Jewish Education and Learning

<p>First published in 1994. This volume, dedicated to Dr David Patterson, founding President of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, takes as its theme Jewish education and learning throughout the ages. But it is the ‘Academy’ - interpreted here to mean an institution of Judaic scholarship - which dominates this collection of essays. For almost three thousand years centres of Jewish learning have flourished in many parts of the world. This volume discusses these institutions from biblical times to the present. From the time of the Mishnaic Academy at Yavneh, established in the first century CE, the academies were more than schools of higher religious education. They incorporated rational analysis of the scriptures, the natural sciences and other secular studies. Some of the most celebrated academies, such as those in Cairo and Tunisia, and later in the Iberian Peninsula were of a very high intellectual order, sometimes superior to the great Christian universities. It was at these institutions that the great Jewish legal and literary works were written and completed. </p><p>This collection of essays has been written by outstanding scholars who have been associated with David Patterson and the Oxford Centre. The essays explore the nature and function of the ‘Jewish Academies' in the broadest sense, the leading personalities associated with them and their social, cultural and moral effect on the Jewish communities of their day.</p> <p>Foreword; Notes on Contributors; Introduction; 1. Smolenskin and the Revival of Hebrew Education <i>Tudor Parfitt</i> 2. Bar-Ilan University - A Question of Identity <i>Harold Fisch </i> 3. Ancient Academic Activity and the Origin of the Pentateuch <i>Calum M. Carmichael</i> 4. Hebrew Language and Literature at the Hebrew Union College: Jewish Institute of Religion 1876-1930 <i>Ezra Spicehandler </i> 5. The <i>Maskil</i> as <i>Lamdan</i>: The Influence of Jewish Education on <i>Haskalah</i> Writing Techniques <i>Tova Cohen </i> 6. Notions of Yiddish <i>David Katz </i> 7. The Teaching of Jewish Law in British Universities <i>Bernard S. Jackson</i> 8. Jewish Education in the Byzantine Empire in the Twelfth Century <i>Nicholas de Lange </i> 9. Criteria of Modernism in Early Hebrew <i>Haskalah</i> Literature <i>Moshe Pelli</i> 10. The Controversy between M. L. Lilienblum and the World of the <i>Yeshivot</i> as Depicted in "Mishnat Elisha Ben Avuyah" (1878) <i>Yehuda Friedlander</i> 11. Religious Education in Israel: A Perspective <i>Noah Lucas</i> 12. Jewish Attitudes to Greek Culture in the Period of the Second Temple <i>Martin Goodman</i> 13. The Content of Jewish Education and its Responsibility within the Jewish-Christian Encounter <i>Alice and Roy Eckardt</i> 14. The Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums: Marginalia-Personalities-Reminiscences <i>Edward Ullendorff </i>15. Chaos in the Bible? <i>Tohu Vavohu Terry Fenton </i>16. Greek Language and Philosophy in the Early Rabbinic Academies A. Wasserstein 17. <i>’Aggadah</i> and Childhood Imagination in the Works of Mendele, Bialik and Agnon <i>David Aberbach </i> 18. Jewish Education in 19th Century Russia in the Eyes of Mendele Mokher Sefarim <i>Shmuel Werses</i> 19. The Role of Higher Education in Zionist Society <i>S. Ilan Troen</i> 20. Smolenskin, Ben-Yehuda, and the Jewish Education of the Future <i>George Mandel</i> 21. Purpose and Language in Two Seventeenth Century Paduan Hebrew Chronicles <i>Alan David Crown</i> 22. Moses Mendelssohn as Political Educator <i>Lionel Kochan</i> 23. David Patterson: A Bibliography <i>R. May</i>; Index</p>