make Hebrew the vernacular language. Most of the parents were not fluent in this new-old language, which also lacked many words, and the mother tongue of most of the children in the moshavot was Yiddish, not Hebrew. Lack of knowledge of the language impeded the activities of the kindergartens and the schools, as Matmon explained at the founding meeting of the Teachers’ Union (1903), “The preparatory program is instead of the kindergarten, for a true kindergarten is a foreign element that cannot be transplanted here, as we lack one of the required conditions—a mother tongue.” He continued by explaining the problems entailed in implementing the European model of the kindergarten as is, in the local reality: “Kindergartens were introduced ‘as we found them’ among the European nations, but the evidence is not relevant to the subject. In European kindergartens, the toddlers acquire various terms and knowledge through a language they have already learned to speak at home, whereas we must first teach the language.” The first preparatory program was established in the moshava of Rishon LeZion in 1894. The kindergarten was meant for

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

57

children 3–6 years old and was characterized as a preparatory class. The teacher described herself as a supporter of Froebel’s educational outlook. The kindergarten was financed by a budget provided by the administration of Baron Rothschild and later by JCA, whose clerks were guided by the conservative humanistic French culture.55 The preparatory program in the moshava of Kfar Tavor was close to the conservative approach. Its aims were described by the school’s principal, Yehuda Antebi: “In the preparatory program the student will begin to learn how to read, so that when he leaves the preparatory program, he will already be able to read well.” Together with reading, the young students learned arithmetic and writing.56 Collaboration between the Hilfsverein network and Hebrew-speaking teachers led to the opening of a kindergarten in Jerusalem in 1903. This was the first kindergarten initiative in a city funded by the network. In the following years, the network financed additional kindergartens, and in fact, most Hebrew-speaking kindergartens were supported by the Hilfsverein network. School for the Blind In 1902 Jerusalem saw the founding of a school for the blind that differed from other educational institutions in both its nature and its financing.57 Similar institutions for the general public had been founded by actors and European Christian religious networks in Jerusalem, but this was the first Jewish educational institution in Ottoman Palestine to provide a solution for children with special needs. Education for the blind underwent significant changes in the nineteenth century for several reasons. The implementation of compulsory education highlighted the lack of education for children with disabilities. In addition, the medicalization of education differentiated between “normal” students and “abnormal” ones who were eligible for tailored education.58 In the nineteenth century, blindness, once a marginal phenomenon, became more prevalent following the spread of trachoma, an eye disease, and an increase in work accidents due to the Industrial Revolution, among other factors.59 In the first third of the century, educational institutions for the blind were established in Western-Central Europe and the United Kingdom, where training measures were developed. Braille made a crucial contribution to making education accessible to the blind population, spreading unevenly to various countries but receiving official recognition at the Third Teachers’ Congress

58 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

in 1879.60 This congress, which illustrates the development of a transnational knowledge network on blindness, included teaching coordinators for the blind. Lending libraries and entries in encyclopedias also appeared.61 This knowledge was transferred to Ottoman Palestine, as noted, by religious networks and missionary actors, the most prominent of which was the Schneller Protestant Pension, established in 1882.62 The lack of a public health system in Ottoman Palestine was also evident with respect to the blind. The hospitals and medical facilities of the 1870s were all the work of religious networks, missionaries, and philanthropists who sought to provide assistance in the Holy Land. Most of the blind people in Jerusalem had been born with eyesight and they became blind due to poor sanitary conditions that allowed trachoma to proliferate.63 This harsh reality motivated five Jerusalem-born scholars, the most prominent of whom was the geographer Avraham Moshe Lunz, himself blind, to establish a school for blind children. These five educated men were scions of the religiously conservative Jewish society and received schooling in its educational facilities. Their exposure to education with national and modern concepts that aspired to education and productivity led them to establish a modern school for blind children.64 The five founders also feared that sending blind Jewish children to Christian institutions would lead to their Christianization and abandonment of the Jewish people.65 A blind education house, unlike other educational institutions, was not supported by an educational network and it did not receive funding from philanthropists. The institution was unable to charge tuition from the children’s parents, who belonged to the weakest strata of society. The institution depended on fundraising through articles, various events, and appeals to affluent people. The School for the Blind was an internal educational institution with a religious-Zionist character built under the educational and auspices of institutions in Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman period. The institution offered Jewish children between the ages of six and twenty vocational education and training to prevent their dependence on others and allow them to become effective adults who work for a living and contribute to society. The school had three components. The first one included preschool and elementary education, which were based on a standard curriculum, development of social and educational skills, and religious studies. The second component dealt with professional education, training of students

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

59

to work in handicrafts, and music. A third component was the boarding school, which provided a variety of services, including accommodation, food, clothing, and footwear, health, cultural and leisure life, religious services, and the like.66 Its characteristics, as an educational institution for blind children, placed it somewhere between a welfare institution that sheltered a needy, marginalized population and an educational institution. The language spoken at the school was Hebrew, but reading and writing were taught in German, as they were based on the German Braille system. In 1907, the institution’s teachers succeeded in adapting this educational object to the local conditions and developed a Hebrew Braille script. A great deal of time and money was required to create a proper Hebrew library. In addition to Hebrew Braille, a Hebrew version of raised print (Stechelschrift) was developed.67 The School for the Blind had between six and nine teachers and educational staff, most of whom held only part-time positions and occasionally volunteered. The staff size was determined by the number of students and the institution’s available resources. The staff included teachers (such as Avraham Moshe Lunz and Nahum Nathanson, who, in addition to their administrative positions, were teachers and educators), kindergarten teachers, and professional teachers for music. Specialists in the relevant fields taught music and handicrafts. Among the music teachers was Mr. Kowalsky, who had served as a conductor in the Russian Army’s wind instrument orchestra before teaching at the School for the Blind. Shortly after his arrival word spread about the virtues of the new teacher, and seeing students from all over the city came to learn from him as well.68 In 1905, Sarah Rosenblum, a native of Safed who had attended a Viennese institution that provided training in teaching the blind, the Hoch Warte Jewish Institute for the Blind, arrived at the School for the Blind. She was the first teacher at the institution with accreditation to teach the blind. Seven years later, teachers who had graduated from the School for the Blind and studied education joined the institution. These blind teachers had personally dealt with the reality of life as a blind person and thus had a deeper understanding of the special needs of the students, as well as an ability to guide the students in the skills and practices they needed.69 The students’ social diversity was a salient feature that differentiated the School for the Blind from the other Jewish educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine. Not only did the institution enact gender and ethnic

60 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

integration, but it also added other identity components such as various blindness characteristics and a multiplicity of ages. Secondary Education An examination of the establishment of Jewish secondary schools in Ottoman Palestine, their goals, and the curricula they developed reveals two main approaches that were transferred from Europe to Ottoman Palestine. Formal and informal networks propelled the actors and molded and guided modern Jewish schools in the country. The first approach was the educated approach, which focused on molding an educated Jew, a descendent of the modern educated Jewish student. This person has mastered at least one foreign language in various subjects such as history, literature, and philosophy. The second approach was a pragmatic approach that focused on the need to mold a “new” rooted Jew, usually a “farmer” or a “laborer,” in contradistinction to the traditional learned Jew or the modern free professional.70 We shall start with the educated approach, which was related to two models of secondary education in Europe. These were the lycee and gymnasium. The model transferred to Ottoman Palestine was that of the gymnasia that operated in Germany and spread to Tsarist Russian cities. As Anderson writes, these educational institutions were secular, run by the state or city council. They were not organically linked to popular education.71 The purpose of these institutions was to prepare their students for university studies. The curriculum was oriented toward passing the matriculation exams in order to be admitted to the university. The educated view was the motive behind the founding of the gymnasia. Its aim was to prepare students for the matriculation exams. The language of study was Hebrew. In addition to the gymnasia, there operated two teachers’ training institutions. The first institution established in Ottoman Palestine was the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jaffa in 1905. Later, the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem (1909) and the Reali School in Haifa (1913) were founded. The founding of the Gymnasium in Jaffa stemmed from a combination of ideas and their implementation by certain actors and networks, some of whom sought to cross their state borders. Among these were the social networks of Jewish intellectuals and political activists of Hovevei Zion and the World Zionist Organization in Eastern Europe. They were seeking to reach beyond the boundaries of the European arena and create a Hebrew cultural center in Ottoman Palestine. Initially, they would locate teachers with a full or partial academic education who were willing to leave Europe

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

61

for Ottoman Palestine in order to realize the vision of creating a Hebrew culture. Later they also participated in the financing of institutes. The second group of actors was teachers native to Eastern Europe who were part of the Hebrew teacher network, and most of whom had attended German universities and wanted to create an educated Zionist-Hebrew generation. Some of these founding teachers acquired teaching, and sometimes administrative, experience in Eastern European gymnasia. The third group of actors comprised parents, who included two subgroups. One subgroup consisted of parents who were professionals or merchants, primarily residents of Jaffa, and who embraced the practice of study and preparation for matriculation examinations in order to pave the way to advanced studies. The presence of the local Hebrew Gymnasium alleviated the need to send their children out of the country or to non-Hebrew-­ speaking educational institutions. The other subgroups of parents were immigrants from Russia, Poland, Bessarabia, and Romania who sent their children the Jewish gymnasia that opened in Ottoman Palestine.72 The founders of the first Gymnasium were a couple, Fania and Yehuda Leib Matmon-Cohen, who wanted to provide Jewish students in Ottoman Palestine with the option of an advanced secondary education.73 Fania and Yehuda Leib Matmon-Cohen’s professional biography reveals a dynamic and shifting combination of educational approaches, ideological discourse, social and pedagogical processes, and trial-and-error efforts to adapt these to the environment and implement them. Before she emigrated to Ottoman Palestine, Fania had adopted Froebel’s educational viewpoint and established the first Hebrew kindergarten in Bialystok. She attended the University of Odessa and Bern University. When she opened the Gymnasium with her spouse, she took the teaching of arithmetic in the preparatory program upon herself and wrote a textbook for her students in 1906.74 Matmon-Cohen, an ordained rabbi, was very familiar with religious education and the traditional lifestyle. While still in Eastern Europe, he became acquainted with the concept of Hebrew nationalism advanced by Hovevei Zion and enthralled by one of its leaders, Asher Ginzburg (Ahad Ha’am), who called for the emigration of quality teachers to Palestine. Following this call, Matmon-Cohen established “The Army of Rebirth,” an organization whose aim was to establish a Hebrew Gymnasium in Palestine.75 Matmon-Cohen rounded out his knowledge in the field of organization when he took on the administration of a Jewish evening high school in Paris. In pursuit of this goal, he completed his studies at the University

62 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

of Bern. During his studies in the biblical and Hebrew students’ network, he met the director of the Freies Gymnasium and interned as a teacher at the institution. Yehuda Matmon-Cohen’s motivation in choosing the Swiss educational model is illustrated by his assertion, upon being appointed principal of the school in Rishon LeZion in 1904, that “before me was another format of the Swiss school, with all its methods and organization, and we sought to adapt the Hebrew school to it as well.”76 The model before Matmon-Cohen was that of the Freies Gymnasium, which operated in the university city of Bern. Matmon-Cohen pursued his internship with Dr. Preiswerk, the institution’s principal, in parallel with his doctoral studies on Semitic languages at the university. He adopted the division of classes he saw at Freies Gymnasium, with a lower grammar school for years 7 and 8 and preparatory classes (school years 5 and 6).77 The need to adapt the educational institution to address the lack of elementary schools in Jaffa and Tel Aviv led to the addition of elementary school classes during the school year. As at the Freies Gymnasium, the institution promised to prepare its graduates for the matriculation examinations.78 The evolution of the Jaffa Gymnasium manifested in changes that began in the educational realm and in the change of its status from a private institution to an educational facility. During its first year, the Gymnasium was located in the Matmon-Cohen family’s rented apartment. In other words, it followed the traditional educational model, where there is no designated place of study, and instead studies take place at the teacher’s home. This was, however, an economic default choice rather than a pedagogical one. That year seventy-four students paid tuition. The teaching faculty included Yehuda and Fania Matmon-Cohen and Bernard Moshinson, who taught French.79 The next stage entailed changing the Gymnasium’s structural space and administrational system. The Gymnasium was successful, and as the number of students grew, it moved from place to place until the autumn of 1907, when Eliyahu Berlin, a wealthy Jaffa resident, assumed patronage and offered it quarters in a building he owned. Berlin himself lived on the top floor of this building, and the other two floors were dedicated to the Gymnasium. According to Re’ut Gordon, the integration of classrooms and the patron’s living quarters in the same building was an extension of and variation on the Jewish heider, which was traditionally part of the teacher’s house. It also resembled schools built in the Western world beginning in the seventeenth century, where the teacher served as a father figure responsible for the monks’ education, that is, the abbot.80

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

63

Changes in the Gymnasium’s educational format were supplemented by changes in the institution’s structure, administration, and financing. The gymnasium model familiar to the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe was that of the Prussian Gymnasium.81 A newly founded society that bore the name “The Hebrew Gymnasium Society in the Land of Israel” owned stocks, raised money, and was responsible for the institution’s administration. A supervisory committee headed the society, and it raised money for the Gymnasium from various networks in the Jewish world, such as Hovevei Zion and other Jewish donors. In other words, the Gymnasium’s status changed from that of a private institution to that of a public one, legally bound to be administered as an association. At this stage, the teaching staff increased greatly, to nine. In addition, a physician by name Sonia Belkind, who was among the first female physicians in Ottoman Palestine, worked for the school. The change in the school’s administration mode affected the economic aspect. The Gymnasium’s budget was balanced due to tuition, the support of the Hovevei Zion committee, interest from funds collected from various contributions, and payments from the shares of the association’s members.82 This fund financed the Gymnasium’s furnishings and construction. An additional fund available to it provided for the purchase of books and teaching aids. The Hilfsverein network financed the purchase of equipment for the study of natural science.83 Most of the teachers and supporters of the Gymnasium were also members of the Zionist Organization network. Thus one of its teachers and one member of the supervisory committee were sent as delegates to the World Zionist Congress in 1907. The teacher, whose biography was similar to that of Matmon-Cohen, was Dr. Haim Bograshov, a native of Ukraine, who had attended Bern University. The second delegate was the activist and political figure Menahem Shenkin, who sold shares of the Gymnasium Society to his colleagues. This activity aroused a good deal of interest, contributing to cooperation with another delegate from England, the magistrate Ya’acov Moser, a wealthy man who contributed 99,500 francs toward the construction of the Gymnasium’s building. Moser’s condition was that the Gymnasium bear the name of the founder of the Zionist Organization, Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl, and, indeed, its name was changed to the Herzliya Gymnasium (and remains so to this day). Several months after the 1907 Zionist Congress, the president of the transnational Jewish network of the Zionist Organization, David Wolffsohn, visited the Gymnasium and gave it his heartfelt blessing. Another important

64 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

actor in the Zionist Organization was the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which purchased land. The JNF bought the plot designated for the building site, and Moser transferred it to them.84 With this act, he legally became a recognized actor of the Zionist Organization. The plot designated for the building was in a new neighborhood, which later became the heart of the city of Tel Aviv following its founding in 1909. The Gymnasium’s structure resulted from the intertwining of European cultural outlooks regarding school structure, together with the native Jewish building style and Muslim influence. The actors of the national Hebrew education sought to shape an educational visual culture that challenged the traditional Jewish education system, using new visual symbols that were not accepted in in traditional Jewish education. In the Zionist utopias, school yards were depicted with palm trees, fountains, and statues. An example of this can be seen at the Herzliya Gymnasium.85 An expression of this can be seen at the Herzliya Gymnasium. The dominant architectural model used was that of Trinity College in Dublin. This was a university college design, which included towers and a wide gateway, projecting the message of higher education. The message was dramatically amplified by the conditions of the Yishuv in Ottoman Palestine, where there was no mass education and very few children completed eight years of elementary school studies. The architectural model adopted served as an advertising placard because it was visible from a distance. The location of the Gymnasium building meant that it overlooked the main road of the new neighborhood and was visible to passengers on the Jaffa-Jerusalem train.86 The architectural entanglement of the Gymnasium building illustrates how and in which ways architectural styles permeate different cultures. Shenkin requested of Yosef Bersky, the architect, that the building be designed in the style of the Temple. This request reflects the great importance of the Gymnasium and its designated function. The architect found a picture of a mosque in the Persian city of Mashad, where many Jews who were forced to live outwardly as Muslims dwelt, and adapted it for the Gymnasium’s building. The result was a mixture of the façade of a cathedral and that of a mosque, including the four corners of an altar, as in archeological findings. The lower level of the façade was made of rough stone masonry, which was supposed to be reminiscent of the walls of Jerusalem. Notably, however, this type of masonry pointed to a European architectural tradition that had originated in the Italian Renaissance. The building conveyed the power of Turkish establishment buildings, which

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

65

dwarf those entering them through the monumentalism of the building’s entrance, constructed as a gigantic hidden door containing a door whose height was twice that of an adult man. Both sides of the two towers were constructed in a way that enhanced the entrance while simultaneously diminishing those entering its portals. Those structures, whose roots trace back to the muezzins’ minarets, became incorporated into the buildings of the Turkish establishment. The Gymnasium also had a dominant physical and symbolic presence in the renascent Hebrew Jewish society, conveying a combination of modern culture and Middle Eastern locality. In Gordon’s words, the outward message of “a grand and stable construction of a modern educational institution, neither humble nor hidden” was crucial.87 While in some countries, insecurity led Jews to build houses of study and prayer that were not visible from the street, the Gymnasium building sought to transmit the opposite message. The internal division of classrooms reflects the planners’ adoption of the late industrial model, namely, homeroom classrooms and designated classrooms for the teaching of various subjects, from physical education to laboratory sciences. Photographs reveal furniture in the form of hard wooden benches attached to a table. In some classrooms, the benches were wide enough for three or four students. The room was arranged differently in the designated classrooms, as was the furniture.88 In 1910, after much deliberation by various actors involved in the Gymnasium’s administration and development, they decided to ask the Ottoman authorities to accredit the institution, that is, to recognize its report cards and, in particular, its matriculation certificates. Toward this end, the Gymnasium’s founders and teachers agreed to accept the Ottoman authority’s conditions, which included the study of the Turkish language and the acceptance of Ottoman citizenship by the head of the institution. The Gymnasium experienced rapid growth, and on the eve of the First World War it had 721 students, boys and girls. Almost half were youth who had immigrated from Eastern Europe, some without their parents, and some with only their fathers, to attend the Hebrew-speaking Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. The Herzliya Gymnasium was a hub of several networks, including, for example, Jewish youth from Eastern Europe and the Hebrew-speaking community in Ottoman Palestine. It was also a hub of two Jewish transnational networks, the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and Hilfsverein. It was the only training institution open to girls and boys to study together as equals. The majority of its first wave of students were from Jaffa, the

66 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

sons and daughters of members of the free professions, merchants, and the Jewish intelligentsia. As parents, they wanted their children to continue pursuing an education after elementary school and to do so in the spirit of Hebrew nationalism, without having to venture outside Israel or attend a missionary educational institution. Some Gymnasium graduates became leaders of the Hebrew society in Palestine. The second Hebrew gymnasium opened its gates to Jewish students in Jerusalem in 1909. Until then Jerusalem had no secondary schools, and the only option had been to attend the Hilfsverein Seminary or turn to foreign Christian schools.89 The success of the Jaffa Gymnasium motivated nationalist-Hebrew families to open a similar institution in Jerusalem. To establish the institution, three main actors joined forces: the parents, a limited number of intellectuals and Jewish public servants in Ottoman Palestine, and four founding teachers who took the educational work and administrative matters upon themselves. The Gymnasium encountered tremendous difficulties during the period of preliminary organization. It had no building of its own, fundraising proved to be difficult, and the number of students did not grow: each class had only 2–3 students, and the highest grade had only one student. By the end of 1910, with a total of only sixteen students, the Gymnasium’s overseers were considering its closure. To prevent this, parents of the Gymnasium’s students approached the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jaffa. The Jaffa Gymnasium’s supervisory board assigned the task of helping the Jerusalem Gymnasium to Dr. Matmon-Cohen, and he agreed to take it up.90 Matmon-Cohen’s efforts, accompanied by large street posters announcing the opening of registration, succeeded, and the Gymnasium continued to function. By the end of 1911, Dr. Matmon-Cohen was spending three days per week in Jerusalem, in his words, rearranging the weak organizational structure of the Jerusalem Gymnasium. Toward this end, he appointed a treasurer, took measures to ensure a strict, orderly budget, and arranged for the Gymnasium’s relocation to a large, well-ventilated structure. He convened a new, expanded general assembly, which chose a supervisory council and a fundraiser, convened teachers’ meetings, held model classes, and developed the curriculum (with the addition of sports and nature studies).91 That year, the number of students in the Jerusalem Gymnasium grew to fifty-two. Additional teachers joined the Gymnasium staff, including Dr. Shlomo Schiller, who, in 1912, took on the administration of the Gymnasium. Matmon-Cohen disseminated his pedagogical and organizational knowledge to the Jerusalem Gymnasium, which was taking its first

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

67

slow steps. The author and historian Joseph Klausner, a graduate of Heidelberg University, wrote, “In Jaffa, everything is borrowed, everything is brought from Europe, from Switzerland or Russia…. The unexpressed aspiration of the Jaffa Gymnasium was ‘House of Israel, let us be like all the other nations!’ – we shall have a gymnasium like other gymnasia, but it shall be in Hebrew.”92 The establishment of the gymnasium in Jerusalem also drew reactions from AIU network representatives and that of Hilfsverein. AIU’s director of schools in the city, Albert Antavi, underestimated the gymnasium and did not expect it to succeed. Ephraim Cohen, the director of H’s seminar, was skeptical but also practical. He was concerned about the attractiveness of a Hebrew high school that might compete with the teachers’ seminar. He addressed the parents and voiced his doubts about the academic level of the gymnasium. He also clarified that the main disadvantage of the gymnasium lies in the fact that it is not an actor in an international network. And that no university in the world will recognize her graduation certificate.93 Teacher Training Three teacher training institutions operated during 1904–1914, implementing the pedagogical approach of adapting to local conditions. The first was the Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem, established by the Hilfsverein network. The second was the Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary, established in 1913 after a dispute with the Hilfsverein network. The third was the Levinsky Seminary for Teachers and Kindergarten Teachers, located in Tel Aviv and modeled after the Hilfsverein seminary in Jerusalem as well as its own neighbor, the Herzliya Gymnasium. It was the weakness of the Jewish community in general, and of Hebrew teachers in particular, that led the Hilfsverein network to establish the first teacher training institution. Various actors involved in developing the education system in Ottoman Palestine had been drawing attention to the need for teacher training. Among these was the political actor Asher Ginzburg, one of the leaders of the Hovevei Zion movement, who believed in the vision of a Jewish spiritual center in Ottoman Palestine. The teachers’ seminary was the cornerstone of this vision, and the various actors involved in cultural and educational life therefore based many hopes on it. The Hebrew teachers themselves also underscored the urgent need for teacher training in Ottoman Palestine. They raised the subject at the

68 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

founding assembly of the Teachers’ Union in 1903. After the petitions to the JCA company and Hovevei Zion failed to bear fruit, an appeal was made to the Hilfsverein network, which took the mission upon itself. However, its goals were not only to prepare teachers in order to meet local needs, but also to serve its schools in the Balkans and Turkey. In other words, the Hilfsverein network wanted to establish a transnational teacher training institution, similar to the ENIO. In April 1904, the Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem opened its doors. Ten students in the preparatory program (graduates of various schools) and eighteen students who had completed their studies at the Lemel School began undergoing preparation for teaching.94 Whereas in Germany the educational program was divided into a three-year preparatory course followed by three years in the seminary, in the Jerusalem seminary graduates of the Lemel School embarked directly on three years of teacher training, while graduates of the other schools took a one-year preparatory course before beginning the actual teacher training. The gap was narrowed in 1907, when a year was added to the teacher training segment. In 1910, the seminary’s teacher training program was extended to five years (following the eighth grade in elementary school).95 The Jerusalem seminary’s hourly schedule reveals that the time devoted to study increased by about 15 hours per week, reaching the same level as the German seminary, primarily due to the addition of Jewish and language studies. An examination of the seminary’s curriculum reflects an almost complete conversion to the German outlook on teacher training. The program focused more on enriching the students’ knowledge and less on practice in teaching. Teachers’ and Kindergarten Teachers’ Training Kindergarten teachers’ training was designated for girls. The students were girls who had been born in the country or arrived as youths during the immigrant wave of 1881–1904, completed elementary school, and wished to acquire a profession. The portals of education for girls in the modern Jewish community opened without a gender struggle, in contrast to some advanced European states and the Unites States.96 This stemmed, among other factors, from both practical and ideological considerations, which made it possible to view girls and women as integral in molding Hebrew-national culture.97 The assumption was that girls educated in Hebrew would bequeath the language and later the Hebrew culture to

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

69

their sons and daughters. Therefore girls were an integral part of the Hebrew kindergartens and schools. The first kindergarten teacher training, which took place in a kindergarten that was part of the Evelina de Rothschild School, involved a combination of observation and guidance. Concurrently, the organized continuing education of kindergarten teachers took place in Jerusalem, supervised by kindergarten teachers who had graduated from the Pestalozzi-Froebel Seminary in Germany. These graduates, who had been sent by the Hilfsverein Seminary to receive training, conducted kindergarten work according to Froebel’s viewpoint. This was the first time Froebel’s approach was implemented in Palestine and proposed as an educational method for preschoolers. In October 1909, an organized course for kindergarten teacher training was opened under the auspices of the Hilfsverein Seminary. The course took place regularly until the outbreak of the First World War. It was intended for girls aged 14 and older. Most of the kindergarten teacher advisors came from Germany after receiving their training at the Pestalozzi-­ Froebel Seminary. Using transnational history, it is possible to observe the movement of ideas on preschool education according to Froebel’s approach in modern educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine. In 1913, following the confrontation regarding the language of instruction in educational institutions—Hebrew or German—the Hilfsverein society canceled its kindergarten teacher training courses in Jerusalem. Hasia Feinsod-Sukenik, a kindergarten teacher and teacher trainer, then created training courses in Hebrew for kindergarten teachers. Feinsod-­ Sukenik had completed her professional training in Bialystok and, upon reaching Palestine, worked both as a kindergarten teacher and as a teacher trainer in the Hilfsverein Seminary’s preparatory courses in Jerusalem. The courses she established, which were titled “Lessons for Kindergarten Teachers,” continued throughout 1913–1919 and provided training for about one hundred Hebrew kindergarten teachers. The experience of “Lessons for Kindergarten Teachers” later served the Levinsky Hebrew Seminary for Teachers and Kindergarten Teachers, which Hovevei Zion had founded in Jaffa 1912.  he Hebrew Seminary T The Hebrew Seminary was founded because of a conflict regarding the language of instruction in modern Jewish educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine. In 1908 two networks and two actors decided to

70 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

establish the first professional post-secondary institution in Ottoman Palestine—the Technion. These networks were the WZO and Hilfsverein; the actors were the Jewish Wissotzky family and the renowned philanthropist Jacob Schiff.98 The institution was intended to train skilled workers (foremen, technicians, and assistant engineers). Its program included the curriculum used by Prussian gymnasia secondary schools, with which the Technion was intended to be affiliated. The Hilfsverein network contributed most of the funding, and its leadership decided on German as the language of instruction. The academic argument was that German is a transnational language that includes scientific discourse. However, this argument can also be seen as a demonstration of the civilizing mission.99 The centrality of Hebrew in the national culture was indisputable, as was the consensus that the lion’s share of responsibility for bequeathing Hebrew to the next generation was in the hands of teachers, and thus they must be properly trained for this mission. The seminary adapted the German curriculum to Jewish values and to promoting proficiency in the Hebrew language but did not renounce teaching in German. As such, it did not fulfill the expectations of the Hebrew culture advocates or, in particular, the Hebrew youth who followed them. In October 1913, a meeting on the language of teaching was held at the Technion, and it was decided that the studies would be in German. As a result, the Zionist Regents resigned from its management. A wave of resistance against the Hilfsverein network arose. The struggle was led by representatives of the Hebrew teachers in the Teachers’ Union, who were joined by students from the Hebrew Gymnasium and other Hebrew and modern schools. The Hilfsverein network’s teacher college students staged strikes and protests. (Following the strike, Turkish police officers were deployed in educational institutions to protect those who chose not to strike.) These squabbles resulted in a failure to find donors to continue the project, which forced the college to stop construction, for lack of funding, and to postpone the institution’s opening.100 The conflict over the language of instruction at the Technion has been termed the Language War. This was a clash between those who advocated the use of the German language as an expression of cultural colonialism and those who saw it as a threat to the establishment of a local Hebrew language and culture. Socialist political activists born in Russia also joined the struggle and used revolutionary concepts to describe the war of languages.101

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

71

But alongside this confrontation, there was a fascinating and equally significant generational clash. Adults such as Levin and other teachers at the seminary saw the adoption and diffusion of German teacher training as a necessary step in creating the local education system. The young people who studied in the Hebrew education system, however, adopted the characteristics of the ideal Hebrew graduate and demanded study in the language of revival, Hebrew. On December 13, 1913, the day after David Yellin was fired, the Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem was founded. Yellin, the other teachers who were fired, and sixty of the eighty-five students began laying the foundation for a new seminary. Emotions ran high, and there was great anger surrounding the fact that Yellin, his colleagues, and the students had to conduct the first lessons in the open air due to lack of a structure. The new seminary later came to be housed in an old building outside the walls of Jerusalem. Seeking to preserve the traditional character of the seminary, even if artificially, Yellin required the students show certificates of character attesting that they were following the dictates of religion. After he came under attack for this requirement, however, he relaxed that demand.102 The long-standing seminary curriculum served as the basis for teacher training at the new seminary, allowing it to commence operations quickly. At the Hebrew seminary, however, in contrast to the Hilfsverein Seminary, all the lessons were in Hebrew. To strengthen the Hebrew foundations of the seminary and incorporate the cultural values and principles that would inform adaptation of the imported curriculum to Hebrew-national culture, Yellin focused his efforts on recruiting suitable teachers during the first years of the seminary. The teachers were chosen on the basis of their expertise and, in some cases, their status, connections, and ability to collaborate with local thinkers and creators, as well as their part in creating a Hebrew-national culture. The choice of teachers was designed to invite and attract varied groups of students to the seminary. Indeed, students who transferred from the Hilfsverein network’s school sat side-by-side with Sephardi students, who had not numbered among the Hilfsverein students, primarily because of the difficulty of studying in the German language. The latter group included graduates of traditional Talmud Torah schools, among whom were sons of wealthy and influential members of the Jerusalem Jewish community.

72 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

 he Levinsky Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary T The Hovevei Zion Committee established a Hebrew-speaking teaching college for women in 1912.103 The seminary’s location—in a girls’ school building in Jaffa—reflected its precarious financial situation. Hovevei Zion provided funding for a considerable portion of the seminary’s expenses and exercised influence over its curriculum, the selection of its teaching staff, and its educational policy. The curriculum and its objectives reflect the interchange between the ideas and programs adopted by various European actors and the Zionist conception of teacher training as an essential and integral part of building Hebrew-national culture. Dr. Nissan Turov, the seminary’s first principal, enlisted people known for their cultural activities to serve as teachers. Most of these individuals, although not teachers, were chosen for their cultural, rather than educational, contributions. Among them were a doctor of history, a well-known Hebrew writer, a musician, a physical education teacher, and Levin Kipnis, a handicrafts teacher who wrote children’s songs. The Levinsky Seminary strove to ensure future employment for girls from lower-income families. It is important to note that, in contrast to the Gymnasium, most of whose students came from middle-class families, the majority of the girls who attended the Levinsky Seminary came from the lower socioeconomic class. Hovevei Zion subsidized these girls’ education. Between its establishment and the First World War, some forty students attended the seminary, and about fifteen Hebrew teachers who concluded their studies were integrated into Hebrew schools. The curriculum of Levinsky Seminary adopted the structure of that of the Hilfsverein network. Thus it was a full-time (38 hours per week) four-­ year program, divided into five main fields: humanities studies (general and Judaic), practical studies, languages (French was required, Arabic was optional), the arts (painting, gymnastics, singing, handicrafts, and music), and pedagogy with practical training. The practical training was more limited in scope than the other fields.104 The non-pedagogical curricula were copied from those of the Herzliya Gymnasium. The Vocational Agricultural School The establishment of an agricultural secondary school by the AUI network in 1870 demonstrates the entanglement of educational connections between the authorities of the Ottoman Empire and a European network. Four years earlier, the central committee of the AIU network held a

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

73

meeting to discuss the need to help the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine by using the development of agriculture as a source of employment. Behind this initiative stood Charles Netter, one of the founders of AIU, a Parisian businessman who had established a school of handicrafts for poor children in Paris.105 He had received several applications from local Jews who, in seeking training in agriculture, had contacted the AIU network. Netter traveled to Istanbul and met with Sultan Abdulhamid II, who granted official permission for an agricultural school to be opened in Jaffa, in Ottoman Palestine. The government’s involvement in authorizing an educational institution is attributable to the regime’s efforts to implement the Tanzimat reforms, which aimed to restructure, centralize, and “modernize” the empire. The Ottoman Empire had initiated several school-development projects that both emulated European models and emphasized a uniquely Ottoman sense of morality. These schools included traditional Islamic schools, secular state schools, and foreign schools financed and founded by Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish organizations such as the AIU network.106 Such a connection between the Ottoman government and the school allowed the administrators a great deal of independence, similar to other schools being operated by foreign actors in various locations across the empire at that time. The agricultural school was made possible, in part, by the Ottoman Empire’s interest in promoting education in the spirit of modernism, alongside the founders’ recognition of the need to compromise in light of the fiscal reality and international weakness. Much can be discerned about the institution’s relationship with the Ottoman government from the school’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, which was held with full pomp and glory. Ottoman and foreign dignitaries attended, surrounded by Ottoman flags and portraits of Sultan Abdelhamid II.107 The planners of the Mikve Israel School adopted the model of an agricultural farm that was accepted in France, which had various themes that relate to learning. The farm, which resembled a grand estate, included a mixture of agricultural fields and a winery built in 1877 by a group of expert builders brought from Italy. The prayer house was located at the end of a row of palm trees, with two-story houses on either side used for staff and student quarters.108 In its early years, the school faced financial hardship. Intervention by the actor Baron Hirsch improved the institution’s financial condition. He allocated a fixed stipend for the school. Toward the end of 1870, Mikve Israel was described as the most important training institution of AIU.109

74 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Mikve Israel adopted the pedagogy of agricultural science that had been flourishing in France. Agricultural education was established in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century, the French government became interested in promoting agriculture as part of elementary and secondary education and in teacher training colleges. The French agricultural secondary schools were boarding schools, and Mikve Israel adopted this model. France was the leading country in Europe in agrarian studies in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.110 One of its well-known agricultural science centers was Montpellier University, from which Joseph Niego, an engineer agronomist, graduated. Niego, born into the Jewish community of Edrine (formerly Adrinapole, Turkey), had also attended ENIO. In 1886 Niego arrived at Mikve Israel, which he ran from 1891 to 1904.111 Niego succeeded in increasing the school’s student body considerably, reaching 200 in 1898. Niego took an important step in allowing children from moshavot to join the school. The school’s educational program was limited to four years of study in those years, and children from moshavot studied for only two years.112

3.2   The Pedagogical Approaches The founding actors of the different sectors of modern Jewish education declaredly and actively accepted the two approaches of modern humanistic schools: the classical humanistic approach, also termed the rationalistic, positivist, or conservative approach, and the naturalistic humanistic approach, also known as romantic education and later as child-centered education, new education, or new pedagogy. This active reception is the first stage in what Gita Steiner-Khamsi calls lending and borrowing. The subsequent stages are active reception, implementation, and indigenization, which entail local modification of the active reception and gradual metamorphosis into a native model.113 The implementation and indigenization of the pedagogical theories by various actors are the focus of this chapter. The educational actors who arrived in Ottoman Palestine were familiar with the Jewish religious approaches to religious studies. Occasionally, as an afterthought, they would open a narrow window to “practical” studies.114 Jewish religious education is, in many ways, an example of an educational concept spread across countries and continents and has existed in various Jewish communities for centuries. These first Jewish educational actors who worked in Jerusalem accepted the elementary assumptions of

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

75

the  classical humanistic approach. Humanism has become the common ground for many competing educational theories as a worldview and ethical code. Until the eighteenth century, liberal education and humanistic education—liberal arts and humanities studies—were synonymous. Since the eighteenth century, however, other distinct forms of humanistic education have made an appearance: the romantic form, as currently expressed in humanistic psychology and progressive education; others that evolved out of existentialist philosophy; and another that emerged from the “counter-culture” and neo-Marxist educational theorists. The roots of the classical humanistic approach trace back to ancient Greece. It was expressed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates.115 During the Renaissance period, the classical humanistic approach focused on student excellence through a methodical and comprehensive study of literary masterpieces.116 During the Enlightenment, this approach emphasized the motivation for critical thinking and Man’s autonomy. The responsibility for reinforcing these two components lies in the hands of the educational framework, which operates systematically and focuses on the physical and emotional needs of the student. One of the main principles was an emphasis on broadening a child’s knowledge by teaching basic subjects to instill reading and writing abilities in the native tongue, arithmetic, and heritage and to become a self-sufficient adult. Classical humanism saw education as the tool to develop thinking skills and mold moral behavior. At the core of proper moral behavior, according to this approach, stands “goodwill” and the responsibility to act by the moral law.117 With the development of pedagogy within the humanities framework, the idea of Bildung as an inner sanctum came to dominate. Bildung, a German concept whereby the self must be cultivated and preserved, began to acquire a unique shape and form in the eighteenth century. The first function of the classical ideal of Bildung is integration by education and culture. The concept of Bildung had a primarily emancipatory function and was strongly associated with such ideas as independence from all external authority, to use Kant’s expression. At the same time, the concept of Bildung is itself not free of theological traditions and biological-­ organic connotations, which are widely diffused and have enormous variance in meaning.118 The Bildung outlook saw the rules of courtesy and the student’s appearance as a significant expression of the graduate’s proper educational process. This approach had molded German teachers’ colleges and it had been implemented in the Hilfsverein network’s teachers’ college in

76 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Jerusalem. The students and teachers were required to wear clothing deemed “respectable,” including a brimmed hat. They were also required to participate in prayers every Friday. Participation in religious rituals was an expression of courtesy and religious morality rather than of religious belief, and was also applicable to the non-religious teachers. A code was drawn up to enforce the institution’s behavioral regulations, and punishments were decreed for violations of its rules, from a reprimand to expulsion from the college.119 The study of the arts, such as music, painting, and the like, was intended to refine the students and motivate them to practice self-restraint and perseverance. During the 1890s, the Lemel School implemented this pedagogical approach and offered its students painting, music, physical education, and the art of recitation in German and Hebrew.120 Recitation, as noted earlier, encourages memorization, practice, and the drilling of selected song and literature passages. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the classical humanistic approach was focused on the function of education in dispelling materialism and “barbarity” and drawing the student toward cultural achievements.121 There were two methods for the actualization of this approach. The first entailed teaching from the Great Books and was based on the belief that understanding these masterpieces of human culture is a condition for cultural growth. The second way was modeling, namely, regarding the teacher as a model for imitation. Applications of this method are generally characterized by teachers’ lectures and dialogue among the students.122 The teacher typically acts as a conveyor who conveys the subject matter but does not rely on students’ thinking and critical skills. Instead, the teachers aim is that the students internalize exactly what they as teachers convey. In order to achieve this goal, the teachers implement a routine of detailed, closed questions.123 An examination of the lesson-plan notebooks used by Yeshayahu Karlin, who taught at the school in Zichron Ya’akov from 1910 until 1913, point to his implementation of the conveyor teaching method. For example, the first geography lesson for the fourth grade presented a blueprint of questions and expected answers, which, on the one hand, showed a desire to enrich the students, but on the other hand, focused on memorization and drilling. The indigenization stage of the example noted here is evidenced by the references to local geographical data, as in the question and answer set “What is it the name of the sea? The Mediterranean Sea,” among others.124

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

77

Classical humanistic education encouraged excellence in studies, and Annie Landau, the principal of Evelina de Rothschild, implemented this approach by awarding monetary prizes for excellence to deserving students. Toward this end, she approached the Ladies’ Committee of the AJA with a special request to allocate funds.125 The classical humanistic approach has contributed to creating a suitable learning environment through illustrative tools, and European Jewish actors implemented this approach in the educational setting in Ottoman Palestine. Such illustrative tools included maps, models for biology lessons (human skeletons), laboratory devices, and customized and intriguing textbooks for children. As in the cities, this approach to a learning environment was also implemented in the moshavot in most educational institutions supported by European actors. According to a student at the Rishon LeZion School, for example, their desks had a space carved out for inkwells.126 The Lemel School was known for its various instruments and botanical and zoological collections to study nature. The Hilfsverein network’s annual reports describe maps for geography lessons, physics lesson devices, and craft and farming equipment.127 In addition to standard school equipment, the Evelina de Rothschild School environment included baking ovens in the cookery class as part of domestic science.128 In the late 1890s and subsequent years, the teachers at moshavot schools and the girls’ school in Jaffa began to implement naturalistic education. Lending and Borrowing of the Naturalistic Humanistic Approach to Education The naturalistic humanistic approach to education, also termed romantic humanism, emerged at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the writings of Johann Amos Comenius.129 Comenius, who coined the term “natural pedagogy,” opined that education was “everything for everyone” and sought a teaching method whereby the teachers would teach less, but the students would learn more. Rousseau’s writings further consolidated this approach in the eighteenth century, giving it philosophical backing and wider circulation. Rousseau’s approach led to the development of educational methods that focused on psychology as well, rather than only philosophy, on emotion rather than only on reason, on the individual rather than only society, and on experience rather than structured didactics. At the core of the naturalistic educational approach was a differentiation between child and adult and between childhood and adulthood.130

78 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

One of the foci of this field of knowledge was developmental psychology, which linked intelligence to the developmental age and the chronological age in the nineteenth century.131 During the nineteenth century, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Herbert Spencer adapted Rousseau’s ideas to pedagogical theories that focused on the individual’s capacity for knowledge and rationality by using the five senses. In German this method is termed Anschauung, which is translated into English as sense-impression (observation), among other terms, although it essentially means the direct knowledge of the object without intermediary processes such as reasoning.132 An appreciation of sense-impression or Anschauung as the foundation of knowledge is not new. However, the attempts to formulate a practical method of education take it further, and Pestalozzi’s mythologizing of “right” perception, that is, the “Art” of Anschauung, is fundamentally new. According to him, the sense impressions of essential properties are the crucial foundation for the ultimate purpose of intellectual education: clear ideas. Without this, the individual will not think, judge, or talk clearly and correctly. Pestalozzi sought to establish a method of education for the balanced development of “head, heart, and hand,” that is, intellect/intelligence, morality (including religion), and body (health and useful skills). To achieve that, the proponents of this method supported going out of the classroom into nature, working the land, participating in games, and engaging in physical exercise through the gradual development of skills and knowledge.133 Some supported the active reception of this method of appreciation of sense-impression by the main educational actors of the Hebrew education, as reflected in Itzhak Epstein’s 1898 publication, which argued, “The natural method is the method by which almost all the fields of study can be taught, not only by means of using their minds and memory, but through all their senses, especially the senses of sight and touch. According to this method, if we desire to teach little children knowledge of the first numbers, we should count primary objects before them, add to them, subtract from them, multiply and divide them through actions, rather than thoughts.”134 Epstein sought to implement these principles of sense-impression in nature and environment studies. “When we begin the study of natural history, we shall present various animals to our students, and we shall explain their parts. We shall show them sand, clay, stones, and various metals.” It is interesting to note that Epstein wanted to use sense-impression in

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

79

teaching history, which as a subject was given the Hebrew biblical term, “Chronicles.” “Teaching chronicles as well, we shall present the young students with good pictures portraying the lives of the heroes of the stories and their deeds, and we have imbued the dead spirits with living breath…. The general point is that the natural method brings about learning through movement and life, and not through dead words read from the pages of a book.”135 Simcha Wilkomitz, Epstein’s successor, expressed his active reception of the sense-impression learning method when he spoke at the teachers’ convention in 1903: “On the basis of this method, the student will learn not only through thought and memory, but each one according to his five senses.”136 Epstein, Wilkomitz, and other teachers implemented this method of sense-impression learning through the five senses and modified it into a native model. Two elements of the native model were the creation of attachment to the land and an attempt to mold a corporeal Hebrew body. One of the main aspects of Pestalozzi’s method was its use of gradual steps from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown, and from the concrete to the abstract.137 The following statement in Grazovsky and Ziprin’s 1891 book reflects their internalization and adoption of the principle of gradual steps, and their attempt to implement it in the teachers’ textbook: “It (observation) goes from the simple to the complex very slowly, from one level to the next.”138 Another example of an attempt to implement the viewpoint of gradual steps was a lesson on Anschauung and knowledge of the homeland, prepared by three teachers from the girls’ school in Jaffa, Yosef Ozrakovsky (Azaryahu), Yehiel Yehieli, and Mordechai Kirshavsky (see Chap. 1). The three teachers state that the yardstick for choosing the simple, near, and tangible should be the children’s stage of development. They state that by the word “near,” they mean “not only in the sense of physical location but also what is near to the child’s spirit.”139 The relationship between the teacher and the students is an important component in the natural approach. Pestalozzi, Tolstoy, and others wrote about the need to teach with love and understanding.140 Wilkomitz explained this notion as follows: “The experienced teacher knows how to turn things around in a way that will not have to multiply commandments and orders regarding studies, work, trips, games, songs…. On the contrary, he wants them to desire these while demanding that they fulfill their various obligations.”141

80 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Wilkomitz addressed the obvious question, “How will this system work upon developing the students’ desires?” His answer reveals his adoption of the pedocentric viewpoint, which sees the child as a secret treasure in which mental powers are hidden, and holds that it is incumbent upon the teacher to arouse them. “I think that a strong desire will develop within the child through freedom, through confidence in his strengths and in achieving his desired goals…. All these good results uplift the students’ spirits, strengthen their assurance in their abilities, and through this reinforce their desire always to aspire to reach their goals, and to make an effort to reach them without stopping by the wayside.”142 In his words, the active reception of this outlook would mean that, rather than discipline the child, the educator would be attentive to the child, encourage and nurture his independent study, and introduce him to the world around him. The relationship between the teacher and the student was modified into a native model by Hebrew teachers, who believed that they were emissaries of a national mission. The Hebrew teachers saw themselves as cultural pioneers whose mission was to mold a new culture and society. Most regarded themselves as builders of a new society wherein education was a cornerstone. In other words, education was another expression of a national mission similar to other activities such as agricultural work, guard duty, and the like. The native model was expressed in the symbiosis between the teacher and his task. As Yair Seltenreich stated, the dedication to this symbiosis was a matter of pride.143 Thus, for example, Shmuel Ben-Shabbat, principal of the school in the moshava Kfar Tavor, described his predecessor Asher Ehrlich, “I saw him sitting at his desk until late at night.”144 The desire to mold a new reality often reduced the distance between teacher and student, and this direct connection continued after class hours. Ben-­ Zion Michaeli, a student in the moshava Sejura, described how his teacher, Ya’akov Klivensky, turned out to be his friend: “And we would leap through the hills, and skip together over the stones… while the teacher Klivensky would stride in front, and participate in all the pranks.”145 Teacher Ze’ev Carmi described how he would host his students at home on Friday afternoons, thereby crossing the line between teacher and students, adult and youth.146 Other fascinating examples of the lending and borrowing model with respect to humanistic naturalistic education were the Hebrew version of Frobel’s method and the “Fan Model” for kindergarten teacher training.

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

81

Froebel formulated the idea of establishing a new educational institution, different from a school—an educational house for toddlers. He sought to enable children to learn about the world through creative education, guided by an outlook that holds that every person has an inherent, hidden ability to actualize his or her natural potential. Froebel, who considered imagination and curiosity the basic components of the child’s ability to comprehend the world, posited that toddlers can learn through action, play, music, and song. Thus the term “kindergarten” emerged in 1840,147 and by 1850 some twenty kindergartens were set up throughout Germany.148 The success of kindergartens in Germany was interrupted following an 1851 decree by the Prussian minister of education and religions, which claimed that the educational methods used in kindergartens teach socialism and atheism. Nevertheless, the Froebelian approach to early childhood became a transnationalist movement, as Clem Adelman, and Kasper Burger point out in their studies.149 In 1851, the first kindergarten was opened in US, and five years later in England.150 In 1873 Henriette Schrader-Breymann opened a seminary for kindergarten teachers based on Froebelian pedagogy—the Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus.151 Students from all over Europe came to the seminary, which spread the message of the Froebelian kindergarten. Among these were several young Jewish women who served as kindergarten teachers in the Froebelian kindergartens in Ottoman Palestine, as we shall see. Kindergartens were founded in major European cities, including cities in Tsarist Russia where Yiddish was spoken.152 A Hebrew-Froebelian kindergarten and a program for kindergarten teacher training in the spirit of Froebel titled “Froebelian Courses,” were opened in Warsaw by two Jewish teachers, Yehiel Heilperin and Yitzchak Alterman in, 1910.153 The diffusion of Froebelian ideas to Jewish education in Ottoman Palestine is a local example of processes that took place across Europe, North America, British Empire countries, Latin America, and Brazil, as evidenced by the wide range of studies in this area, including the work of Ruth Watts, among others.154 The circulation of Hebrew-Froebelian ideas in Ottoman Palestine was carried out by several actors, from Emma Jungjekel, who had attended Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus in Berlin, to Hebrew women teachers and the Hilfsverein network. Jungjekel circulated Frobel’s ideas at the Evelina de Rothschild School in Jerusalem in 1896. One of her teacher students was the seventeen-year-old Esther Shapira (Ginzburg), who developed the third type of kindergarten. This indigenous model became a national symbol in the Zionist discourse. The

82 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

first modern Hebrew kindergarten in Ottoman Palestine opened its doors in 1898 in the moshava of Rishon LeZion.155 Shapira invited young women who wanted to train themselves for educational work in kindergartens to study with her. She gave these girls the guiding principles of Froebel’s philosophy, intertwined with the influences of the conservative humanistic approach that she had absorbed from the Evelina de Rothschild School. To these, Shapira added the foundations of the Hebrew-Jewish culture, which she integrated as compatible with the needs and expectations of the environment, and she assembled and incorporated content and activities that she garnered from the Hebrew culture. Shapira wove these threads together to formulate the responsibilities of kindergarten work for the trainees. When the time came, she encouraged them to open their kindergartens to other girls and to share their ideas with the widening community of Hebrew kindergarten teachers.156 Indeed, some of the teachers who received their training at Esther’s kindergarten became independent kindergarten teachers who identified content and activities for their students and founded other kindergartens. At these kindergartens, they trained young women who also wished to prepare themselves for kindergarten work. The success of this process is evidenced by the adaptation and spread of the model, the origins of which were sometimes forgotten. It became so successful that people believed this model of training for Hebrew kindergarten was part of the local culture. One such example is provided by the story of Leah Mazeh-Neiman, who received her training at Shapira’s Hebrew kindergarten in Rishon LeZion.157 Leah had come to the kindergarten in Rishon LeZion in 1900 at the age of 17 and, over the course of a year of training, received no monetary compensation.158 After completing her studies, in 1901, Mazeh took it upon herself to establish a kindergarten in Jaffa. She initially had to convince the people of Jaffa, who opposed the opening of the kindergarten, that their children needed an educational framework. Once the parents were convinced, she was free to engage in educational work according to the Froebelian model, adapted to the Hebrew-national culture she knew.159 The Jaffa kindergarten was successful, as reflected in the kindergarten’s growing number of children, especially girls. Leah established an active dialogue with the parents, with the aim of transmitting the subject matter being taught at the kindergarten and thus turning the parents into active participants in their children’s educational enterprise. Thus Leah extended the process of teacher training at her kindergarten through her educational work.

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

83

The story of kindergarten teacher Yehudit Eisenberg (Harari) provides evidence of the success of the Froebelian model, as altered and adapted to the Hebrew culture and environment of Palestine. In 1902, when she was 16 years old, Yehudit opened the first kindergarten in Rehovot, with twenty-six boys and girls. The kindergarten was run according to the “Hebrew Froebel” method. This title motivated parents in the moshava to send their children there. The young women who observed the kindergarten or acquired their training there praised its educational activity. As a result, Yehudit was asked by the principal of the Evelina de Rothschild School to take upon herself the administration of the well-attended Jerusalem kindergarten. In practice this meant proposing a change in the model that guided the kindergarten. Jungjekel, to whom the transfer of the Froebel’s original model from the Berlin seminary was attributed, was about to retire, and with her the original model. In her place, Eisenberg was asked to implement the model that had been adapted to the local environment—the Hebrew-Froebelian model. The enthusiastic reception of educators in Ottoman Palestine to Friedrich Froebel’s viewpoint, as it relates to kindergartens, is illustrated by a remark David Yellin made in the winter of 1903: “And now we are about to establish a new enterprise for education, a Hebrew kindergarten for toddlers aged 3 to 6. This institution, which will be planned according to Froebel’s method, will greatly aid the children’s development and spirit.”160 The kindergarten was the one in Jerusalem, opened by a graduate of the kindergarten teacher training program at the kindergarten in Rishon LeZion, Elisheva Gissin.161 Various partners were involved in these educational endeavors: kindergarten teachers, local educators, parents, and financers. Their involvement centered primarily on two aspects. The first was the need to adapt and integrate the transferred Froebelian educational model into the local language—Hebrew. Thus, kindergarten teachers functioned, perhaps, as linguistic mothers, with Hebrew successfully competing with the mother tongue.162 The second was the need to match the model and its pedagogical characteristics to the natural environment surrounding the kindergarten. In other words, the model needed to refer to the local flora and fauna, as well as the local weather, sounds, and equipment and instruments available to implement the curriculum. A review of the organizational process of the kindergarten and of reports on the curriculum reveals that even during the formation of this

84 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

kindergarten, different and sometimes contradictory ideas were circulating.163 Supporters of the kindergarten hoped that the kindergarten would function as a Hebrew kindergarten. The language spoken there would be Hebrew, and the spirit of the Hebrew-national movement would infuse the pages of its curriculum.164 The movement of pedagogical ideas that paved the path to the first Hebrew kindergarten continued along a meandering, entangled course in molding modern Hebrew kindergartens in Ottoman Palestine. It was shaped by the ideas that kindergarten teacher Shapira and her colleagues, the Hebrew educators in her rural community, espoused. In 1909 the Hilfsverein network opened a structured course for the training of kindergarten teachers, which operated continuously until 1915. The course curriculum was based on that of the German Froebel seminary, and was transferred to the local course by its graduates. The two-year course was in Hebrew, with German taught as a second language. Three kindergarten teachers taught classes on kindergarten theory and practice within the course framework. Two of these were graduates of the Pestalozzi-Froebel Seminary in Berlin, and one was graduate of the Froebel Seminary in Frankfurt. The kindergarten teachers were the sole source of information for the students, as suitable Hebrew textbooks on the subject matter did not exist. The kindergarten teacher instructors relied on their own notes from their seminary training in Germany. Graduates of the course applied what they learned in kindergartens in the agricultural villages and Jewish communities in the cities. They frequently met, at their own initiative, to share their challenges and means of coping. Their discourse on means of coping became one of the main tools for adapting the Froebelian approach to the conditions of the Palestinian environment and aided in creating a Hebrew-­ Froebelian model, which differed from the original in accordance with the local circumstances.165 The Natural Method of Language Instruction Based on Local Conditions For the most part, the framework of philanthropic Hebrew education encompassed the study of several languages: that of the financing organization as well as Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew. Hebrew was studied at the institutions of the AIU, Hilfsverein, and the AJA networks as a sign of the modern Jewish national brotherhood rather than for Zionistic motives.166

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

85

At Yeshayahu Peres’s Lemel School in Jerusalem, French, Turkish, and Arabic were taught, while some regular lessons were taught in Hebrew. In contrast, in Rishon LeZion, Hebrew was taught through translation into Yiddish, French, and Arabic. At the first Hebrew-national schools, Hebrew was taught alongside other languages. At the school in Jaffa, Yiddish and Arabic, which were both spoken in the Old Yishuv, were supplemented by some ten languages and dialects, previously unknown in Jerusalem but brought by immigrants from the Diaspora. Moreover, the different manners brought from their parents’ homes also complicated matters. The following expression of multiculturalism, from 1904, is illustrative: “The medley of languages on their lips (in addition to Ladino), certainly didn’t help the students. The teaching of religious studies in Hebrew and speaking exercises in the Hebrew language, based on the viewpoint that ‘it is incumbent upon the teachers to do the work,’ instead delayed the students’ intellectual development and advancement in the lower classes. In their studies, the bilingual method (Hebrew and German) began in first grade.”167 The multiplicity of local languages is also evident in an 1884 internal report of the AIU network regarding its schools. The author notes the many local languages, Askenazic, Arabic, Persian, Greek, and Italian.168 There was apparently no intention of instilling a living local language. The discourse on foreign language instruction was not unique to the Hebrew schools in Ottoman Palestine. In fact, it was one of the main subjects in the modern pedagogical discourse on foreign language teaching methods. Until the start of the modern era, the accepted method of teaching a foreign language was through translation. Thus, Biblical Hebrew was taught in the heider, and Latin was taught by private teachers or in monasteries. Comenius, Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, and Johann Bernhard Basedow were notable critics of this approach. One of their pedagogical claims against the traditional translation method was that real use should be made of language. They also proposed ending the teaching of grammar as a means to develop speaking skills. These ideas were derived from the importance they attributed to learning through the use of one’s senses and experience, touch, feeling, trial and error, proximity to nature, and the like. The above viewpoints gained support and reinforcement with the development of psychology and scientific research into human thought, which saw the acquisition of the mother tongue as a model for language learning. They recognized the importance of verbal communication, curiosity, and interest in learning. These developments contributed

86 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

to the advancement of the “natural method” or the “mother-tongue approach” for learning modern languages developed during the nineteenth century. While the methodologies of this approach vary, its key principle is that, from the first lesson, the language to be learned should be the only language of speech, with the gradual inclusion of grammar in the learning material, as well as utilization of audio-visual material, at least in the initial stages.169 Israeli historiography in general, and its educational historiography in particular, present the revival of the Hebrew language, and its adoption as a daily language, as vital to realizing the vision of national rebirth.170 Hebrew was a semi-living language, a diglossic language whose written form was used side by side with spoken languages, similar to Latin in Catholic Europe, Greek in Eastern Europe, and Sanskrit in India. Hebrew was the written language of most Jews until the mid-nineteenth century. The emancipation processes and the integration of Jews into European cultural life resulted in processes of cultural entanglement, which relegated the use of Hebrew to the more conservative and religious sectors of the Jewish community. The Hebrew teachers, in conjunction with the linguist Eliezer Ben-­ Yehuda, were the main actors in the conversion of Hebrew into a daily language. During the 1890s and 1900s it became the primary language of students in the Hebrew-speaking schools. The children of the graduates of these educational institutions already spoke Hebrew as a mother tongue. The primary pedagogical means used by teachers was titled “Hebrew in Hebrew.” Accordingly, we posit that “Hebrew in Hebrew” marks the indigenization stage of the “natural method” of language teaching in Europe. The “natural method” challenged the “grammar-translation” method, which was based on the translation of classical languages’ phrases and had been the dominant form of language acquisition.171 Gottlieb Heness, a teacher, emphasized in his 1866 book, The Guide to Teaching in The German Language (Der Leitfaden für den Unterricht in der Deutschen Sprache), that the core activity of language learning is natural communication. To explain the meaning of natural communication, Heness used the term “object-teaching,” which differed from Pestalozzi’s conception.172 Also in the 1860s, in a book titled The Art of Thinking in a Foreign Language (L’art de penser dans une langue étrangère), Frenchman Claude Marcel demonstrated the necessity of connecting directly to the foreign language.173

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

87

Soon thereafter, in 1880, French educator François Gouin published The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages (L’art d’enseigner et d’étudier les langues). This book proposed methods that use enactment and physical response to integrate living language around “centres d’intérêt,” without grammar or translation.174 In Germany, Wilhelm Viëtor embraced the principles of the new movement in his famous Language Classes Must Reverse (Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren), a plea for the spoken language as the basis for instruction.175 In 1882 the AIU network school in Jerusalem began to teach Hebrew using the “natural method.” The initiator of this teaching method was Nissim Bachar, one of the salient actors in modern Jewish education in Ottoman Palestine. Bachar attested that he had taught French as a second language using the natural method when he was principal of the AIU network school in Istanbul. In his own words, he was introduced to this method during his training at ENIO during the late 1860s, and “was then very jealous of the method of teaching the living and flexible French language, which I, myself, was a teacher thereof.” The ease of this method, and its success among the students, led Bachar to shift from the stage of active reception to that of implementation in teaching Hebrew. For the natural method, in 1874, he turned to the Hebrew teacher and linguist Haim Ba’abani, proposing that he teach the Hebrew language using the natural method at the school he ran in Istanbul. Bachar noted that this form of teaching was “without any translating, save the use of those tools included in Pestalozzi and Froebel’s books, and according to their methods. And after the children were fluent in the language, Rabbi Haim, and, following him, all the other teachers who assisted him, abandoned the translation method and became completely devoted to the natural method.”176 Bachar sought to continue teaching Hebrew using the natural method at the school he ran in Jerusalem. He asked the person known in Israeli historiography as the “reviver of the Hebrew language,” Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, to teach Hebrew using this method.177 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a linguist, taught Hebrew at the school for a few months, but without a focus on the characteristics of the natural method, but he stopped teaching because of illness. Bachar then chose to take steps toward implementation by training two Arabic-speaking native Jerusalemite youths, David Yellin and Yosef Meyuhas, to teach the Hebrew language according to the rules of the natural method. These two youths would eventually hold important positions in various educational networks in Ottoman Palestine. Yosef Meyuhas, who married David Yellin’s sister,

88 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

taught Hebrew using the natural method over the following years in three educational networks run in French, English, and German.178 Yellin, who was crowned “the reviver of the teaching language,” was the first teacher who taught Hebrew using the natural method in an organized and structured manner, starting at the AIU network school in 1883.179 Four years later, additional teachers from Eastern Europe began teaching all the other subjects in Hebrew and at the schools of the moshavot as well. In line with their aspiration to fashion a generation of Hebrew speakers—that is, native speakers of the renewed language who would differ from their own generation—these teachers described their efforts in revolutionary terms. The first school where the various curricular subjects were taught in Hebrew was in the moshava of Rishon LeZion, and the teachers were David Yudelevitz and Mordechai Lubman. In his memoirs, Yudelevitz explained how teachers coped with the lack of such basic educational means as textbooks: Lubman, he related, insists on also teaching natural science. “There was no method, there were no textbooks, and he’s holding up a book in Russian and reading to his students in Hebrew.”180 In the same year, another teacher, David Shube taught in Hebrew too in the northern moshava of Rosh Pina. However, the other subjects were taught in French.181 Hebrew teachers did more than just transmit language: they were main actors in the formation of the new culture, disseminating it to, and through, the schoolchildren were learning in Hebrew. The moshavot schools functioned, among other things, as linguistic laboratories, in which teachers tested new words, transmitting them to the children, who took them home to their families. Canadian linguist Moshe Nahir terms this process “children-to-adults direction of language acquisition.”182 Such a process, in which the children educate their parents, is also found in schools in other immigrant societies, as documented by Margaret Gibson and others.183 Because these teachers lacked basic Hebrew terms and textbooks for the various disciplines they taught, they decided to translate the necessary textbooks. The need to create a rich cultural environment for the new Hebrew-speaking generation led the teachers to see to the translation and distribution of belles letters in Hebrew.184 One of the first teachers in the schools of the moshavot who sought didactic means for teaching in Hebrew was Yehuda Grazovsky, who taught at the school in Mazkeret Batya, which operated under the patronage of Baron Rothschild. Grazovsky’s active receptivity to pedagogical literature, especially from French sources, inspired his decision to implement the

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

89

principles of the natural method in Hebrew-language instruction. He approached two colleagues who were fanatical about teaching the Hebrew language, the above-mentioned David Yudelevitz, and Chaim Ziprin, a teacher in Zichron Ya’akov. Together they authored seven textbooks for teaching Hebrew, which were published in the early 1890s. These books, at varying levels of proficiency, were designed for elementary school classes. They can be seen as readers for learning the Hebrew language. Baron Rothschild, one of the more active actors in Jewish public life, financed the books’ publication.185 The books opened with the following lines: “It is unnecessary to inform the teacher that no other language will be spoken in our school, save our own, and that everything will be translated and explained solely in Hebrew.”186 These books were unique in the way they saw the child and the child’s abilities, in their desire to transform educational content to age-appropriate terms, and in their desire to convey the various nuances of Hebrew. These books, which provided a foundation of words for acquisition of the language, were supplemented by additional publications that offered instruction in the natural method for teaching Hebrew.187 In 1900 and 1901 Yellin published two books, one for students, and the other a manual for teachers, which proposed that Hebrew reading be taught according to the types of syllables. Seeking to adapt the natural method of Latin languages to the teaching of Semitic languages, Yellin classified the Hebrew syllables, structuring the language according to types of syllables. The study begins with easy syllables and steadily introduces syllables that are more difficult to pronounce.188 The same year that Yellin’s second book was published, Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher and linguist, saw the publication of his book Hebrew in Hebrew. This was the fruit of five years of teaching. Epstein, educated in the traditional Jewish framework of the heider, had learned Hebrew as part of his religious studies. At the age of 14, Epstein began attending the Reali high school in Odessa, where he was exposed to the study of natural science. During his studies, as he attests in his book French Book, he encountered and studied “teaching through the eyes” or “observation lessons” in which observation is the starting point and source of learning.189 In 1895, Epstein arrived in Ottoman Palestine and began teaching at the AIU network’s school for girls in Safed and at the schools in two moshavot, where he enjoyed academic freedom, which allowed him to test his approach.190 This approach, which he further developed at the school in the moshava of

90 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Rosh Pina, in the northern part of the country, was based on the use of all five senses, rather than only on the cognitive dimension. In Epstein’s words, “the natural method is the method by which we shall study all the disciplines, using not only the children’s abilities and understanding but all their senses.”191 We can see how the gradual metamorphosis into a native model led to the adoption of the naturalistic approach in additional fields of observational study—that is, Anschauungsunterricht. Teaching Hebrew as a living language essentially changed the international “natural method” into a Hebrew-national version through observation and speaking, reading, and writing in that language.192 In the Hebrew schools, teachers participated in curriculum development and the talented ones among them engaged in writing books and instructional materials that would assist in the assimilation and teaching of the curriculum. At the girls’ school in Jaffa, for example, three (leading) teachers designed the curriculum, wrote a detailed instruction book for teachers, and guided them in their educational endeavors. The network teachers had acquired pedagogical knowledge of instruction, general education, and norms of behavior. The Hebrew school teachers had a more eclectic education; some had received their training in their country of residence before moving to Palestine. Some were self-­ taught, having studied independently. Others traveled to Switzerland, Germany, Austria, or to other countries to complete their education. Through their studies, they became acquainted with different pedagogical approaches, transferred them to the Hebrew schools, and processed and adapted them to their vision, their students’ needs, and the local environment.

3.3   Summary This chapter of the book comprises two subchapters that discuss the processes of active reception, implementation, and indigenization in Ottoman Palestine’s modern Jewish and Hebrew education system. Each chapter examines the transfer processes surrounding a topic related to the various educational institutions in the modern education system. The theme at the center of the first chapter is the framework in which educational activities took place, that is, the different structures and learning environments established for the various modern schools. The second chapter focuses on the educational content; it reviews the different types of modern Jewish

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

91

and Hebrew schools in which the transfer process took place, as reflected in the curriculum and teaching methods. The modern educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine underwent a transition from a place of study to a place designated for education, similar to the process in other societies. This process first led to the transfer of various architectural models from Europe and their relocation for the construction of modern schools in Palestine. The transfer of models was carried out by the actors and networks that built the first modern schools. Their adaptation to the local environment is reflected primarily in the combination of local symbols used as decoration. One such example is the structure of the Lemel School. Originally inspired by Austrian actors, the school came under the patronage Hilfsverein network. The building of the Lemel School was designed by a German architect influenced by the Templar movement. The building was built in a European neoclassical style. The local aspects were expressed through a combination of decorative Jewish elements: a Star of David, a water well in the shade of palm trees, and a relief of Zion with its towers behind it. The growth of modern schools designed for Jewish children of different ages—kindergarten, elementary school, and post-primary school— promoted transfer processes and as well as adaptation and assimilation processes that embodied the schools’ visions and goals. Five main types of modern schools developed in the late Ottoman period, and their construction style was almost identical to that of the networks’ schools in areas outside Palestine. The vision of the Ottoman schools, the culture they wanted to convey to their students, and the goals they set for themselves were also similar. The local aspects of the schools’ structure were marginal and manifested mainly in the location of windows and sometimes in the ornaments drawn from local symbols. Rural Hebrew elementary schools were built by the administration of a significant actor in the construction and design of the Hebrew-national colonies, Baron Rothschild, and by the administration of the JCA network. However, these builders adapted their construction to the community’s rural environment and basic needs. The administration dealt with the structure and funding required and left it to the teachers and community members to design the school’s interior and request to purchase aids they deemed appropriate. The urban Hebrew elementary schools embodied the vision of educating the local future generation that would form the basis for the existence and growth of a Hebrew community. They were built mainly by

92 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

associations such as Hovevei Zion and donors who embraced the Hebrew-­ national vision. One such example is the girls’ school in Jaffa, whose construction by Jewish workers was supervised by local activists. Jewish post-primary schools were built on the basis of Hovevei Zion objectives as well. The Hilfsverein Teachers’ Seminary and the high school in the commercial department were attached to the structure of the Lemel School, thereby creating a database of teachers who taught German in the three institutions. The Mikve Israel agricultural school was built as a farm at which various school subjects were taught. Hebrew post-primary schools—the Hebrew gymnasia—were characterized by a vision whose eclectic elements were also reflected in the design of their structure. On the one hand, their goal was to produce educated graduates, like their peers in Europe, and on the other hand, to cultivate local leaders with roots in their country. This vision is reflected in the building of the first Hebrew gymnasium. Erected in 1909 in Tel Aviv, it was built in a style intended as a new local architecture, a style that combines Middle Eastern with European elements. The shape of the building and its impact on the urban space positioned the school as a paramount and important institution of education in the city’s fabric. The medicalization approach also influenced the creation and design of the school environment of modern schools in Palestine. Hygiene considerations regarding windows and other objects were a fundamental factor in planning modern schools’ construction. The scientific discourse, which argued that there is a close connection between health and sanitary conditions, was translated into a social norm, which sees lack of cleanliness as a social problem requiring both private and public responses. The Jewish schools adopted this discourse. Hebrew schools specifically adapted the hygiene discourse to mold the new Hebrew body. The role of the school as an institution that provides health services was most important because of the local conditions. There was no public health system in Ottoman Palestine as in France and Germany. Most students received medical treatment exclusively in schools. The school also functioned as a research laboratory, with the students identified as scientific subjects, as in the educational systems of Switzerland, Prussia, and France. One could argue that the schools were responsible for the body and not just for knowledge and cognitive development. The curricula and teaching methods in modern schools in Palestine were transferred through three stages of lending and borrowing. The first was active reception, the second was implementation, and the third was

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

93

indigenization. A fascinating case study of this process is the teaching of Hebrew using the natural method. In the years 1860–1880 French and German linguists developed a method of learning a foreign language terms the “natural method.” The AIU Jerusalem school principal, Bachar, became acquainted with the natural method while working as a teacher in Istanbul. This acquaintance corresponds to the first stage of active reception. Bachar taught using the natural French method. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he asked teacher Yellin to use this method to teach Hebrew. This step corresponds to the definition of the second stage, implementation. Along with other Hebrew teachers, Yellin spread the natural method throughout schools and kindergartens in Ottoman Palestine. He and the linguist Ben-Yehuda were the main actors in the conversion of Hebrew into a daily language, making it the primary language of students in the Hebrew-speaking schools during the 1890s and 1900s. The children of the graduates of these educational frameworks already spoke Hebrew as a mother tongue. This teaching instruction has become known in Hebrew historiography as “Hebrew in Hebrew”—a term that represents the third stage of lending and borrowing, the indigenization stage.

Notes 1. Jeffery A. Lackney, “History of the Schoolhouse in the USA,” in Schools for the Future: Design Proposals from Architectural Psychology, ed. Rotraut Walden (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2015), 23. 2. Saul Stampfer, “The Cheder – Learning Torah and Preserving the Social Fabric,” in The Cheder Research, Documents on Chapters of Literature and Memory, ed. Emmanuel Etkes and David Assaf (Tel-Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2010), 37–56 [Hebrew]. 3. Rotraut Walden, ed., Schools for the Future: Design Proposals from Architectural Psychology (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2015). 4. Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon, “General Introduction,” in Mass Education and the Limits of State Formation, c. 1870-1930, ed. Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–12. 5. Gunilla Budde, “From The ‘Zwergschule’ (One Room Schoolhouse) to the Comprehensive School: German Elementary Schools in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic, 1870-1930,” in Brockliss and Sheldon, Mass Education, 95–116; Simon Schalz, “The Historical Development of School Building in Germany,” in Walden, Schools for the Future, 48–49.

94 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

6. Nava Dekel and Naftali Thalmann, “Education and Educational Framework in the Jewish and Templar Village towards the End of the Ottoman Period,” Dor LeDor 35 (2010): 7–24 [Hebrew]. 7. Christine Mayer, “Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow’s Education of the Children in Rural Communities and Its Impact on Urban Educational Reforms in the Eighteenth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 1 (2003): 19–35. 8. Shmuel Feiner, “Educational Pragmatism and Social Ideals: The Jüdische Freyschule in Berlin 1778-1825,” Zion 64 (1995): 393–424 [Hebrew]. 9. Feiner, “Educational Pragmatism.” 10. Re’ut Gordon, “Education, Architecture, Society: The History of School Construction in Israel” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2013) [Hebrew]. 11. Rachel Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel, Volume 1, 1854-1914 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1986), 82–86 [Hebrew]. 12. Yeshayahu Peres, This Is the History of the School Named for the Honorable Von Lemel in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Lemel School, 1936) [Hebrew]. 13. Gordon, “Education, Architecture, Society,” 35–36. 14. David Yellin (1941-1864) was born in Jerusalem, graduated from ENIO, taught at the Lemel School, and co-founded the Hebrew Language Committee with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. 15. Peres, This Is the History, 33. 16. Yehoshua Ben-Aryeh, A City in the Mirror of Time (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-­ Zvi, 1979), 353 [Hebrew]. 17. Michael F. Davie, “Local and Western Educational Institutions in Beirut: Topographical and Symbolic Domination,” in Entangled Education: Foreign and Local Schools in Ottoman Syria and Mandate Lebanon (19–20th Centuries), ed. Julia Hauser, Christine B. Lindner, and Esther Moller (Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2016), 49–72. 18. David Kroyanker, The German Colony and Emek Refaim Street (Tel Aviv: Keter Publishers, 2008) [Hebrew]. 19. The building belonged to a formerly wealthy man, Jacob Frutiger, who had gone bankrupt, see Schore, The Best School in Jerusalem, 1–54. 20. Ibid., 70. 21. Yosef Lang, “The Educational Crisis in Rehovot, 1903-1905: From the Notebooks of Yitzhak Cohen, the Talmud Torah Teacher in Rehovot,” Dor LeDor 23 (2003): 71–122 [Hebrew]. 22. Yosef Lang, “University or Yeshiva as in Yavne? Comment and Clarifications regarding Education in Gedera,” Dor LeDor 35 (2010): 25–64 [Hebrew]. 23. “Thus It Is, Rosh Pina,” The Israeli Knesset B, 1887, p. 221, cited in Ran Aharonson, “Sites from the Past in the First Moshavot as a Cultural Bridge to the Present,” in Talking Culture: The First Aliya, an Interperiod

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

95

Discourse, ed. Yafa Berlovits and Yosef Lang (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2020), 256; Haim Goren 130 Years to Rosh Pinna. (Rosh Pinna Local Council, 2010) [Hebrew]. 24. Rishon LeZion School Committee, minutes, April 1900, A/192/909, Central Zionist Archives (CZA). 25. Yair Seltenreich, People from Here: Education and Educators in Galilee Moshavot During the Yishuv Era, 1882-1939 (Jerusalem and Ramat Gan: Yad Ben-Zvi and Bar-Ilan Press, 1914) [Hebrew]. 26. Ibid., 240: Saar Harel The School in Kfar Tabor: The first principals and the surrounding community in the years 1903-1917. MA Thesis. (Tel Aviv University School of Education, 2008) [Hebrew]. 27. Yoav Regev, Menachmiya – Melachmiya, (Netanya: Ariel, 2018), 41. 28. The large moshavot were Rishon LeZion, Zichron Ya’akov, and Rosh Pina as well as the moshava of Petach Tikva. 29. In the 27 moshavot in the country, there were 22 rural schools where 60 teachers taught 1448 students. Yosef Azaryahu, “Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel,” in Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, ed. Kimhi, 79–89. 30. Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon, “Continental Europe: Introduction,” in Brockliss and Sheldon, Mass Education, 89–94. 31. Ze’ev Carmi, The Way of an Educator (Haifa: Department of Education and Culture 1965), 152 [Hebrew]; P. LevTov, “From Bygone Days,” in The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1953, ed. D. Kimhi and L. Y. Riklis (Tel-­ Aviv, 1956), 580 [Hebrew]; Yuval Dror, National Education Through Mutually Supportive Devices: The Zionist Story (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2007), 195 [Hebrew]; Eliezer Riger The Hebrew Education in Eretz-Israel vol 1 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1940) [Hebrew]. 32. Rosenhack to Antebi, 17 July 1907, file 5.203.2137, AJE [French], cited in Seltenreich, People from Here; Carmi, The Way of an Educator. 33. Carmi, The Way of an Educator. 34. Yehuda Levin, “Labor and Land at the Start of Jewish Settlement in Argentina,” Jewish History 21, nos. 3–4 (2007): 341–359. 35. Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education, 310–399; Seltenreich, People from Here, 393–434; Israel Bartal, Cossack and Bedouin: Land and People in Jewish Nationalism (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2007) [Hebrew]. 36. David Neiman, Mazkeret Batya: Eighty-Five Years Since the Arrival of the First Members of Ekron in Mikve Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1968) [Hebrew]. 37. Ben Zion, “In the Holy Land,” HaMelitz, 3 December 1901, 3 [Hebrew]. 38. “It Is Unpleasant to See a Closed Garden,” Milestones Pamphlet  – Mazkeret Batya, No. 8 Tabernacles Eve 2005, p. 302, cited in Mordechai Naor, The Book of Mazkeret Batya – Ekron, The First 100 Years (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2010), 371 [Hebrew].

96 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

39. Naor, The Book of Mazkeret Batya – Ekron, 158. 40. Seltenreich, People from Here, 409. 41. Ever Hadani, Settlement in the Lower Galilee (Ramat Gan: Massada and the Farmers’ Association of the Lower Galilee, 1955), 175–176 [Hebrew]. 42. Ibid., 172. 43. The Mazkeret Batya, 9.6, AJE. file. 44. Zipora Miller, “Memories from the House of Joseph Miller,” file 33, p. 2, Mazkeret Batya Archive. 45. Yaakov Harisman, The Pioneers of the Hula (Yesod HaMa’ala: Moetzet HaPoalim, 1958), 134–136 [Hebrew]. 46. Kaspar Burger, “Entanglement and Transnational Transfer in the History of Infant Schools in Great Britain and salles d’asile in France, 1816-1881,” History of Education 43, no. 3 (2014): 304–333. 47. Roberta Lyn Wollons, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); See also Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, and Larry Prochner, eds., Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education: Transnational Investigations (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Ruth Watts, “Julia Lloyd and the Kindergarten Networks: A Local Case Study in a Transnational Setting,” in Women, Power Relations, and Education in a Transnational World, ed. Christine Mayer and Adelina Arredondo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 123–147; James C.  Albisetti, “The Transnational Roots of the Froebel Educational Institute, London,” in Mayer and Arredondo, Women, Power Relations and Education, 149–173. 48. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), who composed many words in Hebrew and wrote the first modern Hebrew dictionary, is regarded as one of the revivers of the Hebrew language. 49. Tsvia Walden and Zipora Shehory-Rubin, From Kindergarten, Not from Birth: The Contribution of the Hebrew Kindergarten and Its Teachers to the Renewal of Hebrew as a Mother Tongue, 1898-1936 (Beer-Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2018), 8 [Hebrew]. 50. Burger, “Entanglement and Transnational Transfer.” 51. Zipora Shehory-Rubin, “Hebrew Kindergarten Teachers during the First and Second Aliyot,” Dor LeDor 19 (2002): 153–194 [Hebrew]. 52. Ibid. 53. Bernard Spodek and Olivia. N. Saracho, Right from the Start: Teaching Children Ages Three to Eight (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1994). 54. Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education, 159. 55. Azaryahu, “Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel,” 64–66.

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

97

56. Yair Seltenreich, “A Diary, an Educator, a Man: The Reflection of a Galilean Teacher’s Life through his Diaries,” Dor LeDor 25 (2005): 2–27 [Hebrew]. 57. This was an institution for blind children of the French Catholic order Vincent de Paul; in addition, a class for blind girls was opened by British teacher Mary Jane Love. See Gil Gordon, “A Canary in the Bedroom: The Schneller Protestant Mission and the Beginning of the Education for the Blind in the Holy Land during the Late Ottoman Period,” Cathedra 151 (2015): 102–132 [Hebrew]. 58. Antonio Fco. Canales and Simonetta Polenghi, “Classifying Children: a Historical Perspective on Testing and Measurement,” Paedagogica Historica 55, no.3 (2019): 343–352. 59. Zina Weygand, The Blind in French Society: From the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), cited in Gordon, “Canary in the Bedroom,” 104. 60. Gordon, “Canary in the Bedroom,” 103. 61. Education for the Blind, https://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/05306a.htm. 62. Gordon, “Canary in the Bedroom,” 102–132. 63. Orit Navot and Moshe Gross, “The Campaign against Trachoma: The Beginnings of Public Health in Eretz Israel,” Cathedra 94 (1999): 89–114 [Hebrew]. 64. Basmat Even Zohar, “The Inclusion of Children in the Hebrew Initiative in 1880-1905,” Dor LeDor 36 (2011): 40–42 [Hebrew]. 65. Renana Kristal, “Processes and Trends in Education for Blind Children in Israel (1902-1959)” (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University, 2022). 66. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). 67. Known as Stechelscrift, these were solid, raised Roman characters made of tin, which could be read or felt, and were produced mechanically. Later, a similar needle writing was developed for Hebrew letters. 68. Kristal, “Processes and Trends in Education for Blind Children.” 69. Ibid. 70. Nirit Reichel, “Between the Dream and the Reality: Vocational Education in Israel, 1948-1992,” Israel Affairs 19, no. 3 (2013): 542–561. 71. Robert Anderson, “The Idea of the Secondary School in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe,” Paedagogica Historica 40, no. 2 (2004): 93–106. 72. Baruch Ben-Yehuda, ed., The Story of the Herzliya Gymnasium (Tel Aviv: Herzliya Gymnasium Publishers, 1970), 61–69 [Hebrew]. 73. Nirit Raichel, “The First Hebrew ‘Gymnasiums’ in Israel: Social Education as the Bridge between Ideological Gaps in Shaping the Image

98 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

of the Desirable High School Graduate,” Israel Affairs 17, no. 4 (2011): 604–620. 74. Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p.  689, www.tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/ view/2/689 [Hebrew]. 75. Ibid. 76. David Yudelevich, ed., Rishon LeZion: 1882-1941 (Rishon LeZion; Carmel Mizrahi, 1941), 211 [Hebrew]. 77. Benglas-Kaufman Hanit and Yuval Dror. “Dr. Yehuda Matman-Cohen: Founder of the Herzliya Gymnasium and urban Zionist entrepreneur of Hebrew education and culture in Europe and Israel (1869-1939)”. Dor LeDor 55,(2021) 38–84. 78. Hanit Benglas, “Judah Leib Matmon-HaCohen: Founder of the First Hebrew Gymnasium,” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2015), 1–30. 79. Ben-Yehuda, Story of the Herzliya Gymnasium, 61–69. 80. Gordon, “Education, Architecture, Society,” 60. 81. Eliyana R. Adler, In Her Hands: The Education on Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011). 82. By the end of 1910, the number of stockholders had reached 700, and the stocks’ capital fund totaled 50,000 francs. See Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 18, p.  5351, http://www.tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/18/ 5351/3/20 [Hebrew]. 83. This included a microscope, stuffed animals, and pictures of non-native flora and fauna. See Ben-Yehuda, Story of the Herzliya Gymnasium, 90. 84. Ibid.; Michelson, Udi and Lapidot, A. (Eds.). Gymnasium Herzliya – a Hundred Years. (Tel Aviv: NDD Media, 2004), 1–45. 85. Rachell Elboim Dror, “The Visual Text in Historical Perspective” in House, School, ed Osnat abr-Or (Tel Aviv: Hkibutz Hamehud, 2002), 84–89. 86. Gordon, “Education, Architecture, Society,” 61. 87. Ibid., 62. 88. Ibid., 63. 89. Haim Merchavia, ed., The Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem, Jubilee Book 1909-1949 (Jerusalem: The Association of Supporters of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem, 1962), 1; Ben-Yehuda, Story of the Herzliya Gymnasium, 3–15; Shlomi Rosenfeld. (Ed.). A Hundred Years of… The story of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem. The Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem. (Jerusalem, The Hebrew Gymnasium, 2009) [Hebrew]. 90. Ben-Yehuda, Story of the Herzliya Gymnasium, 152. 91. Yehuda Leib Matmon-Cohen, “The Matter of Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem,” HaMeir 4 (1912) [Hebrew]. HaMeir was a popular monthly edited by Israel Belkind and dedicated to the Land of Israel and its settlement.

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

99

92. Joseph Klausner, A Nation and Land Come to Life, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Yavne Publishers, 1944), 134 [Hebrew]. 93. Shlomi Rosenfeld, A Hundred Years of… The story of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem. The Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem. (Jerusalem, The Hebrew Gymnasium, 2009), 19–20 [Hebrew]: Laskar Michael, “Avrham Albert Antebi”, in Tzahor Zeev. The Second Aliya: (vol. C) Biographies. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak, Ben-Zvi, 1997) 280–286 [Hebrew]. 94. Moshe Rinot, Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden in Creation and Struggle (Jerusalem Hebrew university, Ministry of Education and Culture and Haifa University, 1971) [Hebrew]. 95. Nirit Raichel, “The Role of Teacher and Kindergarten Training in Building Hebrew-National Culture,” Eyunim Behinuch  – Studies in Education, no. 15/16 (2017): 39–69. 96. Richard J.  Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australia (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1978). 97. Margalit Shilo, The Challenge of the Gender: Women in the Early Yishuv (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007) [Hebrew]. 98. David Wolfowitz Wissotzky (1930–1861), a Russian-born Jew whose father founded the Wissotzky Tea Company, became head of the company after his father’s death. A public activist and philanthropist, he donated 100,000 rubles to establish the Technion and undertook to make another donation in the same amount five years later. He was a member of the Technion’s Board of Trustees, which elected on March 5, 1908. Jacob Henry Schiff (1847–1920), a Frankfurt-born Jew, immigrated to the United States in 1865. He married the daughter of one of the leaders of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co, and became its manager. Schiff was actively involved in philanthropic activities. In 1908, he visited Ottoman Palestine and subsequently donated money to the institutions of the Jewish community. See Yuval Dror, “The Early History of the Hebrew Technion in Haifa, 1902-1950: From the Plan of a ‘Jewish Institution of Higher Learning’ to the End of Kaplinsky’s Administration,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 6 (1996): 330–357 [Hebrew]. 99. Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education, 310–311. 100. Raichel, “Role of Teacher and Kindergarten Training.” 101. Yosef Ahramovich, “You Will Soon get to Hear About a Beautiful (or Wonderful) Revolution” 14 November, 1913 CZA A20/54  in Yehosa Kaniel (ed). (1997). The Second Aliya: (vol. B) Sources. (Jerusalem:Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1997), 290–288 102. Ofra Meitlis, On the Middle Path: David Yellin – A Life Story, Dor LeDor (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2015) [Hebrew].

