ABSTRACT
Split attitudes to Hebrew became increasingly clear by the early 19th century: East European Jews remained attached to Hebrew while West European Jews were often ignorant of the Holy Tongue, indifferent or even hostile to it. Hebrew, promoted by the Haskalah as a means of secular education for Jews ignorant of other languages, particularly in the sciences but also in history and the arts, was often a springboard for their disappearance as Jews. As Jews increasingly chose to send their children to secular schools which used the language of the state, this didactic use of Hebrew was largely obsolete by the late 19th century. Among assimilated Jews, traditional love for Torah study was often replaced by contempt for Jewish education as a regressive force, holding assimilation back. Much creative Jewish writing in modern times in languages other than Hebrew and Yiddish is scarred with unusually deep ambivalence toward Hebrew and Jewish education: Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth are among many writers who expose the flaws of traditional Jewish education – or present themselves as victims of it. As Jewish nationalism emerged, yeshiva-educated Hebraists such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, M. J. Berdichewsky, Chaim Nachman Bialik, J. H. