David Aberbach - Nationalism, War and Jewish Education: From the Roman Empire to Modern Times

David Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Studies, McGill University, Montreal. He has held visiting positions at Oxford, the LSE, UCL, and Harvard. His work bridges the arts and social sciences; his books include, Surviving Trauma: loss, literature, and psychoanalysis; Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media; and National Poetry, Empires and War.

Series Editor: Oliver Leaman
University of Kentucky

Studies, which are interpreted to cover the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, culture, politics, philosophy, theology, religion, as they relate to Jewish affairs. The remit includes texts which have as their primary focus issues, ideas, personalities and events of relevance to Jews, Jewish life and the concepts which have characterised Jewish culture both in the past and today. The series is interested in receiving appropriate scripts or proposals.

Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics

Edited by Curtis Hutt, Halla Kim and Berel Dov Lerner

The Bible and the Holy Poor

From the Tanakh to Les Misrables

David Aberbach

Violence and Messianism

Jewish Philosophy and the Great Conflicts of the Twentieth Century

Petar Bojani

Ethical Monotheism

The Philosophy of Judaism

Ehud Benor

Nationalism, War and Jewish Education

From the Roman Empire to Modern Times

David Aberbach

Nietzsche and Jewish Political Theology

David Ohana

For a full list of titles in the series: www.routledge.com/middleeaststudies/series/JEWISH

David Aberbach

First published 2019

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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2019 David Aberbach

The right of David Aberbach to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Aberbach, David, 1953 author.

Title: Nationalism, war and Jewish education : from the Roman empire to modern times / David Aberbach.

Other titles: Routledge Jewish studies series.

Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge Jewish studies series

Identifiers: LCCN 2018032462 | ISBN 9781138361393 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429432750 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: JewsEducationHistory. | Jewish religious schoolsHistory. | Jewish nationalismHistory.

Classification: LCC LC715 .A24 2019 | DDC 370.89/924dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032462

ISBN: 978-1-138-36139-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-43275-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

My overriding debt for this book is to my late father, Professor Moshe Aberbach, of blessed memory, whose London University Ph.D. on Jewish education in the Talmud and Midrash, completed in 1959, and his book on this subject, published in Hebrew in 1982, are the chief scholarly sources, from which I have drawn liberally. These are based on huge compendia of erudite citations relating to Jewish education laboriously assembled by my father (much of the Ph.D. was written in the London underground, on the Piccadilly line between Bounds Green and Chancery Lane), and covering the entire range of rabbinic literature in the Talmudic age. This enormously ambitious work took 12 years to complete (194759), during which (like his examiner, Cecil Roth, in the interwar years) he was unable to obtain a university position, and he worked as a schoolteacher, librarian and journalist in London before finding an academic post in Baltimore in 1961. My father, who trained both in Jewish and Roman history, was fascinated both by the long struggle to create a viable international system of education aimed chiefly at the poor the first of its kind and, despite its imperfections, a harbinger for the later expansion of education, both religious and secular and by the many forces which stood in the way: the hostility of the Roman Empire, the allure of Hellenization, the messianism leading to frequent war and economic breakdown in the 1st and 2nd century CE, the rise of Christianity, the poverty and ignorance of a subsistence-level agricultural society, and anti-rabbinic elements in the land of Israel and the diaspora. My fathers view was that just as after the catastrophe of the loss of Jewish statehood in 70 CE education was the salvation of the Jewish people, so also after the Holocaust: Jewish education had to be transformed and adapted meaningfully to radically changed circumstances. The history of Jewish education proved to be my fathers chief life-work, extending over a 35-year period, and more. The present book, perching on his shoulders, would have been impossible without it.