100 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

103. Elchanan Leib Levinsky (1857–1910), a member of the Hovevei Zion movement, was a philosopher and a publicist. Raichel, “Role of Teacher and Kindergarten Training.” 104. Ibid. 105. Shlomo Rosner, Mikve Israel (Jerusalem: Government Publishing Office, 1970) [Hebrew]; Aryeh Horshi, Mikveh Israel (Tel Aviv: Lichtenfeld Publishers, 1983) [Hebrew]. 106. Alma Heckman and Frances Malino, “Packed in Twelve Cases: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 19, no. 1 (2012): 53–69. 107. Rosner, Mikve Israel. 108. Jakobe Shavit, “French Spirt and French Culture in the Jewish Settlement in the Land of Israel, 1882-1914,” Cathedra 62 (1982): 37–53 [Hebrew]; Shavit Jakobe, “Culture and Culture State: Basic Development in Hebrew Culture during the Second Alyia”, in The Second Aliya- Studies, ed Bartal Israel (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1997). 109. Bulletin de L’Alliance Israélite Universelle [French] Semester 2, 1878, p.  17, in Esti Yankelevich, “Agricultural Education in the Agricultural High Schools in Palestine, 1870-1948” (PhD diss., Haifa University, 2004), 20 [Hebrew]. 110. Alan Baker, “Farm Schools in Nineteenth-Century France and the Case of La Charmoise, 1847-1865,” Agricultural History Review 44, no.1 (1996): 47–62, in Yankelevich, “Agricultural Education in Palestine,” 20–40. 111. Amalia Skarlatou, Evanescent Happiness: Ottoman Jews Encounter Modernity – the Case of Lea Mitrani and Joseph Niego (1863–1923) (MA thesis, University of Maryland, 2010). 112. Joseph Shapira, 100 Years of Mikve Israel (Tel Aviv: Division of Culture and Education, 1970) [Hebrew]. 113. Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Thomas S.  Popkewitz, The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending (New York: New  York College Press, 2004); Fuchs, “History of Education,” 20. 114. Shlomo Haramati, The Pioneer Teachers (Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 2000), 12–30 [Hebrew]; Nimrod Aloni, All That One Needs to Be a Person: A Journey in Educational Philosophy (Tel Aviv: Mofet Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2005 [Hebrew]; Nimrod Aloni, “A Redefinition of Liberal and Humanistic Education,” International Review of Education 43, no. 1 (1997) 87–107; Stephen Chatelier (2015) “Towards a Renewed Flourishing of Humanistic Education?,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36, no. 1 (2015): 81–94. 115. The term humanitas in the sense of paideia (education) also first appeared in Rome. Humanitas symbolized the quality that typifies the most excel-

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

101

lent of people. People were differentiated from barbarians by means of the educational-­cultural process they had undergone. 116. Aloni, All That One Needs to Be a Person, 18–33. 117. Emmanuel Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason, translation, introduction, and commentary by Yirmiyahu Yuval (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Project for the Publication of Exemplary Literature, 2013), 127 [Hebrew]. 118. Rebekka Horlacher, “‘Bildung’  – a Construction of a History of Philosophy of Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 23, nos. 5–6 (2004): 409–426. 119. Rinot, Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, 134–133. 120. Peres, This Is the History, 28. 121. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, vol. V of the Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. Robert H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965). 122. Robert Hutchings, Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954). 123. Michel J.  Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 284–324. 124. Neiman, Mazkeret Batya, 57. 125. Laura A. Schore, The Best School in Jerusalem: Annie Landau’s School for Girls, 1900-1960 (Waltham: Brandeis University, 2013), 51. 126. Neiman, Mazkeret Batya, 57. 127. Rinot, Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, 106–107. 128. Schore, The Best School in Jerusalem, 46–47. 129. See Radim Šterba, “Not Too Well-Known “Predecessors” of C. R. Rogers’s Humanistic Pedagogy (J.  A. Comenius, J.  I. Felbiger, J.  F. Herbart, O. Chlup),” Universal Journal of Educational Research 6, no. 4 (2018): 619–628. 130. David Gauthier, Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence (Cambridge University Press, 2006). 131. Werner Deutsch and Christliebe El Mogharbel, “Clara and William Stern’s Conception of a Developmental Science,” European Journal of Developmental Psychology 8, no. 2 (2011): 135–156. Such studies included those by William Thierry Preyer (1841–1897), which were published in Germany and dealt with developmental psychology and language research. 132. Keiichi Takaya, “The Method of Anschauung: From Johann H. Pestalozzi to Herbert Spencer,” Journal of Educational Thought 37, no. 1 (2003): 77–99. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid.

102 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

135. Yitzhak Epstein, “Hebrew in Hebrew,” HaShiloach 4 (1898): 365 [Hebrew]. 136. Simcha Wilkomitz, “A Lecture on the Schools in the Moshavot of our Brethren in the Land of Israel,” 1903, file 1/1/9, AJE. 137. Maria Laubach, “Pestalozzi and His Significance in Democratic Education,” Journal of Philosophy and History of Education 61, no. 1, (2011): 185–194; Robin Veder, “Pestalozzi and the Picturebook: Visual Pedagogy in The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins,” Visual Resources 24, no. 4 (2008): 369–390. 138. Yehuda Grazovsky and Chaim Ziprin, Introduction, in The School for the Children of Israel, (Jerusalem: M. Lunz, 1981) [Hebrew]. 139. Yosef Ozrakovsky, Mordechai Kirshavsky, and Yehiel Yehieli, “Lesson on Observation and Knowledge,” 37, in David Shachar, Know from Where You Came – Teaching National History in the Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel 1880-1918 (Rehovot: Idan, 2003), 230 [Hebrew]. 140. Laubach, “Pestalozzi and His Significance,” 185–194. In his writings, Tolstoy described the activities of a teacher as those of an educator, drawing on his personal experience at Yasnaya Polyana, the school he established on his own estate for the children of farmers. 141. Simcha Haim Wilkomitz, “Minutes of the First Teachers’ Assembly in the Land of Israel on 27 August 1903,” cited in Y. Riklis, ed., The Teacher’s Book, in memory of S. H. Wilkomitz (The Teachers’ Union Press, 1949), 125–161 [Hebrew]. 142. Ibid. 143. Seltenreich, People from Here, 120–121. 144. Yitzhak Ogen, ed., That Which Was: Memorial Book for Asher Ehrlich, OBM (Tel Aviv: Achdut Press, 1949), 115 [Hebrew]. 145. Ben-Zion Michaeli, Sejura: Its History and People 75 Years after its Establishment 1899-1973 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved 1973), 170, cited in Seltenreich, People from Here, 124 [Hebrew]. 146. Carmi, The Way of an Educator. 147. Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997). 148. Donna M. Bryant and Richard M. Clifford, “150 Years of Kindergarten: How Far Have We Come?,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 7 (1992): 147–154. 149. Clem Adelman, “‘Over Two Years, What Did Froebel Say to Pestalozzi?,” History of Education 29, no. 1 (2000): 103–114; Burger, “Entanglement and Transnational Transfer.” 150. The first Froebelian kindergarten in the US was opened in Watertown near Boston, and the first Froebelian kindergarten in the UK was opened in London. See Adelman, “Over Two Years.”

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

103

151. Ann Taylor Allen, “Children between Public and Private World: The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany 1840-Present,” in Kindergarten and Cultures, ed. Roberta Lyn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000(, 16–41. 152. These European cities included France, England, Italy, and Holland. See Ann Taylor Allen, “Gender, Professionalization, and the Child in the Progressive Era: Patty Smith Hill, 1868-1946,” Journal of Women’s ­ History 23, no. 2 (2011): 112–136. 153. Yehiel Heilperin and Yitzchak Alterman opened two kindergartens. In addition, Alterman, in cooperation with Noah Pines, founded “Froebelian Courses.” Alterman also wrote “Froebelian Games: Songs, Games, and Plays for Kindergartens and Schools, editing and arrangements by Y. Alterman, with musical tones arranged by the composer M. KantorKravitz” (Vilna: Yehudia, 1903) (musical notes) [Hebrew]. 154. Watts, “Julia Lloyd and the Kindergarten Networks”; Alessandra Arce Hai, Frank Simon, and Marc Depaepe, “Translating Ovide Decroly’s Ideas to Brazilian Teachers,” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 6 (2015): 744–767. 155. Raichel, “Role of Teacher and Kindergarten Training.” 156. Ibid. 157. Shehory-Rubin, “Hebrew Kindergarten Teachers,” 115–194. 158. Leah Mazeh, “Report on the Kindergarten in Jaffa to the Supporting Committee in Odessa,” undated, file 8.25/2953, AJE. 159. Leah Mazeh, “Memories from My Kindergarten,” file 8.25/2953, AJE. 160. Moshe Rinot, “The Activities of the Ezra Organization of German Jews for Education in the Land of Israel 1901-1918” (PhD diss., Jerusalem, 1969), 89 [Hebrew]. 161. Zipora Shehory-Rubin, “‘From the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings You Have Founded Strength’  – How the Children of the Jerusalem Kindergarten Contributed to the Spread of the Hebrew Language,” in From Safed to Jerusalem: The Book of Shoshana Halevi, ed. Eli Schiller (Jerusalem: Ariel Publishers, 2010), 57–68 [Hebrew]. 162. Tsvia Walden and Zipora Shehory-Rubin, From Kindergarten, Not from Birth: The Contribution of the Hebrew Kindergarten and Its Teachers to the Renewal of Hebrew as a Mother Tongue, 1898-1936 (Beer-Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2018), 8 [Hebrew]. 163. David Yudelevich, “The First Hebrew Kindergarten,” in Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, ed. Kimhi, 155–156. 164. The curriculum in the kindergarten was based on the child’s independent activity and on spontaneous expression, play, and free initiative. The program, centered on one central subject, was termed “the subject method.” The subjects were mainly derived from elements in the children’s sur-

104 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

roundings, such as the seasons, holidays, and animals, and entailed rich experiential activities. The children thus acquired new words and concepts. Miriam Snapir, Shosh Sitton, and Gila Russo-Zimet, The Israeli Kindergarten in the Twentieth Century (Sde Boker: Ben-Gurion University Teachers’ Institute, 2012), 67–80 [Hebrew]. 165. Rinot, “Activities of the Ezra Organization,” 97–99. 166. Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education, 74–113. 167. The report is located in the Alliance Archive in Paris, cited here from the translation from French by Zohar Shavit. See Zohar Shavit, “On the Publication of a Bilingual Anthology by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Haim Calmy,” Zion, 81 nos. 3–4 (2016): 452–453 [Hebrew]. 168. Ibid. 169. B. H. Banathy and J. O. Sawyer, “The Primacy of Speech: An Historical Sketch,” The Modern Language Journal 53, no. 8 (1969): 537–544. 170. Arieh Bruce Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education; Yehudit Shteiman, “The Formation of the New Hebrew Child as Part of a Cultural Building Process in the Beginning of the 20th Century in Eretz Israel” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2002) [Hebrew]. 171. Anthony Pym and Nune Ayvazyan, “Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting in Foreign-Language Teaching Contexts,” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Linguistics, ed. Kirsten Malmkjaer (London: Routledge, 2017). 172. Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (London and New  York: Routledge, 1998). 173. Wilfried Decoo, Systemization in Foreign Language Teaching: Monitoring Content Progression (New York: Routledge, 2010). 174. Garon Wheeler, Language Teaching through the Ages (New York and London: Routledge, 2013). 175. Frans Wilhelm, “Foreign Language Teaching and Learning in the Netherlands 1500-2000: An Overview,” Language Learning Journal 46, no. 1 (2018): 17–27. 176. Shlomo Haramati, “Approaches and Methods for Teaching the Hebrew Language,” Orchot A (1962): 9–11 [Hebrew]; Rubik Rosenthal, Yosef Dan, Yirmiyahu Yuval, Yair Zaban, David Shaham, and Derek Jonathan Pensler, eds., New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age, Volume 2: Social and National Movements – Religious Society Facing Secularization and Modernization: Hebrew and Jewish Languages, (Jerusalem: Keter Publishers, Lambda – the Association for Modern Jewish Culture, 2007), 323 [Hebrew].

3  THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES 

105

177. Joseph Lung, “Eliezer Ben-Yehuda  – a Hebrew Teacher at Hatora Vehamelacha School,” Cathedra 56 (1990): 93–108 [Hebrew]; Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 48–53. 178. Yosef Meyuhas taught at the AIU network girls’ school, the Evelina de Rothschild School, and the teachers’ seminary of the Hilfsverein network. Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, p. 101 http://www.tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/1/101 [Hebrew]. 179. Uri Kesari, “David Yellin – or a Monument to the Teacher,” Maariv, 6 March 1964, in Meitlis, On the Middle Path, 113; Fellman, Revival of a Classical Tongue, 48–53. 180. David Yudelevitz, “Memories of the Founders,” in Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, ed. Kimhi, 150. 181. Moshe David Shuv Memory of David’ House (Jerusalem: Mass publishing house, 1973), 1119–1120, in Eliav Mordechi. The First Aliya: (vol. B) Documents, Biographies and Bibliography. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1981), 254. 182. Moshe Nahir, “Micro Language Planning and the Revival of Hebrew: A Schematic Framework,” Language in Society 27 (1998): 335–357. 183. Margaret Gibson, “Immigrant Adaptation and Patterns of Acculturation,” Human Development, 44 (2001): 19–23. 184. Dov Kimhi, ed., The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1928 (Jerusalem: Teachers’ Union, 1929), 153 [Hebrew]. 185. Haramati, Pioneer Teachers, 34. 186. Grazovsky and Ziprin, School for Children, 3. 187. Meitlis, On the Middle Path, 13–112. 188. Ibid. 189. Cited in Yitzhak Epstein, “What Is the Natural Method?” Studies (Jerusalem: Kohelet Publishers, 1947), 35 [Hebrew]; Haramati, Pioneer Teachers, 34. 190. Dror, National Education, 226–228. 191. Yitzhak Epstein, Hebrew in Hebrew: The Beginning of the Teaching of the Hebrew Language According to the Natural Method – a Book for Teachers and Fathers Who Teach Children Four Years Old and Older (Warsaw: Achiasaf, 1901), 5 [Hebrew]. 192. Dror, National Education, 226–228.

CHAPTER 4

The Portrait of the Graduate

One of the significant questions to have emerged in the field of education since Rousseau’s writings is whether children should primarily grow into their true personalities or develop as citizens. The humanistic pedagogical approach, in its various shades, such as the Bildung concept, sought to enable the growth of a person by expanding his intellectual knowledge, cultural awareness, and environment. Another model is the authentic adult who knows how to discover himself, coming out of his personal experience with as little mediation as possible. The functionalist approach to education seeks to shape a graduate who will be an active and useful citizen in his society. The education system aims to shape a graduate with tools, skills, and habits that help him fulfill his social and professional functions. The graduate will embody these qualities after leaving the system. Schools often combine the different approaches, but using different doses and emphases. The transfer of the various pedagogic approaches to the local reality of Ottoman Palestine generated several examples of graduates of the educational institutions. The degree of transferability and adaptation led in general, to two main figures of graduate: the modern Jewish figure of graduate, which includes several sub-figures of the three net educational works. The figure of the Hebrew graduate figure encompasses both urban and rural students.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3_4

107

108 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

One of the primary educational means is the curriculum, which “always represents somebody’s version of what constitutes important knowledge and a legitimate worldview,” according to Sleeter and Grant.1 The selection and organization of this knowledge are made by those who determine and define which knowledge is valid and important, and which is of secondary worth. The curricula sought to “translate” the ideal image of the education system’s desired alumni into educational messages to be conveyed in the instruction of various subjects. The common thread connecting all the actors active in Ottoman Palestine was their reliance on the views of conservative humanist education and naturalist humanist education and the accommodation of these views to local reality.

4.1   The Portrait of Modern Jewish Graduate The portrait of the graduate of modern Jewish education reflects the adaption of the European Jewish networks to the idea of the civilizing mission of European colonialism. Three transfer processes occurred, whereby concepts from three metropoles were imparted to the same colony, not controlled by the European country. Each metropole and its educational network had developed its own portrait of the graduate. At the same time, however, there was a common ethnic and religious solidarity between the subjects of the civilizing mission and its recipients. Jewish solidarity relied on a centuries-old historical tradition and underwent several tumultuous tests during the nineteenth century.2 This emotional involvement affected the power relationship between the European funding bodies and the children of local families. The common religious denominator manifested as a desire to shape graduates who maintain tradition and observe the basic religious commandments. Another significant component of the entanglement between the modern Jewish European actors and the local students was the activities of local Jewish intelligentsia and immigrant Jewish teachers. These teachers chose to settle in Ottoman Palestine and did not see this educational activity as a temporary sojourn on their travels.3 It should be noted that the three networks operated among an indigenous population, meaning that the students belonged to the religious and conservative Jewish communities living in the cities. The colonial relationship was characterized by European paternalism toward the natives, whereas the Hebrew schools viewed the next generation as destined to surpass their parents. At the same time, Hebrew education took place in schools where the students were new immigrants or children of

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

109

immigrants from Eastern Europe, whose views were less conservative than those of local Jews. Relations between the European educational networks and the Jewish public were based on the concept of a civilizing mission, similar to relations between European colonial educational actors and local populations elsewhere. Notably, however, alongside the civilizing mission embraced by Jewish educational networks, there was also a dimension of ethnic (Jewish) solidarity. The relations between Hebrew-national educational actors, on the one hand, and the students and their families, most of whom were immigrants from Eastern Europe, on the other, was based on a common denominator—namely, the aspiration to create a new society—although there were differences of opinion regarding the essence of the necessary change. There was much concern in the various Jewish educational networks, particularly in Jerusalem, surrounding the temptation posed by Christian missionary schools, whose presence and activities might promote conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Indeed, Jerusalem was the first city in Ottoman Palestine in which European networks’ schools began operating. Notably, Jerusalem was also the city with the largest number of students. From the 1870s, most of its inhabitants were Jewish, and they accounted for more than half of the Jewish population in Ottoman Palestine. Most European Jews in Jerusalem depended for their livelihood on financial support from Jews who resided beyond the boundaries of Ottoman Palestine and sought to fund Torah scholars in the Holy Land. This way of life resulted in tremendous poverty and poor living conditions, drawing harsh criticism from European Jewish actors and networks that viewed the practice as fostering a life of idleness and laziness. European Jewish educational networks aimed to change the way of life of these ultra-conservative communities. Indeed, the struggles surrounding schools’ activities reflected the clash between modern and very traditional lifestyles. This way of life, in which nearly all members of a congregation study and do not work, was not as acceptable in the corresponding conservative Jewish communities in Europe or the Mediterranean Basin.4 Those communities had varying proportions of full-time Torah scholars; in each case, however, these groups were a minority. They usually included the wisest students or those whose wives or parents supported them. Thus, the way of life practiced by Jerusalem’s Jews was unusual. It necessitated a financial commitment by Jews outside of Ottoman Palestine, who saw support for Torah scholars as a religious imperative stemming from their belief that providence resides in the Holy Land. There is an

110 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

interesting phenomenon here, whereby residents of a particular place, defined in terms of religious sanctity, enjoy financial support from members of their ethnic group who live beyond their political and geographical boundaries. The communities of East European Jews in Jerusalem (some of whom grew up in the city during last third of the nineteenth century) vehemently opposed modernity. They sought to preserve the ultra-­ orthodox way of life. They saw Ottoman Palestine (Zion) as a place of refuge from the processes of secularization and the influence of secular education. The Sephardi communities (descendants of the Spanish expulsion of Jews), however, like their brethren in the Jewish communities of North Africa, were less hostile to the encounter with education and modernity.5 The European educational networks adopted the core curriculum in the educational institutions they established and saw it as a means to mold a graduate who would be at home in Western culture, maintain tradition, and observe the basic religious commandments, while also being able to support himself financially. The Jewish students in the modern elementary schools spoke many languages. As Nissim Bachar, principal of the AIU school in Jerusalem, attested, “the students in our school spoke a ‘mixed multitude’ of languages, Ladino, Yiddish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Italian.”6 The financing organization determined the school’s language of instruction, yet it also taught additional languages such as Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew. The implementation of mass education in Western and Central Europe also entailed an expansion of the curriculum beyond the “three Rs”— reading, writing and arithmetic. The curriculum included mathematics, geography, history, nature, literature, language, physical education, sewing (for girls), foreign languages, gardening, and religious studies. This curriculum translated modernity into general future educational messages characterizing the desired graduates.7 The Figure of the Evelina de Rothschild School Graduate The Evelina de Rothschild School molded two models of graduates. The first model, developed between the 1850s and the 1890s, was that of a young Jewish girl in a very conservative society. She belonged to the first generation of girls to study within an organized educational framework. The education these girls received had a limited curriculum: the three Rs and needlework. The second model, which applied from the 1890s

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

111

onward, was of a young, religious, Jewish girl who adopts the character attributes of a Victorian girl living in the Levant, while simultaneously challenging some of the patriarchal norms of her community. By the mid-­ nineteenth century, as we know, there thousands of young Jewish girls across various European communities were school graduates. Middle-class Jewish girls attended schools in German, French, and Russian cities, and there were even schools where the student population and the teachers were Jewish.8 However, the idea of girls’ education did not reach Ottoman Palestine until the mid-nineteenth century. The educational system in Jerusalem was inherently single-gendered, having been designated solely for boys. Many aspects of Jewish society were very conservative compared with corresponding communities in Europe and North Africa. Members of the society had reservations about any educational institution that was not dedicated solely to religious studies. For them, any study classified as secular, such as arithmetic, language, or geography, categorically threatened the norms of traditional religious society and the power structure at whose apex stood the rabbis. The few girls who were granted the opportunity to study did so privately with tutors or their parents.9 The Evelina de Rothschild School, established in 1854, adopted the educational model used for poor communities in Central and Western Europe. These educational institutions taught the three Rs as well as needlework, which included sewing, embroidery, and weaving—skills that were intended to enable them to support themselves (sewing also became part of the regular elementary school curriculum in the following years).10 The conservative Jewish community in Jerusalem regarded the acquisition of a profession as a desired goal only for those incapable of becoming religious scholars. Therefore, the pursuit of these subjects by women, whose place was on the margins of religious society, did not clash with the social and gender norms of this community. The community’s rabbis did, however, fear that even the mere existence of an educational institution that taught secular subjects and was not under their supervision would lead to the establishment of such schools for boys, and therefore they did voice some opposition to it, albeit not vociferously. The first girls to attend the Evelina de Rothschild School in the Old City were from Sephardi families, who were less apprehensive about modern influences. Over the years, they were joined by girls from European families who were less meticulous in their lifestyles. The school taught a foreign language—French—in addition to Hebrew. During its first

112 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

thirty-five years, when the school operated under the auspices of the Meir Rothschild Hospital, it sought to mold graduates by providing a formal, even if minimal, education, systematic knowledge of sewing and embroidery, and religious knowledge such as prayers and their explanations, as well as knowledge of a foreign language.11 As previously noted, Fortuna Bachar, a graduate of AIU, arrived in 1889 to run the school. She wanted to adopt the curriculum familiar to her from her work in the AIU educational network. Moshe Lunz, one of the founders of the Jerusalem School for the Blind, colorfully described the attempt to transfer and implement the pattern of a modern school that strives to mold a graduate whose education goes beyond the three Rs: “She tried with all her might to give the house the form of a school, to teach therein the languages of science in accordance with the programs of her school in Europe.”12 During the 1890s, following the school’s transfer to the Anglo-Jewish Association network in 1894, the portrait of the Evelina de Rothschild School graduate began to change. The AJA network, which focused solely on girls’ education, adopted the colonial and missionary approach that believed the key to social change in groups defined as failing lay in the gender roles they play as educators of the next generation.13 This approach is evident in a statement by Eugénie Luce, founder of the girls’ school in Algiers in 1845: “Girls’ education would provide the key to a ‘fusion of races’.” AJA adopted the spirit of these words, explaining, “Let us educate the daughters so we will not have to educate the grandchildren.”14 In 1900, the AJA network appointed Hannah (Annie) Landau, a Graystoke Teachers’ College graduate and former teacher at the Westminster Jews’ Free School for Girls in London, as headmistress of the Evelina de Rothschild School. As a consequence of this move, the character of the Evelina de Rothschild School graduates came to be molded according to AJA’s ideal of the preferred “good Jewish girl.” This ideal adopted the feminine Victorian model of the late nineteenth century, preserving Jewish religious practices and faith. The Victorian model encouraged girls to regard the role of wife and mother—the role of Angel in the House—as the loftiest and most desirable role a woman could hope to fulfill.15 Improvements in education for girls were considered a means of improving the quality of motherhood. The image of the Victorian girl conveyed that she must endeavor to improve her moral nature. Indeed, her future tasks as wife and mother could be appropriately carried out only if her moral sense were developed correctly. Landau tried to instill self-­ improvement norms and serve the common good by employing informal

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

113

educational means. For example, she introduced an attendance flag, which was granted to the class with the fewest absences. This competition helped cultivate a sense of group solidarity.16 Another illustration of adaption with awareness is the following student testimony: “One girl did not bring her school fee, and one of her classmates approached Landau and said, ‘You think we are not like the English girls – honorable? Please let me pay for her. I brought a franc to school today for a pencil box; I can wait until later for it. Melke will not be able to pay herself, and she has a stepmother and her father is blind and cannot work.’”17 One of the most important characteristics of the Victorian girls’ model was domestic skills, although, it was not unique to this model of femininity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, European schools allocated school hours for sewing, ironing, home economics, and the like, making home management a form of vocational training. Domestic education evidently entailed a dual conception that focused on the acquisition of domestic skills, insisting on the value of lessons from professionals, while simultaneously claiming that domesticity was a natural, inborn feminine ability. Domestic education was also termed domestic science, and a range of social reformers employed the terms scientific, mother, and efficient housewife.18 At the Evelina de Rothschild School, domestic education encompassed cooking, baking, sewing, and cleaning classes.19 One school photo, featuring a cooking class from 1910, depicts a number of girls engaged in various stages of the cooking processes. Interestingly, all the girls are wearing white aprons and white caps—uniforms that signaled the importance of the class. Landau proudly reported that domestic education was a valuable skill for the graduates, who would be able to work as housekeepers at Augusta Victoria, a luxurious hostel.20 At the end of the nineteenth century, writers and educators encouraged Victorian girls to be ambitious and freely develop their intellectual capacities without giving up domestic education. Landau adopted this trend in her life and encouraged her students to continue studying. She was very proud of those students who continued to participate in school life after graduating. Landau stated, for example, that twenty-nine Evelina de Rothschild graduates had been selected to work as teachers in Hilfsverein kindergartens.21 However, an examination by the Hebrew newspaper HaZvi (later HaOr) found that this was not the case and that only four girls were working as assistant teachers in kindergartens.22

114 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Efforts to present the school as an extension of British imperialism, or J.A.  Mangan’ term ‘imperial diffusion’ were evident in ceremonies and ceremonial expressions that linked important events in the life of the British Empire with school activities.23 In 1901, for example, the schoolgirls participated in mourning the passing of Queen Victoria by wearing black ribbons.24 Landau, some teachers, and chosen students participated in the memorial service in Jerusalem.25 The school celebrated the crowning of Edward VII at a ceremony sponsored by the English consul and his wife, which also included awards for the schoolgirls. At the end of the event, all those present sang “God Save the King.”26 The Figure of the AIU Graduate The founders of the AIU network saw education as the key to changing Jewish society in the Middle East and assigned their graduates a central role in the modernization of their environment. The AIU network adopted the Orientalist discourse, adapting it to Jews living in Middle Eastern countries. Alongside this discourse, however, another internal Jewish discourse considered the “correction” or “repair” of Jews in order to make them productive citizens. Educated Jews, who sought a comprehensive reform of Jewish society, wanted to guide Jews toward new, productive professions. They therefore tried to promote an education that, in addition to religious studies, included a course of study beyond reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. Particularly relevant in this context is the influence of the educational process in France on the Jewish community and its transfer to Jewish communities in the Middle East. The share of public education in France increased following the law of June 28, 1833, which obliged every community to provide popular education and exempt the children of the poor from tuition fees. At the time, there was also a network of church schools that provided an alternative for religious parents, and these were supplemented by institutions for vocational training. French Jewish leaders sought to adapt this model of vocational training for Jewish students, enabling them to become part of the French state and culture. One such school, founded in Paris, was supported by the same philanthropic actors who founded the AIU and by Baron Rothschild. Thus, it is safe to conclude that support for productive or vocational education was an accepted and even binding norm of the Jewish elite in France.27 The advocates of Jewish education in France were not satisfied with the “correction” of local Jews. They sought to bring

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

115

about this type of change to Jewish communities in the Middle East, communities that they associated with the dark past of the Middle Ages. The concepts of Enlightenment and modernization, as Rodrigue emphasizes, have been used to paint Eastern communities in a negative light. Specifically, the Orientalist Jewish discourse attributed the Jewish communities in Middle Eastern countries the following characteristics: ignorance, laziness, backwardness, uncleanliness, and many other pejoratives ascribed to the natives in the various colonies. The term “ignorance” included illiteracy and unfamiliarity with the concepts and terms of European cultures, such as hygiene and medicine. These expressions and definitions are part of the civilizing-mission discourse that characterized French colonialism, similar to other colonial societies.28 The focus of the AIU’s vision was, as noted, the regeneration of Jewish society, and the ways to achieve this goal were twofold. One way was to train graduates who would engage in agriculture and various trades (artisanal training), and the other was to adopt the ideal of Franco-Judaism, as taught in the French urban education system. The productive Jewish agriculturalist model was the first one that the AIU network tried to design in Ottoman Palestine. This model was based on the Enlightenment concept of “correcting” or “repairing” Jews through agriculture. The approach of German Jewish Enlightenment thinkers who believed that farming was one of the means of repairing Jews derived from the view of agriculture as morally worthy and fitting—in contrast to occupations that were considered typical Jewish livelihoods, such as usury, peddling, and the like. This attitude was based, inter alia, on the eighteenth-century Physiocratic school of thought, which held that the source of human wealth is agrarian.29 The view of agrarianism as the solution to “the Jewish Problem” was also adopted by the Tsarist regime during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The Tsarist government transferred Jews from the Pale of Settlement to areas captured from the Ottoman Empire, which were termed New Russia.30 In the East, the agrarian idea continued to percolate widely among the Jewish public, and was adopted by various actors following the pogroms against the Jews in the Pale of Settlement during 1881–1882. In Ukraine, these efforts were not successful, as the number of Jewish farmers remained minimal.31 There were, however, greater degrees of success in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and Cyprus, with the greatest long-term success in Ottoman Palestine, in Jewish discourse. The transnational aspect of the agrarian initiative reflects

116 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

both the idea’s appeal and the Jews’ view of themselves as a transnational nation.32 The first attempt to mold a Jewish farmer was an initiative of the Mikve Israel agricultural school. The school sought to educate urban students to become farmers, and its ideal graduates were to be farmers with proper training and knowledge. As a transnational network, AIU saw agriculture as a profession that is not necessarily related to a particular territory. The same graduates of Mikve Israel who chose agriculture as a profession did so outside of Ottoman Palestine in the years leading up to the First World War. The Mikve Israel School had adopted the model of the ideal graduate of an agricultural school as taught in France, the professional farmer—that is, with scientific knowledge in the field of agriculture. Agricultural knowledge had developed during the nineteenth century at various universities, and the French government invested resources in its dissemination. Among the molders of the ideal agricultural school graduate in France was the agronomist and Supervisor of Agricultural Education in the East of France, Eugene Tisserand. The heads of the AIU hired Tisserand as an advisor, and he even visited Ottoman Palestine. It is important to note one of the differences between the figure of the ideal graduate according to Tisserand and the ideal graduate of AIU in general and Mikve Israel in particular. The French student grew up among peasants who had known cultivation since childhood, while most graduates of Mikve Israel were urban children with no experience and no land for tillage. The aspiration to reshape the unproductive Jew is evident in the following remark by Joseph Niego: “Their bodies, their souls, and their minds must be molded and shaped in a manner to conform to the new life we could have them lead.”33 The AIU network saw Mikve Israel’s ideal adult as a model that must be adopted and transferred to other countries in the Mediterranean Basin, and in 1894, it established an agricultural school in Gedida, Tunis. The school’s principal was an assistant to Niego, Shmuel Avigdor, who had worked with him at Mikve Israel.34 AIU’s belief in the importance of agricultural education even prompted it to financially support a Jewish agrarian school in Hanover, Germany, outside its operating area.35 An elementary school that combined the two approaches was Torah and Craft, under the direction of Nissim Bachar, founded in Jerusalem in 1882. This school united two types of curriculum transferred from France. The sponsors’ associations’ curriculum offered professional training in

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

117

France and included specialization in carpentry, tailoring, shoemaking, engraving, stone and shell sculpture, ironwork, and copper works. The second curriculum was the one used in all AIU schools. The ideal graduate of this school was a productive person, as succinctly conveyed by the words of Jerusalem-born teacher Avraham Elmaliach, when he presented data on the school’s graduates. Elmaliach noted that of the 698 Torah and Craft School graduates, 543—more than three-quarters—“live off the fruit of their labor.”36 The second aim of the AIU was to make Western education accessible, employing a curriculum similar to that of an elementary school in France. AIU’s educational goals were reflected in a circular sent by the Central Committee to teachers in 1896, as presented in Rodrigue’s book: “What was the aim of the AIU? Primarily to send a ray of light from Western culture to communities that had atrophied from centuries of ignorance. Following that, they find them more secure and less degrading employment than peddling by providing the foundations of basic education and rationalism to their children. Finally, they wanted to open their hearts to Western ideas.”37 An important pillar of the western culture was the Greek history. The children of the Jewish communities in Ottoman Palestine were included, together with the rest of the Middle Eastern Jews, in the category of an atrophied population that requires rehabilitation, as reflected in testimonies by the founders and principals of the AIU schools.38 The curricula of the civilizing mission were built upon two components of the ideal of Franco-Judaism. The AIU saw Judaism as a moral religion. This approach was expressed through a curriculum that combined core studies and basic religious studies, and the transfer of religious practice through a minuscule number of hours of study, totaling a mere 3% of all the hours of study. The curriculum did, however, include the study of Hebrew, granting it over 16% of the study time, and the study of biblical history. In addition, the schools’ culture included attention to the Jewish calendar, keeping kosher, and other external characteristics. Importantly, the model of the graduate across the Mediterranean Basin did not differ from the model in Ottoman Palestine. This demand for uniformity in the graduates reflects the colonialist cultural dimension of the transnational network. The salient expression of that is the relatively large amount of time dedicated to studying languages. Before continuing, we must note that a comparison of the AIU curriculum with that of the Hebrew Teachers

118 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Union for 1907 shows that most of the hours dedicated to language study came at the expense of the study of arithmetic. Thus, for example, if in the AIU schools 6% of the hours of study were devoted to arithmetic, in the Hebrew schools arithmetic study took up 16% of the time.39 The study of French in AIU schools began as early as kindergarten, and took up 28% of all the hours of study.40 French language was the network’s marketing asset and induced parents from the Sephardi community, who sought a means of livelihood for their children, to send them to AIU schools. Thus, for example, with the establishment of the school in Safed in 1912, there was competition between the two networks for the hearts of the parents. In the Hebrew schools, lessons were conducted in Hebrew rather than French or German. The parents of Sephardi students saw this as a drawback that would impede their children’s future opportunities for earning a livelihood.41 Alongside French, students also learned the local language, and in the case of Ottoman Palestine, Turkish, the language of the government, took up 14.5% of the study time, as did study of the Hebrew language.42 The emphasis on language was designed to prepare the graduates to manage well in a French-speaking environment in the Middle Eastern region. The AIU graduates were meant to feel at home in the French colonial culture that crossed geographical borders and was entrenched in the Ottoman Empire. One of the pedagogical approaches to shaping the ideal graduate was based on the rationale of the French elementary school curriculum. Teaching was a concentric process. Each class was an entity in itself, independent of other classes. Each year the students had to complete the entire program; in the following year, they had to take the same material and, by adding new details, develop and deepen the ideas acquired in the previous year.43 The most revolutionary change AIU sought to bring about had to do with the female graduate. The AIU network fought to change the status of Jewish females in the Mediterranean Basin. It used the term emancipation, that is, the emancipation of Jewish women in the East. The term emancipation is a cornerstone in the discourse of the Jews of France. The French Revolution emancipated the Jews, who saw this as a source of pride and gratitude.44 The AIU network sought to create a new model of an adult girl, a revolutionary model that challenged the premises of patriarchal Jewish society. AIU struggled against the image of women perpetuated by the

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

119

conservative, Jewish society, which believed in the patriarchal order that keeps women in a passive position in the private sphere. The rabbinical ultra-orthodox establishment forbade core studies and feared that opening schools to girls would destabilize the community’s power structure. The AIU network founded five schools for girls in the cities alongside the boys’ schools.45 AIU schools sought to mold a woman who would be independent of her mother, marry at a later age, and value the advantages of education.46 The AIU network believed that the emancipation process should focus on the removal of head coverings and prevention of childhood marriages. In Islamic countries, Jewish girls and women were following the practice of wearing a hijab, thus adopting the dress code of their Muslim surroundings, even though Jewish law only requires married women to cover their heads. AIU teachers were greatly troubled by the fact that Jewish girls were wearing head coverings, because they viewed this as the adoption of Muslim customs foreign to Judaism. Notably, this issue was less problematic in Ottoman Palestine, where most of the Jewish population traced its roots to Eastern Europe and therefore did not usually require girls to cover their heads before marriage. In European eyes, that practice was a terrible example of sexual enslavement.47 One of the ways to delay the age of marriage for girls was school attendance. AIU banned married girls from attending school. Like the other education networks, AIU saw the mother as the natural educator of the future generation. This is why educating girls was necessary for creating change in Jewish society. In the eyes of the school’s adult network, it would be the mother who would educate her children to adopt the norms of Western culture in its French format. The ideal female graduate incorporated the main character traits of bourgeois French women of the nineteenth century. One of the primary professions in French girls’ education was sewing, considered a necessary economic tool for the girls’ futures as housewives. This was because most of the family’s clothes were sewn at home, and only affluent families could afford the services of a seamstress or tailor. A study by Rebecca Rogers shows that learning the skills of housework was considered a necessary element in the daughter’s education in France during the time of Napoleon and his successors.48 Training in sewing continued to be a central pillar in the curriculum of the French Third Republic. The importance of sewing as a profession is reflected in the allocation of training hours at AIU girls’ schools, where more weekly hours were allocated to sewing than to any

120 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

other subject. One could argue that the model AIU network graduates were the teachers who had studied there, most of whom returned to teach there after undergoing training. They had adopted the values of the network and passed them on, thus serving as a model for imitation (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1). The Figure of the Hilfsverein Network’s Graduate The Hilfsverein network, like the other education networks, believed that “folk education is the basis for all educational activities everywhere and especially in the Near East. It was needed more than anything else for the masses, whose education was their only weapon in the war of existence.”49 This message, which appeared in one of the network’s annual reports, was repeated in various publications, expressing the essential aspect of Hilfsverein’s desired ideal for adults: the individual’s ability to achieve basic economic independence with a respectable income. Alongside this were two other sets of attributes, corresponding to those of AIU alumni: the attributes of traditionally observant Jews and the attributes of German culture generally and Prussian culture in particular. The curriculum, issued by the network in 1905–1906, on the occasion of the opening of a girls’ school in Jerusalem and a boys’ school in Jaffa, clearly outlined the ideal male and female graduates. The desired adult (male) was supposed to become a tradesman, craftsman, or manufacturer. The curriculum was intended to prepare him for this future by adding a few years of schooling to the six grades of elementary school [Elementarschule].50 In November 1903, the Hilfsverein network’ educational committee decided to adopt the educational regulations of the German government, adding two-three years of schooling and creating a middle school [Mittelschule] with 7th–9th grades. The main reason for the change was the need for broader training for the younger generation, to cope with the changes in the world of employment. Graduates who wanted a certificate attesting to vocational training would be assigned two basic frameworks. One was the commercial school that trained for accounting, and the other was the network’s teacher training college, which was supposed to ensure a respectable livelihood as a teacher. The ideal graduates were expected to fulfill the traditional gender roles of wife and mother. The proper expression of this was the pursuit of home economics, sewing studies, and even gardening—for the purpose of growing vegetables for home consumption. Along with this basic model,

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

121

the network sought to create a model of a graduate who could support herself by teaching, and for whom the kindergarten course was intended. The numbering of the classes reflected the school structure. The last school year was labeled “first grade”; the year before that was labeled “second grade,” and so on.51 The Hilfsverein network expected its graduates to form ties of loyalty to the territory they grew up in. Its aim was to have the students find a means of livelihood in their places of residence and not emigrate to the West. Behind this goal was, of course, a consideration of domestic Jewish politics. Some German Jews feared a massive migration of Jews from Middle Eastern countries to Europe. They worried that such immigration could spark anti-Semitic reactions that would, in turn, cause them harm.52 An examination of the Hilfsverein Seminary curriculum in Jerusalem and a comparison with the 1904 curriculum for the school in Berlin reveals that the German curriculum was adopted almost in its entirety. Some of the teachers came to the seminary from the Lemel School, after having undergone training in Jewish or general European seminaries. Others were from Germany, including experts who had obtained their higher education in Europe. The differences manifest, of course, in the area of religious and linguistic studies. In Palestine, the main language of instruction was German, with Hebrew for religious studies, and the foreign languages were Arabic, Turkish, and English (depending on teacher availability), while in Germany, the foreign language was French. The result was that the Jewish student in Ottoman Palestine learned three languages rather than two. These differences resulted from the adaptation of the German curriculum to the needs of Ottoman Palestine. However, a more accurate analysis of the scope of study hours of the various subjects offers the following insights. The Hilfsverein schools in Ottoman Palestine devoted fewer hours to music, physical education, and the arts than those in Germany. Conversely, they devoted more hours to mathematics lessons than did the schools in Germany. Evidently, non-core subjects were less valued in the eyes of parents and even teachers, whereas they considered mathematics an essential resource for future livelihoods. The model seminary graduate was to have manners regarded as respectable and appropriate by the German bourgeoisie. As in the German seminaries, the seminary had a strict code of conduct for the teachers and students. The students were required to wear respectable clothing, which included a brimmed hat. The teachers and students were required to attend Friday prayers. The seminary promulgated rules that included

122 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

penalties for disobedience, from a reprimand to expulsion, to enforce the institution’s code of conduct.53 German was the language of instruction in all subjects aside from Jewish studies, which were taught in Hebrew. The additional languages taught were Arabic, English, and Turkish. The language structure reflects the seminary’s effort to take the wishes of the Hebrew-national leadership into account, while at the same time reviewing its lack of faith in the possibility of teaching in Hebrew, especially in the sciences, given the lack of vocabulary and technical terms.54 The pedagogical program included psychology, logic, educational science, the history of education, Jewish education, school procedures, hygiene, textbook criticism, investigation of teaching methods, and practical work. The practical work focused on observing lessons in the Lemel School and teaching lessons, mainly during the last year of teacher training. Upon concluding their studies, the students took practical exams (preparing and giving a sample lesson), while for their theoretical exams, they had to write compositions in German on central subjects and issues: Pestalozzi, Rousseau, and the new subject of study (Anschauungspädagogik)—Observational pedagogy.55 Teaching primarily entailed lecturing. There was a dearth of textbooks for Hebrew studies, and for these lessons, the teachers’ and students’ notes served as the main written materials. For the subjects taught in German, the seminary had textbooks sent from Germany. The Hilfsverein society equipped its seminary with teaching aids used in the German seminaries, especially in the field of natural science. The curriculum in Ottoman Palestine had, as noted, two additional subjects: Jewish studies and language studies. Jewish studies replaced the Christianity program in place in the German seminaries. They were taught in Hebrew and the curriculum included Bible, Talmud, the history of the Jews in the Arab-Spanish period, and the Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) until Mendelsohn. In addition to German and English, as noted, the language studies included Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish. This adaptation entailed an increase in the number of hours, from 36–37 weekly hours in the German seminaries to 43–49 hours at the seminary in Ottoman Palestine.56 During the years the seminary was active, there were no major changes in the curriculum other than the addition of two subjects. The inclusion of these subjects indicated the seminary’s willingness to accommodate the newly developing culture as long as it did not conflict with Hilfsverein’s

