Toward a History of the Education of Russian Jews

Period III

In our first series of discussions, we explored the struggle between the government and the Jews, which was initiated by the former and ended with its triumph over the latter; in the second series, we talked about the same struggle, initiated by the Jews and ending, as we have seen, with a factual, though unofficial, victory for the latter. In this section, we explore the internal struggle within various Jewish elements who came to clash over their obvious diversity in their desires to realize the goal of educating Jews.

On the one hand, the government assumed that central religious injunctions, created in France by Napoleon, were highly instrumental in “eliminating former prejudices that alienated Jews from civic society.” Therefore, the main goal of the government in terms of reforming the Jews was to establish a special institution called crown rabbis, who, having been educated in the spirit of the government, could serve as conduits to convey the state’s ideas into Jewish civic life. Accordingly, the crown rabbis were to utilize the Jewish religion as a tool for reformation, since, in the view of the Jewish Committee, the Jewish religion was considered “the primary and only power influencing the social and familial conditions of this people.” Later, however, this measure appeared one-sided because Jews could not trust the government organs and could not “accept civic authority as valid in matters of religion.” This led to the conclusion that it was necessary to create a central institution, and to give it religious authority in the eyes of the Jews, since it, through its moral influence, could “give credence to all orders given by the government for the reformation” of the Jews and, under the closest supervision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, could “direct state rabbis to gradually merge Jews into the general population, and to turn their activities to benefit the state.” And so on 18 May 1848 the government formed the Rabbinical Commission. [ . . . ]

From the questions suggested by this second expanded rabbinical commission, two are significant for our discussion: 1) Jewish women’s academies, and 2) the directive to rabbis to deliver model sermons.¹ With regard to the second of these questions, the rabbinical commission’s investigation did not conclude with positive results, and we will discuss this in a different place when we deal with the influence of rabbinical schools on Jewish education. The first question, however, was initially resolved, but the measures suggested by the commission to achieve the goal of educating Jewish women appear to be more than naïve. The commission acknowledged that education of Jewish females, especially among the lower classes, is in a state of “relative neglect.” Since this circumstance presupposes the existence among Jews of prejudice, based on faulty understanding, the commission was convinced of the need to investigate whether there are, in the teachings of the Jewish faith, places that, if interpreted literally, could have given rise to false understandings about the state of education of women among the masses. [ . . . ]

The commission learned that the Talmud has significance for both religious and civic affairs, and that the combination of Talmudic rules is called the Law (Torah), equal to the dogmatic teaching of Moses; according to Jewish religious convictions, the laws contain hidden wisdom, the understanding of which requires systematic and consistent study. Therefore, for females whose activities are limited to the domestic sphere, scholarly study of the law is completely useless and even, in many respects, harmful. Further, the Talmud contains a magnitude of laws, the fulfillment of which are not related to women’s obligations and the study of which would be for them, according to Jewish understanding, simple “futile vanity.” The commission thus concludes that the above-mentioned saying [“Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah teaches her tiflut” (frivolity) (b. Sotah 21b)], which forbids women to study the Law (Torah), has in mind Talmudic laws that cannot have any significant benefit for woman, and therefore it does not foreclose a way toward intellectual and moral development of the woman. [ . . . ]

Agreeing with the basic perspective of the 1857 commission that the Jewish religion does not forbid women’s intellectual development, we cannot accept as expedient the measures chosen by the commission to achieve the goal of educating Jewish women. Having accepted a faulty base as the starting point for their assessment, the commission accordingly chose false measures for the achievement of the goal.²a