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

123

values and goals. The first subject added comprised agricultural studies, productivity, and self-sufficiency, which were the flagship cultural and educational values in the eyes of the European networks. Agriculture was at the top of the scale of the desired productive values in the eyes of the molders of the Hebrew-national culture. In 1907, Haim Cohen, a farmer from Petach Tikva, was asked to design a curriculum for agriculture and to teach the practice at the seminary, and toward this end, the Hilfsverein network sent him to enrich his knowledge at the Higher Academy for Agriculture in Hanover. Upon concluding his studies, he designed a program aimed at the seminary’s fourth- and fifth-year students. He included chapters on earth science, fruit and vegetable cultivation, cattle raising and poultry farming, beehive management, the teaching of agriculture in elementary schools, and agricultural tours.57 The second subject was the class field trip as an educational-study tool. Its inclusion in the curriculum was supported by Cohen, who had also integrated the class trip into the curriculum of the Lemel School he headed. The class trip accorded with the modern cultural-educational values of philanthropy, which held that excursions into nature were a means of preserving the simplicity, naiveté, and health of the children. It was even an accepted tool for nationalistic education in German elementary schools.58 The Hebrew-national culture also attributed importance to the class trip as a link in the process of connecting the students to the homeland and deepening their knowledge of the varied landscapes and the near and distant history interwoven within them.59 The aspiration was to instill within the students, who were renewing the settlement of the land after two millennia of desolation, the value of attachment to the homeland. The assumption was that walking among the pathways, observing the landscape, and meeting the remnants of the past would deepen the hikers’ roots in their land. This viewpoint was reflected in the founding meeting of the Teachers’ Union in 1903, and in the first general Hebrew curriculum.60 The Jerusalem seminary instilled within its students the foundation needed for teaching, deepened their knowledge of the Hebrew language, endowed them with basic agricultural terminology, and encouraged them to conduct field trips. In addition, it planted seeds of German cultural values within the future teachers. Some of these seeds, which had sprouted among the seminary’s graduates who integrated into the Hebrew schools, were passed to the younger generation through lessons and discussions. The seminary graduates taught at the Hebrew schools alongside other

124 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

teachers, many of whom were former yeshiva graduates while others were auto-didacts whose training and lifestyle met the teaching requirements for traditional yet Enlightenment-inspired education. Most of these teachers lacked general and pedagogical knowledge, were unacquainted with modern pedagogical methods, had not experienced agricultural work, and lacked the expertise needed to achieve the Hebrew-national educational goals and promote modern and Hebrew culture. Because of their pedagogical input in terms of knowledge, literature, and teaching methods borrowed from Europe, the seminary students were sought after as teachers for Hebrew schools in Eretz Israel and abroad. Their knowledge and expertise were placed at their teacher colleagues’ disposal and disseminated among their students. The influence of the teachers’ training and the impact of its innovations are evident in a report by David Yellin from 1911–1912, written after a visit to a school in Rehovot, where a graduate of the seminary taught. Yellin proudly pointed to his practical, theoretical, and moral knowledge, which he passed on to the students during the course of teaching agriculture. He stressed the importance of the seminary as the only place that provided teachers with agricultural knowledge, thereby enabling its dissemination.61 The German cultural-educational values taught at the seminary and disseminated to Hebrew schools by its graduates did not encounter opposition from the builders of the Hebrew culture. However, the Hebrew educators felt that the attention to Hebrew culture and language was insufficient, and this posed a problem they could not ignore. The centrality of the Hebrew language in national culture was not a matter of debate, and there was also agreement that the teachers bore the lion’s share of teaching Hebrew to the students, and that the teachers must be trained for this. The seminary adapted the German program to Jewish values and to the advancement of knowledge of the Hebrew language. It did not, however, abandon teaching in German, and thus did not meet the expectations of Hebrew culture’s leaders or, primarily, of the Hebrew youth who followed them. Another stream of thought emphasized the importance of making Hebrew a language of instruction. Because the Hilfsverein seminary was the first institution to take upon itself the training of teachers, its opening raised high and varied expectations regarding its goals. The Jewish press reflected some of those expectations. According to the press, the outlook of the Seminary as a partner in the creation of Hebrew-national culture did not take into account the

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

125

impact of Hilfsverein values and goals, or the facts that a German model guided the teachers’ training and that it attributed such importance to the German language and culture. The seminary’s teachers, some in identification with its pathways and others so as not to lose their source of livelihood, attempted to narrow the gap between them and the Hebrew-national cultural leadership. They increase the number of Hebrew language lessons. Several teachers proclaimed that even though the seminary is not a Hebrew school, it is bilingual, and the students become fluent in both languages. These attempts did not satisfy the Hebrew nationalists. In the seminary’s third academic year, the students began to express dissatisfaction with the place of Hebrew studies relative to the teacher training seminar studies. The network management was stringent and claimed that it was impossible to learn science in Hebrew. Political actors who represented the young socialist immigrants joined the campaign, which became a national issue.62 The war of language demonstrates the conflict between the desire to strengthen localism and the Hilfsverein network’s desire to transmit German culture. The established intellectual leadership and the network management had the same perception of the importance of teacher training. Both sides saw teacher training as a means to continue transferring the various approaches to the next generation.63 The Hebrew-national teachers who hoped that the seminary would be a preliminary stage in the development of Hebrew culture joined the Hebrew students’ strike of 1913. They ignored Cohen-Reiss’s demand that they return to teach according to the existing curriculum and were therefore fired. Those fired included Cohen-Reiss’s deputy, David Yellin, who was known as a moderate person who intertwined tradition and modernism in his personal life and joined the struggle only in its advanced stages.64

4.2   The Portrait of the Hebrew Graduate We outline two portraits of the Hebrew student that were supposedly original but were in fact the outcome of transferred knowledge and values. The one portrait, which was dominant in public discourse, was of a farmer, laborer, or pioneer whose character should be diametrically different from that of an Eastern European Jewish town inhabitant. The second portrait was of a descendant of an educated Jew of modern times. More precisely, the latter was a new Hebrew portrait molded by the schools for boys and girls in Jaffa—with the development of the 1907 curriculum. The

126 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

establishment of gymnasia in Jaffa and Jerusalem marked the molding of a young Hebrew elite. The subject of the rural school and the image of the graduates it is supposed to mold very much preoccupied the various relevant actors, especially Hebrew teachers. They saw the image of the Hebrew-speaking Jewish farmer as the necessary prototype to achieve the national vision. The differences between rural education and urban schools were a known and accepted phenomenon in Europe. However, due to compulsory education, the curriculum gaps and the discrepancies in number of study hours had narrowed, though there were still noticeable differences during the years under discussion. The Portrait of the Hebrew Graduate Farmer The concept of what constituted a desirable rural education derived from the model of the farmer that the various actors strove to attain. One could argue that there were two secondary images of the Hebrew farmer whose molding was expressed in the curricular content of rural education. One model was the Hebrew-speaking practical farmer, knowledgeable about agriculture and natural sciences, a graduate with a limited number of years at a school where a foreign language was not studied. Baron Rothschild’s administration, the JCA, embraced this model, as did some of the Hebrew teachers. Another secondary image, which other Hebrew teachers embraced was the farmer with an education similar in essence to that of the urban student but whose education should not interfere with his responsibilities of working the land.65 Analyzing this issue from the curricular point of view reveals its conservative premise, which links the level of knowledge the student needs directly with his future occupation. That is, the assumption was that students who would continue to secondary school should have eight years of elementary school. In contrast, the children of farmers, who were not destined to continue their studies and were expected to work in agriculture, presumably required fewer years of study. The opposing approach sought to mold an educated farmer and held that all the curricular differences should be left to secondary education, thereby creating a uniform curriculum for urban and rural elementary schools. These different models were reflected on the school grounds of the moshavot, where the variation in models reflected the influence of the various actors. Efforts to adopt and adapt a specific plan of rural education

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

127

familiar to the teachers, while rejecting other features, sparked numerous discussions leading to the actual curricular choice. The image of the hard-working, Hebrew-speaking Jewish farmer grew out of the intermingling of two beliefs that had crossed continents and that were expressed in German, French, Spanish, English, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The first one was the Enlightenment-based idea of “repairing” Jews through agriculture.66 The second was the national discourse, which saw modern agriculture in Ottoman Palestine as a symbol of the end of the transnational era of the Jewish people, which had characterized their exile. However, one can say that the cultivation of a rural life entailed swimming against the historical current of urbanization and modernization in the West. Still, as discussed above, the concept did gain traction in Jewish communities around the world and in Ottoman Palestine. At the same time, some of the farmers, especially in the wealthier moshavot, adopted urban bourgeois practices, which did not include acceptance of the Eastern European village lifestyle. One of the expressions thereof, described negatively by the press of that time and by some of the teachers themselves, was the employment of Arab workers by farmers in moshavot founded by the first wave of immigrants, and especially those supported by the Baron—Zichron Ya’akov, Rishon LeZion and Petach Tikva. Aside from the economic reasons for needing cheap labor, this practice reflected a desire to adopt the lifestyle of the landowner who, in turn, was unwilling to embrace the rural lifestyle necessitating hard physical labor. The farmers’ adoption of bourgeois practices was visually evident in their garb, as reflected in pictures and testimony from the time. Archival images from Rishon LeZion show men in white suits and fez hats. Women’s dresses included lace fabric and billowy sleeves, supplemented by white gloves and corsets. These were worn mostly on holidays or for parties and family events such as weddings. Nonetheless, their acquisition aroused a public debate that reflects the fascinating entanglement of the actors’ approaches to rural Jewish life, the image of the farmer, and, of course, the rural student. Whereas the Baron criticized the “elaborate garb” that did not accord with his taste or concept of proper village modesty, one of the moshava women explained in her memoirs that European dress contributed to the “refinement of the place.”67 Here we must note that class and internal Jewish tensions influenced the way Baron and the JCA’s bureaucracy viewed the farmers in general and rural education in particular. The attitude of the bureaucracy toward

128 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Eastern Europeans incorporated paternalistic and colonialist perceptions of the French bourgeoisie during the Belle Époque. This outlook painted the Eastern European Jews as ignorant, primitive, and uneducated by French bourgeoisie standards.68 The JCA’s bureaucracy claimed that the Jewish farmer was supposed to live in conditions similar to those of the local Arab farmer, the falah (peasant).69 A visual expression of this these competing approaches is evident in the combination of homes and schoolhouses modeled after those of rural Europe, side by side with the customary local Arab house. Models of European village houses, whose common denominator was the relatively large dimensions of the house, built of wood or brick with a sloping roof covering an attic, contrasted with models of an Arab village house, which, together with its courtyard, was one complex where the house itself was of less importance as far more work could be done in the yard itself thanks to the climate. The structure of the houses, the construction materials, the nature of the courtyards and the type of roof illustrate the entangled history of the creation of a rural, Jewish Eretz Israel house, influenced by the European model, but not identical to it, while also borrowing from the rural Arab house. The Baron’s officials built a house more spacious than the Arab house, yet more crowded than the European rural house. In the Baron’s and JCA’s moshavot, permanent houses were built from (local) stone, limestone, or basalt, using the regular construction method of Arab villages, with the addition of iron strips to strengthen the walls. The roofs were sloped and made of tiles, as customary in Europe.70 One of the characteristics shared by the Arab falahs and the Jewish farmers was their relation to land ownership: like the Arab falahs, a large portion of the Jewish farmers did not own the land they worked. 71 As we have seen, the Baron’s support for the Mikve Yisrael School, which was founded years before educational activity began in the moshavot, reflected a desire to mold a generation of young practical farmers.72 A year before establishing the school in Rishon LeZion in 1887, a framework for agricultural study was set up in Zichron Ya’akov—the Arbester Schule (the school for workers), designated to prepare sixty youths for agricultural work within three years, and then grant them land.73 The practical farmer also represented an ideal among those Hebrew teachers who considered the peasant an authentic national archetype, as this definition was accepted by the revolutionary Russian intelligentsia in general, and the Nordia Vollia (Desires of the People) movement in

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

129

particular. These messages were transferred through an informal network of newspapers and personal communications between Russian revolutionaries and young Jewish students native to the Tsarist Empire.74 One group of Jewish students and artisans, which included youths who left Odessa and Kiev after the pogroms of spring 1881, chose the name Am Oylom (Eternal Nation). This group migrated to the United States and attempted to establish farms, which failed after several years. In Kharkov, in the Ukraine, there also emerged a new pioneering discourse, a second revolutionary group of fourteen young Jewish students—Bilu. This discourse defined working the land in terms of national redemption, and the redeemers (i.e., the farmers) as pioneers leading the camp (i.e., their nation). One of the members of Bilu was a student, Israel Belkind, who had set up a Hebrew school in Jaffa. Belkind explained, “the teachers in the moshavot should attend to teaching the children not only the ways of the Torah and wisdom but also the ways of labor, to arouse within them the love of labor at home and of working the land in the field and the garden.”75 Belkind was not conservative in his views, character, or choices. To him, his membership in Bilu was a partnership with a revolutionary organization in terms of that era. However, the revolutionary reason for creating a new farmer led Belkind and other teachers to agree with the conservative premise that links the level of knowledge that the student needs directly with his future occupation. They believed that the farmers’ children were part of the workforce for the agricultural economy; therefore, many hours and years of study would come at the expense of their agricultural work. Another actor interested in the practical farmer was the farmer who had adopted the conservative lifestyle aligned with the Jewish religious educational tradition of Eastern Europe. He was a scion of the moshava and educated in a heider. In these heiders, the children learned not only religious studies but also some arithmetic and sometimes Arabic or Turkish.76 The approach that regarded the rural school as an institution for endowing a more limited education than that provided by the urban school (and therefore the approach that molded the image of the practical farmer) drew nearly unanimous support at the first general meeting of the Teachers’ Union in 1903. A decision was made to have two separate curricula, one for urban schools and the other for rural schools. The schools generally comprised four classes, with each class sometimes containing two age groups.77

130 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

In discussing what Hebrew teachers considered to be the image of a proper rural graduate, it is important to differentiate between the village and the farmer. This differentiation reflects the entanglement stemming from the transfer and adoption of various images. The Hebrew teachers overwhelmingly belonged to the first and second waves of immigrant networks. Some of them were engaged in agricultural work. Epstein, for example, was an agricultural worker before devoting himself to teaching.78 Within this second wave of immigrants, the thinker Aharon David Gordon played an influential role. He linked individual redemption to national redemption through working the land. Gordon condensed this approach in a pair of words (in Hebrew), which became very central to the Zionist discourse—“The Religion of Labor.”79 One of the teachers in his network was Ze’ev Carmi, who worked on a small agricultural farm in one of the moshavot, where he served as a school principal.80 Other teachers in the agrarian communities of the Galilee raised sheep and cattle. A goodly number of teachers adopted the positive image of the village as a sign of being rooted. At that time, however, this association was ambivalent given the image of the farmer in the Tsarist Empire, who was portrayed as ignorant and uneducated. In other words, many teachers objected to copying the image of the Eastern European farmer. In their mind’s eye, these teachers conjured the image of village schoolchildren in Tsarist Russia. As Yosef Vitkin, a teacher from Rishon LeZion and native of Byelorussia, commented, “Our schools are not on a lower level than the village schools of the nations of Eastern Europe.”81 These words reflect the entangled attitude of Hebrew teachers toward the Russian farmer in general and rural education in particular. In the Tsarist Empire—the native country of many of the teachers—for example, the farmers founded village schools following the 1864 reform. These educational institutions offer only two years of schooling, less than the norm, which decreed at least three years of study. The quality of teaching and of the equipment was low, as was the proportion of village children who attended. During the 1890s, the proportion of farmers’ children who attended school rose dramatically, to slightly more than 15%, but it was only in 1911 that it reached four-fifths of all the rural children.82 In the Prussian districts (which at that time were part of Germany), there were great differences between urban and rural education. In 1891, less than half the farmers’ children attended school, and less than 1% attended schools with six grades. Of the schools in the cities, 40 to 45% had six grades.83

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

131

In addition, the local model of the falah (Arab farmer) aroused opposition, inter alia, because he was usually illiterate. Many teachers judged the farmers condescendingly and accused them of indifference, narrowmindedness, and lack of ambition, which in turn harmed their children. Part of the teachers’ criticism was based on their aspiration to create a new generation that would surpass their parents’ ghetto-like generation. This is evident in Vitkin’s view of parents being a generation that quickly abandoned the vision and returned to old habits rather than engage in hard labor. His extreme conclusion was that parents should be prevented from influencing their children. The Hebrew educator must, according to this view, educate not only the children but also their parents.84 Within this framework, it is clear that there is a desire to mold the rural student to be better versed in many subjects than the practical farmer, on the one hand, but not the same as an urban student, on the other. This desire was translated into a curriculum by Simcha Wilkomitz, principal of the Rosh Pina School and author of the Gedera Plan of 1904. The curriculum, which was not minimalistic, included studies that opened a window to the world beyond the village, such as geography, general history, and music. This revolutionary model of rural education was aimed at creating a native farmer who views working the land as second nature and has received a proper education according to the norms of the times. The school in Rosh Pina included four classes, each divided into two classes or, in short, the school was based on eight years of study.85 The two new study subjects included in this program were so effectively adapted that many years later the new model appeared be native: observation (Anschauungsunterricht) and agricultural studies. The adoption of agricultural studies was intended to convey that the school would train its students to work the land. Agricultural studies in elementary school was a new and revolutionary phenomenon in the developing Hebrew education. The transfer of the gardening class from European schools to the Hebrew rural schools and the encounter with the local reality led to the creation of a new curricular subject—agriculture classes. The inclusion of the agricultural garden in the curriculum indicates the intersection between the naturalistic view of humanistic education, which sees gardening as an educational necessity, and the aspiration to develop a national ethos using the myth of the Hebrew land worker. Agricultural studies had been part of the curriculum at the more progressive urban schools where the teachers who were native to Eastern

132 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Europe were raised and among the students of the AIU network and the Baron’s and JCA’s bureaucracy. In France, agriculture was considered a required subject in schools from 1887, and it was recognized as well in the Tsarist Empire, Switzerland, and Germany.86,87 Agricultural studies, which in some places was termed “gardening,” entailed working in gardens or on parcels of land within the school framework. Gardening studies were administered within the framework of two discourses. The first was the pedagogical discourse, which regarded the working of tracts of land as a practical expression of the Nature Study Movement inspired by Pestalozzi and Froebel. The second discourse centered on the practical training of rural students to help them become more professional farmers when they become adults.88 In the eyes of the JCA, agricultural studies were a need that the school had to meet by training future farmers. Indeed, the JCA’s deputy inspector of education officially rebuked Hayoun, principal of a school in Petach Tikva, for not including agricultural studies.89 Agricultural studies reflect the entanglement between the transfer and adoption of naturalistic humanitarian viewpoints and the aspiration to mold the local farmer, based upon the adoption of the Russian version of the national farmer. Supplementing this entanglement, various actors in the rural educational system, among them actors from conservative networks on the one hand and Hebrew teachers on the other were partners in this curricular endeavor.90 The ambivalent attitude among teachers regarding the appropriate level of education for their rural students is evident in the fiery words of Asher Ehrlich, a teacher and principal of the school in Kfar Tavor, during a heated discussion with other teachers: “It is necessary and useful even for the students of a rural school … to know who the Egyptians were. [They need] to know about the lives of the Canaanites, the Assyrians, Persia, Greece, Rome, so that they know about the conflicts and wars that took place between them and the Jews.”91 Ehrlich was, notably, the only teacher who came from a family of Jewish farmers in an agricultural village in Eastern Europe. Born in 1878 in a Jewish village in the Kherson District of Ukraine, he received a traditional Jewish education, up to the stage at which one would receive rabbinical ordination. Ehrlich renounced that route, however, opting instead for military service under the Tsar. Later he did pursue studies at the rabbinical seminary, which also trained teachers for Jewish schools, and taught as an accredited teacher at the more progressive heider in the city of Mykolaiv.

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

133

The curriculum of the progressive heider was similar to that of the Russian state schools, and thus Ehrlich brought with him a curriculum not suited to farmers’ children.92 At Kfar Tavor, he attempted to develop a model of the educated farmer, whose education is not limited to the knowledge needed for his work. However, his successor at Kfar Tavor, Antebi, felt otherwise and minimized the study of history and other subjects when he assumed the position. In 1907, at the fifth assembly of the Teachers’ Union, held in Sejera, the teachers decided that all the schools, in both the city and the village would have eight years of study. According to the minutes, the participants concluded that the Union’s creators, too, “did not find that it was necessary for them to consider the current format of the schools, which was undergoing change” but, rather, saw their goal as creating “that normal model of an elementary school in our land, which we must attain in the near future.”93 This declaration illustrates that even those who cast the desired graduate of the moshavot in the image of a practical farmer chose not to copy the familiar model of the European farmer. On the declarative level and in practice, there was one curriculum for the urban schools, and another for those in the moshavot. The two curricula had common elements. In practice, however, and by implication, the subsequent assemblies of the Teachers’ Union recognized the difference between the rural and urban schools as affirmed in 1907, namely that “minor differences and small omissions are necessary” with respect to schools in the moshavot.94 The responsibility for making changes in the moshavot schools would fall to the teacher, who “knew … what he should be responsible for, knowing the special nature of his school.”95 In other words, it was understood that it would be necessary to make relatively major changes in the distribution of hours of study, and, on that basis, the course of study.96 The moshavot schools were offered a shortened program and a more limited curriculum. The records regarding these two curricular formats, the general one and the shortened one, which was intended for schools with two to four teachers, indicates that the number of hours allocated for students in most of the moshavot was less than the number allocated for urban students, and thus the rural students received less attention from teachers than did the urban students. Another parameter was geographic location. Schools in the moshavot in the periphery (in the north and in the Jordan Valley) suffered from a limited teaching staff, who were also transient for the most part, and thus could not fulfill all the curricular requirements. For this reason, too, the

134 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

available knowledge in all the subjects was minimal. Thus, the conditions in some moshavot also affected the molding of the farmers’ children and their image. One can appreciate the differences among the schools in the various moshavot by comparing the curricula of three schools in the center of the country: two comparatively wealthy moshavot—Rishon LeZion and Zichron Ya’akov—and the moshava of Petach Tikva. There was a curriculum designated for four classes in these three schools, each with two years of study. These curricula had the following in common with the urban curriculum: French studies, drawing, and the lack of agricultural studies that were supposed to characterize rural education.97 A 1909 survey found that of the twenty-two elementary schools operating in the moshavot, only four comprised eight years of study. The rest ranged from four to six years of study. By 1912, there was some progress in this regard, with seventeen schools in the moshavot offering eight years of schooling, meaning that children attended school until they were fourteen years old. Hebrew City Youths The educational approach at these schools focused on molding an educated Jew, a descendent of the modern educated Jewish student. That person has mastered at least one foreign language and various subjects such as history, literature, and philosophy.98 The following discussion examines the intersection among the pragmatic approach, the educational approach, and the movement of ideological and pedagogical ideas that the gymnasium teachers, students, and their parents brought to bear. The image of the urban Hebrew graduate, intended to be the image of a young local elite, was sketched by the gymnasia in general and the Herzliya Gymnasium in particular. The portrait of a gymnasium graduate was influenced by three main actors who were partners in the gymnasium’s founding and leadership. The first was a network of politicos that included Jewish intellectuals from Eastern Europe who sought to create this elite and initiated the ­process.99 The second actor was a group of founding teachers with a higher education intermixed with practical knowledge, who had immigrated to Ottoman Palestine and founded the gymnasium where they taught. The third actor was a group of Zionist parents who wanted their children to receive a secondary school education in the spirit of Hebrew nationalism.

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

135

In addition, there was a group of Jewish parents from Eastern Europe who sent their children to the Jewish gymnasia that opened their gates in Ottoman Palestine, thus allowing these students to receive the matriculation certification denied them due to the numerus clausus. Each actor sketched the image of the graduate that fit its worldview. The common denominator of all the images was an educated graduate with all the necessary tools to continue expanding his education by pursuing a higher education—that is, he could obtain a matriculation certificate. The gymnasium’s administration and educators sought to combine the different images drawn by the actors and educate the student to fulfill the many and varied expectations of him. During the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the gymnasium’s new building, some of the actors outlined their views of the gymnasium’s educational aims. Thus, for example, the representatives of the founding group declared that the gymnasium was a “great national beacon” whose aim was to enlighten “the hearts of our brethren in exile and unite in the national task of revitalizing our nation in our land.” The concept of a “national task” was not made explicit in practical terms, but the aspiration to have the gymnasium become a spiritual center spreading light from Ottoman Palestine to the Jewish communities in the various countries was clear. Juxtaposing this approach, Dr. Matmon-Cohen, the gymnasium’s principal, represented the founding educators. He adapted himself to the surroundings where the gymnasium was established: the Zionist parents whose children would study there, and the Hebrew-nationalist residents. The intersection between the educational approach and the pragmatic approach, and the difficulty it created, are reflected in the words of Matmon-Cohen regarding the gymnasium’s educational aims during its cornerstone-laying ceremony: “Do not think that we only aim to create another doctor, another architect, another teacher among our people— these are, indeed, necessary, but our nation has many of them…. [Rather], we care for the entire generation, and we hope that the gymnasium will establish for us a generation of Hebrew intelligentsia who will … be worthy of leading the nation, of showing it the way.”100 These remarks indicate that the gymnasium’s principal, who was aware of the new nationalistic aspirations to maintain distance from the ghetto intelligentsia, intellectuals, and the ideological vacuum regarding the essence of the Hebrew-national thinker who does not work the soil. His words reveal the difficulty in defining the Hebrew intellectual’s function

136 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

and nature and, consequently, the difficulty of determining the educational goals of the gymnasium. Matmon-Cohen rejected the idea that the gymnasium is an instrument for preparing the next generation to be free professionals, although he was not explicit about how the gymnasium would in fact guide its graduates toward their future. And if the preferred graduate, according to Matmon-­ Cohen, does not hold a free profession, how can the obstinate struggle and high price he was willing to pay for international recognition of the gymnasium’s diploma be explained? From 1908 to 1914, the Herzliya Gymnasium became the focus for attracting Jewish youth from Eastern Europe. Most of the students from the Diaspora came temporarily without their parents for the period of their studies. Their tuition was an essential part of the funds for its upkeep. Some of the students arrived at the gymnasium after being accepted at Russian gymnasia. Other students from the Diaspora chose the gymnasium in order to combine secondary education with Jewish-national enrichment. Most of the “external students,” or at least their parents, hoped that the gymnasium would endow them with gymnasium matriculation certificates, which would enable them to attend universities in Europe. One of the Russian students wrote, “In Russia, there is a decree not to accept a Jew at any school once [Jews constitute] five percent, and [even] after I excelled at my examination … I wasn’t accepted. Nothing can describe the blow I experienced … and now I have steeled myself mentally to enter the Jaffa gymnasium.”101 Other parents of “external students” expected the gymnasium to give their children a Jewish education alongside the “gymnastic” education, as one father from Bessarabia wrote, “I am a shopkeeper from holy Russia … and the question of education reverberates in my mind. What shall I do so that my son will retain his Judaism … and still have all the knowledge that a man needs to be a man?”102 Thus, the image of a gymnasium graduate combines a Hebrew graduate, trained to lead the next generation along a new national path, together with a complete secondary education, equivalent to what was denied him in his homeland, as well as a general education close to tradition and Judaism. The molding of this multifaceted graduate demanded that the gymnasium focus on three main layers: The first entailed creating a formal curriculum that would fulfill the demands of universities abroad. It was necessary to receive official accreditation from the authorities and thus give the graduate’s diploma international value. The second layer

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

137

necessitated a division that provides for Judaic studies in the curriculum. The third layer required designing an informal curriculum that would form the basis for training a Hebrew-national leadership. The gymnasium’s administration gave attention to all three layers.  he Formal Layer T In order for to the gymnasium’s diploma to have value, it was necessary to obtain certification that would be recognized by the international academic world. Such recognition could be obtained from one of the European powers or the Ottoman authorities. The heads of the gymnasium chose the latter route. The principal, Matmon-Cohen, became an Ottoman citizen, made a commitment to teach the Turkish language at the gymnasium, and took upon himself the supervisory authority of the Turkish inspector of the school’s internal matriculation examinations. Fulfillment of these three conditions gave the gymnasium the desired certification. From 1910 Istanbul University welcomed the graduates of the gymnasium, and subsequently so did all the other universities in the world. A formal curriculum was adapted to help ensure the achievement of matriculation diplomas. The gymnasium’s formal curriculum for all students began at sixth grade, and comprised three central divisions, each reflecting one of the three images of the graduate. One division, adapted to the image of the educated Hebrew nationalist, focused on providing an extensive education in the Hebrew language and enriching the student with wide-ranging knowledge from traditional-national sources. The graduates should be local people with an attachment to the land cultivated through field trips, work camps, moshavot, familiarity with the “sons of the land,” inclusion in national endeavors, and opportunities to contribute their abilities. An informal education department supplemented this formal study division, as discussed below. The second division, adapted to the European model, was designed to prepare the student for higher education upon completing studies at the gymnasium. Achieving this goal required meeting the criteria of Turkish authorization. To this end five branches or clusters of main subjects were studied at the gymnasium. As these were practical and scientific subjects, the students at the gymnasium studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology.103 At the Hebrew gymnasium, the spoken language, as well as that of instruction, was Hebrew. The gymnasium students and its graduates

138 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

engaged in organized activity (they established a society called “Only Hebrew”) to spread the Hebrew language. In addition to Hebrew, the gymnasium taught ancient languages (Latin, and at certain times, ancient Greek as well). Moreover, in order to recognize the institution and give it international recognition, enabling its students to enter universities, the regime required that the school teach the Turkish language. Therefore, the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium taught Turkish, Arabic, and an additional European language with a widespread global scope, including grammar and literature (until the First World War French was chosen). Aside from the European languages, Arabic and written Turkish were taught at the gymnasium as required subjects (1912–1914).104 Latin also had a significant place in the curriculum. The students read original texts from Livy, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, and others.105 The fifth cluster focused on the humanities and included art, physical education, and subjects such as general history and literature. To this cluster was added an additional unit whose purpose was to cultivate the Jewish intellectual graduate by focusing on Judaic studies. Of these, the gymnasium gave extra attention to Bible studies (not only as the key to the Jewish religion, but also as a source on history, philosophy, literature, and morality, as well as a legal text). This method of teaching did not suit part of the traditional public and often aroused public debate (the Bible controversy).106  he Informal Layer T In addition to the formal education it offered, the gymnasium made informal education an integral part of its curriculum.107 This was primarily to reinforce the image of the graduate as a Hebrew-national leader and to fulfill the requirements of another actor who grew from within and was nurtured by the group of students and graduates.108 The essence and educational strategies that characterized informal education reached the gymnasium as part of the naturalistic, humanistic approaches.109 The group of founding actors encountered this approach through the network they formed during their studies and when then discovered unique schools in Central Europe, primarily in Switzerland. They adapted the approach to the characteristics of the gymnasium, developing and expanding on it, and making it an integral part of the gymnasium as well as other gymnasia founded later. One of the notable elements of the gymnasium’s informal education, involving both teachers and students, was the class trips that encouraged knowledge of the land and social and experiential education.110

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

139

As noted, this aspect of the curriculum—knowing the land—involved a class trip beyond the school boundaries. The class trip, and everything involved in its preparation and actualization, became one of the gymnasium’s prominent means of upholding its national responsibility and its promise to create an unbreakable link between the gymnasium’s student and the national expectations of him. The gymnasium viewed these trips as major educational projects. The school’s best resources were devoted to the subject. The formation of a council of students offered the opportunity to actualize this initiative and its social potential. The preparations (including study) and excitement took up a good deal of time and attention before the trip. The trips emphasized historical connections and the present populace of sites and communities, and strengthened them. The students experienced the difficulties of agricultural work in different areas, as well as the security problems that some of the moshavot have to deal with. Not infrequently, the trips involved great danger and physical hardship. The gymnasium’s program of trips included at least one one-day trip every month to the nearby surroundings. Within this framework, it focused on enriching the students’ knowledge and putting into practice some of what they studied in class: nature, climate, and neighbors’ lives. The students also took a long twelve-day trip across the length and breadth of the land under field conditions, emphasizing the connection of all the places with the nation’s history and general history. During the major trip, students contended with dangers and difficulties, underwent an unforgettable experience, and deepened their connection with the Land of Israel.111 According to student testimony, these trips were the experience they remembered best from their years of study at the gymnasium. It contributed to their sense of partnership in building a new society and introduced them to the challenge of building and preserving the land in the future.112 The gymnasium nurtured students’ sense of society, out of a belief that through social education, the students would become accustomed to involvement with the community, participating in and even running ­projects.113 Meetings between the students and socialist immigrants further accelerated the cultivation of a students’ society in the gymnasium. These meetings illustrated the gap between the ideology of implementation and the studies at the gymnasium. Very few students left in order to join the pioneers, although some spent vacations in work camps, physically learned the landscape of the country, and forged the students’ society during their time of study. However, this occurred outside the school grounds, very often with the participation of the teachers. The first seeds of the

140 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

aforementioned activity were planted during the gymnasium’s first year. In 1913, the Gymnasium Student Union and what was known as “The Limited Union” were established. The two organizations aimed to unite the gymnasium graduates, direct them toward national aims, and maintain connections between each year’s students. The activists were gymnasium graduates, and the connections with the administration, the use of the gymnasium’s infrastructure, and the support of the students prompted the formation of social organizations among the young students. Together with the students’ society, the gymnasium’s teachers strove to enrich the complementary education. In addition, education and recreational activities enhanced the students’ education with subjects not included in the heavily laden formal curriculum. The gymnasium students were offered a framework in which to enrich and enhance their studies using the gymnasium’s teachers. Thus, for example, in 1911 Karchenski, the music teacher organized and conducted a choir. The ensemble gathered twice a week, on Thursday afternoons and Saturday mornings, for two hours each time. The students learned solfeggio, and performed several dozen cantorial pieces, religious dirges, and holiday songs, and translated classical pieces by Handel, Saint Saens, Mendelsohn, Schumann, and others, Hassidic songs, barcarole, and more. The choir performed at the gymnasium and official events in Jaffa and the moshavot.114 In addition to the choir, in 1912 the gymnasium gained two orchestras. First, there emerged an orchestra of wind instruments where only boys participated, and later, a girls’ orchestra of string instruments, including mandolins, guitars, mandolas, a cello, and a bass. Pictures from the gymnasium’s archives show about forty members in each orchestra. The images also indicate that boys participated in the string orchestra and that there were members of varying ages. All of the orchestras’ instruments were purchased by the gymnasium. Both orchestras appeared in public and at official events, both on the Jewish community’s behalf and by invitation from the Ottoman authorities. The students were permitted to participate in the choir and the orchestras. Aside from the extracurricular musical education, sports also contributed to molding the students, who themselves added sports gatherings (including wrestling, athletics, and in particular football (soccer)). Similar associations existed for the intermediate classes: “Ofer” and “Ayala” supplemented the graduates’ association, serving similar purposes. Because the gymnasium’s auditorium housed the enthusiasts of the “Hebrew stage,” and as these enthusiasts included some of the gymnasium’s

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

141

teachers (Yehudit and Dr. Haim Harari, Dr. Eliyahu Luria, Israel Dushman), the students were permitted to take (a generally passive) part in the rehearsals. Theater-loving graduates were invited to watch performances. The gymnasium committed to offering the students several frameworks designed by its teachers as ways of spending leisure time or means of aiding the students’ initiatives. All the activities took place within school grounds.

4.3  Summary The leading actors and networks of the modern Jewish and Hebrew institutions in Ottoman Palestine aspired to create a revolutionary change for the next generation. The transnational history of schools illustrates the process of transmitting pedagogical ideas and their implementation. The implementation processes entailed three central factors: the goals of the researchers and the networks, the local conditions, and the growing Hebrew nationalist ideology. The three educational networks shaped three modern Jewish graduates. They all had the civilizing mission as a common basis. The degree to which the networks copied and processed ideas from elsewhere varied. In some cases, such as the AJA’s Evelina de Rothschild School, there was large-scale correspondence to patterns of colonial education. That is, the school attempted to create a model of an early-twentieth-century English school graduate while adapting it to the model of a modern religious Jewish girl in Jerusalem. The AIU network’s graduates in Ottoman Palestine were supposed to be similar to those of the network in other locations in the Mediterranean region. The most prominent expression of this was the use of French as a language of study. The network’s representatives considered themselves part of French culture. The Hilfsverein educational network adapted to the local conditions, which meant that the language of instruction in the kindergartens and schools was not to be German. The emphasis was on providing a modern education in its German style. On the other hand, at the teachers’ seminary, the network aspired to copy the German teacher training curriculum with almost no local adaptations. The Hebrew educational institutions sought to create or shape the new Hebrew graduate to replace their parents’ generation in Eastern Europe. The Hebrew secondary school education was based on two central foundations. One was a modern curriculum and the other a local,

142 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Hebrew-national one. Among the various Hebrew educational institutions, there were differences between the adapted European models and local Hebrew models. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the strengthening of Zionist ideology, the Hebrew schools openly—and some teachers in network schools secretly—sought to strengthen the educational goals that promote loyalty and attachment to the place and the vision of a new society. This local form of empowerment diminished the power of the transfer and internalization of European cultural models to some degree. The Hebrew rural education emphasized working the land and sought to bring about a transformation in the pyramid of professions among Jews. In contrast, the urban schools and gymnasia established in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem emphasized a broad general education that would allow graduates to acquire higher education abroad if they wished. Of course, this curriculum also made room (mainly through informal education) for the installation of national values, alongside general studies and the acquisition of a European language, analysis of Hebrew, the Bible, and history with a local-national emphasis.

Notes 1. Christine E. Sleeter and Carl A. Grant “Race, Class, Gender and Disability in Current Textbooks,” in The Politics of the Textbook, ed. Michael Apple and Linda K.  Christian-Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 78–110; Michael Apple, “Curriculum Planning Content, Form, and the Politics of Accountability,” in The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction, ed. Connelly, F.  Michael, et  al. (SAGE Publications, 2007), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tau/detail. action?docID=996458. 2. Yitzhak Conforti, “The Cultural Origins of Jewish Nationalism: Early Zionism and the Weight of the Pre-Modern Tradition,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 21, no. 3 (2021): 225–239, https://doi. org/10.1111/sena.12356. 3. Gross Nahum, “The Land of Israel’s Economy in the Late Ottoman Period,” in Israel Kolatt ed. The History of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine Since the First Aliyah  – The Ottoman Period, vol. 2, (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences, 2003), 279–308 [Hebrew]. 4. Elboim-Dror Rachel, Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel, Volume 1, 1854-1914 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1986), 78–81 [Hebrew]. 5. Wallach Yair, “Rethinking the Yishuv: Late-Ottoman Palestine’s Jewish Communities Revisited,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, no.2 (2017): 275–294.

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

143

6. Nissim Bachar, “For the History of the Natural Method,” HaDoar, 10, no. 12, (1931): 193 [Hebrew]. 7. James C.  Albisetti, Joyce Goodman, and Rebecca Rogers (eds.), Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World: From the 18th to the 20th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 8. Adler R. Eliyana, In Her Hands: The Education on Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011). 9. Margalit Shilo, “A Cross Cultural Message: The Case of Evelina de Rothschild,” in Women and Gender in the Yishuv and the State of Israel, ed. Margalit Shilo, Ruth Kark, and Galit Hasan Rokem (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-­Zvi, 2001), 229–247 [Hebrew]. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Moshe Lunz, “The House of Rothschild and Jerusalem,” Ben Yehuda Project, https://benyehuda.org/read/2630 [Hebrew]. 13. Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin. Gender, Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Experience (London: Woburn Press, 2002), https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203760918. 14. Cite in Shilo, “A Cross Cultural Message,” 235. 15. Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Taylor & Francis Group, 2012): 100–112. 16. Schore Laura A., The Best School in Jerusalem: Annie Landau‘s School for Girls, 1900-1960 (Waltham: Brandeis University, 2013), 48. 17. Anglo-Jewish Association, Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900–1901, 34–35, Hartley collection in Schore, The Best School in Jerusalem, 48. 18. Joan Parker, “Lydia Becker’s ‘School for Science’: A Challenge to Domesticity,” Women’s History Review 10, no. 4 (2001): 629–650, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020100200609; Vanessa Heggie, “Domestic and Domesticating Education in the Late Victorian City,” History of Education 40, no. 3 (2011): 273–290, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/0046760X.2010.529832. 19. Jewish Chronicle 12 June, 2012, 18 https://archive.thejc.com/archive/ 1.390285?highlight=Evelina+de+Rothschild. 20. The hostel, one of the most magnificent buildings in Jerusalem, was built for German pilgrims. Schore, The Best School in Jerusalem, 46–49. 21. Ibid., 63. 22. HaZvi, 3 June 1911, 1. 23. See J. A Mangan,. “Eton in India: The Imperial Diffusion of a Victorian Educational ethic. History of Education, 7no.2 (1978),105–118 in Gary McCulloch, “Empires and Education: The British Empire”, in International Handbook of Comparative Education, ed. Robert Cowen and Andreas Kazamias (New York: Springer, 2009) 170–178

144 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

24. HaZvi, 8 February 1901, 1. 25. Jerusalem, Jewish Chronical, February 8, 1901,15 https://archive.thejc. com/archive/1.277950?highlight=Evelina+de+Rothschild. 26. HaZvi, 29 August 1902, 1. 27. Lisa Moses Leaff, “Jewish Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century France: The Evolution of a Concept,” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 1 (2002): 33–61. 28. Aron Rodrigue, Image of Sephardi and Eastern Jews in Transition (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993). 29. Tali Tadmor-Shimony, “Cultivating the Soil as an Educational Message in Israeli Schools during the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 10, no.1 (2011): 23–42. 30. The Pale of Settlement was a region in western Tsarist Russia in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. The Pale of Settlement included all of Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, and present-day Ukraine, parts of eastern Latvia, eastern Poland, and some parts of western Russia. 31. Israel Bartal, “Farming the Land on Three Continents,” Jewish History 21, no. 3–4 (2007): 249–261. 32. Ibid. 33. Joseph Niego, “The Ideology of Agricultural Education: Mikve Israel, 1900-1901,” Bulletin de Alliance Israelite Universelle, 1901, 152–156, cited in Rodrigue, Image of Sephardi and Eastern Jewry, 97. 34. Yankelevich Esti, “Agricultural Education in the Agricultural High Schools in Palestine, 1870-1948” (Ph.D. diss., Haifa University, 2004), 22. 35. Ibid., 15. 36. Avraham Elmaliach, “Accounting of the AIU Company for the Year 1905,” Hashkafa 4, no. 9, September 1906 [Hebrew]; On Elmaliach, see Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, p.  512, http://www.tidhar.tourolib.org/ tidhar/view/1/512 [Hebrew]. 37. Aron Rodrigue, Education, Society, and History: Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jews of the Mediterranean Basin, 1860-1929 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1991), 28 [Hebrew]. 38. M.  Franco, The Sephardim and Ashkenazim of Safed, 1898, cited in Rodrigue, Education, Society, and History, 155. 39. Rodrigue, Education, Society, and History, 44–45; Yuval Dror, “National Education” through Mutually Supportive Devices: A Case Study of Zionist Education (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 257–256. 40. Rodrigue, Education, Society, and History, 44–45.

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

145

41. M.  R. Cohen, HaPo’el HaTza’ir [The Young Worker], Safed, 23 May 1913, 15, cited in Shmuel Har-Noy, Safed in the Turbulence of Education (Safed, 2020), 22 [Hebrew]. 42. Ibid. 43. R. Cohen, HaPo’el HaTza’ir [The Young Worker], Safed, 23 May 1913, 15, cited in Har-Noy, Safed in the Turbulence of Education 22. 44. Leaff, “Jewish Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century France,” 33–61. 45. Schools for girls were founded in Jaffa in 1894, in Haifa in 1895, in Safed in 1897, in Tiberias in 1900, and in Jerusalem in 1906. See Sylvie Fogiel-­ Bijaoui, “Un Chemin D’émancipation: Alliance Israélite Universelle Et Les Femmes Juives De Palestine (1872-1939),” Archives Juives 46, no. 1 (2013): 107–119. 46. Malino Frances, “Prophets in Their Own Land? Mothers and Daughters of the Alliance Israélite Universelle,” Nashim 3 (2000): 56–73. 47. Peter Drucker, “Disengaging from the Muslim Spirit: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and Moroccan Jews,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 11, no.1 (2015): 3–23. 48. Rebecca Rogers, “Boarding Schools, Women Teachers, and Domesticity: Reforming Girls’ Secondary Education in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” French Historical Studies 19 no.1 (1995): 153–181. 49. Annual report of the Hilfsverein, cited in Rinot, Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden in Creation and Struggle, 99. 50. See Ephraim Cohen’s letter announcing that he is sending the German educational regulations, 19 November 1903, documentation of the Hilfsverein seminary, A152/111/1, AJE. 51. Moshe Rinot, Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden in Creation and Struggle (Jerusalem, 1971), 106, 289 [Hebrew]. 52. Steven E.  Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 37–68. 53. Rinot, Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden. 54. Ibid. 55. Isaac Leon Kandel, The Training of Elementary School Teachers in Germany (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1910); Rinot, Hilfsverein der Deutschen. 56. Rinot, Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden. 57. Ibid. 58. Katharine D.  Kennedy, “Eastern Borderlands in German Schoolbooks, 1890-1945,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 1 (2007): 29–43. 59. Tali Tadmor Shimony, ‘The Shaping of Landscape Identity by Israeli State Education during the 1950s-1960s’, Paedagogica Historica International Journal of History of Education, 49:2, (2013): 236–252.

146 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

60. Dror, “National Education” through Mutually Supportive Devices. 61. Ofra Meitlis. On the Middle Path: David Yellin – A Life Story (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, David Yellin Teachers College, Efrata Teacher College, 2015) [Hebrew]. 62. Yosef Abramovich, “You Will Soon get to Hear About a Wonderful” CZA A 54/20 in Yehosa Kaniel (ed). (1997). The Second Aliya: (vol. B) Sources. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1997), 288–289 [ Hebrew]. 63. Aviezer Yalin, “Rebellion,” in Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, ed. Kimhi, 232–237. 64. Meitlis, On the Middle Path. 65. Nirit Raichel, “The Israeli Pupil at the Beginning of Hebrew Education: The Reality Between Two Ideal Images,” Zemanim no. 72 (2000): 65–75 [Hebrew]. 66. Israel Bartal, “Farming the Land on Three Continents: Bilu, Am Oylom, and Yefe-Nahar,” Jewish History 21, no. 3 (2007): 249–261, https://doi. org/10.1007/s10835-­007-­9037-­4. 67. Ayla Raz, “Occupied with Their Smiles,” Et-Mol 27 no. 4 (April 2002): 24–26 [Hebrew]. 68. Yair Seltenreich, “Cultural Aspects of Philanthropy: Belle Époque Administrators and Jewish Peasants in the Galilee,” Mediterranean Historical Review 23, no. 1 (2008): 35–51. 69. Yair Seltenreich, “The Solitude of Rural Teachers: Hebrew Teachers in Galilee Moshavot at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 5 (2015): 1–16. 70. Yossi Ben-Artzi, Early Jewish Settlement Patterns in Palestine, 1882-1914 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997). 71. Almost all the farmers in the Galilee, both Arabs and Jews, did not own the land. In most of the Arab villages, the large extended family or the village controlled all the land and apportioned tracts of varying quality to each farmer. In the JCA moshavot, as noted, the land belonged to the organization, and the Jewish farmers were sharecroppers. See Yair Seltenreich, People from Here: Education and Educators in Galilee Moshavot During the Yishuv Era, 1882-1939 (Jerusalem and Ramat Gan: Yad Ben-Zvi and Bar-Ilan Press, 1914) [Hebrew]. 72. Derek Jonathan Penslar, “French Influences on Jewish Agriculture in Palestine, 1882-1914,” Cathedra 62 (1991) 54–66 [Hebrew]. 73. For reasons of operational difficulties at the institution, only about half the students completed their training and received plots of land in a number of moshavot. See Shaul Dagan, “Stubborn on the Mountain – Zichron Ya’akov and Its Daughters, 1882-1918,” in Writings and in Light of Memories (Zichron Ya’akov: The Sarah and Moshe Arizon Museum of the First Aliyah, 2012), 86–87 [Hebrew].

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

147

74. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 90–97. 75. Israel Belkind, remarks at the First Assembly in Rishon LeZion 20 November 1891, in The First Furrows in Hebrew Education: “The Assembly of Hebrew Teachers in the Land of Israel and its Place in the History of Education (1892-1896), ed. Shlomo Carmi (Jerusalem, Reuven Mass Publishers, 1986), 65 [Hebrew]. 76. Seltenreich, People from Here. 77. Nirit Raichel, “The Design of the ‘New Hebrew’ between Image and Reality: A Portrait of the Student in Eretz Yisrael at the Beginning of ‘Hebrew Education’ (1882–1948),” Israel Affairs 21, no. 4 (2015): 633–647. 78. Seltenreich, People from Here, 155. 79. Aaron David Gordon, The Writings of Aaron David Gordon (Jerusalem: HaSifriya HaTzionit, 1982), 74 [Hebrew]. 80. Ze’ev Carmi, An Educator’s Journey: Memoires (Haifa: The Bureau of Education and Culture, 1964) [Hebrew]. 81. Yosef Vitkin, “On the Question of Education in the Moshavot,” HaHashkafa, 13 October 1902, 7 [Hebrew]. 82. Ben Eklof, “The Myth of the Zamstov Schools: The Source of the Expansion of the Rural Education in Russia 1864–1904,” History of Education Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1984): 561–584. 83. Hans-Georg Herrlitz and Wulf Hopf Hartmut Titze, Ernst Cloer, Deutsche Schulgeschichte von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart: eine Einführung (Weinheim: Juventa, 1993) [German]. 84. Yosef Vitkin, The Writings of Joseph Vitkin (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1961), cited in Seltrenrich, People from Here, 161. 85. H. Keller, “The School in Rosh Pina During the Time of S. Wilkomitz, OBM,” 534–536, Education File, Curricula, Rosh Pina Archive. 86. Mary Forrest and Valerie Ingram, “School Gardens in Ireland, 1901-24,” Garden History 31, no. 1 (2003): 80–94. 87. Ibid. 88. Kelly Johnson, “The Nature-Study Movement,” Green Teacher 99 (2013): 16–20. 89. Letter from Shem-tov Frienda, Deputy General Manager of the JCA Moshavot, to David Hayoun, 16 January 1905, 7.33/1, AJE. 90. Nirit Raichel and Tali Tadmor Shimony (2020), Intercultural Meeting in the School Yard – Hebrew Education in the Moshavot of the Baron and JCA from the 1880s until 1914, (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2020), 161–165.

148 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

91. Reply 12–13 to the Teachers’ Center, August-September 1908, Registry Account, p. 249, Kfar Tavor Archive. 92. Ehrlich, who was politically active, served as a delegate to the Third Zionist Congress. In 1904, he reached Ottoman Palestine, where he ran the school in Kfat Tavor from 1907 to 1910. Following a confrontation with JCA, he left the moshava to pursue studies in Beirut and Bulgaria, after which returned to Ottoman Palestine and worked in Tiberias. See Yitzhay Ogen, ed., What Was: A Memorial Book to Asher Ehrlich (Tel Aviv: Ehrlich Family, 1959). 93. Minutes of the Fifth General Assembly of the Teachers’ Union, Sejera, Summer 1907, 9.1/6, AJE. 94. Minutes of the Fifth General Assembly, 1907, 9.1/6, 29, AJE. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. David Yudelovich, ed., Rishon LeZion: 1882-1941 (Carmel Mizrahi, 1941), 223. 98. Nirit Raichel, “Between the Dream and the Reality: Vocational Education in Israel, 1948–1992,” Israel Affairs 19, no. 3 (2013): 542–561. 99. Shavit Jakobe, “Culture and Culture State: Basic Development in Hebrew Culture during the Second Aliya”, in The Second Aliya-Studies, ed Bartal Israel (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1997) [Hebrew]. 100. Baruch Ben-Yehuda, The Story of the Herzliya Gymnasium, (Tel Aviv: Massada Press, 1970), 58 [Hebrew]. 101. Ibid., 61. 102. Ibid., 65. 103. Ibid., 85–90. 104. Ibid., 93. 105. Nirit Raichel, “The First Hebrew Teachers in Eretz Israel: Characteristics, Difficulties and Coping Methods (1881-1914),” History of Education 37, no. 5 (2008): 95–113. 106. Ibid. 107. Shlomo Romi and Miriam Schmida, eds., Informal Education in a Changing Reality (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2007). 108. Nirit Reichel, “The First Hebrew ‘Gymnasiums’ In Israel: Social Education as the Bridge between Ideological Gaps in Shaping the Image of the Desirable High School Graduate (1906 – 1948),” Israel Affairs 17 no. 4 (2011): 604–620. 109. John Howlett, “Romanticism,” in Progressive Education: A Critical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 35–68. 110. Gil Gertel, “School Field Trips and Their Significance for Educators and Students during the Period 1920-1980” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2002), [Hebrew].

4  THE PORTRAIT OF THE GRADUATE 

149

111. Gil Gertel, Wandering Eye  – The Beginning of Youth Movement Trips 1912-1942 (The Council for Research of Youth Movements, 2016), 113–127 [Hebrew]. 112. Testimony from students’ diaries and letters, ibid., and the Gymnasium Archives, 279. 113. Shlomo, Zedkiayu, “Social Education in School,” in Romi and Schmida, Informal Education in a Changing Reality, 379–386, 393–398. 114. The choir is mentioned in student stories in the gymnasium archives.

CHAPTER 5

Between Leadership and Caring

The teachers who taught in the modern schools of Ottoman Palestine were not only teachers, they were the main actors in a multi-tonal process involving the transfer of cultures, educational concepts, and pedagogical methods. As they circulated the teaching methods best suited to their students, these teachers became the leading adaptors of ideas. They saw themselves as representatives of modern education, yet they faced very conservative communities in their mission to persuade parents of the value of their educational approaches. Like their colleagues in Western Europe, the teachers at modern educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine believed that childhood is a unique stage in human life. Their approach held that the characteristic contours of childhood differentiate it from other stages in human life, and these distinctive contours should be considered in the planning and realization of educational work. The teachers from Eastern Europe grew up in conservative communities where the teacher’s criticism was already heard within the framework of traditional education, lacking the pedagogical skills as demonstrated by Moti Zelkin in his research.1 They were aware, even in their youth, of the echoes of the educational changes that took place in Jewish society, but they criticized the inactivity of these changes. The teachers who engaged in modern Jewish and Hebrew education in Palestine had diverse personal biographies. They were born in different © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3_5

151

152 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

countries and had attended different types of schools. Their pedagogical instruction varied in style, as did the training institutions they attended. In addition, some teachers traveled between educational institutions and sometimes taught simultaneously at more than one school. Their encounters with diverse philosophical approaches and various pedagogical methods—from memorizing scriptures to sensory teaching outside a classroom—were reflected in their educational work. This chapter contains two subchapters that focus on the professional profile of teachers, and another that looks at teachers from a social gender perspective, examining the implications for women’s place in society.

5.1   Not Just a Teacher—The Teacher as an Agent of Culture, a Social Leader, and an Initiator The image of a proper teacher was a matter of direct as well as indirect concern in various philosophical educational theories in ancient times, during the Middle Ages, during the modern period, and in our time, the post-modern era. The phrase “proper teacher” or “good teacher” is an archetypical universal term that expresses the public’s collective aspiration toward that principle, although in practice its content and characteristics are many and varied. Plato and several subsequent philosophers, including Aristotle, Maimonides, Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Dewey, Freire, and Korczak, among others, have drawn profiles of the ideal teacher.2 While these profiles differ from one another, the lens of entangled history would have no difficulty finding their intersections, the points where they clash, their points of transfer, the relationships between them and their surroundings, and the reasons they were formed. It would identify the intersection of Rousseau’s writings and Pestalozzi’s educational work and of the attitude of Pestalozzi and young ages, according to Froebel. Philosophers and theorists generally associate the “ideal teacher” with a holistic educational viewpoint. In contrast, research in the field of education has promoted in-depth investigation into the various components of teaching from which it is possible to deduce the image of the ideal teacher. Three central aspects of the image of the proper teacher have emerged in the research literature: the ethical-ideological axis of the teacher’s work, personal characteristics, and the teacher’s pedagogical and disciplinary field of knowledge.3 Looking at the ethical-ideological axis, one can identify four basic images of the proper teacher, which differ from one another in terms of the emphasis they place on the teachers’ work and the central

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

153

aims they should strive to achieve: a teacher who instills culture; a teacher who acts as an agent for social preservation or change; a teacher who develops the individual; and a teacher who instills disciplinary knowledge. The first three of these images of an ideal teacher point to a type of “super-­ idealization of education,” which one might term socialization and individualization. The teacher instilling disciplinary knowledge can be included in any one of these three ideologies, in accordance with the specific aims of the disciplinary knowledge being instilled.4 The axis of the teacher’s personality has been the subject of research since the 1940s.5 Some researchers see the teacher’s knowledge as the basis for the pedagogical and substantive knowledge necessary for teaching, and have proposed various models for the types of knowledge required of a teacher.6 The modern educational research literature has a wealth of studies that address teaching as a profession and in terms of the unique characteristics of the professional teacher. There are three aspects to these characteristics: the academic aspect—the profession’s knowledge base and the processes of training for the profession; the ethical aspect—a public mission that requires behavior according to ethical rules and is characterized by a reward and prestige system; and the professional aspect—the organizational structure and the autonomy of members of the profession.7 As we shall see in this chapter, the components that feature in the profile of the proper teacher as conceived in modern research were already considered in the period under discussion and adapted to the environment and the circumstances of that period. The discourse regarding the proper teacher in Ottoman Palestine emerged and developed at meetings of the informal network of Hebrew teachers, initially at teachers’ gatherings (1892, 1895) and later within the Teachers’ Union (1903–1928). It is reflected in articles in the formal network of newspapers and the journal they founded—HaChinuch (The Education). Within the discourse, there is a noticeable diffusion of diverse philosophical viewpoints, including the conservative humanistic view, which some of the teachers experienced during their learning process, and perspectives with different naturalistic hues. Among the latter were perspectives inspired by Rousseau, which strove for the education of an authentic “new man” (a new Jew), who would be prepared to reform the world order. These were adapted to reality by Pestalozzi, who believed that education should enable the actualization of powers embedded within man in the physical realm by means of manual labor, in the moral realm, and in the intellectual sphere.8 Within the teachers’ discourse, one may

154 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

discern the processes of transfer prompted by Georg Kerschensteiner, who led the effort to create vocational schools and, in parallel, to identify the diffusion of the viewpoints that motivated the German ‘Reform Pedagogik’ movement.9 Examples of such discourse are evident in the discussions among teachers regarding the threshold qualifications for non-member teachers to join their professional discussion groups, namely the Teachers’ Assembly. This is an illustration of the setting of criteria for a desired professional identity.10 The image of the “good teacher” and the image of the “good Hebrew teacher” continued to engage the teachers at the Teachers’ Union general meetings. Two central aspects characterizing the archetypical “good teacher” emerged there. One was the teacher as a human—given the assumption that teachers were a model to be emulated, it was evident that their personality and behavior in and outside of school is important for the educational process. Here one sees the influence of the progressive-­ naturalistic viewpoint, which some of the teachers encountered in the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Gustav Wyneken, and Hermann Lotze, among others, whose works they read in the original language or in Hebrew.11 The second aspect, the professional teacher, was evident in the belief that teachers should demonstrate pedagogical abilities, enabling them to make the subject matter appealing to the students and arouse their desire to learn.

5.2  Teaching Methods of the “Good Hebrew Teacher” The curriculum and teaching methods of the Jewish teacher in modern educational institutions in Palestine were determined by the prototype being followed in the original institutions in their respective countries. Despite this, employing the transnational history lens allows one to identify the processes by which the programs and teaching methods were transferred and adapted to the unique environment in which the school operated. Thus, for example, the Hilfsverein seminary in Jerusalem and the Alliance boys’ school had approved Hebrew studies curricula. Nisim Bechar, principal of the Alliance school, even permitted the use of the Hebrew in Hebrew method, designed by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. This method was not accepted in the teaching of other languages.12 In the Hebrew schools, teachers discussed the image of the professional teacher, focusing on pedagogy and didactics at their meetings. One such

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

155

discussion took place near the end of the nineteenth century at a teachers’ meeting that addressed the question of which subjects to cover and the yardsticks for their classification. One of the themes that emerged during this dialogue was the naturalistic teaching approach, which does not limit itself to the mere transfer of material but also focuses on its manipulation by the student. On the other hand, the conservative approach, which relies upon drills, also received mention. The decision reached by the teachers’ assembly points to their assimilation of the new, progressive viewpoints, as opposed to the religious and the conservative-humanistic viewpoints. The case of Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher, illustrates how the system of teaching the Hebrew language by the natural method was created. In Epstein’s words, “A French book landed in my hands, and then my eyes, and even more my heart, were infused with the light of the saying—teaching for the eyes. This saying was like a powerful expression of my dim inspiration.”13 Epstein’s words support Werner and Espange’s view that the international spread of knowledge correlates with cultural transfer, and that national culture reflects a collection of external influences. In addition to considering general pedagogical principles, the teachers discussed pedagogical matters specific to various fields of knowledge. Thus, for example, their discussion of biblical studies focused on such questions as whether it is possible and permissible to combine biblical studies with the study of the Hebrew language. The subject motivated a widespread pedagogical discussion regarding the essence of the “Hebrew spirit” that the teachers sought in the “natural material” of the students in Eretz Israel, comparing it to the natural patriotism of the French, Russian, or German child. The present chapter also considers the teachers’ discourse on the place of children’s literature in the education of Hebrew children, as an example of the migration of pedagogical ideas from the West to Palestine. In this context, it also focuses on the transfer of the view that school is a necessary part of the child’s growth, on the translation of literature into Hebrew as part of the desire to spread the Hebrew language, and on the creation of original children’s literature aimed at the Hebrew child. The Professional Identity of the Hebrew Teacher The discourse on the good Hebrew teacher’s image and duties took place at the teachers’ assembly and at meetings of the Teachers’ Union, and the

156 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

call for teachers to take an active part in molding the Hebrew-national education system strengthened the professional identity of the Hebrew-­ national teacher.14 Two central components characterize the professional identity: how teachers view themselves—what seems important to them in their works and professional life; and how teachers are seen by others— students, parents, their colleagues, and the public in general.15 These two components were clearly expressed in teachers’ meetings at the Teachers’ Assembly and at the meetings of the Teachers’ Union. The veteran teachers in the Teachers’ Union strove to create common denominators with the new teachers who joined the teaching profession, offering support and transferring knowledge and experience at meetings to which they were invited, thereby paving the way for them to become part of the group. This ever-growing group enabled Hebrew teachers to share their difficulties with colleagues and invited them to apply their own abilities to solving their colleagues’ difficulties in teaching Hebrew. As part of the process of forming the Hebrew teacher’s professional identity (without actually using this term, which came later), the teachers discussed enhancing the status of the teacher in society and in the community. Another aspect, as further discussed below, was the relationship between the Hebrew teacher and the students’ parents. Because parental involvement in school life was part of the teachers’ world, in responding properly to parents’ demands, teachers had to strike a balance that would neither undermine their professional standing nor create friction that would interfere with the fulfillment of their job.16 The two central components of professional identity as described above applied to the Jewish teacher in the modern schools of the AIU and Hilfsverein networks. However, some of the teachers saw themselves as Zionists, committed to fostering Hebrew culture in these schools whose declared aim was the spread of French culture or German culture. This was a source of conflict, which manifested in these teachers’ writings, in the “Language Wars,” and in the educational path that they continue to follow in Palestine. In addition, some modern teachers taught in more than one school during their professional career and even transferred between networks. They shifted from the modern schools of the educational networks and the schools in the moshavot to the modern Hebrew schools in the cities, and sometimes also taught in traditional schools. They drew on their professionalism and pedagogical abilities to adapt themselves to the students on the one hand and to the guiding principles of the schools on the other.

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

157

For example, Zalman Ben-Tovim, born in Bialystok (1876–1957), who first received a traditional Jewish education and later studied science independently, taught for three years at Baron Rothschild’s clerical school in Mazkeret Batya. Following his relocation to Jerusalem, Ben-Tovim joined the teaching staff at the city’s School for the Blind. Later, he directed a Talmud Torah associated with one of the city’s religious communities while concurrently teaching at other educational institutions. Aside from his educational work at various schools, including the Hilfsverein girls’ school, Ben- Tuvim participated in the activities of the Teachers’ Union in Jerusalem and was a member of the Teachers’ Union from its inception. Ben-Tovim was also involved in non-educational public activities and regularly wrote in the Hebrew newspapers.17 Mordechai Ezrahi-Krishevsky, born in 1862, was a prominent teacher at the Hebrew School for Girls in Jaffa and taught there from 1902 to 1904. Ezrahi-Kryshevsky, born in Ukraine, was certified as a teacher at the State Gymnasium in Poltava, where he taught at a Talmud Torah that offered religious, secular, and Russian studies. During this period, he volunteered to teach workers and artisans and was an active member of a Zionist association.18 After migrating to Palestine, he taught at village schools and for the AIU network. In addition to teaching, he played a significant role in the development of Hebrew education and was an active partner in the founding of the Teachers’ Union (1903). In 1904, Ezrahi-­ Kryshevsky was called upon to head the girls’ school in Jaffa. During his time in Jaffa, with his fellow teachers Yehieli and Azaryahu, he wrote a proposal for a Hebrew curriculum that was distributed among Hebrew schools and recognized as an official product of the Teachers’ Union.19 Another teacher, Eliyahu Hacarmeli (Lulu), had a very different biography. Born in Haifa in 1891, he graduated from the AIU School in that city, and after completing his basic studies, he attended the AIU teachers’ seminary (ENIO) in Paris. Like Ben-Tovim, Eliyahu also had an educational career characterized by transition, as he shifted between schools with different guiding principles and cultures. Upon his return to Ottoman Palestine from Paris, he taught at schools in the moshava of Yavniel, and then moved to Tiberias. Alongside his educational work, he was active as a member of the Teachers’ Union.20  he Hebrew Teacher as an Initiator T The primal, chaotic state of the Hebrew-national education system at the time meant that the Hebrew teachers could not merely copy ideas that had

158 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

been implemented in schools in other countries. Because the Hebrew-­ national education system was built from scratch, step by step, the teachers understood that in addition to teaching, they had to assume responsibilities that under normal conditions, in an orderly state, would be handled by the Ministry of Education. The need to initiate, find ways to solve problems, and fill lacunae arose in almost subject that the teachers discussed at their teachers’ assembly meetings and in the general meetings of the Teachers’ Union. Because the schools lacked a curriculum, they took it upon themselves to prepare one. There was a shortage of textbooks in Hebrew, so they would ask colleagues to write them and they themselves wrote some textbooks as well.21 When producing books turned out to be a problem, they founded a so a joint-stock company to publish reading books for children and textbooks for children and teachers—the Teachers’ Union’s Kohelet Publishers.22 Notably, Kohelet Publishers took it upon themselves to publish books aimed at broadening teachers’ knowledge and promoting their professionalism. They published Hebrew translations of several psychology books. They facilitated the transfer of information garnered in the Western world regarding child development and childhood characteristics. Besides initiatives connected directly or indirectly to the school, teachers initiated activities in various cultural areas as well: theater, rhythm, music, and other examples and their sources of inspiration. In Chap. 1, we discuss the choice of books and their repercussions, as well as role of the Hebrew-national teacher in the growing number of children’s books. The processes of change that the teachers underwent following their direct and indirect encounters with modern ideas and educational outlooks contributed to the construction of their professional identities. The dilemmas with which they struggled because of their personal educational background and training, the initiatives they took, and, of course, the difficulties and failures they experienced all played a part. The entangled history lens allows us to differentiate the various components of ideologies and modern educational viewpoints that were transferred to the Hebrew teachers, reworked by them, and integrated into the nascent education system in order to transfer them to students and their families in various ways, while also adapting them to the personality of the teachers and the character of the community where they taught.

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

159

5.3  Three Models of the Woman Teacher The establishment and expansion of a public education system entailed the employment of many teachers and the addition of women to the teaching staff. This social process created prototypes of women teachers who reflected the various shades of gender approaches that diverse European actors and networks had transferred to Ottoman Palestine. The entanglement of actors and networks with local agencies created three models of women teachers working in modern Jewish and Hebrew schools: the unmarried woman teacher, who worked at all types of schools and taught in French, English, German, and Hebrew; the professional female teacher, who worked in the AIU network; and the revolutionary female teacher, who saw education as a national mission and a gender-blind profession and worked in Hebrew-speaking schools. The Unmarried Female Teacher Maternalist discourse emphasizes the traditional status of women in the family in order to influence the legal and social framework and create welfare mechanisms for women and children. According to Ann Taylor Allen, this discourse views motherhood as a profession rather than an occupation.23 That is, the central role of the family in shaping the nation state transformed motherhood into a profession that involves societal commitments. The mother was expected to educate the next generation of the state’s citizens, thus fulfilling both a private and a national role.24 One of the expressions of the national maternalist viewpoint was the marriage ban imposed throughout most of Europe and in the United States, which prohibited married teachers from continuing to work. This ban was essentially a social norm and, in most cases, a legal one as well. It reflected the bourgeois order, which saw women’s work as a temporary situation resulting from reduced economic means, which should end with the woman’s marriage. The marital ban affirmed the assumption that a married woman who works outside of her home undermines the gender ideal and is therefore a negative influence.25 In German-speaking countries, most teachers were men. While the proportion of women teachers was small, there emerged a growing number of unmarried female teachers who did not want to stop working.26 In Britain, the United States, and other societies, the marriage ban resulted in a constant turnover of young, unmarried female teachers, which

160 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

contributed to the feminization of the profession. The profession’s status steadily decreased, in part because of the presumably nurturing nature ascribed to it, and also because it was seen as non-professional due to the salary discrimination and the short-term employment future of unmarried teachers.27 Over the years, however, the issue of married female teachers sparked a variety of attitudes. Until the passage of the Public Service Act of 1883 in Australia, married female teachers would sometimes work with their husbands. In many societies, the image of the “good teacher” was of the longtime unmarried teacher, as Kay Whitehead has noted. Studies by Alison Prentice in Canada, Alison Oram in the United Kingdom, Jackie Blount and Claudia Goldin in the United States, and Jennifer Redmond and Judith Harford in Ireland present similar arguments.28 Those women, who chose to not to wed and continued to teach, were commonly called “old maids.”29 Most of the teachers and kindergarten teachers in Ottoman Palestine adopted the maternalistic bourgeois model and saw their work as temporary employment until they married, as a cross-referencing of teachers’ names with other sources, including primary sources such as memorial books, reveals.30 Thus, for example, we found the name of Menuha Goldberg, who taught in the moshava of Petach Tikva for six years (1890–1896) and left her work after marrying Ya’acov Valiro, a scion of a well-known and wealthy banking family in Jerusalem.31 Another example is Miriam Lasker, the first kindergarten teacher in the moshavot, who left her work when she married.32 These women accepted that they must choose between professional identity and loyalty to the gendered model of wife and mother who finds satisfaction in raising her family.33 The entangled history perspective allows us to describe the women teachers who ceased work following their marriage as having adopted the Zionist “mother of the family” model— namely, a woman who devotes her time to building the Hebrew-national home. Such was the case with kindergarten teacher Leah Mazeh, who, after three years of teaching in Jaffa, married a farmer from the moshava Mazkeret Batya, left the school, and became a tiller of the soil. Four school administrators chose to adopt the model of unmarried teachers: Fortuna Bachar and Hannah Landau, who headed the Evelyn de Rothschild School in Jerusalem; Rosa Yaffe, who was the principal of the girls’ school in Jaffa; and Vera Pintshover, who ran the municipal girls’ school in Jerusalem.34

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

161

These women belonged to a group of transnational teachers who crossed borders and countries, similarly to teachers in colonies as Rogers and Whitehead have shown.35 However, they chose to stay in one particular territory—their envisioned homeland—and put their efforts into building modern educational institutions.36 We have chosen to focus on two of these women: Hannah (Annie) Landau and Rosa Yaffe. Landau was born in London, the eldest of thirteen children in a modern religious family, left her homeland, and studied in Frankfurt-am-Main at the ultra-orthodox Samson Raphael Hirsch School. She returned home in 1892, graduated from Graystoke Teachers’ College, and was appointed to teach at the Jews’ Free School for girls in London, where she remained until 1898, the year she arrived in Jerusalem. In 1900, she succeeded another unmarried teacher, Fortuna Bachar, becoming the Evelina de Rothschild School principal, a position she held for the next forty-five years. Landau put so much effort into the school that over the years it unofficially became known as “Annie Landau’s School for Girls.”37 Rosa Yaffe was born in the Ukraine to a family that provided an academic education for all its children. After graduating from the gymnasium in Berdyansk, she was sent along with her sister to Montpelier University in southern France for three years, to study the natural sciences. Upon graduating in 1889, Rosa returned to the Ukraine, where she started teaching at the Jewish school in Simferopol. Yaffe’s brother Hillel was a well-known physician and malaria researcher who served as chairman of the Hovevei Zion executive committee in Ottoman Palestine from 1895 to 1905. Using his connections in the Hovevei Zion network on behalf of his sister, Hillel secured her the position of principal of the girl’s school in Jaffa.38 Yaffe had to face a great deal of opposition due to her lack of fluency in Hebrew and her preference for French or Russian, despite her being head of a Hebrew school. Toward the end of 1903, she resigned from her position and moved to the moshava Yavniel to become a familyless farmer, an unusual phenomenon in the moshavot, whose social structure was familial.39 Because these women worked as school principals in Ottoman Palestine, the research literature describes them as brave trailblazers who overcame gender restrictions. One should recall, however, that the AIU education system and many East European Jewish girls’ schools also had female school principals.40 Jaffe, Landau, Bachar, and Pintshover were members of a small group of women who chose careers over family, but this very choice reinforced the image of the ideal female teacher as unmarried.

162 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

The Professional Woman The model of the teacher who combines professional life with family was particularly evident in the Third French Republic, where the marriage ban did not exist. France, which sought to cultivate secular education in order to compete with church education, refused to dismiss married teachers. The result was that in 1898, about half the female teachers in France were married.41 Another—and more interesting—result of not imposing the marriage ban was the phenomenon of married couples working as teachers in France, particularly in its rural areas.42 Moreover, the increasing accessibility of education for women also led to the establishment of the Ecole Normale Superieure, where young women could study and receive teaching degrees from the Ministry of Education. The AIU network, which encouraged the employment of married female teachers in general and teachers who were married couples in particular, adopted and spread this model.43 According to scholars of education history such as Rebecca Rogers, Jewish historians such as Aron Rodrigue, and the Jewish gender scholar Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui, AIU was the major actor in molding modern Jewish women.44 The first graduates of ENIO started working in the schools of Ottoman Palestine during the years 1888–1889, and their numbers steadily grew, in particular during the first decade of the twentieth century. Among the teachers were a number of girls from the moshavot who were taking part in Baron Rothschild’s philanthropic project. These young girls were chosen by the baron’s chief clerk and sent to study education at ENIO in Paris. According to gossip that circulated in the moshavot, these girls had paid to be chosen and for their educational costs with sexual favors. Upon their return, they were appointed to positions as French teachers in the moshavot schools, and sometimes their appointment led to the dismissal of the previous teacher, who was male. Notably, in terms of training and accreditation standards, these were highly qualified teachers with certification from the French Ministry of Education—at a time when there was a shortage of certified teachers. Nevertheless, the chief clerk sparked grievances when he appointed some of these teachers as principals.45 Among the critics were teachers who saw these young girls as competitors for sources of livelihood and positions of power. The rural society in these moshavot was conservative, and the phenomenon of young working women holding authority was seen as a threat. These young teachers did

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

163

not maintain their positions for very long, as during the 1990s, after the baron’s chief clerk left Palestine, they were fired. Most of the natives of Ottoman Palestine who attended schools in the AIU network went on to receive teacher training in Paris. They then returned to teach at AIU schools in cities of the Ottoman Empire. Their employment contract obligated them to work for ten years within the network, and some continued working at AIU schools for many years, even until retirement. As an employment network, AIU encouraged married women to continue working. In some families, two daughters became teachers and continued working after they were married, as in the Bachar family. One of the two sisters, Esther, even married a teacher, David Aerie, thus creating a family network of teachers. This was not the only married couple where both partners were teachers within the AIU network in Ottoman Palestine. There were several such couples.46 For example, Chana Averbaum, a native of Safed and graduate of the network’s elementary school, pursued teacher training in Paris, where she married Eliyahu Kahanov, a graduate of her school in Jaffa and later of the teacher training institution. The two returned to Ottoman Palestine and ran an AIU school.47 These married women teachers resisted the image of women prevalent among the conservative orthodox Jewish public in Ottoman Palestine. Most of the teachers born in Ottoman Palestine grew up within a conservative ultra-orthodox society that maintained a patriarchal order in which women were kept in a passive position in the private sphere. The rabbinical establishment in ultra-orthodox Jewish circles forbade core studies and feared that opening the schools to girls would destabilize the community’s power structure. AIU schools, in contrast, sought to mold a woman who would be independent of her mother, would marry at a later age, and would value the inherent advantages of education.48 The female teachers themselves served as role models to be emulated by their students. They were independent, educated women who earned their bread and forged a professional identity. Most were married mothers who demonstrated through their lifestyle that women did not have to choose between career and family. At the same time, and in contrast to the model of the new Hebrew female teacher, these women teachers did not participate in any autonomous action outside the AIU network.49

164 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

The New Hebrew Female Teacher The model of the female teacher who combines professional identity, independence, and the ethos of equality in married family life emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century. These young teachers were members of several networks, some formal and others informal, which were entangled with each other. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the image of the new woman, as a concept that would undermine the accepted gender order, became a focus of ever-growing interest and demand. Most of the married woman teachers were born to Jewish families in the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia. During their childhood and youth, they experienced an entanglement of two societies, the Jewish community and the general Russian society. Each of these societies underwent a process that entailed the extension of secondary education for girls. Traditional Jewish society upheld Jewish law (Talmud) as a standard to which all boys must adhere. The purpose of these studies was to instill the Jewish child with basic familiarity with the sacred Hebrew text, thereby unifying the members of their group. The comparatively marginal status of girls, in religious terms, within the conservative and patriarchal Jewish society made general education more accessible to them than it was for boys.50 During this period, they had the option of attending the state high school for girls, the gymnasium, which as Louise Hirsch argues, was a unique phenomenon that had no equivalent in any other country.51 These gymnasia, founded during the reign of Alexander II (1855–1881), were designed for the education of girls from all social ranks. The Russian Empire had networks of girls’ gymnasia even in small cities. The gymnasia provided an approved curriculum and a recognized diploma at affordable tuition fees. Another significant factor was the numerus clausus policy, which was enforced for Jewish boys and adults at gymnasia and academic institutes beginning in 1887. However, Jewish girls who attended gymnasia were not subject to numerus clausus laws.52 As a result of these circumstances, more young Jewish females than young Jewish males were graduating from gymnasia. Indeed, at many girls’ gymnasia in the Pale of Settlement, half of the students were Jewish.53 One of these was Shulamit Shimshelevich-Klugai, a renowned prose author who taught French at a gymnasium. Born in 1891 in Poltava, she attended the gymnasium in her home town, went on to pursue studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in 1910 came to Jerusalem to teach at the Hebrew gymnasium.54 In her case, however, two of her brothers attended

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

165

a boys’ gymnasium as well.55 Another woman, Sarah Azaryahu, had to face the entanglement between her Jewish tradition and Russian society because the Russian gymnasium she attended had lessons on Saturday. As Jewish law prohibits writing and working on Saturday, Sarah’s parents did not allow her to attend the gymnasium. However, they found a solution, one that was also very prevalent among middle class families—private tutoring. Sarah was then able to take the teachers’ qualification exam and to become certificated as a teacher.56 Sarah, Shulamit, and other Russian women who wished to continue their studies beyond the gymnasium faced many barriers as women. The Russian government’s position on women’s education was shifting and contradictory.57 Most of the state educational institutes were closed to them, and they were required to continue their studies at Bestazher Higher Courses, which were a type of alternative institute for academic education.58 The outcome of this policy was that women left to study abroad. Hence, women from the Russian Empire formed the largest network of female students at German-speaking universities during the years 1882–1913.59 For Jewish women there was another pitfall that drove them out of Russia: like Jewish men, they faced numerus clausus restrictions. Many of them chose to attend German-speaking centers of learning, such as Berne University in Switzerland.60 Such was the case with Fania Matmon-Cohen and Sarah Azaryahu. Both were married when they began their studies at Berne University. Fania was already a certified teacher when she met Yehuda in 1897. Fania, Shulamit, and Sarah were also members of an informal network of young Russian-born radicals who took part in a revolutionary discourse on women’s rights. This discourse was entangled with the Marxist discourse that viewed the liberation of women as an expression of historic processes. These ideas circulated by written word in books and newspapers for young Jews in Eastern Europe, as evidenced in Sarah Azaryahu’s memoires: “I learned about the deprivation of woman, her poor status in the family, and the special and unwritten laws that limited her rights by looking at the social life of our people and reading books in different languages.”61 German universities provided a platform for personal encounters between these young people and exposed them to attitudes that called for a revision of gender roles. These institutes functioned as meeting places for networking and the circulation of ideas. Among the students were young women who struggled with the equation of family versus career and the dilemma of choosing a career. Many of these were young Jewish

166 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

women who saw higher education as a means of freeing themselves from gendered limitations and simultaneously enabling their emancipation.62 This trend spread among the Jews of the Tsarist Empire, who as a society were polarized in their attitudes toward women’s education.63 These women teachers participated in group activities involving both sexes, which deviated from the gendered boundaries of their parents. At times, their activities were of a political nature and entailed the risk of incarceration.64 Some of these couples echoed the call for equality in marriage, more so than was evident in revolutionary socialist circles, and strove for complete parity. As Ze’ev Carmi recalled, “I remembered the good days in Boryslav, when we dreamed of a family life lived in full equality.” He made these remarks in reference to a dilemma he and his wife Freha, a kindergarten teacher, faced in the late 1910s, when they sought a workplace that would employ both of them. The couple was faced with a choice: either work in a large village with a pleasant atmosphere, which offered a position for Ze’ev, or move to a small village, whose conditions were more difficult yet whose school offered teaching positions for both of them. The couple chose the second option.65 The Carmis and their comrades in this network of immigrants to Ottoman Palestine adopted the ethos of equality between marriage partners, is also reflected in the Azaryahus’ story. Sarah and Joseph Azaryahu faced a similar dilemma in 1905, when a position became available for only one of them, forcing them to choose between familial and professional responsibilities. At the time, both of them were working as teachers in the Ukraine, and Joseph was offered a teaching position in Ottoman Palestine. The offer was conditional on his immediate arrival at the new school in the middle of the school year. Sarah did not receive a similar offer, and she remained in the Ukraine with their son, while her husband left for Ottoman Palestine.66 Sarah’s choice demonstrates the challenge in finding equilibrium between work and family life. She chose not to take upon herself the role of a “loyal wife” who follows her husband, and instead chose the option that was best for her, and not necessarily for family unity. Evidently, Sarah decided to embrace the model presented by independent women whom she had met in her intellectual environment. Another possible explanation is that the balance of power between the two spouses was egalitarian, or close to it, and that they were both sufficiently secure in their relationship that Sarah’s choice would not undermine it. One of the most prominent and easily analyzed aspects among couples sharing a profession is their location in the formal professional hierarchy,

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

167

that is, in management and leadership roles. Indeed, the proportion of married male teachers filling management roles was higher than that of married female teachers. Simcha Wilkomitz was a school principal and regional inspector. His wife Lyuba was an admired teacher, yet she did not achieve Simcha’s management status.67 Similarly, Yehuda Matman-Cohen, who directed an elementary school before directing the gymnasium, gained more recognition than his wife Fanya did, because of his writing ability, his education, and perhaps, also his contribution to the national anthem.68 The number of women serving as school principals was, as mentioned, small. Yosef Azaryahu held management positions higher than those did his wife, who was a girls’ school principal. Notably, the social and professional networks in which teachers operated were more hospitable to both sexes than other institutions in the Jewish community. At its first convention, in 1903, the professional Teachers’ Union regarded its male and female members as equals. This was the first Zionist organization in Ottoman Palestine in which women were officially recognized as equal to their male colleagues.69 The image of the teaching profession among Hebrew speakers was the direct result of attempts to form a new society. Therefore, teaching in elementary schools was not defined—as was the case in most Western nations—as a profession that required caregiving qualities, but rather in terms of leadership. We can see that the unmarried female teacher presented a widespread model that embodied an accepted gender outlook among the European bourgeoisie, and to a large extent, it accorded with that of the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine. The AIU model of the professional woman and the network’s local schools challenged the conservative communities in which they acted—communities in which sending a girl to study was daring. This aspect also characterized the network’s schools in other Jewish communities where it operated across the Middle East. The phenomenon of married women teachers presented a new family model, which refused to adopt the gender definitions of national maternalism and rejected the choice between raising a family and teaching. Alongside the male teacher and family man stood the female teacher and family woman. This model was the outcome of two processes. The first was the formation of the image of leadership and the status of pedagogy in a society undergoing processes of nation building. The second was the adoption, internalization, and integration of the model of the new woman, which was molded in German universities, and the model of the revolutionary woman, which was created in revolutionary circles in Tsarist Russia.

168 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

5.4  Summary The teachers who taught in the modern schools of Ottoman Palestine were central actors in the transmission of pedagogical ideas, educational concepts, and teaching methods. They served as agents of a modern Jewish education that did not exist in Ottoman Palestine until the establishment of schools belonging to large networks, the schools in the moshavot, and the modern Hebrew schools. Their primacy as teachers in modern educational institutions meant that, alongside their role as teachers, they took on additional roles that enabled and promoted the existence and development of modern education. Before the formation of the Teachers’ Union (1903), they did so through regional meetings where they discussed various pedagogical and didactic topics on which they shared personal knowledge. Since many of the teachers had lived in various places and they were exposed to different perceptions during their studies and teaching careers, the professional encounters between them enriched their repertoire and their ability to cope with the lack of a local modern educational model that could be leaned on and developed. With the establishment of the Teachers’ Union, meetings among modern Hebrew teachers gained a national framework within which the teachers could jointly determine the educational path forward. These meetings also enabled the transmission of different educational and cultural approaches and ideas, as well as suggestions for processing and adapting them to the local reality. It is worth noting the different circumstances of teachers in the network schools versus teachers in the Hebrew schools: the former had at their disposal both an educational model and the accessories necessary for modern learning (textbooks, maps, etc.), whereas the latter, in addition to their teaching roles, created their own curricula, wrote textbooks, translated reading books, and organized continuing education courses for themselves to fulfill their professional and ideological role. Education should be adapted to students and see them in the center, and part of education is also to teach students to maintain their health, hygiene, and the like. This common denominator enabled teachers’ transition from the networks to Hebrew schools and vice versa. The three models of women teachers in Ottoman Palestine reflect the transmission of the three models of femininity in Europe. Hebrew education, which was less institutionalized and more revolutionary than the education provided in the European networks, offered fertile ground for the emergence of a model of the teacher that combines professional identity, independence, equality in marriage, and an ethos of family life.

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

169

Notes 1. Mordekhai Zalḳin, Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth Century Eastern Europe : the School as the Shrine of the Jewish Enlightenment. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 2. Nirit Raichel, “The Ideal Teacher,” Hed HaChinuch –Journal of the Israeli Teachers’ Union 85, no. 5 (2010): 60–63 [Hebrew]; Carmen Rusua, Laurentiu Şoitub, and Oana Panaitea, “The Ideal Teacher. Theoretical and Investigative Approach,” Procedia  – Social and Behavioral Sciences 33 (2012): 1017–1021. 3. Sara Arnon and Nirit Reichel, “Who Is the Ideal Teacher? Am I? Similarity and Difference in Perception of Students of Education Regarding the Qualities of a Good Teacher and of Their Own Qualities as Teachers,” Teacher And Teaching: Theory and Practice 13, no. 5 (2007): 441–464; Nirit Reichel and Sara Arnon, “A Multicultural View of the Good Teacher in Israel,” Teacher And Teaching: Theory and Practice 15, no. 1 (2009): 59–85. 4. Zvi Lem, In the Whirlwind of Ideologies: The Foundations of Education in the Twentieth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002) [Hebrew]. 5. David Berliner, “The Near Impossibility of Testing for Teacher Quality,” Journal of Teacher Education 56, no. 3 (2005): 205–213. 6. Lee S.  Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform,” Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 1 (April 1987): 1–23. 7. Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 8. Arthur Brühlmeier, Head, Heart and Hand. Education in the Spirit of Pestalozzi (Cambridge: Sophia Books in collaboration with Pestalozzi World, 2010). 9. The roots of the “Reform Pedagogik” movement are linked to the application of “cultural criticism” (Nietzsche, Langbehn) in child psychology; Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart, trans. Donalso Macedo and Alexandre Oliveira (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Ellen Karolina Sofia Key, The Century of the Child, trans. Marie Franzos (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909). 10. Shlomo Carmi, “The Assembly of Hebrew Teachers in Eretz Israel (1892–1896) and Attempts to Renew Its Activities,” Cathedra 36 (June 1985): 165–180 [Hebrew]. 11. Richard Dougherty, “Eros, Youth Culture and Geist: The Ideology of Gustav Wyneken and Its Influence upon the German Youth Movement,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1978); Ralf Koerrenz, Annika Blichmann, and Sebastian Engelmann, Alternative Schooling and New

170 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Education: European Concepts and Theories (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2018). 12. Sara Bronson, “Hebrew, Old and New,” Faces: People, Places, and Cultures 21, no. 4 (2004): 26–27. 13. Yitzhak Epstein, Studies in the Psychology of Hebrew Language and Education (Jerusalem: Kohelet Publishers, 1947), 353 [Hebrew]. 14. Les Tickle, “Teacher Self-Appraisal and Appraisal of Self,” in The Role Of Self in Teacher Development, ed. Richard P. Lipka and Thomas M. Brinthaupt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 121–142. 15. Douwe Beijaard, Paulien C.  Meijer, and Nico Verloop, “Reconsidering Research on Teachers’ Professional Identity,” Teaching and Teacher Education 20, no. 2 (2004): 107–128. 16. Jay Mathews, “Tips for a Better Parent-School Relationships: A Few Suggestions from Both Sides of the Discussion,” The Washington Post, October 17, 2006. 17. “Zalman Ben-Tovim,” in Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 9, p.  3413, http:// www.tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/9/3413 [Hebrew]; Yaffa Berelowitz, Abra-Na in Israel: Travels in the Land of Israel of the People of the First Aliyah (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1992), 217 [Hebrew]. 18. Elboim-Dror Rachel, Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel, Volume 1, 1854-1914 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1986), 37 [Hebrew]. 19. Ibid., 219. 20. “Eliyahu Hacarmeli (Lulu),” Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 9, p. 3333, www. tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/9/3333 [Hebrew]. 21. Nirit Raichel, “Study Books as Agents of General Education at the Beginning of Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel,” Waves of Study and Research 2 (2003): 35–49 [Hebrew]. 22. Dov Kimhi, ed., The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1928 (Jerusalem: Teachers’ Union, 1929), 67 [Hebrew]. 23. Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism, Social Science, and the Meanings of Modernity: The Debate on the Origin of the Family in Europe and the United States, 1860-1914,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1085–1113; Laura S.  Abrams and Laura Curran, “Between Women: Gender and Social Work in Historical Perspective,” Social Service Review 78, no. 3 (2004): 434. 24. Abrams and Curran, “‘Between Women,” 429–446. 25. Jennifer Redmond and Judith Harford, “One Man One Job: The Marriage Ban and the Employment of Women Teachers in Irish Primary Schools,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 5 (2010): 639–654; James C.  Albisetti, “The Feminization of Teaching in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Perspective,” History of Education 22, no. 3 (1993): 253–263.

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

171

26. Freidenreich, Female, Jewish and Educated (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 1–132. 27. Kay Whitehead, “Lavinia Seabrooke, Gender and State Formation in Late Nineteenth Century South Australia,” Women’s History Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 7–26. 28. Kay Whitehead, “Post War Headteachers’ Perspectives of ‘Good’ Teachers,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 35. no.1 (2003): 23–35. Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 160–170; Jane Blount, “Spinsters, Bachelors, and Other Gender Transgressors in School Employment, 1850–1990,” Review of Educational Research 70, no.1 (2000): 83–101; Alison Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester Press); Jennifer Redmond and Judith Harford, “One Man One Job: The Marriage Ban and the Employment of Women Teachers in Irish Primary Schools,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 5 (2010): 639–654; Alison Prentice and Marjorie R. Theobald, Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Kay Whitehead and Judith Peppard, “Placing the Grandy Sisters as Teachers in Pre-Confederation Newfoundland,” Historical Studies in Education 17, no. 1 (2005): 81–105; Kathleen Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Karen Leroux, “Public Service in the Late-­Nineteenth-­Century United States,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no.1 (2009): 36–42. 29. Leroux, “Public Service in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States: 36–42. 30. Information about the number of teachers who resigned after one or two years of teaching was derived by cross-referencing a list of female teachers in the moshava of Rishon LeZion [Hebrew], Rishon LeZion Online Archives. 31. Valiro Family Collection, Yad Ben-Zvi Archive, Jerusalem [Hebrew]. 32. Zipora Shehory-Rubin, “Hebrew Kindergarten Teachers during the First and Second Aliyahs,” Dor LeDor 19 (2002): 125–128 [Hebrew]. 33. Whitehead, “Lavinia Seabrooke”; Albisetti, “The Feminization of Teaching.” 34. Zipora Shehory-Rubin, “Administration and Gender in Eretz Israel: Profiles and Career Paths of Women in Educational Administration during the Late Ottoman Period, 1889-1914,” History of Education Review 44, no.2 (2015). 35. Rogers, “Telling Stories about the Colonies”; Lynne Trethewey and Key Whitehead, “Beyond Centre and Periphery: Transnationalism in Two

172 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Teacher/Suffragettes’ Work,” History of Education” 32, no.5 (2003); 547–559. 36. Shehory-Rubin, “Administration and Gender in Eretz Israel.” 37. Schore, The Best School in Jerusalem. 38. Shehory-Rubin, “Administration and Gender in Eretz Israel.” 39. Ibid. 40. Shehory-Rubin, “Administration and Gender in Eretz Israel”; Frances Malino, “Prophets in Their Own Land? Mothers and Daughters of the Alliance Israélite Universelle,” Nashim 3 (2000): 56–73; Sylvie Fogiel-­ Bijaoui. “Un Chemin D’émancipation: L’Alliance Israélite Universelle Et Les Femmes Juives De Palestine (1872-1939),” Archives Juives 46, no. 1 (2013): 107–119; Adler, In Her Hands. 41. Susan Trouvé-Finding, “Teaching as a Woman’s Job: The Impact of the Admission of Women to Elementary Teaching in England and France in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” History of Education 34, no. 5 (2005): 483–496. 42. Ibid. 43. Malino, “Prophets in Their Own Land?”; Fogiel-Bijaoui, “Un Chemin D’émancipation.” 44. Rebecca Rogers, “Conversations about the Transnational,” 117–124; Malino, “Prophets in Their Own Land?”; Aron Rodrigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring – Summer 1996). 45. Shehory-Rubin, “Hebrew Kindergarten Teachers during the Period of the First and Second Aliyah,” 118. 46. Fogiel-Bijaoui, “Un Chemin D’émancipation.” 47. Chana was born in 1891, and Eliyahu was born in 1882  in Ottoman Palestine; Zipora Shechori-Rubin, “Characteristics of ‘The Eretz-Israeli Female Sabra’: Natives of Eretz-Israel from the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv,” Dor LeDor 49 (2016); 237–286 [Hebrew]. 48. Malino, “Prophets in Their Own Land?” 49. Efi Kanner, “Transcultural Encounters: Discourses on Women’s Rights and Feminist Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Turkey from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Interwar Period,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (2016): 66–92, 187–188. 50. Iris Parush, “Gender, Penmanship and the Primacy of Speech over Writing in the Jewish Society of Galicia and Eastern Europe in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Nashim 16 (2007): 29–66; Eliyana Adler, “Rediscovering Schools for Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia,” East European Jewish Affairs 34, no. 2 (2004): 139–150. 51. Louise Hirsch, From the Shtetl to the Lecture Hall: Jewish Women and Cultural Exchange (Lanham: University Press of America, 2013).

5  BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CARING 

173

52. Ibid. 53. Once they received their diplomas, the graduate schools of Switzerland and Germany were open to them. Ibid., 20–28. 54. Uriel Ofek, Hebrew Children’s Literature, 1900-1948, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1988), 533 [Hebrew]. 55. Fania Matmon-Cohen,” in Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p. 689, http:// www.tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/2/689 [Hebrew]. 56. Sarah Azaryahu, My Life Story (Tel Aviv: Neumann, 1957) [Hebrew]. 57. Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 87–93. 58. Ibid. 59. Hirsch, From the Shtetl to the Lecture Hall, 32. 60. Ibid. 61. Azaryahu, My Life Story, 12. 62. Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated, 1–132; Catherine L. Dollard, The Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 66–92. 63. Paula E. Hyman, “Discovering Puah Rakovsky,” Nashim 7 (2004): 97–115. 64. “Fania Matmon-Cohen,” in Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p.  689, www. tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/2/689 [Hebrew]. 65. Ze’ev Carmi, The Way of an Educator (Haifa: Department of Education and Culture 1965), 160–161 [Hebrew]. 66. Azaryahu, My Life Story, 55–57. 67. Seltenreich, People from Here, 128. 68. “Fania Matmon-Cohen,” in Tidhar, Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p. 689, http:// www.tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/2/689 [Hebrew]. 69. This recognition contrasted starkly with the opposition to gender equality in the founding convention, one day earlier, of a country-wide representative national organization, where women were not allowed to participate. Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education, 208–240.

CHAPTER 6

The Body as an Educational Object

The student body has been an educational object throughout the history of schooling.1 Educational actors have to address the multiple agendas regarding the functions and regulations of the body. In the eyes of medicalization, the body has become a social problem. In the eyes of scientists advocating Darwinism, genetics vs. environment, the human body has become a biological individual belonging to a race. Advocates of racial theories, the eugenics movement, and nationalism have seen the body as an essential element in their argumentation. One of the meeting points between the different discourses on the body has been the topic of physical education. Educators believe that strengthening the body through exercise is necessary for the development of the student on the one hand and an answer to social and personal illness on the other hand. These approaches underwent embedment and adaptation by the various educational actors and physicians who operated in the educational spaces in Ottoman Palestine. The first chapter in this part discusses the school regulation of the body and the medicalization of the educational site. This chapter focuses on how the concepts of hygiene and a healthy body were incorporated into a native model of Jewish and Hebrew schools in a country without a public health policy. The second chapter deals with the corporeal activity in Jewish schools, which was unfamiliar and, in many cases, unwelcomed by the students’ parents in the receiving country. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3_6

175

176 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

6.1   The School as a Medical Site When David Hayoun arrived in Petach Tikva, he wrote in his diary, “I had hoped to see healthy children … but sadly, what I found were thin, scrawny children, some of them suffering from eye diseases … I suggested to the parents that they pay special attention to their children’s diet, which should consist of a healthful, rational combination of foods.”2 These words in Hayoun’s diary, which describe his first meeting with his students, point to the introduction of a medical model into the native Hebrew school model in Ottoman Palestine. While the term medicalization has several meanings, the present study uses Kristin Barker’s definition, inspired by Michel Foucault, whereby “medicalization is the process by which an ever-wider range of human experience comes to be defended and treated as a medical condition.”3 The School as a Provider of Preventative and Therapeutic Health Services Hayoun’s words were directed at the various components of medicalization: ocular health, hygiene, nutrition, and bodily strength and appearance. His attitude toward the parents reflects his view regarding the place of the school as a provider of preventative and therapeutic health services, as well as accurate and appropriate health advice in everyday life. His use of the term “rational” indicates that adoption of the “scientific” discourse is based upon empirical truth. Hayoun was a graduate of the official network of the French teachers’ educational system, which had an ethos of child-saving that included measures for controlling infectious disease in children and interventions designed to promote optimal health in healthy children. In 1889–1890, the French government initiated a child-saving program, which included legislation on subjects such as child labor and wet nursing. It had provisions whereby those deemed “unfit” could lose custody of their children.4 Two years before Hayoun’s arrival, Dr. Aharon Mazeh spoke at a conference of representatives of the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine regarding the place of the school in fighting infectious diseases in Ottoman Palestine.5 Aharon Mazeh who had studied medicine at the University of Zurich and specialized in ocular medicine in Paris pointed out that much could be learned from what the French, Germans, English, and Italians were doing to address these diseases. He emphasized, “all these strategies

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

177

have been and are being used in many more places in Europe, where this disease has spread, so why should we not do the same, and succeed?”6 Involvement by schools in the health of students in the West has increased since the second half of the nineteenth century, indicating the involvement by welfare services in the life of the individual. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, rapid urbanization led to the collapse of infrastructures and the deterioration of sanitary conditions among lower class (poor and working-class) neighborhoods. One of the results was the spread of epidemics, which in turn prompted a great deal of fear.7 One reaction was the emergence of a new discourse based, inter alia, on empirical and quantitative methods. The scientific conclusion, positing a strong correlation between health and sanitary conditions, was translated into a social norm that views lack of sanitation as a social problem requiring both a private and a public response.8 The sense of a need for a public response also permeated schools supported by private actors and networks. The state’s involvement continued to increase following the transition from voluntary to compulsory education and the acceptance of the premise that a child deserves both an education and basic medical care. Additional practices that qualify as the medicalization of education were also adopted: keeping track of children’s growth, fostering a clean and suitable environment for children, and providing education in personal hygiene. During the late nineteenth century and first three decades of the twentieth century, schools incorporated healthcare practices through complex and subtle interrelationships among such actors as janitors, nurses, pediatricians, pathologists, pharmacists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and teachers. These interrelationships were reinforced by practices of hygiene and public health. These interrelationships were manifested in architectural spaces, discourses, and practices in clinics, courts, hospitals, prisons, and schools in material forms.9 As Helen Proctor and Kellie Burns argue, “Mass schooling and public health comprise two of the great projects of the nineteenth and twentieth-­ century nation-state. In the space of roughly a century, sovereign and colonial governments all over the world instigated new, ambitious plans and projects of collective sanitation and disease control and universal elementary education.”10 The Modern Jewish and Hebrew schools in Ottoman Palestine were not part of a modern nation-state, nor were they supported by a colonial government that could promote mass schooling and disease control projects. Therefore, the schools themselves became providers of basic and essential health services. Most of the health services

178 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

were funded and administered by various networks, and some of them even included the provision of basic medical care, especially preventative medicine for children. The local authorities supported only one hospital in Jerusalem. The other hospitals and clinics were funded by various Jewish actors and Christian orders such as the Scottish Mission.11 These organizations were compelled to contend with a population with little awareness of basic sanitary conditions. Thus, the cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Safed suffered from poor sanitary conditions, from sewage that flowed in the streets and served as a fertile breeding ground for infectious bacteria. Epidemics such as typhus, malaria, cholera, and others wreaked havoc among the population. In many families, children never reached puberty. Such was the case with the family of Chana Ba’alul, a teacher who was born in Jaffa and later taught in the Kfar Tavor moshava: three of her brothers died in their early teens.12 The medical institutions in Ottoman Palestine were unable to meet the needs of many of the ill, and people would travel to Europe, Istanbul, or Cairo to seek medical treatment.13 Such was the case with Yitzhak Teller, a teacher from the moshava of Rehovot who suffered from rabies after being bitten by an infected dog. As there was no medicinal solution in Ottoman Palestine, he was forced to travel to Cairo, a distance of several days’ travel, where he died.14 The helplessness of the Ottoman authorities was starkly evident during the outbreak of infectious diseases. The authorities did not attempt to take even minimal preventative actions, such as cleaning and preventing sewage from flowing in the streets, and would enforce a quarantine on the village where the ill lived. In 1902, a cholera epidemic raged in the city of Tiberias in the north of the country. Although the authorities imposed a quarantine, residents who paid a bribe could leave the blockaded city, and thus the disease spread.15 Under these conditions, Baron Rothschild’s organization and the local JCA network provided the funding for drugs and physicians’ salaries and ensured the provision of basic medical care for the students and schools in most of the moshavot. Baron Rothschild even established a medical center, which included fourteen beds for hospitalization and a pharmacy, in the moshava of Zichron Ya’akov in 1890. Dr. Hillel Yaffe, who later became identified with the fight against malaria, joined the medical center. Yaffe offered his medical services to the inhabitants of the surrounding area, including students in the school. Medical services were also made available

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

179

to the inhabitants of the moshava Hadera, which suffered particularly from “marsh fever” (malaria), even though it was not a project supported by Baron Rothschild. The JCA bureaucracy expanded, granting medical services in Galilee after a cholera outbreak in 1902.16 This healthcare was provided through funding for medical treatment, education, and sanitation for the community. Physicians made weekly or biweekly rounds in all the schools in these communities, each of which had a pharmacist who provided medicine to the students, teachers, and their families.17 In those moshavot that were not supported by networks, a tax on the residents funded the medical services and a local (unlicensed) medic. Employing a doctor was, of course, more expensive and contingent on the financial state of the moshava.18 As in other societies, the medical services provided by schools to their students were located in their area of residence, but a review of the native model reveals that the geographical periphery-versus-center dynamics can be altered by financial factors. If in most European societies, the availability and quality of medical care depended on the population’s ranking (urban versus rural), the picture was very different in the Hebrew schools of Ottoman Palestine. The students and teachers of the moshavot established by Baron Rothschild and the JCA enjoyed healthcare services through funding for medical treatment, education, and sanitation for the settlement as a whole. Consequently, the students in these rural villages (who encompassed the majority of students in rural schools) enjoyed better medical care than most of their urban counterparts. The teachers and principals of urban schools were compelled to make their own provisions for the health needs of their students. In 1907, for example, teachers at the Girls’ School in Jaffa drafted a regulations handbook for the institution, which stated that the school must “supervise the bodily health in general, and in particular the health of the eyes of the students, [as well as] the work of the clinic’s medics regarding the school’s students with eye diseases.”19 The handbook’s guidelines reflect the viewpoint of the teachers themselves regarding the school’s involvement in and responsibility for students’ health. Another illustration of an official measure by a school to address the health of its students was the step taken by the Herzliya Gymnasium, which employed a doctor. The school doctor’s work included tracking the health and development of its students. However, as some of the students were residing in Tel Aviv without their parents, who had remained in Europe, the school doctor primarily paid them home visits in the course of

180 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

providing medical care. In providing this function, the school was adapting social medicine to the local reality. The first school doctor was Sonia Belkind, also the first woman physician in the country.20 The main disease that the educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine dealt with, and to which great efforts were dedicated was trachoma which was widespread among children and adults and which in severe cases even caused blindness. This infectious disease was attributable to a lack of running water and a lack of primary sanitary conditions and was identified as a contagious disease. Trachoma, which common throughout the world at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, was widespread in places where sanitary conditions were especially poor, including the Middle East and North Africa.21 Data collected by physicians and published in a study on the proliferation of trachoma among schoolchildren in the years 1912–1914 showed that in most educational institutions, the proportion of children with the disease ranged from 18.5% to 25%.22 It should be noted that all the physicians in Ottoman Palestine went to school in Europe and most received their medical diplomas from a university in Geneva, Zurich, Berlin, Paris, or Odessa. These physicians belonged to a community that, by its nature, was trans-nationalistic and based on the diffusion of knowledge between researchers in different places. Jewish physician-scientists were active in the tropical medicine community, which began to grow following the expansion of European imperialism, new scientific developments in the fields of hematology and microbiology, and the technical improvement of the microscope. The physicians in Ottoman Palestine focused on trachoma in educational institutions, thereby implementing the international consensus that efforts to counter the spread of contagious diseases should shift from treating illness in adults to actively preventing disease in children, as demonstrated with tuberculosis in the case of Europe.23 The doctors, who were members of the medical school network at European universities, such as those of Berlin and Zurich, sought to transfer this approach and implement it in Jewish educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine. Because the kindergartens, schools, and gymnasia were not subject to regulation by the education and health ministries, there were no legal sanctions to ensure enforcement. Thus, it was necessary to foster awareness of the doctor’s authority among parents and students. The teachers were required to accept a hierarchal structure in which the doctor subordinated school activities to the needs determined by

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

181

medical policy. This subordination, which manifested in various ways and at different levels, was predicated on a view of the educational institution as quarters for both ill and healthy children who were candidates for medical treatment precisely because this was an educational site. Thus, the teachers were asked, in the words of Dr. Mazeh, “to learn a chapter on trachoma, in order to provide excellent supervision by looking out look out for their students, lest the disease take root in their eyes, so that they can send them to the doctor as quickly as possible, to cure them in time, and to support the doctor in curing the disease.”24 Another illustration of the way in which the relationship between the specialist physician and the implementing teacher was incorporated into the native model is provided by a notice issued a decade after these events. The notice, reportedly in English, invites teachers to take a continuing education summer course on the subject of “the function of the teacher in the war on infectious diseases found in the Land.”25 Most of the modern Hebrew educational institutions examined and diagnosed the children in the schools and kindergartens, although there were some, such as the Alliance school in Haifa, that did not provide health services. This practice, as noted, resulted from joint initiatives by the teachers and doctors, in conjunction with the parents’ cooperation.26 In most moshavot, the doctors and medics performed eye examinations and treated the children who suffered from trachoma. In other moshavot, the tracking was partial, as was the treatment.27 Funding for the treatment of trachoma by the American Hadassah Women’s Organization, a Jewish body, reinforced the approach that the provision of medical services is a function of the school, and helped implement this approach in the schools in Jerusalem during 1912–1914. The students had follow-up exams by a doctor every three months by a doctor, and continuously by nurses. Especially difficult cases were referred to surgery.28 The Girls’ School in Jaffa committed itself to providing preventative treatment to its students. It implemented an orderly process of examination, diagnosis, and provision of especially intensive treatment, as illustrated by teacher Sarah Azaryahu’s description of the care provided by the school in 1907. The girls underwent eye tests by a doctor, and received daily medicinal treatment from the medic. The importance ascribed to this medical function by the school is evidenced by the fact that treatment was provided during classes, as the number of afflicted students was so great it would have been impossible to complete the treatment during the breaks between lessons.29 In 1911 the School committee declared that the

182 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

school’s physician’s duties were to check the physical health of the girls in general and their eyes in particular.30 Public Health versus Pedagogical Considerations There are four sets of conditions under which doctors may compel a school to accept public health considerations: preventing the exclusion of children with trachoma from the educational institution, whether they had an acute form of the disease, which increased the chances of infection (suppurating secretions), or a milder form (the eye was dry); placing the ill children on separate benches in the classroom; allowing children who were only mildly ill to attend the educational institution; and preventing severely ill children from attending the educational institution. As noted, not all the modern Hebrew educational institutions enjoyed medical services. The first situation, where no medical consideration was operative, characterized the Hilfsverein schools and a minority of those in the moshavot. The second situation, of segregation of the ill from the healthy students within the confines of the institution, was extremely common. The policy where the severity of the disease dictated the presence of the students was in effect in some of the educational institutions in the moshavot and in the cities. The more stringent policy, which prioritized public health over any other consideration, was in operation in some of the moshavot, in the kindergarten in Haifa, and in the two gymnasia, that in Tel Aviv (Herzliya), and that in Jerusalem (the Hebrew Gymnasium).31 Thus, for example, the Herzliya Gymnasium prohibited those students who were suspected of having trachoma, or who were suspected of developing symptoms of the disease, from attending school or taking examinations until a doctor had confirmed their health. Only 1% of the students suffered from trachoma, a much lower proportion than at the other schools.32 The two gymnasia employed doctors who monitored the health of the students, and their policies exemplified how, with local modification, these institutions upheld what Michѐle Hofmann described as doctors’ dominance in the administration of schools in Switzerland.33 The physician who enacted the stringent policy in the kindergarten in Haifa was Dr. Eliyahu Auerbach, who had studied medicine in Berlin, and established a method of treatment that included three weekly appointments. The treatment itself was painful, the children resisted, and some parents refused to allow their children to undergo this procedure. The

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

183

doctor stipulated that the children could attend the kindergarten only if they underwent the treatment, and the kindergarten teachers and the parents, some of whom initially objected, eventually acquiesced to his demand.34 Writing in a German medical journal, Auerbach proposed holding a conference to discuss ways of combating trachoma. The response was enthusiastic. In 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the First World War, the conference on combating trachoma convened in Jerusalem. The fact that it was held under the auspices of a German academic journal illustrates that the Jewish doctors in Ottoman Palestine were part of the network comprising the transnational medical community, and reflects the scientific atmosphere of the conference. The conference discussions indicate that the doctors viewed the school as subject to the public health policies set by the doctors themselves. Thus, for example, it was decided that every educational institution must have a school doctor. Another decision held that all students were entitled to attend school, but the doctor could determine who would be permitted to attend and who would first be required to recover. In other words, it was within the doctor’s power to determine the children’s level of attendance.35 Trachoma was, indeed, the most common disease among children in the schools. However, the most dangerous disease was malaria, an infectious disease spread by the female anopheles mosquito, which inhabited swamps and sources of standing water.36 Malaria was widespread in several regions known for their fertile land. Most of the moshavot were in these areas, and thus their inhabitants were especially vulnerable to malaria, which caused many deaths. One of those who died was Haviv Lubman, a teacher and principal of the school in the Rishon LeZion moshava. In other villages, malaria was so prevalent that no family was immune to it.37 Many students did not even reach puberty, as illustrated by the heart-wrenching words of one of the children in the moshava of Hadera in 1900, “We whispered to each other … David is dead, Miriam has already died … and on Sunday in the month of Tamuz (July) only three students came to school. Even one of the teachers got sick, and only one remained. And the teacher got up to eulogize one of the students who died on Friday, and we three children together with the teacher broke out in tears. That day, the school was closed.”38 In his memoirs, teacher Ze’ev Carmi wrote about the fever that had afflicted his wife several times and almost killed his infant daughter.39 The

184 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

Jewish physician-scientists who struggled against malaria in Ottoman Palestine also lived in the very area they were studying and themselves suffered from the disease. In contrast to those colleagues who visited the colonies in order to conduct experiments and then returned to their homes in European cities, these physician-scientists conducted their experiments and established laboratories in Ottoman Palestine. The physician-­scientists who spoke Hebrew and wrote in German and English saw their attempts to solve the problem of malaria and other diseases as a twofold contribution: both to the world of science and to the Zionist enterprise. They were members of two networks: the formal professional network and the informal network of the Zionist activists. A doctor tending to his patients was also a scientist seeking to solve a fascinating issue while simultaneously acting to ensure healthy lives in order to fulfill the Zionist dream in difficult surroundings.40 One of the means employed by doctors to address malaria was to treat students and, at the same time, view them as research subjects; in other words, the school also functioned as a research laboratory. Thus, for example, noted malariologist Dr. Hillel Yaffe, who had studied at the Center for Tropical Diseases in Italy, tested the dosage of quinine tablets needed to treat malaria by administering it to schoolchildren over the course of a year.41 The data regarding their treatment was gathered and analyzed on international scientific platforms. The educational framework allowed for empirical research and statistical analysis, while monitoring the patients and their environment over time. The students were defined as scientific subjects, as the educational systems of Switzerland, Prussia, and France had been doing since 1860, according to studies by Gina Greene and Michèle Hofmann.42 Local physicians implemented this approach, which posits that medical statistics can be used to generate scientific data in order to address disease, in the concrete reality of Jewish and Hebrew schools in Ottoman Palestine. Another empirical treatment experiment was that performed by Dr. Ya’acov David of the Melachmiya moshava. He instituted a course of treatment that involved administering eyedrops to students, and the results were that within one year the prevalence of the disease dropped from 70% to 18%.43 By statistically tracking the prevalence of trachoma among Hebrew and Jewish schools students, the Medical Society was able to produce a comprehensive survey, which appeared in the Teachers’ Union journal, HaChinuch.44

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

185

The School as a Branch of the Hygiene Movement “When you wake from sleep, wash your hands and face with cold water. Your head and you will be clean and healthy and no ill will befall you.”45 These words, written in 1892 by two teachers, Chaim Ziprin and Yehuda Grazovsky, appeared in a reader titled The School Corridor, demonstrating how norms of hygiene were translated into a curricular message. This call for personal hygiene seems almost identical to the message conveyed in the following passage, which appeared ninety years earlier, in an 1802 reader titled The Paths of Study: “You shall rise and wash your hands and face, cleanse and rinse your mouth, and clean and purify it from foulness and phlegm; and you shall dress in clean and glorified garb, and curl the hair of your head with a comb, and there shall be no unclean thing in you.”46 The Paths of Study was published in Vienna and authored by Yehuda Ben-Ze’ev, a Jewish man of the Enlightenment who belonged to the informal pedagogical network of the Philanthropin. The movement, which operated in northern Germany, followed the social practices of the German Bildungsburgertum. These social circles sought to consolidate their position by means of a shared repertoire of values and hygienic behavioral patterns.47 An analysis of the text shows that the choice of words were taken from the repertoire of the early Enlightenment, which sought to mold an esthetic and harmonic personality based on a physical regime that emphasized personal cleanliness. In the second half of the eighteenth century, this process also involved social change, as perceptions of the body and health changed and there emerged advanced, enlightened scientific theories that saw the body as a living organism. Cleanliness became a basic principle and core concept of hygiene. Everything had to be clean: the body, the objects that come into contact with it, and the environment surrounding it. The Enlightenment viewed a clean body as an expression of internal cleanliness and a moral lifestyle. This discourse was consolidated and spread by the bourgeois network.48 If the disseminators of this approach were bourgeois in the German-speaking countries, then in France, they were the new elite, among whose members was Baron Rothschild. Cultural sociologists and anthropologists such as Norbert Elias defined hygiene in terms of one social group endowing its cultural practices to another group that was in one form or another, in subjugation by the

186 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

former. Elias claimed that framing hygiene as a personal and social norm reflects the conception that it is a civilizing process. According to this approach, hygiene serves as a scientific explanation to legitimize cultural and social norms that flowed from the elites to wider groups and later transferred to colonies of the colonializing countries. Chronologically, the first attempt to mold “proper hygienic” patterns in an educational institution in Ottoman Palestine took the form of a public appeal aimed at recruiting students to the Lemel School in 1856: “And the teachers shall always be on guard to maintain cleanliness and order in all their ways and deeds, which shall bring forth good, and valorously increase mental and physical health.”49 The author of this appeal was the school’s founder, Ludwig August Ritter von Frankl, a native of Bohemia and a physician by training, although he had never practiced as one. A poet and a writer, Frankl was deeply involved in German culture, participated in disseminating the cultural codes of the German bourgeoisie, and took part in the 1848 revolution, even composing its anthem.50 In the second half of the nineteenth century, when scientists began to base the doctrine of hygiene on experimental methods of natural science, hygiene itself became a medical science, and doctors, its high priests. Hygiene was classified as a discipline of medicine by Max Josef von Pettenkofer, who in 1865 became the first chair of hygiene at the German-­ speaking Academy in Munich. Over the following years, hygiene developed into a branch of medicine in Switzerland, France, and other Western countries.51 At the same time, the transnational hygiene movement continued to spread throughout modern education systems in Europe, the American continent, and elsewhere.52 School hygiene entailed a range of measures, such as rules of cleanliness, the setting of standards for teaching materials, well-lit classrooms, appropriate duration of lessons, regular medical examinations of the students, and suitable standards of appearance.53 The principles of hygiene were disseminated through translated literature, newspapers, and international conferences on health and demography, including the international hygiene exhibition and, of course, doctors, and teachers.54 As the movement spread, the regulation of hygiene in European schools increased. The impact of this was evident, for example, in the operations of the Evelina de Rothschild School under the administration of two principals who received their educational training in France and England. An 1897 article in the newspaper HaZvi described the yoke of regulation that

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

187

Fortuna Bachar, a graduate of the Alliance teacher training program, imposed upon her students: “The principal is very meticulous about punctilious cleanliness, to the point that mothers are complaining and objecting that the principal is far too strict and the principal’s demands for cleanliness are too overwhelming.”55 Four years later, the new principal, Hannah Landau, a teacher trained at Graystoke College in England, issued the following regulations:56 “The principal demands that every single girl be clean in her person and her garb when she arrives at school. Should a girl not fulfill the regulations regarding cleanliness, and the principal had informed the parents of that, and the parents do not take heed of the warning sent to them, then the girl shall be expelled from the school.”57 The binding contractual framework of the school regulations, to the extent of policymaking on whether students can attend school, attests to the power of the regulation of hygiene in an educational institution. The informal network of Hebrew teachers also exemplified the adoption of hygienic practices in an educational institution in the 1890s. The teacher would organize the students in the schoolyard in order, and the parade leader would count them, inspect their clothing to see it they were clean, their hair combed, and in general, cleanliness maintained.”58 The importance of cleanliness is further illustrated by the fact that it was a school subject on which students were graded. Thus, for example, in 1909 the school in the moshava of Mazkeret Batya would issue a grade (10) for the school subject of cleanliness, alongside others such as arithmetic, history, singing, and the like.59 As noted, school hygiene encompassed such measures as rules of cleanliness, standards for the teaching materials, classroom lighting and class duration, medical examinations, and students’ appearance.60 The transfer of this concern to the school’s learning environment and its adaptation to the class needs in Ottoman Palestine is reflected in school documentation. Thus, for example, in a report by Yehuda Antebi, principal of the school in the moshava of Yavne, to the Teachers’ Union in 1904, he provided a detailed description of the school building, including the number of windows and their height and width.61 Three years later, Antebi, while overseeing a school in another moshava, Kfar Tavor, warned about structural defects that prevented compliance with the ventilation and lighting requirements. The hierarchal pattern of hygiene implementation meant that schools relied on physicians’ requirements regarding improvements needed in the school building’s structure; that is, it was the physicians who

188 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

would determine that “the improper sanitary conditions of the students are caused by the building.”62 The use of hygienic suitability as a yardstick is illustrated by a discussion among teachers at the Jaffa girls’ school in the autumn of 1906 regarding the necessity of replacing furniture. The subject under discussion was the school benches, and the justification offered for demanding the purchase of new furniture was that the current benches were unfit under “the rules of hygiene.”63 The desired regulation of the structure and schoolyard of the educational institution was determined by those regarded as qualified—the physicians. The journal HaChinuch published an article by the noted physician Dr. Yaffe, who spelled out the standards for the students’ health, beginning with the school buildings and concluding with their internal characteristics. Dr. Yaffe also provided a detailed list of requirements: The building must include paved floors and plastered walls. The benches and desks must be adjusted to the height of the children, and the writing desks must be slanted. The benches must also be designed for only two students, in order to minimize the spread of infectious diseases. Fear of infection also means a comprehensive ban on spitting. The yard must be clean, but care must be taken not to sweep toward the building.64 Another measure on which Dr. Yaffe insisted was that the classrooms be well ventilated and well lit. The windows had to be located in such a way that the children’s eyes did not receive direct sunlight.65 These requirements echo the open-air school movement, which, during the first decade of the twentieth century, emphasized the importance of light and clean air in the school.66 If in Western and Central Europe the requirement focused on designing windows to provide light, in Ottoman Palestine windows were supposed to be designed to avoid the sun’s dazzling rays. One of the important principles of the hygienic repertoire was regularity, routine, and discipline. An extreme example of this was a rule adopted by Fortuna Bachar, the principal of the Evelina de Rothschild girls’ school. She set a specific time for drinking water for all of the girls. This rule raised the ire of David Yellin, who called her a tyrant and accused her of turning her school into a prison.67 A local example, from the Hebrew education system, appeared in a report by Wilkomitz, principal of the teachers’ union rural school from 1908. “We have begun to impose regular dress in the school and accustom the students to cleanliness, order, manners, and proper behavior.”68

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

189

The schools in the moshavot and the cities served as influential centers for the treatment, prevention, and eradication of the infectious diseases that characterized Ottoman Palestine at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The support of Jewish European networks and the dialogue between physicians, who spread knowledge about public medicine and hygiene, and teachers, some of whom were born in Europe and some in Palestine, gave rise to various processes that involved medical treatment, inspection, and supervision of health, and education to maintain it.

6.2  Corporeal Activity Discussions about the importance of corporeal activity, under its many different names, have accompanied education from ancient times to the modern era. Miklós Hadas, Vincent Stolk, and others argue that there were several approaches to discussing corporeal activity in general and physical education in particular.69 One approach is the humanistic pedagogy that sees bodily development as equal in importance to intellectual growth—that is, physical education is a need for the independent realization of the child. Another approach sees physical education as a means to developing characteristics such as discipline, self-determination, and integrity. Yet another approach sees physical education as a component in molding the next generation of citizens. Accordingly, physical education is considered a significant element in the nation-building processes. The Diffusion of the Concept of Turnen The concept “gymnastics” has been interpreted in many ways and given various names, such as Turnen, Swedish gymnastics, sport, and physical education. The different names were the product of entangled cultures, which were imported and transferred by a range of actors, including political leaders, organizations of the national welfare state, authors, teachers, the media, and institutes for teaching physical education. These approaches were transferred to Jewish education, particularly Hebrew education. Their adaptation to the local reality in Ottoman Palestine and the creation of the Hebrew term for physical labor, which is not identical to physical activity, are discussed below. The use of the term gymnastics by modern education and its conversion to subject matter to be learned is attributed to the pedagogue J.C.F.  GutsMuths of the Philanthropist school of

190 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

thought, who believed in personal growth (Bildung) and was active at the end of the eighteenth century. GutsMuths, who taught in the German duchy of Thuringia, composed an organized doctrine of exercise rules and physical games. This approach adopted Rousseau’s claim that physical activity preconditioned intellectual development.70 GutMuths’s ideas diffused throughout West-Central Europe and they were adopted by two key actors, who founded the Swedish gymnastics and the German Turnen. H. Ling developed the doctrine of gymnastic exercises based upon the anatomy of the human body. This doctrine was also called the rational gymnastic system and it propagated its principles through the institute for teaching physical education that he established in the 1820s.71 GutMuth’s second disciple was F.  L. Jahn, the founder of Turnen, which spread throughout German-speaking societies in Central Europe. This method emphasized employing muscles and free exercises. Jahn saw in Turnen a means of improving the nation’s strength, which was needed to establish German nationalism and restore German pride in face of the military dominance of the French civilian army, which had caused the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. In German-speaking areas, there were increasing calls to focus on the relationship between physical resilience and national identity. The encounter between the proper use of physical activity, masculinity, and national identity was typical of other societies as well. For example, visual and textual messages of a lean body as the desired prototype of the European man were transferred and spread by various social agents to France, the country which was the rival of Jahn’s homeland. In France, gymnastic studies were defined as a military necessity, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, a school for training gymnastics teachers was established with the intention of serving the military and the public and educational sectors alike.72 Later, with the establishment of the Third Republic and following additional changes to the French education system, the military dimension was reduced, and gymnastics lessons became acceptable in private schools and in a notable number of public schools. Other countries, too, saw the formation of a link between physical education and national education, as illustrated by the Slavic Sokol movement, which served as a recruitment tool for the Czech nationalist movement. The definition of physical education as means of citizenship also included girls’ education. Physical education was supposed to contribute to the bodily health of future mothers of the nation.73

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

191

The close ties between political control and the molding of the body manifested in the establishment of a conservative regime in Prussia, which saw Turnen as means of attacking the authorities. During the 1840s, the political climate changed, and Turnen became once again a significant component of public life, as well as a required subject in the secondary school curriculum.74 With the infusion of German culture into Hungarian culture, Turnen also infused Hungarian society, becoming part of the curriculum in secondary schools by the mid-nineteenth century. Turnen was also adopted by the Hungarian aristocracy and other circles and it became a national symbol. During the celebrations of the Dual Monarchy, gymnasts participated, displaying their prowess, and physical education became a required subject in the secondary school curriculum.75 Concurrently, the humanistic educators, Pastelucci’s students, also spoke in praise of the corporeal activity that was supposed to balance intellectual learning. It is, they argued, good for the child’s motorial and emotional development. Physical education classes were included in the European curriculum from the last third of the nineteenth century, with the implementation of compulsory education. Here one can see a manifestation of the intertwining of history. In colonial Britain, physical games, including football, rowing, and other competitive sports such as swimming and running were considered an expression of British human integrity.76 The first actors to transfer the principles of gymnastics in GutMuths’ style to the Jewish schools in Ottoman Palestine were teachers who had received their pedagogical training at seminaries in Germany, Holland, and France. The gymnastic ideas in their French format were transferred by teachers who had studied within the framework of the Ecole Normale of the AIU network in Paris and taught in the network schools. The first AIU school to offer physical education was the one in Jerusalem.77 In addition, some of the principles of Turnen, as taught in the Jewish teachers’ seminary in Hanover, “journeyed” to the German-speaking school in Jerusalem during the 1890s. Jehoash Peres who had attended the Lemel School was sent by the school to study pedagogy in Hanover, where he assimilated the principles of physical education. He then returned to the school and became its principal.78 In his memoirs, Peres said that he used to exercise in the schoolyard. One day, the Turkish governor saw this and sent someone to find out whether it was an exercise by an army battalion.79 The gymnastics classes enabled the Lemel School to present student gymnastic performances as part of informal education to the general public.

192 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

The Lemel School’s gymnastic performances were the highlight of festive events such as the Purim celebration, as noted in the Hilfsverein report for 1905. The school saw gymnastic performances as an expression of respect for important guests, as was the case during the visit of the national poet Haim Nachman Bialik. Despite the impressive gymnastic performances,80 the physical education teacher, Goldschmidt, earned a lower salary than the other teachers did, and his picture did not appear in the school’s class photos.81 The importance ascribed to gymnastics exercises defied the gender barrier, becoming part of the curriculum at the Evelina de Rothschild School. The appearance of girls before the public was a form of defiance in the eyes of the ultra-orthodox, who believed that covering a woman’s body was a necessary practice for the maintenance of proper social order. The journalist Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Ben-Yehuda, saw this as the liberation of the lean female body from the ultra-conservative society’s expectation that women minimize their presence.82 Another teacher, Avraham Zvi Goldschmidt, born in Jerusalem, also helped spread the principles of gymnastics. After graduating from the Lemel School, he continued his studies in physical education in Holland, returned to Jerusalem, and began to spread the teaching of gymnastics at the Hilfsverein teacher training institute during the first decade of the twentieth century. His class included orderly exercises; freestyle gymnastics, gymnastics with the help of hand instruments, building human pyramids, climbing ropes, and especially gymnastics on devices (tension, parallel bars, and rings), as well as light athletics (running, long jump, and high jump). His plan met opposition from a large number of the parents, who claimed that there were already enough “concert merchants” (hit makers) in the locality, even though Goldschmidt was an ultra-orthodox Jew.83 Goldschmidt started teaching physical education at the teachers’ seminary and later at the Hilfsverein girls’ school in Jerusalem in 1910.84 A major turning point in the transfer of gymnastics occurred with the founding of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jaffa, which made gymnastics a required subject during the second year of studies. The teacher, Zvi Nishri, was sent by the institution to study Swedish gymnastics in Berne, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. Nishri made an important contribution to the professionalization of gymnastics by sharing his insights and knowledge regarding the Gymnasium students and the entire coalescing modern Hebrew education system. He did this by means of published books, professional literature in Hebrew, lectures, invitations to his lessons, and

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

193

mainly continuing education for all the teachers.85 The Teachers’ Union decided to make physical education more practicable through teachers’ continuing education courses, which were held during the summer vacation. Strengthening the Body The body discourse saw strengthening the body through exercise as an answer to social and personal illness. For example, degeneration, which had become an accepted term in medical literature in the mid-nineteenth century, sought to describe those whose nerve was weakened due to the use of drugs, drinking, and moral weakness or defective social surroundings.86 The aim of physical education was the same for girls and boys, with one very important exception: boys were to be prepared for military service, whereas girls were to be prepared for childrearing and becoming good mothers. The dispersion of this concept followed from the development and infiltration of the medicalization discourse. Various actors, including physicians and psychiatrists, posited a correlation between a degraded physical state and mental disorders.87 One of the aspects of this phenomenon was the discourse regarding the European Jewish body. The public discourse defined the Jewish body in terms of pathological, physical, and mental characteristics. The discussion of physiognomy permeated the German-­ speaking Jewish space through the German-speaking Jewish Enlightenment movement in the late eighteenth century. Educated Jews sought to “correct” the Jewish body and adapted it to the physical norms of the surrounding reality. Notably, within Jewish discourse, the idea of “a healthy mind in a healthy body” resonated; however, in daily life, the vast majority of the Jewish public did not engage in physical activities. One reason was opposition to what was considered “wasting time that could be spent in Torah studies.” In addition, the desire for spiritual purity led to a negative conception of the body. The traditional religious way of life sought to reduce the influence of the body on the mind. For several historical reasons, most Jewish people did not engage in works that required physical exertion. Sander Gilman describes how the amalgamation of the definition of social phenomena using biological criteria with theories regarding eutrophication and anti-Semitic stereotypes led to the error of the Jewish body.88

194 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

The year 1892 saw the publication of the book Entartung (Degeneration), which was written in German and discussed processes of eutrophication among groups considered to be harmful and even deviant (criminals, beggars).89 The author was the Jewish psychiatrist Max Nordau, who was born and raised in the city of Pest, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and embodied the concept of a “transnational actor.” He was born to an orthodox Jewish family, attended local gymnasia, studied medicine and psychiatry at the University of Pest, became a journalist and writer who visited most of Europe’s capitals, and was a Zionist leader. Nordau’s book reflected the growing discourse that entailed the reduction of social phenomena through biological criteria. Darwinism had defined the individual body as a biological item belonging to the race, and within the framework of this new discussion, the nation or society was defined in biological terms; in other words, the nation is a collection of organisms rather than individuals, and is expected to undergo eutrophication as do all biological creatures, if the necessary actions to preserve it are not taken in the face of diseases that cause extinction. A year after Nordau published his book, the mathematician Francis Galton presented the eugenics school of thought, which spread over the ensuing years from England to France and Germany, and thence to the United States and other countries toward the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a transnational movement by the eve of the First World War.90 In his book, Nordau disseminated the voices of those who feared the power of the economic and social changes. He repeated the claim that resonated in many circles regarding the damages caused by urbanization and modernization, which were said to erode people’s nerves. Conversely, the Romantic claim—that the calm, rural lifestyle of farmers strengthens them through agricultural work—reemerged. This lifestyle was thought to be the antithesis to nervous fatigue, bodily weakness, and possible atrophy.91 These approaches were widespread throughout Europe and accepted among the Russian intelligentsia. They were transferred through communication agents such as books, and especially the Jewish press in Hebrew, Russian, and German, which were read in Europe and Ottoman Palestine. In the same year that Nordau’s book was published, there appeared a story by the teacher and writer Ze’ev Yavetz, telling of the children of the moshava who were endowed with physical strength and “no longer suffered from nervous fatigue nor were their faces pallid.”92 This terminology of “nervous fatigue” and “pallid faces” reflects the dissemination and

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

195

internalization of the initial assumption linking a sick body to mental problems, which had appeared in the physicality discourse in Europe. It is evident from the teachers’ words at their meetings during the 1890s that the discourse on the intertwining of physical strength formed part of the nation’s resurrection, and they expected their students’ generation to differ from that of their students’ parents.93 The 1904 curriculum of the Hebrew schools included physical education classes, but the inclusion of gymnastics lessons in rural schools was not successful for several reasons, some prosaic, such as the shortage of teachers. The parents of rural students were, for the most part, conservative, viewing gymnastics as a gentile custom belonging to a foreign culture, undermining their identity. Added to this was the parents’ concern about injuries. In some rural schools, discarded exercise equipment brought by the Baron’s clerks in the 1900s was relegated to the institution’s warehouse. The reason was that after a student was injured while climbing a rope and his parents demanded compensation, the Baron’s officials decided to store the instruments.94 The teacher Wilkomitz, who spoke about the importance of physical education at the teachers’ meeting, instituted such classes at his school, setting a precedent. As one of his female students recalls, “At first we were puzzled. What is exercise? We finally managed to do all the exercises.”95 The students loved the exercise but the parents objected, and after Wilkomitz’s death, the gymnastics classes at the school stopped. In the moshava of Tavor, Ehrlich also led gymnastics classes during the early hours and placed gymnastics equipment in the schoolyard. An article published in 1910 describes the twists and turns of attempts to transfer physical education to the members of the moshavot: “In general, the members of the moshavot regard the study of gymnastics with complete indifference. The moshavot that always strive for fresh and clean air no longer need gymnastics because they already have this virtue.”96 Another reason was the rural environment. The moshava children’s parents and some of the teachers argued that the children worked on their parents’ farms, breathed clean air, and, in fact, maintained a lifestyle that was ostensibly healthy and desirable according to Nordau’s romantic outlook. Thus, gymnastics was thought of as a waste of the time required for true physical labor, namely, work on the parents’ farm for purposes of existence and livelihood in the difficult reality of rural life in Ottoman Palestine.

196 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

In 1908, sixteen years after the publication of Entartung (Degeneration), Nordau called upon the Jews to beware of the degeneration that threatened them as a nation. This call to rehabilitate the Jewish body was not new. It had been permeating the discourse of Jewish reformers since the time of the Jewish Enlightenment, whose disciples to fit the Jewish body to the physical norms of the late-eighteenth-century German bourgeoisie. A century later, this call underwent an additional twist, incorporating the correlation of mental behavior to physical image. This outlook adopted anti-Semitic stereotypes regarding the Jewish body. However, Zionist doctors, writers, and activists claimed that the negative image of the Jewish body—characterized by nervous fatigue due to physical weakness, lack of mobility, and other factors—does not reflect intrinsic characteristics of the Jewish people.97 Instead, these physical and mental traits result from their degraded urban lives and from having distanced themselves from nature.98 The solution that Nordau proposed was to mold the new Jew with strength and physical presence, instilling in him the language of muscular Judaism. Gilman notes the gendered expression of this new image, which symbolized the return of the Jewish Man to history and erased the feminine image of the Jewish man as being weak and nervous. Mosse argues that the muscular Jew was an expression of transfer and internalization of the prototype of the Western bourgeoise’s Ideal Man, a strong, muscular man with short hair, free of the manners of adornment and softness.99 At the same time, most were rejected from European physical education associations due to their Jewishness. Nordau also saw Zionism as a physical revolution, serving the necessary condition of preventing the atrophy that threatened the very existence of the Diaspora Jew. Nordau’s words corresponded and intertwined with the physical change that had already begun in Jewish education in the Jewish and Hebrew schools of Ottoman Palestine. Nordau’s words were spread, among other things, by means of a Jewish gymnastics association, which bore a name that symbolized physical and national bravery according to Jewish tradition—the Bar-Kochva Association’s—whose founders were the teacher Aviezer Yellin and students from the Hilfsverein teachers’ seminary. In the same year, another gymnastics association was founded by the Hebrew Gymnasium physician in Jaffa, and its members exercised at the girls’ school in Jaffa.100 These Jewish gymnastics associations adopted the imagery of physical bravery that emerged from the Turnen phenomenon, intertwining it with the Hebrew-national revolution’s vision of the New Jew.

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

197

This was, however, only one of three approaches that combined to form the concept of physical labor in the Hebrew-national education. The other two approaches were agricultural work in the school garden, and class field trips. The argument was that physical labor such as gardening or carpentry, especially if done in the open air, strengthens one’s professional proficiency and contributes greatly to health. Indeed, according to Yitzchak Epstein, one of the noted Hebrew pedagogues of the time who held this view, calling on teachers “to strengthen the muscles of their students as much as possible by means of exercise in the open air, field trips, and working the land.”101 “The spiritual and moral forces cannot develop properly and achieve their possible perfection in a weak and running body, but only in a healthy, firm, and strong body.” These words, by Wilkomitz, demonstrate the creation of a causative relationship, as it were, between physical characteristics and a moral statement.102 The proposed solution was a lifestyle change that would include exercise, proper nutrition, and a change of profession. The other significant alteration was the change of environment, that is, a transition from the city to the village that was portrayed at the end of the nineteenth century as a healthier environment, even if the reality was different.

6.3   Summary The discussion in this chapter has examined the adoption of various European conceptions regarding the body, including the medicalization approach and the process of adaptation to the local conditions of Ottoman Palestine. The modern Jewish and Hebrew-national schools were part of the transnational hygiene movement. The educational networks and educational actors adopted the hierarchal pattern of medicalization, whereby schools relied on physicians’ requirements regarding improvements needed in the school’s environment. Adaptation to the local conditions of a hot climate was reflected in the construction of the windows, for example. Given the lack of a public health policy in Ottoman Palestine, some schools provided otherwise-unavailable preventive medical services and healthcare to the children. This pattern is similar to the phenomenon of colonial schools as the only entity providing health services. In many schools, the issue of health essentially became an institutional concern. Doctors, nurses, and paramedics visited most of the educational institutions. Some schools had a permanent doctor. In this context, we should

198 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

note the importance of cooperation with the Hebrew-national doctors. Such collaborations demonstrated the localization of the Jewish medical profession and its link with modern Jewish kindergartens and schools. Alongside the medicalization approach, there was the revolutionary vision of creating a new, modern Hebrew-speaking society. One of the pillars of the vision was the modeling of healthy, physically strong Jews, who were to be the antithesis of the Eastern European Jew. Another pillar was physical education. The process of transfer, meaning that Jewish students receive a lesson in physical education in the curriculum as it was in the urban and some rural schools was revolutionary. Physical education was intended for boys and girls, even though the conservative Jewish community had reservations about it. Alongside the formal education, there was an informal physical education that manifested in ceremonies, parades, and gymnastics performances.

Notes 1. Mona Gleason, “Metaphor, Materiality, and Method: The Central Role of Embodiment in the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica, 54: 1–2 (2018): 4–19, DOI:10.1080/00309230.2017.1355328. 2. David Hayoun, Diary, file 7.33/9, AJE. 3. Kristin K. Barker, “Medicalization and Contested Illness,” in Handbook of Medical Sociology, ed. Chloe E.  Bird, Allen M.  M. Fremont, Peter Conrad, and Stefan Timmermans, 6th ed. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010), 151. 4. Cynthia Connolly, “Pale, Poor and ‘Pretubercular’ Children: A History of Pediatric Antituberculosis Efforts in France, Germany and the United States, 1899–1929,” Nursing Inquiry 11 (2004): 139–147. 5. Aharon Meir Mazeh (1858–1930) was a physician and a linguist. After receiving a work proposal from Baron Rothschild to serve as a doctor in four moshavot, he arrived in Ottoman Palestine in 1889. During the following years, he became one of the leading physicians and the land, in addition to being a leader in the fight against trachoma. See Nissim Levi, The History of Medicine in the Holy Land: 1799–1948 (Haifa: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Bruce Rapport Faculty of Medicine, Technion, 1998), 455–457 [Hebrew]. 6. Aharon Mazeh delivered this speech at an event in 1903, and several months later it appeared in print as Aharon Mazeh, “A Lecture on Preserving Health in the Land,” HaTsfira 12 (February 1904): 10 [Hebrew].

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

199

7. From the end of the eighteenth century, the view that good health is a positive indicator of character and personal conduct began to take root. Good health was seen as a necessary condition to achieving personal aspirations. The traditional view of disease as the price of sin was replaced by the view that health is a personal responsibility, and that citizens must tend to their own health and thus prevent harm to the health of the entire society. See George Rozen and Elizabeth Fee, A History of Public Health (New York: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 8. Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Time (London: Routledge, 1991). 9. Patrice Milewski, “Medico-Science and School Hygiene: A Contribution to a History of the Senses in Schooling,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 3 (2014): 285–300. 10. Helen Proctor and Kellie Burns, “The Connected Histories of Mass Schooling and Public Health,” History of Education Review 46, no. 2 (2017): 19. 11. Levi, Medicine in the Holy Land. 12. Zipora Shehory-Rubin, “Characteristics of ‘the Eretz-Israeli Female Sabra’: Natives of Eretz-Israel from the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv; Educational, Social, and Cultural Aspects,” Dor LeDor 49 (2016): 237–286 [Hebrew]. 13. Ibid. 14. Amiad Brezner, “The Education System in Rehovot from the First Days until the End of the First World War,” 22, Rehovot Archives. 15. Dan Bar-El and Zalman Greenberg, “Disease and Cholera in Tiberias During the First World War,” Cathedra 120 (2006): 161–182 [Hebrew]. 16. The first physician, Dr. Eliezer Ben-Ze’ev, was the son of a farmer, Ze’ev Avramovich from Rishon Le-Zion; some years later, Eliezer Ben-Ze’ev left the country and died in Cairo in 1944. See Levi, Medicine in the Holy Land, 328–352. 17. Ran Aaronson, Rothschild and Early Jewish Colonization in Palestine (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 146–148. 18. Eliahu Ze’ev Levin-Epstein, My Memories (Tel-Aviv: Levin-Epstein Brothers, 1932), 184 [Hebrew]; Moshava, minutes no. 526, March 1910; minutes 795, April 1913, Rehovot Archives. 19. 1907 Regulations of the School for Girls, 10, file 1.46/1, AJE. 20. Mordechai Brachyahu, “Hygiene Work in Schools in the Land of Israel,” in Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, ed. Kimhi, 279–310. 21. Navot Orit and Gross Moshe, “The Campaign against Trachoma: The Beginnings of Public Health in Eretz Israel,” Cathedra 94 (1999) [Hebrew].

200 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

22. Nahum Shimkin, “Trachoma in Palestine: Its Epidemiology and Review of Measures for Dealing with It,” British Journal of Ophthalmology 10, no. 5 (1926): 247–279. 23. Dov Krinkin, “Trachoma in Schools in the Land of Israel, and the Means of Fighting this Disease,” HaChinuch A (1914): 21–56 [Hebrew]. 24. Mazeh, “Preserving Health in the Land.” 25. “The Function of the Teacher in the War against Infectious Disease in the Land,” HaChinuch 3 (1913): 76 [Hebrew]. 26. Krinkin, “Trachoma in Schools.” 27. In the older moshavot, the proportion of those suffering from trachoma was slightly lower than the national average, while in the newer moshavot in the north and in the Galilee, some 38% of the students suffered from trachoma. See Shimkin, “Trachoma in Palestine.” 28. Navot and Gross, “The Campaign against Trachoma.” 29. Sarah Azaryahu, My Life Story (Tel Aviv: Neumann, 1957), 90–91 [Hebrew]. 30. Girl”s School, The Curriculum and the School Regulations of Girls School in Jaffa (Jaffa: Etan print house, 1911),10. 31. In Petach Tikva, Zichron Ya’akov, and Rishon LeZion the more stringent policy was in use. See Krinkin, “Trachoma in Schools.” 32. Dov Krinkin, “Report to the Trachoma Convention” (Jerusalem: Health Station Publication, 1916), 37–57 [Hebrew], cited in Navot and Gross, “The Campaign against Trachoma.” 33. Michèle Hofmann, “Ärztliche Macht Und Ihr Einfluss Auf Den Schulalltag in Der Schweiz Im Ausgehenden 19. Und Beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert,” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 1 (2015): 1–16 [German]; Milewski, “Medico-Science and School Hygiene.” 34. Eliyahu Auerbach, From the Fatherland to the Land of the Fathers: The First Jewish Doctor in Haifa (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi and the Leo Baeck Institute, 1969), 235 [Hebrew]. 35. Navot and Gross, “The Campaign against Trachoma.” 36. Mark Harrison, “A Global Perspective: Reframing the History of Health, Medicine, and Disease,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89, no. 4 (Winter, 2015): 639–689. 37. Levi, Medicine in the Holy Land, 478–495. 38. Ever Hadani, Sixty Years of Its History  – Hadera 1891-1951 (Tel-Aviv: Massada, 1951), 154 [Hebrew]. 39. Ze’ev Carmi, The Way of an Educator (Haifa: Department of Education and Culture 1965), 52 [Hebrew]. 40. Sandy Sufian, “Colonial Malariology, Medical Borders, and Sharing Scientific Knowledge in Mandatory Palestine,” Science in Context 19, no. 3 (2006): 381–400.

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

201

41. Hillel Yaffe, The Generation of Illegal Immigrants: Memoirs, Letters, and a Diary (Jerusalem: HaSifriya HaTzionit, 1971), 411–412 [Hebrew]. 42. Gina Greene, “Architecture, Medicalization, and the Aesthetics of Hygiene at the Écoles Maternelles,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 34, no. 1 (2017): 9–41; Michèle Hofmann, “Ärztliche Macht Und Ihr Einfluss”; Milewski, “Medico-Science and School Hygiene.” 43. Navot and Gross, “The Campaign against Trachoma,” 81. 44. Hebrew Medical Society in Eretz Israel, “Trachoma in Schools” HaChinuch D (1912): 76 [Hebrew]. 45. Chaim Ziprin and Yehuda Grazovsky (Gur), Corridor to the School (Warsaw: Tushia, 1892), 27 [Hebrew]. 46. Yehuda Leib Ben-Ze’ev, The Paths of Study (Part A of the School Handbook), (Vienna, 1802), cited in Zohar Shavit, “What Do You Do When You Get Up in the Morning: The Place of the Enlightenment Movement in Changing Jewish Habits,” in The Library of the Haskalah: The Creation of a Modern Republic of Letters in Jewish Society in the German-­Speaking Sphere, ed. Shmuel Feiner, Zohar Shavit, Natalie Naimark-­ Goldberg, and Tal Kogman (Holon: Am Oved Publishers, 2015), 55 [Hebrew]. 47. Tal Kogman, The “Maskilim” in Science: Jewish Scientific Education in the German-Speaking Sphere in Modern Time (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2013), 22–43 [Hebrew]. 48. Dafna Hirsch, We Are Here to Bring the West: Hygiene Education and Culture Building in the Jewish Society of Mandate Palestine (Sde Boker: Ben-­Gurion Institute, 2014) [Hebrew]. 49. Yeshayahu Peres, This Is the History of the School Named for the Honorable Von Lemel in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Lemel School, 1936), 7 [Hebrew]. 50. Frankl (1810–1894) established a school for blind Jewish children in Vienna in 1876. 51. The first professorship for hygiene was held by Adolf Vogt in 1876 (1823–1907) in Bern. In 1886 a chair was established in Zurich, followed by Basel in 1892 and Lausanne in 1897. See Hofmann. “Ärztliche Macht Und Ihr Einfluss.” 52. Pedro L.  Moreno Martínez, “The Hygienist Movement and the Modernization of Education in Spain,” Paedagogica Historica 42, no. 6 (2007): 793–816. 53. Stephen Petrina, “The Medicalization of Education: A Historiographic Synthesis,” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2006): 503–531. See also the special issue on education, health, and social welfare, History of Education 36, no. 6 (2007). 54. Petrina, “The Medicalization of Education.”

202 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

55. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, “Daily Happening,” HaZvi, 26 March 1897, 1, in Zipora Shehory-Rubin, “Administration and Gender in Eretz Israel: Profiles and Career Paths of Women in Educational Administration during the Late Ottoman Period, 1889-1914,” History of Education Review 44, no. 2 (2015). 56. Schore Laura A., The Best School in Jerusalem: Annie Landau‘s School for Girls, 1900-1960 (Waltham: Brandeis University, 2013). 57. “The Evelina de Rothschild School,” HaZvi, 12 April 1901 [Hebrew]. 58. Minutes of the Eighth Assembly, Protocols of the Gathering of the First Teachers in the Land of Israel, Articles for the History of Hibat Zion and the Settling of the Land of Israel, ed. Alter Druyanov (Odessa: The Committee for the Settling of the Land of Israel, 1933), 1010 [Hebrew]. 59. Report card of Zipporah Ashbel, 1909 Buildings and Buildings of Mazkeret Batya, Mazkeret Batya Archive. 60. Petrina, “The Medicalization of Education.” 61. Yehuda Antebi, Report to the Teachers’ Union, 1904, file 9.6, AJE. 62. Letter from Antebi to JCA, 15 August 1907, file J15/5557, CZA, cited in Yair Seltenreich, People from Here: Education and Educators in Galilee Moshavot During the Yishuv Era, 1882-1939 (Jerusalem and Ramat Gan: Yad Ben-Zvi and Bar-Ilan Press, 1914), 273 [Hebrew]. 63. Minutes of the Pedagogical Council, 12 October 1906, file 1.46/4.45, AJE. 64. Hillel Yaffe, “School Hygiene”, HaChinuch B (1912): 39–44 [Hebrew]. 65. Ibid. 66. Nelleke Bakker, “Fresh Air and Good Food: Children and the Anti-­ Tuberculosis Campaign in the Netherlands c. 1900-1940,” History of Education 39, no. 3 (2010): 343–361. 67. Joseph Klausner, ed., The Writings of David Yellin, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 1976), 66, in Shehory-Rubin. “Administration and Gender in Eretz Israel.” 68. Shlomo Wilkomitz, “Reply to the Teachers’ Union, 1908,” Hed HaChinuch, 29 December 1937 [Hebrew]. 69. Miklós Hadas, “The Rationalisation of the Body: Physical Education in Hungary in the Nineteenth Century,” History of Education 38, no. 1 (2009): 61–77; Vincent Stolk, Willeke Los, and Weil Veugelers, “Physical Education for Citizenship or Humanity? Freethinkers and Natural Education in the Netherlands in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” History of Education 41, no. 6 (2012): 733–748. 70. Gertrud Pfister, “Epilogue: Gymnastics from Europe to America,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 26, no. 13 (2009): 2052–2058.

6  THE BODY AS AN EDUCATIONAL OBJECT 

203

71. Hadas, “The Rationalization of the Body”; Stolk, Los, and Veugelers, “Physical Education for Citizenship or Humanity?” 72. Thierry Terret and Leomar Tesche, “French Gymnastics in Brazil: Dissemination, Diffusion and Relegalization,” The International Journal of the History of Sport, 26, no. 13 (2009): 1983–1998. 73. Johaness Westberg, “Adjusting Swedish Gymnastics to the Female Nature: Discrepancies in the Gendering of Girls’ Physical Education in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Espacio, Tiempo y Educacion 5 no. 1 (2018): 261–279, https://doi.org/10.14516/ETE.162. 74. Gertrud Pfister, “Cultural Confrontations: German Turnen, Swedish Gymnastics and English Sport – European Diversity in Physical Activities from a Historical Perspective,” Culture, Sport, Society 6, no. 1 (2003): 61–91. 75. Hadas, “The Rationalisation of the Body,” 61–77. 76. Pfister, “Cultural Confrontations.” 77. Tali Ben-Yisrael, From Theory to Practice: Physical Culture in the Culture of Pre- State Israel (Tel Aviv: Mofet Institute, 2009), 73 [Hebrew]. 78. Ernest Simon, Henrich Borrower  – Biographical List (Tel Aviv: Nahum Dreamer, 1953) [Hebrew]. 79. Isaiah Peres, One Hundred Years in Jerusalem, from the Memoirs of the Man of Jerusalem. https://benyehuda.org/read/30738 [Hebrew]. 80. Uriel Zimri, Avraham Zvi Goldschmidt – A Pioneer of Physical Education in the Land of Israel (Netanya: Wingate Institute, 1967), 8, cited in Ben-­ Yisrael, From Theory to Practice, 76. 81. Ben-Yisrael, From Theory to Practice, 76. 82. Itamar Ben-Avi, Hashkafa 39, 6 March 1906, 2 [Hebrew]. 83. Report on the Hebrew Girls’ School in Jerusalem – 1915, file 305-S/2, Education Department Files, CZA. 84. Ben-Yisrael, From Theory to Practice, 74–76. 85. Ibid. 86. George L. Mosse, “Max Nordau, Liberalism and the New Jew,” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992): 565–581. 87. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). 88. Ibid. 89. Moshe Zimmermann, “Muscular Judaism  – the Cure for Nervous Judaism,” Zmanim 83 (2003): 56–65. 90. Paul Weindling, “International Eugenics: Swedish Sterilization in Context,” Scandinavian Journal of History 24, no.2 (1999): 179–197. 91. Mosse, “Max Nordau,” 565–581. 92. Ze’ev Yavetz, The New Year for Trees (Warsaw, 1892), 5 [Hebrew]. 93. Minutes of the Third General Meeting of the Teachers’ Union, 1892, file 9.1.8, AJE.

204 

T. TADMOR-SHIMONY AND N. RAICHEL

94. Nashri, A Brief History of Physical Education, cited in Ben-Yisrael, From Theory to Practice, 86. 95. Rivkah Grabovski, Memories of Rosh Pina (Tel Aviv: AH, 1999), 43 [Hebrew]. 96. A.  Avivi, “Letter from Eretz Israel,” Hashkafa, 30 January 1907, 1 [Hebrew]. 97. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 38–59. 98. Max Nordau, Zionist Writings (Jerusalem: HaSifriya HaZionit, 1954), 117 [Hebrew]. 99. George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Gilman, The Jew’s Body. 100. Ben-Yisrael, From Theory to Practice, 77. 101. Teachers’ Meetings in the Land of Israel, HaMelitz, 26 October 1903, 4. 102. Wilkomitz, “About the Schools in our Brothers’ Colonies in Eretz Israel,” lecture, file 9.1.1, AJE; Zvi Nishri, “The Physical Education,” in Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, ed. Kimhi and Riklis, 660.



Conclusions

This book discusses the growth of a modern education system in Ottoman Palestine in two ways. One approach focuses on the processes that led to the educational outcome, and the second focuses on the actual products. The term educational outcome includes, among other factors, pedagogical approaches, perceptions regarding the student’s body and health, learning environments, the educational management structure, teacher training, and the figure of the graduate. Our attempt to understand the development of educational outcomes in Ottoman Palestine, where the government did not provide educational services, led us to opt for the use of transnational research. Hence, the question before us was how to explain the formation of modern educational institutions in a territory that, in terms of educational development, was in a different era from that of most Western countries and was similar in certain ways to territories that were the target of colonial and missionary educational activity. In Ottoman Palestine, there was no functioning ministry of education; compulsory mass education did not exist. Most Jewish educational institutions were religious, and most were for boys only. Historians of education might see these historical conditions as offering a unique opportunity to conduct a case study on the foundation of modern education, a case study in which a historian can diagnose the starting point and locate the biographies of all

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3

205

206 

CONCLUSIONS

the actors, their journeys, and patterns of activity. Thus, the first approach we employed entailed a discussion of the manner in which theories were transferred from Europe to Ottoman Palestine. This discussion used the actor-networks concept. Most such studies focus on the transition of one network or several actors from one place to another or on the phenomenon of an educational idea diffusing to different arenas. In contrast, this book presents a combination of several actors and networks operating in the same geographical area and conveying educational ideals, teaching approaches, and perceptions regarding the educational environment suitable for various educational institutions. The actors working in the modern educational institutions in Ottoman Palestine present a fascinating phenomenon because they embodied the amalgamation of diverse ideas and concepts collected while crossing state borders and cultural spheres in their travels. The book presents three transnational educational networks that operated in Ottoman Palestine: the French network Alliance Israélite Universelle, the German Hilfsverein network, and the Anglo-Jewish Association. The three networks shared ethnic solidarity, which essentially crosses geographical borders. The common denominator of the three educational networks was the infiltration, work, and assimilation of a curriculum of core studies in combination with education and regulation for hygiene and healthy living conditions. Operating alongside the networks at that time was another significant actor—Baron Rothschild, who financed and initiated the establishment of educational institutions in the moshavot and thus inaugurated local public education. Another transnational Jewish network was the JCA, which focused on Jewish colonization. This was a well-established network that owned agricultural lands, and because of the nature of its operations, it also financed educational institutions. The leading teachers (actors) had experienced a traditional Jewish way of life during their childhood, whether in Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Central Europe, or the West. The shared Jewish traditions that cross geographical and political borders attest to the transnational dimension of the Jewish people and their teachers. For example, Hannah (Annie) Landau, born in London to a religious family, ran the girls’ school in Jerusalem for many years. Landau did not believe in the Hebrew-national vision, remained faithful to the vision of the British civilizing mission, and sought to shape a generation of religious English-speaking Jewish girls and loyal daughters of the British Empire. Unlike Landau, other teachers had been schooled in a non-Hebrew Jewish educational network and they

 CONCLUSIONS 

207

embraced the Hebrew-national vision in its Zionist form. One such example was the teacher David Hayoun, a native of the Ottoman Empire who received his teacher training through the AIU network and also attended the Sorbonne. Hayoun embraced the values ​​of modernity and secularism of his new environment and clashed with his students’ conservative religious parents over the question of co-education in the primary school in the moshava of Petach Tikva. Another teacher, Yitzhak Epstein, was born in the Tsarist Empire and as a child, he received the traditional Jewish education of the heider. He moved to Odessa to attend high school and then traveled to Ottoman Palestine, where he taught in the moshavot and wrote what became a renowned textbook on the Hebrew language. His journey continued to Europe, where he studied in Lausanne, Switzerland, then graduated with a PhD in pedagogy and returned to Palestine. At each step along his journey, he collected and adopted innovative pedagogies, which he processed and then transferred to the main educational actors in Palestine. The circulation of the models of European femininity manifested in three models of the Jewish woman teacher: the unmarried female teacher, the professional female teacher who worked in the AIU network, and the revolutionary female teacher who taught at a Hebrew-speaking school and saw education as a national mission, as well as a gender-blind profession. Within a short span of time, the Hebrew schools succeeded in producing graduates who became schoolteachers and kindergarten teachers in Hebrew educational institutions, similar to those of the AIU network, which had graduates who became teachers and taught in the network’s schools. Such was the case with Yehudit Einberg Harari, a native of the Rehovot moshava, and Haim Keller, who had attended school in the Rosh Pina moshava. These teachers, the trainees of the Hebrew school, managed to shape a local identity for themselves and their students, which was more real and tangible than that of their own teachers. In this sense, these Hebrew teachers succeeded in molding a local generation that had an attachment to the land. Such efforts to shape a local identity were also reflected in the language war, which may be described as a conflict between the different transference stages of a transitional process. The Hilfsverein network was content with the first stage of transnationalism, the dissemination of German culture to Palestine, while the Hebrew teachers were in the third stage of the transference process, after processing the idea and adapting it to the local reality.

208 

CONCLUSIONS

The teachers, as graduates of the institutional teacher training courses and autodidacts, saw themselves in most cases as bearers of a cultural, social, and national mission. The modern schools saw themselves as the messengers of European modernization and treated the local parents patronizingly. In contrast, the Hebrew teachers defined themselves as the intellectual pioneers of the Hebrew-national vision, and their treatment of the parents depended on their view of the latter’s contribution to this vision. These two groups of teachers did not see the parents as equal partners in the educational endeavor and tried to keep the parents away from school. In line with their vision, the mission concept motivated teachers to take on tasks beyond the work of teaching, and some became entrepreneurs. They assembled missing textbooks, translated children’s books and pedagogy books for teachers, established a publishing house, Kohelet, and theater groups. Some became active in congregational life and others took on political roles. This study presents the distribution and circulation processes of educational approaches suitable for various educational institutions, from kindergartens, primary schools, and secondary education to teacher training and multiple actors and networks. The transfer processes are characterized by three central stages of the lending and borrowing approach: active reception, implementation, and indigenization. One example of pedagogical lending and borrowing process is the Frobel school, which was transferred to Ottoman Palestine by a German-­ born teacher who was joined by other actors who, in turn, adopted the school’s guiding principles and adapted it to local conditions. Most of the Jewish kindergarten children in Palestine grew up in homes where a majority did not speak Hebrew, but rather Yiddish, Arabic, ​​or the language of their old homeland. Teaching the Hebrew language in kindergarten was an important step in realizing the national vision. The Hebrew kindergarten laid the foundation of national ideology while also fulfilling the recognized universal role of cultivating abilities and skills. The various types of modern Jewish schools adopted the architecture of the classroom customary in Europe, comprising rows of wooden chairs and tables. The pedagogical objects in the classrooms included maps, inkwells, and, in the Herzliya Gymnasium, even stuffed animals. The Jewish schools in Palestine also adopted the architectural models of the European school buildings. Thus, the schools in the moshavot resembled village schools in Europe in shape and size, while the urban schools resembled corresponding schools in large cities in Central Europe. A particularly

 CONCLUSIONS 

209

spectacular visual example was the Herzliya Gymnasium, whose architectural entanglement illustrates the ways in which architectural styles permeate different cultures. The Gymnasium’s structure resulted from the intertwining of European cultural views regarding school structure, the native Jewish building style, and the Muslim impact. The study draws five portraits of graduates. Three portraits correspond with the three modern Jewish educational networks and they were designed by educational institutions intended for different ages (from kindergarten to primary and secondary schools, including vocational schools). The AIU network cultivated a figure of graduates capable of supporting themselves, that is, an image adapted to French culture, similar to the model advanced by the French colonialist education. The Hilfsverein network sought a modern Jewish graduate to teach in its kindergartens, and the teachers’ seminary aspired to train teachers who were well versed in the culture of the German educational methods. The AJA network focused on girls’ education and sought to shape young Jewish and Victorian women. Hebrew education sought to be revolutionary in shaping the image of its graduate. This revolution was an expression of rebellion in the societies in which most of the teachers had grown up. The two main models were the figure of the rural graduate and the figure of the urban graduate. These two portraits had in common the Hebrew language, an attachment to landscape, and a commitment to the national vision. One of the models’ common denominators was regulation of the student’s body. All the educational institutions sought to monitor the physical appearance of their students and educate them in environmental hygiene. The schools also provided health services, which was particularly valuable given the lack of a healthcare infrastructure in modern Palestine. The rationale for maintaining the students’ health and hygiene was related to the ideology of each network and the national vision. In this book, we journeyed through the intricacies of the establishment and growth of modern Hebrew educational institutions in Palestine during the Ottoman period. The modern educational institutions were built from the ground up without the pre-existing foundation of a long-­standing tradition. Their formation was not the result of many years of development. The use of transnational research, along with an analysis of transference stages and the actor-network method, assisted us in addressing the issue of growing innovative education in a territory without modern education

Bibliography

Archives Archive of Jewish Education (AJA) Central Zionist Archives (CZA) Kfar Tavor Archive Lemel School collection in Jerusalem Municipal Archive Mazkeret Batya Archive Rehovot Archives Rosh Pina Archive Yad Ben-Zvi Archive

Contemporary Newspaper [Hebrew] HaChinuch HaMeir HaMelitz Hashkafa HaTsfira HaZvi The Jewish Chronicle

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3

211

212 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Teacher’s Textbooks and Memories Azaryahu Sarah, My Life Story (Tel Aviv: Neumann, 1957), 79–80 [Hebrew] Azaryahu Yosef, “Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel,” in Kimhi Dov, ed., The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1928 (Jerusalem: Teachers’ Union, 1929) 79–89 [Hebrew] Ben-Yehuda Baruch, The Story of the Herzliya Gymnasium, (Tel Aviv: Massada Press, 1970a), [Hebrew] Carmi Ze’ev, The Way of an Educator (Haifa: Department of Education and Culture, 1965) [Hebrew] Epstein Yitzhak, Hebrew in Hebrew: The Beginning of the Teaching of the Hebrew Language According to the Natural Method – a Book for Teachers and Fathers Who Teach Children Four Years Old and Older (Warsaw: Achiasaf, 1901), 5 [Hebrew] Epstein Yitzhak, “Hebrew in Hebrew,” HaShiloach 4 (1898): 365. https://doi. org/10.1111/sena.12356 [Hebrew] Girl’s School in Jaffa, The Curriculum and the School Regulations of Girls School in Jaffa (Jaffa: Etan print house, 1911) – Grazovsky Yehuda and Ziprin Chaim. The School for the Children of Israel, (Jerusalem: M. Lunz, 1981) [Hebrew] Hayoun David, Memory, in 100 Years of Schools from Their Establishment by the Baron and the JCA-PJCA Company, ed. Baruch Oren (Petach Tikva: Petach Tikva Municipality Department of Education, 1985), 14 [Hebrew] Hayoun David‘ Diary AJA 7.33/9, n.d.-a Kirshavsky Mordechai, “Johan Amos Comenius,” HaChinuch 2 (1912): 242–247, 307–319. [Hebrew] Lunz, Moshe, n.d. “The House of Rothschild and Jerusalem,” Ben Yehuda Project, https://benyehuda.org/read/2630 [Hebrew] Nishri Zvi, “The Physical Education,” in Kimhi Dov, ed., The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1928 (Jerusalem: Teachers’ Union, 1929) 660. [Hebrew] Peres Yeshayahu, This Is the History of the School Named for the Honorable Von Lemel in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Lemel School, 1936) [Hebrew] Peres Yeshayahu, n.d. One Hundred Years in Jerusalem, from the Memoirs of the Man of Jerusalem. https://benyehuda.org/read/30738 [Hebrew] Yalin Aviezer, “Rebellion,” in Kimhi Dov, ed., The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1928 (Jerusalem: Teachers’ Union, 1929) 232–237 [Hebrew] Yavetz Ze’ev, The New Year for Trees (Warsaw: Sholdberg Brothers Press, 1892), 5 [Hebrew] Yehieli Yehiel, “Nelly Wolffhein  – The Psychological Foundations of the Work Method in Kindergartens,” HaChinuch 1 (1910): 184–186 [Hebrew]

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

213

Yudelevich David, ed. Rishon LeZion: 1882-1941 (Rishon LeZion; Carmel Mizrahi, 1941), 211 [Hebrew] Yudelevich David, “Memories of the Founders,” in Kimhi Dov, ed., The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1928 (Jerusalem: Teachers’ Union, 1929), 150 [Hebrew]

Books and Articles Aaronsohn Ran, Rothschild and Early Jewish Colonization in Palestine (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000) Aaronsohon Ran, “Sites from the Past in the First Moshavot,” in Yaffa Berlovich and Yosef Lang eds. Talking Culture with the First Aliya, (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2010), 248–264 [Hebrew] Abrams Laura S. and Curran Laura, “Between Women: Gender and Social Work in Historical Perspective,” Social Service Review 78, no. 3 (2004): 434 Adelman Clem, “‘Over Two Years, What Did Froebel Say to Pestalozzi?” History of Education 29, no. 1 (2000): 103–114 Adler R. Eliyana, In Her Hands: The Education on Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011) Adler R. Eliyana, “Rediscovering Schools for Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia,” East European Jewish Affairs 34, no. 2 (2004): 139–150 Alamos Kathleen, “Adolescence, Gender, and Class in Education Reform in France: The Development of Enseignement Primaire Supérieur, 1880–1910,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 1025–1055 Albisetti James C. n.d. “The Transnational Roots of the Froebel Educational Institute, London,” in Mayer Christine and Arredondo Adelina, Women, Power Relations and Education, 149–173 Albisetti James C., Joyce Goodman, and Rebecca Rogers (eds.), Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World: From the 18th to the 20th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Alix Sébastien-Akira, “Citizens in Their Right Place: Nation Building and Mass Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Johanne Webstberg, Lukas Boser, and Ingrid Brühwiler School Acts and the Rise of Mass Schooling, (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019) Allen Ann Taylor, “Children between Public and Private World: The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany 1840-Present,” in Roberta Lyn ed. Kindergarten and Cultures, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000(, 16–41 Allen Ann Taylor, “Gender, Professionalization, and the Child in the Progressive Era: Patty Smith Hill, 1868-1946,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 2 (2011): 112–136

214 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Ann Taylor “Feminism, Social Science, and the Meanings of Modernity: The Debate on the Origin of the Family in Europe and the United States, 1860-1914,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999) Anderson Robert, “The Idea of Secondary School in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 1–2 (2004): 93–106.] Apple Michael, “Curriculum Planning Content, Form, and the Politics of Accountability,” in Connelly, F.  Michael, et  al. eds. The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction, (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc., 2007) Arnon Sara and Reichel Nirit, “Who Is the Ideal Teacher? Am I? Similarity and Difference in Perception of Students of Education Regarding the Qualities of a Good Teacher and of Their Own Qualities as Teachers,” Teacher And Teaching: Theory and Practice 13, no. 5 (2007): 441–464 Aschheim E.  Steven, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 37–68 Auerbach Eliyahu, From the Fatherland to the Land of the Fathers: The First Jewish Doctor in Haifa (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi and the Leo Baeck Institute, 1969), 235 [Hebrew] Azaryahu Yosef, Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel (Ramat Gan: Massada, 1954), 12 [Hebrew] Bagchi Barnita, “Connected and Entangled Histories: Writing Histories of Education in the Indian Context,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 6 (2014): 1–9 Baker Alan, “Farm Schools in Nineteenth-Century France and the Case of La Charmoise, 1847-1865,” Agricultural History Review 44, no.1 (1996): 47–62 Bakker Nelleke, “Fresh Air and Good Food: Children and the Anti-Tuberculosis Campaign in the Netherlands c. 1900-1940,” History of Education 39, no. 3 (2010): 343–361 Banathy H.  Bela and Sawyer, Jesse O. “The Primacy of Speech: An Historical Sketch,” The Modern Language Journal 53, no. 8 (1969): 537–544 Bar-El Dan and Greenberg Zalman, “Disease and Cholera in Tiberias During the First World War,” Cathedra 120 (2006): 161–182 [Hebrew] Bar-Or Osnat, Home, Book. (Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 2002). [Hebrew] Bartal Israel, Cossack and Bedouin: Land and People in Jewish Nationalism (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2007a) [Hebrew] Bartal Israel, “Farming the Land on Three Continents,” Jewish History 21, no. 3–4 (2007b): 249–261 Barker K Kristin, “Medicalization and Contested Illness,” in Handbook of Medical Sociology, ed. Chloe E. Bird, Allen M. M. Fremont, Peter Conrad, and Stefan Timmermans, 6th ed. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010) Ben-Artzi Yossi, Early Jewish Settlement Patterns in Palestine, 1882-1914 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997) [Hebrew]

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

215

Ben-Aryeh Yehoshua, A City in the Mirror of Time (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1979), 353 Benglas Hanit, “Judah Leib Matmon-HaCohen: Founder of the First Hebrew Gymnasium,” MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2015) 1–30. [Hebrew] Benglas-Kaufman Hanit and Yuval Dror. “Dr. Yehuda Matman-Cohen: Founder of the Herzliya Gymnasium and urban Zionist entrepreneur of Hebrew education and culture in Europe and Israel (1869-1939)”. Dor LeDor 55, (2021) 38–84 [Hebrew] Ben-Gedelian Yochai, “Empowerment: Tzedakah, Philanthropy and Inner-Jewish Shtadlanut,” Jewish Culture and History 19, no. 1 (2018): 71–78 Ben-Rafael Eliezer and Sternberg Yitzhak, Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (Dis)order. (Boston: Brill, 2009) Ben-Yehuda Baruch, ed., The Story of the Herzliya Gymnasium (Tel Aviv: Herzliya Gymnasium Publishers, 1970b), 61–69 [Hebrew] Ben-Yisrael Tali, From Theory to Practice: Physical Culture in the Culture of Pre-­ State Israel (Tel Aviv: Mofet Institute, 2009), 73 [Hebrew] Berelowitz Yaffa, Travels in the Land of Israel of the People of the First Aliyah (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1992), 217 [Hebrew] Blount Jane, “Spinsters, Bachelors, and Other Gender Transgressors in School Employment, 1850–1990,” Review of Educational Research 70, no.1 (2000): 83–101 Brachyahu Mordechai “Hygiene Work in Schools in the Land of Israel,” in Kimhi Dov, ed., The Teachers’ Union Jubilee Book, 1903-1928 (Jerusalem: Teachers’ Union, 1929) 279–310. Brockliss Laurence and Sheldon Nicola, eds., Mass Education and the Limits of Sate Building c. 1870–1930 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Bronson Sara, “Hebrew, Old and New,” Faces: People, Places, and Cultures 21, no. 4 (2004): 26–27 Brosterman Norma, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997) Brühlmeier Arthur, Head, Heart and Hand. Education in the Spirit of Pestalozzi (Cambridge: Sophia Books in collaboration with Pestalozzi World, 2010) Bryant M. Donna and Clifford M., Richard “150 Years of Kindergarten: How Far Have We Come?,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 7 (1992): 147–154 Budde Guile, “From The ‘Zwergschule’ (One Room Schoolhouse) to the Comprehensive School: German Elementary Schools in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic, 1870-1930,” in Brockliss Laurence and Sheldon Nicola eds. Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c.1870-1930., (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 95–116 Burger Kaspar, “Entanglement and Transnational Transfer in the History of Infant Schools in Great Britain and salles d’asile in France, 1816-1881,” History of Education 43, no. 3 (2014): 304–333

216 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burke Peter, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modem Europe, ed. Peter Burke and Po-chia Hsia, Cultural Translation in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7 Byford Antony, “Turning Pedagogy into Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897–1917),” Osiris 23, no. 1 (2008): 50–81 Canales F. Anronio and Polenghi Simonetta, “Classifying Children: a Historical Perspective on Testing and Measurement,” Paedagogica Historica 55, no.3 (2019): 343–352 Cañizares-Esguerra Jorge, ed., Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) Carmi Shlomo, First Furrows in Hebrew Education: The Convention of the Hebrew Teachers in the Land of Israel and Its Place in the Annals of Education, 1892-1896, (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass Press, 1986) [Hebrew] Carmi Shlomo, “The Assembly of Hebrew Teachers in Eretz Israel (1892-1896) and Attempts to Renew Its Activities,” Cathedra 36 (June 1985a): 165–180 [Hebrew] Caruso Marcelo, “Disruptive Dynamics: The Spatial Dimensions of the Spanish Networks in the Spread of Monitorial Schooling (1815-1825,).” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 2 (2007): 271–282 Conforti Yizthak, “The Cultural Origins of Jewish Nationalism: Early Zionism and the Weight of the Pre-Modern Tradition,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 21, no. 3 (2021): 225–239, https://doi.org/10.1111/ sena.12356 Connolly Cynthia, “Pale, Poor and ‘Pretubercular’ Children: A History of Pediatric Antituberculosis Efforts in France, Germany and the United States, 1899–1929,” Nursing Inquiry 11 (2004): 139–147 Dagan Shaul, “Stubborn on the Mountain – Zichron Ya’akov and Its Daughters, 1882-1918,” in Writings and in Light of Memories (Zichron Ya’akov: The Sarah and Moshe Arizon Museum of the First Aliyah, 2012), 86–87 [Hebrew] Danforth Nicholas, “Multi-Purpose Empire: Ottoman History in Republican Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 50, no. 4 (2014): 655–678 Davie Michael F., “Local and Western Educational Institutions in Beirut: Topographical and Symbolic Domination,” in Julia Hauser, Christine B.  Lindner, and Esther Moller eds. Entangled Education: Foreign and Local Schools in Ottoman Syria and Mandate Lebanon (19–20th Centuries), (Beirut: Orient-Institute Beirut, 2016), 49–72 Dekel Nava and Thalmann Naftali, “Education and Educational Framework in the Jewish and Templar Village towards the End of the Ottoman Period,” Dor LeDor 35 (2010): 7–24 [Hebrew] Dougherty Richard, “Eros, Youth Culture and Geist: The Ideology of Gustav Wyneken and Its Influence upon the German Youth Movement,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1978a

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

217

Douwe Beijaard, Paulien C. Meijer, and Nico Verloop, “Reconsidering Research on Teachers’ Professional Identity,” Teaching and Teacher Education 20, no. 2 (2004): 107–128 Dror Yuval, National Education’ through Mutually Supportive Devices: A Case Study (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007) Dror Yuval, “The Early History of the Hebrew Technion in Haifa, 1902-1950: From the Plan of a ‘Jewish Institution of Higher Learning’ to the End of Kaplinsky’s Administration,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 6 (1996): 330–357 [Hebrew] Drucke F.  Peter “Disengaging from the Muslim Spirit: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and Moroccan Jews,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 11, no.1 (2015): 3–23 Druyanov Alter M, (ed). Minutes of the Eighth Assembly, Protocols of the Gathering of the First Teachers in the Land of Israel, Articles for the History of Hibat Zion and the Settling of the Land of Israel, (Odessa: The Committee for the Settling of the Land of Israel, 1933), 1010 [Hebrew] Eklof Ben, “The Myth of the Zamstov Schools: The Source of the Expansion of the Rural Education in Russia 1864–1904,” History of Education Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1984): 561–584 Elboim-Dror Rachel, Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel, Volume 1, 1854-1914 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1986), 78–81 [Hebrew] Elboim Dror Rachel, “The Visual Text in Historical Perspective” in House, School, ed Osnat abr- Or (Tel Aviv: Hkibutz Hamehud, 2002), 84–89 Eliav Mordechi, The First Aliya: (vol. A). (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1981) Elroy Guy, “Journey to Early-Twentieth-Century Palestine as a Jewish Immigrant Experience,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 2 (2003): 28–64 Epstein Yitzhak, Studies in the Psychology of Hebrew Language and Education (Jerusalem: Kohelet Publishers, 1947), 353 [Hebrew] Ettinger Shmoel and Bar-Tal Israel, “The Roots of the New Settlement in the Land of Israel”, In M. Eliav and Y. Rosenthal (eds.) The Book of the First Aliya, (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Yad Ben Zvi, 1981), 5–20 [Hebrew] Evans Richard J., The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australia (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1978) Even-Zohar Basmat, “The Inclusion of Children in the Hebrew Initiative in 1880-1905,” Dor LeDor 36 (2011): 40–42 [Hebrew] Feiner Shmuel, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 1–84 Feiner Shmuel, “Educational Pragmatism and Social Ideals: The Janisch Freyschule in Berlin 1778-1825,” Zion 64 (1995): 393–424 [Hebrew] Fellman Jack, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 48–53

218 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fogiel-Bijaoui Sylvie, “Un Chemin D’émancipation: Alliance Israélite Universelle Et Les Femmes Juives De Palestine (1872-1939),” Archives Juives 46, no. 1 (2013): 107–119 (French) Forrest Mary and Ingram Valerie Kelly Johnson, “The Nature-Study Movement,” Green Teacher 99 (2013): 16–20. “School Gardens in Ireland, 1901-24”, Garden History 31, no. 1 (2003): 80–94 Fortney C. Benjamin “Education and Change in the Late Ottoman Empire and Turkey,” Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society 10, no. 1 (2018): 44–62 Frankel Jonathan, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews 1860-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1986), 6 Frankel Jonathan, “ ‘Ritual Murder’ in the Modern Era,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 1–16 Freidenreich Harriet, Female, Jewish and Educated (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 1–132 Freire Paulo, Pedagogy of the Heart, trans. Donalso Macedo and Alexandre Oliveira (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016) Fuchs Eckhardt, “History of Education beyond the Nation? Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship,” in Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere eds. Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-­ Cultural Exchanges in (Post-) Colonial Education, (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 20 Gertel Gil, Wandering Eye – The Beginning of Youth Movement Trips 1912-1942 (The Council for Research of Youth Movements, 2016), 113–127 [Hebrew] Gibson Margaret, “Immigrant Adaptation and Patterns of Acculturation,” Human Development, 44 (2001): 19–23 Gilboa Menuhin, Lexicon of the Hebrew Press in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Tel Aviv: Bialik Institute, 1992), 119–136 [Hebrew] Gilman Sander, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991) Gleason Mona, “Metaphor, Materiality, and Method: The Central Role of Embodiment in the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica, 54: 1–2 (2018): 4–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2017.1355328 Goffman Erving, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) Golden Dvora, “Storytelling the Future: Israelis, Immigrants, and the Imagining Community,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2002): 477–508 Goldin Claudia, Understanding the Gender Gap (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 160–170 Goldstein Yossi, “The Beginnings of Hiba Zion: A Different Perspective,” AJS Review 40, no. 1 (2016): 33–55 Goodman Joyce and Martin Jane. Gender, Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Experience (London: Woburn Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.4324/97 80203760918

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

219

Gonçalves Vidal Diana, “Transnational Education in the Late Nineteenth Century: Brazil, France and Portugal Connected by a School Museum,” History of Education 46, no. 2 (2017): 22–241 Gordon Aaron David, The Writings of Aaron David Gordon (Jerusalem: HaSifriya HaTzionit, 1982), 74 [Hebrew] Gordon Gil, “A Canary in the Bedroom: The Schneller Protestant Mission and the Beginning of the Education for the Blind in the Holy Land during the Late Ottoman Period,” Cathedra 151 (2015): 102–132 [Hebrew] Gordon Re’ut, “Education, Architecture, Society: The History of School Construction in Israel” Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2013) [Hebrew] Goren Haim 130 Years to Rosh Pinna. (Rosh Pinna Local Council, 2010) [Hebrew] Grabovski Rivkah, Memories of Rosh Pina (Tel Aviv: AH, 1999), 43 [Hebrew] Green Abigail, “Sir Moses Montefiore and the Making of the ‘Jewish International’,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7, no. 3 (2008): 287–307 Gross Nahum, “The Land of Israel’s Economy in the Late Ottoman Period,” in Israel Kolatt ed. The History of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine Since the First Aliyah – The Ottoman Period, vol. 2, (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences, 2003), 279–308 [Hebrew] Hadani Ever, Settlement in the Lower Galilee (Ramat Gan: Massada and the Farmers’ Association of the Lower Galilee, 1955), [Hebrew] Hadas Miklós, “The Rationalisation of the Body: Physical Education in Hungary in the Nineteenth Century,” History of Education 38, no.1 (2009): 61–77 Haramati Shlomo, First Three Teachers (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1985b), 48–55 [Hebrew] Haramati Shlomo, The Pioneer Teachers (Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 2000), 67–70 [Hebrew] Haramati, Shlomo, “Approaches and Methods for Teaching the Hebrew Language,” Orchot A (1962): 9–11 [Hebrew] Harel Saar. The School in Kfar Tabor: The first principals and the surrounding community in the years 1903-1917. MA Thesis. (Tel Aviv University: School of Education, 2008) [Hebrew]. Heckman Alma and Malino Frances, “Packed in Twelve Cases: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 19, no. 1 (2012): 53–69 Heggie Vanessa, “Domestic and Domesticating Education in the Late Victorian City,” History of Education 40, no. 3 (2011): 273–290, https://doi.org/1 0.1080/0046760X.2010.529832 Heisman Mordechai, The Pioneers of the Hula (Yesod HaMa’ala: Moetzet HaPoalim, 1958), 134–136 [Hebrew] Herrlitz Hans-Georg and Hartmut Wulf Hopf Titze, Ernst Cloer, Deutsche Schulgeschichte von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart: eine Einführung (Weinheim: Juventa, 1993) [German]

220 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hirsch Dafna, We Are Here to Bring the West: Hygiene Education and Culture Building in the Jewish Society of Mandate Palestine (Sde Boker: Ben-Gurion Institute, 2014) [Hebrew] Hirsch Louise, From the Shtetl to the Lecture Hall: Jewish Women and Cultural Exchange (Lanham: University Press of America, 2013) Hofmann Michèle, “Ärztliche Macht Und Ihr Einfluss Auf Den Schulalltag in Der Schweiz Im Ausgehenden 19. Und Beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert,” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 1 (2015): 1–16 [German] Howlett John, “Romanticism,” in Progressive Education: A Critical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 35–68 Horshi Aryeh, Mikveh Israel (Tel Aviv: Lichtenfeld Publishers, 1983) [Hebrew] Hyman E. Paula “Discovering Puah Rakovsky,” Nashim 7 (2004): 97–115 Johnson Kelly, “The Nature-Study Movement,” Green Teacher 99 (2013): 16–20 Kandel Isaac Leon, The Training of Elementary School Teachers in Germany (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1910) Kaniel Yehoshua, The Second Aliya: (vol. B) Sources. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-­ Zvi, 1997) [Hebrew], 298–300 Kanner Efi, “Transcultural Encounters: Discourses on Women’s Rights and Feminist Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Turkey from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Interwar Period,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (2016): 66–92. Kennedy Katharine D., “Eastern Borderlands in German Schoolbooks, 1890-1945,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 1 (2007): 29–43 Kessler Daniel, “The Jewish Community in Nineteenth-Century Palestine: Evidence from the Montefiore Censuses.” Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 6 (2016): 996–1010 Key Ellen Karolina Sofia, The Century of the Child, trans. Marie Franzos (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909) Klausner Joseph, A Nation and Land Come to Life, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Yavne Publishers, 1944) [Hebrew] Koerrenz Ralf, Blichmann Annika, and Engelmann Sebastian Alternative Schooling and New Education: European Concepts and Theories (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2018) Kogman Tal, The “Maskilim” in Science: Jewish Scientific Education in the German-­ Speaking Sphere in Modern Time (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2013), 22–43 [Hebrew] Krinkin Dov, “Trachoma in Schools in the Land of Israel, and the Means of Fighting this Disease,” HaChinuch A (1914): 21–56 [Hebrew] Kristal Renana, “Processes and Trends in Education for Blind Children in Israel (1902-1959)” (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University, 2022) Kroyanker David, The German Colony and Emek Refaim Street (Tel Aviv: Keter Publishers, 2008) [Hebrew]

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

221

Kushner David, “Ottoman Rule in Palestine during the Second Aluya Period”, in The Second Aliya-Studies, ed Bartal Israel (JerusalemYad: Izhak Ben Zvi, 1997) 60–74 Lackney Jeffery, “History of the Schoolhouse in the USA,” in Schools for the Future: Design Proposals from Architectural Psychology, ed. Rotraut Walden (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2015), 23 Lake Marilyn and Curthoys Anne, “Introduction,” in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake eds. Connected Worlds History in Transnational Perspective, (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2005), 5 Lamberti Marjorie, “German Schoolteachers, National Socialism, and the Politics of Culture at the End of the Weimar Republic,” Central European History 34, no. 1 (2001): 53–82 Lang Yosef, “The Educational Crisis in Rehovot, 1903-1905: From the Notebooks of Yitzhak Cohen, the Talmud Torah Teacher in Rehovot,” Dor LeDor 23 (2003): 71–122 [Hebrew] Lang Yosef, “University or Yeshiva as in Yavne? Comment and Clarifications regarding Education in Gedera,” Dor LeDor 35 (2010): 25–64 [Hebrew] Lang, Yosef, “Eliezer Ben-Yehuda  – a Hebrew Teacher at Hatora Vehamelacha School,” Cathedra 56 (1990): 93–108 [Hebrew] Larson Magali Sarfatti, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) Laskar Michael, “Avrham Albert Antebi”, in Tzahor Zeev. The Second Aliya: (vol. C) Biographies. (Jerusalem::Yad Izhak, Ben-Zvi, 1997) [Hebrew] 280–286 Leaff Lisa Moses, “Jewish Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century France: The Evolution of a Concept,” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 1 (2002): 33–61 Lem Zvi, In the Whirlwind of Ideologies: The Foundations of Education in the Twentieth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002) [Hebrew] Leroux Karen, “Public Service in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no.1 (2009): 36–42 Levin-Epstein Eliahu Ze’ev, My Memories (Tel-Aviv: Levin-Epstein Brothers, 1932) Levin Yehuda, “Labor and Land at the Start of Jewish Settlement in Argentina,” Jewish History 21, no. 204 (2007): 341–359 Levin Yehuda, “Education of the Younger Generation in the JCA Colonies in Argentina until the First World War,” Dor LeDor, 35 (2011): 179–202 [Hebrew] Malino Frances, “Prophets in Their Own Land? Mothers and Daughters of the Alliance Israélite Universelle,” Nashim 3 (2000): 56–73 Maria del Mar del Poza Andrés and Sjaak Braster, “The Power of Networks in the Marketing of Pedagogical Ideals: The Dalton Plan in Great Britain (1920-1925),” History of Education 47, no. 6 (2018): 840–864 Mathews Jay, “Tips for a Better Parent-School Relationships: A Few Suggestions from Both Sides of the Discussion,” The Washington Post, October 17, 2006

222 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

May Helen, Nawrotzki Kristen, and Prochner Larry, eds., Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education: Transnational Investigations (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) Mayer Christine, “Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow’s Education of the Children in Rural Communities and Its Impact on Urban Educational Reforms in the Eighteenth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 1 (2003): 19–35. McCulloch Gary, “Empires and Education: The British Empire”, in Robert Cowen and Andreas Kazamias eds. International Handbook of Comparative Education, (New York: Springer, 2009) 170–178 Meitlis Ofra, On the Middle Path: David Yellin – A Life Story, Dor LeDor (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2015) [Hebrew] Merchavia Haim, ed., The Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem, Jubilee Book 1909-1949 (Jerusalem: The Association of Supporters of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem, 1962) Michelson, Udi and Lapidot Aaron. (Eds.). Gymnasium Herzliya  – a Hundred Years. (NDD Media, 2004), [Hebrew] Milewski Patrice, “Medico-Science and School Hygiene: A Contribution to a History of the Senses in Schooling,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 3 (2014): 285–300 Moreno Martínez Pedro, “The Hygienist Movement and the Modernization of Education in Spain,” Paedagogica Historica 42, no. 6 (2007): 793–816 Mosse George, “Max Nordau, Liberalism and the New Jew,” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992): 565–581 Mosse George, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) Naor Mordechai, The Book of Mazkeret Batya  – Ekron, The First 100 Years (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2010) Nahir Moshe, “Micro Language Planning and the Revival of Hebrew: A Schematic Framework,” Language in Society 27 (1998): 335–357 Navot Orit and Gross Moshe, “The Campaign against Trachoma: The Beginnings of Public Health in Eretz Israel,” Cathedra 94 (1999): 89–114 [Hebrew] Neiman David, Mazkeret Batya: Eighty-Five Years Since the Arrival of the First Members of Ekron in Mikve Yisrael (Tel Aviv Central press, 1968) [Hebrew] Nordau Max, Zionist Writings (Jerusalem: HaSifriya HaZionit, 1954), 117 [Hebrew] Ofek Uriel, Hebrew Children’s Literature, 1900-1948, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1988), 533 [Hebrew] Ogen Yitzhak, ed., That Which Was: Memorial Book for Asher Ehrlich, OBM (Tel Aviv: Achdut Press, 1949), [Hebrew]. Oram Alison, n.d. Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester Press)

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

223

Parke Joan R., “Lydia Becker’s ‘School for Science’: A Challenge to Domesticity,” Women’s History Review 10, no. 4 (2001): 629–650, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09612020100200609 Parush Iris, “Gender, Penmanship and the Primacy of Speech over Writing in the Jewish Society of Galicia and Eastern Europe in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Nashim 16 (2007): 29–66 Penslar, Derek Jonathan “French Influences on Jewish Agriculture in Palestine, 1882-1914,” Cathedra 62 (1991): 54–66 [Hebrew] Petrina Stephen, “The Medicalization of Education: A Historiographic Synthesis,” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2006): 503–531 Pfister Gertrud, “Cultural Confrontations: German Turnen, Swedish Gymnastics and English Sport – European Diversity in Physical Activities from a Historical Perspective,” Culture, Sport, Society 6, no. 1 (2003): 61–91 Polland Annie, “ ‘May a Freethinker Help a Pious Man?’: The Shared World of the ‘Religious’ ‘R’ and the ‘Secular’ ‘S’ among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to America. (Essay).” American Jewish History 93, no. 4 (2007): 375–407 Porter Dorothy, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Time (London: Routledge, 1991) Prentice Alison and Theobald Marjorie R., Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) Proctor Helen and Burns Kellie, “The Connected Histories of Mass Schooling and Public Health,” History of Education Review 46, no. 2 (2017): 19 Pym Anthony and Ayvazyan Nune, “Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting in Foreign-Language Teaching Contexts,” in Kirsten Malmkjaer ed. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Linguistics, (London: Routledge, 2017) Raftery Deirdre, “Teaching Sisters and Transnational Networks: Recruitment and Education Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century,” History of Education 44, no. 6 (2015): 717–728 Reichel Nirit, “Between the Dream and the Reality: Vocational Education in Israel, 1948-1992,” Israel Affairs 19, no. 3 (2013): 542–561 Raichel Nirit, “The First Hebrew Teachers in Eretz Israel: Characteristics, Difficulties and Coping Methods (1881-1914),” History of Education 37, no. 5 (2008): 95–113 Raichel Nirit, “The First Hebrew’ Gymnasiums’ in Israel: Social Education as the Bridge between Ideological Gaps in Shaping the Image of the Desirable High School Graduate,” Israel Affairs 17, no. 4 (2011): 604–620 Raichel Nirit, “Study Books as Agents of General Education at the Beginning of Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel,” Waves of Study and Research 2 (2003): 35–49 [Hebrew] Raichel Nirit, “The Role of Teacher and Kindergarten Training in Building Hebrew-National Culture,” Eyunim Behinuch  – Studies in Education, no. 15/16 (2017): 39–69. [Hebrew]

224 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raichel Nirit, “The Israeli Pupil at the Beginning of Hebrew Education: The Reality Between Two Ideal Images,” Zemanim no. 72 (2000): 65–75 [Hebrew] Raichel Nirit, “The Design of the ‘New Hebrew’ between Image and Reality: A Portrait of the Student in Eretz Yisrael at the Beginning of ‘Hebrew Education’ (1882–1948),” Israel Affairs 21, no. 4 (2015): 633–647 Raichel Nirit, “The Ideal Teacher,” Hed HaChinuch  – Journal of the Israeli Teachers’ Union 85, no. 5 (2010): 60–63 [Hebrew] Raichel Nirit and Tadmor Shimony Tali, Intercultural Meeting in the School Yard – Hebrew Education in the Moshavot of the Baron and JCA from the 1880s until 1914, (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2020) [Hebrew] Raichel Nirit and Arnon Sara, “A Multicultural View of the Good Teacher in Israel,” Teacher And Teaching: Theory and Practice 15, no. 1 (2009): 59–85 Redmond Jennifer and Harford Judith, “One Man One Job: The Marriage Ban and the Employment of Women Teachers in Irish Primary Schools,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 5 (2010): 639–654 Regev Yoav, Menachmiya – Melachmiya, (Netanya: Ariel, 2018), 41 ]Hebrew] Rieger Eliezer The Hebrew Education in Eretz-Israel. Vol 1(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1940) [Hebrew] Rinot Moshe, Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden in Creation and Struggle (Jerusalem Hebrew university, Ministry of Education and Culture and Haifa University, 1971) [Hebrew] Rinot Moshe, “Education in the Land of Israel, 1882–1918,” in The History of the Jewish Community in the Land of Israel from the First Aliyah, the Ottoman Period, vol. 1, ed. Israel Kolatt (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1990), 50–94 [Hebrew] Roberta Lyn, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) Roberta Lyn Wollons, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) Rodrigue Aron, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1996) Rodrigue Aron, Education, Society, and History: Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jews of the Mediterranean Basin, 1860-19franc29 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1991), 49–80 [Hebrew] Rodrigue Aron, Image of Sephardi and Eastern Jews in Transition (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993) Rogers Rebecca, “Conversations about the Transnational: Reading and Writing the Empire in the History of Education,” in Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs eds. The Transnational in the History of Education Concepts and Perspectives, (Chicago: Loyola University, 2019), 101–124 Rogers Rebecca, “Telling Stories about the Colonies: British and French Women in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century,” Gender & History 21, no. 1 (2009): 39–59.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

225

Rogers Rebecca, “Language Learning versus Vocational Training: French, Arab and British Voices Speak About Indigenous Girls’ Education in Nineteenth-­ Century Colonial Algeria,” Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 3 (2012): 369–379 Rogers Rebecca, “Boarding Schools, Women Teachers, and Domesticity: Reforming Girls’ Secondary Education in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” French Historical Studies 19 no.1 (1995): 153–181 Roldán Eugenia Vera and Fuchs Eckhardt, “Introduction: The Transnational in History of Education,” in Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs eds. The Transnational in the History of Education Concepts and Perspectives, (Chicago: Loyola University, 2019), 1–49 Roldán Vera Eugenia and Thomas Schupp, “Network Analysis in Comparative Social Sciences,” Comparative Education 42, no. 3 (2006): 405–429, in Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs eds. The Transnational in the History of Education Concepts and Perspectives, (Chicago: Loyola University, 2019), 25 Romi Shlomo and Schmida Miriam, eds., Informal Education in a Changing Reality (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2007). [Hebrew] Rosentha Rubik, Yosef Dan, Yirmiyahu Yuval, Yair Zaban, David Shaham, and Derek Jonathan Pensler, eds., New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age, Volume 2: Social and National Movements  – Religious Society Facing Secularization and Modernization: Hebrew and Jewish Languages, (Jerusalem: Keter Publishers, Lambda – the Association for Modern Jewish Culture, 2007), 323 [Hebrew] Rosner Shlomo, Mikve Israel (Jerusalem: Government Publishing Office, 1970) [Hebrew] Rosenfeld Shlomi. (Ed.). A Hundred Years of…The story of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem. The Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem. (Jerusalem, The Hebrew Gymnasium, 2009), 5–46 [Hebrew]. Rusu Carmen, Şoitu Laurentiu, and Panaitea Oana, “The Ideal Teacher. Theoretical and Investigative Approach,” Procedia  – Social and Behavioral Sciences 33 (2012): 1017–1021 Saadon, Haim (Ed.). To Serve their People in their Way: ‘Alliance Isra’elite Universelle’ and the advancement of the Jewish Communities in the Islamic Lands.) Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2021) [Hebrew] Salmon Yosef, Religion and Zionism (Jerusalem: HaSifriya HaTzionit, 1990), 137–138 [Hebrew] Saposnik Arieh Bruce, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) Sazmet Miriam, “Jewish Pedagogues and the Pedagogical Discourse in Palestine, 1880  – 1935” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017), 56 [Hebrew] Schalz Simon, “The Historical Development of School Building in Germany,” in Walden, Schools for the Future, 48–49.Seltenreich Yair, “Cultural Aspects of

226 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Philanthropy: Belle E’poque Administrators and Jewish Peasants in the Galilee,” Mediterranean Historical Review 23, no. 1 (2008): 35–51 Schore Laura A., The Best School in Jerusalem: Annie Landau’s School for Girls, 1900-1960 (Waltham: Brandeis University, 2013), 7–8 Sciarcon Jonathan, “Expanding the Mission: The Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Jewish Boys’ School in Basra, 1890-1903,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 9, no. 3 (2015): 191–207 Seltenreich Yair, “A Diary, an Educator, a Man: The Reflection of a Galilean Teacher’s Life through his Diaries,” Dor LeDor 25 (2005): 2–27 [Hebrew] Seltenreich Yair, “Cultural Aspects of Philanthropy: Belle Époque Administrators and Jewish Peasants in the Galilee,” Mediterranean Historical Review 23, no. 1 (2008): 35–51 Seltenreich Yair, People from Here: Education and Educators in Galilee Moshavot During the Yishuv Era, 1882-1939 (Jerusalem and Ramat Gan: Yad Ben-Zvi and Bar-Ilan Press, 1914), 181–207 [Hebrew] Seltenreich Yair, “The Solitude of Rural Teachers: Hebrew Teachers in Galilee Moshavot at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 5 (2015): 1–16 Shapira Joseph, 100 Years of Mikve Israel (Tel Aviv: Division of Culture and Education, 1970) [Hebrew] Shavit Zohar, “On the Publication of a Bilingual Anthology by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Haim Calmy,” Zion, 81 nos. 3–4 (2016): 452–453 [Hebrew] Shavit Jakobe, “French Spirt and French Culture in the Jewish Settlement in the Land of Israel, 1882-1914,” Cathedra 62 (1982): 37–53 [Hebrew]. Margalit Shilo, The Challenge of the Gender: Women in the Early Yishuv (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007) [Hebrew] Shavit Jakobe, “Culture and Culture State: Basic Development in Hebrew Culture during the Second Alyia”, in The Second Aliya- Studies, ed Bartal Israel (Jerusalem:Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1997 Shehory-Rubin Zipora, “Hebrew Kindergarten Teachers during the First and Second Aliyot,” Dor LeDor 19 (2002): 153–194 [Hebrew] Shehory-Rubin Zipora, “Administration and Gender in Eretz Israel: Profiles and Career Paths of Women in Educational Administration during the Late Ottoman Period, 1889-1914,” History of Education Review 44, no.2 (2015): 253–367 Shehory-Rubin Zipora, “Characteristics of ‘The Eretz-Israeli Female Sabra’: Natives of Eretz-Israel from the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv,” Dor LeDor 49 (2016); 237–286 [Hebrew] Shilo Margalit, “A Cross Cultural Message: The Case of Evelina de Rothschild,” in Margalit Shilo, Ruth Kark, and Galit Hasan Rokem eds. Women and Gender in the Yishuv and the State of Israel, (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2001), 229–247 [Hebrew]

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

227

Shimkin Nahum, “Trachoma in Palestine: Its Epidemiology and Review of Measures for Dealing with It,” British Journal of Ophthalmology 10, no. 5 (1926): 247–279 Shteiman Yehudit, “The Formation of the New Hebrew Child as Part of a Cultural Building Process in the Beginning of the 20th Century in Eretz Israel” Ph.D. diss., (Tel Aviv University, 2002) [Hebrew] Shulman Lee S., “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform,” Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 1 (April 1987a): 1–23 Simon Ernest, Henrich Borrower – Biographical List (Tel Aviv: Nahum Dreamer, 1953) [Hebrew] Sina Alenn, “The Campaign for Universal Primary Education in Russia, 1890–1904,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge 30 (1982) 482–507 [German] Sjaak Braster, “The People, the Poor, and the Oppressed: The Concept of Popular Education through Time,” Paedagogica Historica, 47, no. 1–2 (2011): 1–14 Skarlatou Amalia, Evanescent Happiness: Ottoman Jews Encounter Modernity – the Case of Lea Mitrani and Joseph Niego (1863–1923) (MA thesis, University of Maryland, 2010): 71–124 [Hebrew] Sleeter Christine E. and Grant Carl A. “Race, Class, Gender and Disability in Current Textbooks,” in The Politics of the Textbook, ed. Michael Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) Shulman Lee S., “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform,” Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 1 (April 1987b): 1–23 Sobe Noah W., “Entanglement and Transnationalism,” in Rethinking the History of Education  – Transnational Perspective on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge, ed. Thomas S.  Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 93–106 Spodek Bernard and Saracho Olivia N, Right from the Start: Teaching Children Ages Three to Eight (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1994) Stamper Shaulr, The Lithuanian Yeshiva in Its Creation (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2005) Stampfer Saul, “The Cheder – Learning Torah and Preserving the Social Fabric,” in Emmanuel Etkes and David Assaf eds. The Cheder Research, Documents on Chapters of Literature and Memory, (Tel-Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2010), 37–56 [Hebrew] Stampfer Shaul. “Traditional Education and the Appearance of New Types of Schools before the First World War.” In Sirutavicius, Vladas, et al. The History of Jews in Lithuania From the Middle Ages to the 1990s. Edited by Martyn Housden and Gustavs Strenga,)Schoningh: Brill, 2019), 202–215 Steiner-Khamsi Gita and Popkewitz Thomas, The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending (New York: New York Teacher College Press, 2004)

228 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Steinman Yehudit, “Teachers as Culture Entrepreneurs – A Case Study: Teachers at the Girls’ School in Jaffa in the Early Twentieth Century,” Dor LeDor 36, (2010) [Hebrew] Stites Richard, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978b), 87–93 Tadmor Shimony Tali, ‘The Shaping of Landscape Identity by Israeli State Education during the 1950s-1960s’, Paedagogica Historica International Journal of History of Education, 49 no.2, (2013): 236–252 Tadmor-Shimony Tali, “Professional Identity, and Familial Life in the Yishuv Area: The Married Women Teacher” Israel 26 (2021), 1–20 [Hebrew] Tadmor-Shimony Tali, “Cultivating the Soil as an Educational Message in Israeli Schools during the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 10, no.1 (2011): 23–42 Terret Thierry and Tesche Leomar “French Gymnastics in Brazil: Dissemination, Diffusion and Relegalization,” The International Journal of the History of Sport, 26, no. 13 (2009): 1983–1998 Tickle Les, “Teacher Self-Appraisal and Appraisal of Self,” in The Role Of Self in Teacher Development, ed. Richard P. Lipka and Thomas M. Brinthaupt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 121–142 Tidhar David, n.d.-b Encyclopedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel, vol. 1, p. 301, http://www.tidhar.tourolib.org/tidhar/view/1/301 [Hebrew] Trouvé-Finding Susan, “Teaching as a Woman’s Job: The Impact of the Admission of Women to Elementary Teaching in England and France in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” History of Education 34, no. 5 (2005): 483–496 Walden Tsvia and Shehory-Rubin Zipora, From Kindergarten, Not from Birth: The Contribution of the Hebrew Kindergarten and Its Teachers to the Renewal of Hebrew as a Mother Tongue, 1898-1936 (Beer-Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2018), 8 [Hebrew] Wallach Yair, “Rethinking the Yishuv: Late-Ottoman Palestine’s Jewish Communities Revisited,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, no.2 (2017): 275–294 Watts Ruth, “Julia Lloyd and the Kindergarten Networks: A Local Case Study in a Transnational Setting,” in Christine Mayer and Adelina Arredondo, eds. Women, Power Relations, and Education in a Transnational World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 123–147 Weiler Kathleen, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) Weindling Paul, “International Eugenics: Swedish Sterilization in Context,” Scandinavian Journal of History 24, no.2 (1999): 179–197

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

229

Westberg Johaness, “Adjusting Swedish Gymnastics to the Female Nature: Discrepancies in the Gendering of Girls’ Physical Education in the Mid-­ Nineteenth Century,” Espacio, Tiempo y Educacion 5 no. 1 (2018): 261–279, https://doi.org/10.14516/ETE.162 Wheeler Garon, Language Teaching through the Ages (New York and London: Routledge, 2013) Whitehead Kay, “Post War Headteachers’ Perspectives of ‘Good’ Teachers,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 35. no.1 (2003): 23–35 Whitehead Kay and Peppard Judith, “Placing the Grandy Sisters as Teachers in Pre-Confederation Newfoundland,” Historical Studies in Education 17, no. 1 (2005): 81–105 Wigen Einar, “Ottoman Concepts of Empire,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 8, no. 1 (2013): 44–66 Willeke Los, and Weil Veugelers, “Physical Education for Citizenship or Humanity? Freethinkers and Natural Education in the Netherlands in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” History of Education 41, no. 6 (2012): 733–748 Wilhelm Frans, “Foreign Language Teaching and Learning in the Netherlands 1500-2000: An Overview,” Language Learning Journal 46, no. 1 (2018): 17–27 Wilfried Decoo, Systemization in Foreign Language Teaching: Monitoring Content Progression (New York: Routledge, 2010) Yankelevich Esti, “Agricultural Education in the Agricultural High Schools in Palestine, 1870-1948” (Ph.D. diss.(, Haifa University, 2004) Zalḳin Mordekhai, Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth Century Eastern Europe : the School as the Shrine of the Jewish Enlightenment. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Zedkiayu, Shlomo, n.d. “Social Education in School,” in Romi and Schmida, Informal Education in a Changing Reality, 379–386, 393–398 Zimmermann Moshe, “Muscular Judaism  – the Cure for Nervous Judaism,” Zmanim 83 (2003): 56–65 [Hebrew]

Index1

A Actor, 7, 11 educational, 5, 23, 43, 46, 74, 78, 109, 175, 197, 207 European, 2, 72, 77, 108, 159 Jewish, 12, 14, 15, 36n20, 47, 77, 109, 178 non-state, 4, 13, 14, 16 transnational, 4, 194 Agriculture agricultural studies, 123, 131, 132, 134 Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), 1–3, 14, 17–19, 32–34, 51, 55, 67, 72, 73, 84, 87–89, 93, 105n178, 110, 112, 114–120, 132, 141, 144n36, 156, 157,

159, 161–163, 167, 191, 207, 209 AIU network, 1, 2, 17–19, 32, 67, 72, 85, 87–89, 105n178, 114–116, 118–120, 132, 141, 157, 159, 162, 163, 191, 207, 209 AIU school, 51, 110, 117–119, 157, 163, 191 Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA), 17, 33, 48, 77, 84, 112, 141, 209 AJA network, 84, 112, 209 Anschauung, 2, 23, 78, 79, 101n132 Antebi, Yehuda, 57, 95n32, 99n93, 133, 187, 202n61, 202n62 Asile d’enfants, 55–57

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Tadmor-Shimony, N. Raichel, Jewish and Hebrew Education in Ottoman Palestine through the Lens of Transnational History, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34926-3

231

232 

INDEX

B Baron Edmund de Rothschild, 28, 30, 31, 33, 40n71, 49, 50, 55, 57, 88, 91, 114, 126, 157, 162, 178, 179, 185, 198n5, 206 Belkind, Israel, 63, 98n91, 129, 147n75, 180 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer, 55, 86, 87, 93, 94n14, 96n48, 97n72, 98n79, 98n83, 98n89, 98n90, 104n167, 105n177, 148n100, 154, 192, 202n55 Berne University, 22, 165 Bildung, 75, 101n118, 107, 190 Body, 8, 13, 53, 54, 74, 78, 79, 92, 175, 181, 185, 190–197, 205, 209 C Carmi Ze’ev, 38n48, 80, 95n31, 95n32, 95n33, 102n146, 130, 147n75, 147n80, 166, 169n10, 173n65, 183, 200n39 Cohen-Reiss, Ephraim, 16, 125 Colonialism, 70, 108, 115 Compulsory education law, 45 Corporeal activity, 8, 175, 189, 191 Curriculum 1904, 121, 195 formal, 136, 137, 140 informal, 137 seminary, 71 Western-Central European curriculum, 7, 43 D Dewey, John, 6, 152 Diffusion, 6, 7, 12, 43, 55, 71, 81, 114, 153, 180 Domestic education, 17, 113

E École Normale Israélite Orientale(ENIO), 1, 6, 18, 33, 37n27, 68, 74, 87, 94n14, 157, 162 Educational object, 59, 175 Ehrlich, Asher, 80, 102n144, 132, 133, 148n92, 195 Elias, Norbert, 185 Epstein, Yitzhak, 21, 52, 78, 79, 89, 102n135, 105n189, 105n191, 130, 155, 170n13, 197, 199n18, 207 Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls, 16, 17, 48, 56, 69, 77, 81, 83, 105n178, 110–114, 141, 161, 186, 192, 202n57 F Farmer, 126–134 Femininity, 113, 168, 207 Foreign language, 15, 33, 60, 85, 86, 93, 110, 111, 121, 126, 134 Frobel, Fredrich, 80, 81, 208 Froebelian kindergarten, 55, 81, 102n150 Froebel Seminary, 69, 84 G German seminaries, 121, 122 Gymnasium, 60–66, 70, 72, 97n72, 98n78, 98n84, 98n89, 99n93, 138, 140, 149n112, 157, 182, 192, 196, 209 graduate, 66 Herzliya Gymnasium, 32, 34, 63–65, 67, 72, 97n72, 98n77, 98n79, 98n83, 98n89, 98n90, 134, 136, 148n100, 179, 182, 208

 INDEX 

Hebrew Gymnasium in Jaffa, 60, 66, 192 Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem, 60, 98n89, 98n91, 99n93 H Machinic, 23, 38n53, 38n54, 39n56, 39n63, 153, 169n2, 184, 188, 200n23, 200n25, 201n44, 202n64, 202n68 Hayton, David, 1, 2, 8n1, 9n3, 132, 147n89, 176, 198n2, 207 Hebrew Hebrew children, 27, 155 Hebrew Kindergarten, 55–57, 96n49, 96n51, 103n157, 103n162, 103n163, 171n32, 172n45 Hebrew national, 61, 66, 125, 134, 137, 141 Hebrew school teachers, 19, 90 Holstein network, 18, 19, 33, 57, 63, 67, 68, 70–72, 75, 77, 81, 84, 91, 105n178, 120, 121, 123, 125, 156, 206, 207, 209 seminary, 67, 124, 145n50, 154 filasterean Der Deutschen Juden, 14 Hovevei Zion, 13, 27, 31, 34, 60, 61, 63, 67–69, 72, 92, 100n103, 161 Hygiene, 92, 185–189, 199n9, 199n20, 200n33, 201n42, 201n48, 202n64 Hygiene movement, 185–189 J Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), 1, 9n3, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 40n82, 46, 49–54, 57, 68, 91, 126–128, 132, 146n71,

233

147n89, 147n90, 148n92, 178, 179, 202n62, 206 Jewish Enlightenment, 15, 115, 193, 196 Jüdische Freischule, 45 K Kfar Tavor, 31, 50, 51, 57, 80, 132, 133, 148n91, 178, 187 L Landau, Annie (Hannah), 17, 36n19, 48, 77, 101n125, 112–114, 143n16, 160, 161, 187, 202n56, 206 Laxer, Miriam, 55 Lending and borrowing approach, 6, 7, 74, 80, 92, 208 Levinsky Seminary for Teachers and Kindergarten Teachers, 22, 67, 72 Lubman, Haviv, 52, 88, 183 Lunz, Avraham Moshe, 47, 58, 59, 102n138, 112, 143n12 M Malaria, 183 Mass schooling, 177 Mazkeret Batya, 30, 52–54, 88, 95n36, 95n38, 96n39, 96n43, 96n44, 101n124, 101n126, 157, 160, 187, 202n59 Medicalization, 8, 43, 57, 92, 175–177, 193, 197, 198 Medical services, 178, 179, 181, 182, 197 Mikve Israel, 18, 29, 73, 92, 100n105, 100n107, 100n112, 116, 144n33

234 

INDEX

N Natural method, 84–90, 105n189, 105n191, 143n6 Network, 11, 34n4, 120–125 educational network, 14, 17, 19–21, 33, 46, 47, 58, 87, 108–110, 112, 141, 156, 197, 206, 209 transnational network, 1, 6, 28, 31, 34, 65, 116, 117 New pedagogy, 22 Nishri, Zvi, 192, 204n102 Nordau, Max, 194–196, 203n86, 203n91, 204n98 O Observation, 2, 69, 78, 79, 89, 131 Odessa, 21, 31, 34, 61, 89, 103n158, 129, 180, 202n58, 207 One-room schoolhouse, 44 Open-air school movement, 188 P Peres, Jehoash, 85, 94n12, 94n15, 101n120, 191, 201n49, 203n79 Pestalozzi, 2, 23, 38n53, 55, 69, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 87, 101n132, 102n137, 102n140, 102n149, 122, 132, 152, 153, 169n8 Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus, 81 Petach Tikva, 1, 9n3, 52, 53, 95n28, 123, 127, 132, 134, 160, 176, 200n31, 207 Philanthropist movement, 45 Physical education, 15, 33, 65, 72, 76, 110, 121, 138, 175, 189–193, 195, 196, 198 Preparatory class, 56, 57, 62

R Regeneration, 115 Revolutionary female teacher, 159, 207 Rishon LeZion, 28–30, 50–52, 56, 62, 77, 82, 83, 85, 88, 95n24, 95n28, 98n76, 127, 128, 130, 134, 147n75, 148n97, 171n30, 183, 200n31 Rosh Pina, 31, 50, 52, 88, 90, 94n23, 95n28, 131, 147n85, 204n95, 207 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 23, 38n54, 77, 78, 85, 101n130, 107, 122, 152, 153, 190 Rural education, 28, 33, 43, 126, 127, 130–132, 134, 142 S School Eveline de Rothschild school, 17 Lemel school, 18, 47, 191 rural school, 28, 29, 33, 95n29, 126, 129, 131, 132, 179, 188, 195, 198 School doctor, 179, 183 School hygiene, 186 vocational school, 15, 16, 36n20, 154, 209 The School Corridor, 20, 185 Shapira, Esther, 81, 82, 84, 100n112 T Templar colony, 47 Third Republic, 6, 28, 33, 119, 190 Three Rs, 15, 33, 51, 110–112 Tiberias, 13, 14, 145n45, 148n92, 157, 178, 199n15 Trachoma, 97n63, 180, 183, 199n21, 200n22, 200n23, 200n26, 200n27, 200n28, 200n31, 200n32, 200n35, 201n43, 201n44

 INDEX 

U University of Lausanne, 22, 25 V Victorian girl, 111–113 Vitkin, Yosef, 130, 131, 147n81, 147n84 Vocational training, 14–16, 18, 36n17, 36n20, 58, 113, 114, 120, 154, 209 W Wilkomitz, Simcha, 52, 79, 80, 102n136, 102n141, 131, 147n85, 167, 188, 195, 197, 202n68, 204n102

235

Y Yaffe, Hillel, 160, 161, 178, 184, 188, 201n41, 202n64 Yehieli, Yehiel, 21, 23, 24, 38n54, 38n55, 79, 102n139, 157 Yellin, David, 8n1, 46, 71, 83, 87, 89, 93, 94n14, 99n102, 105n179, 124, 125, 146n61, 188, 196, 202n67 Yudelevitz, David, 88, 89, 105n180 Z Zichron Ya’akov, 50–52, 55, 56, 76, 89, 95n28, 127, 128, 134, 146n73, 178, 200n31 Zionism, 40n77, 142n2, 196 Ziprin, Chaim, 20, 79, 89, 102n138, 105n186, 185, 201n45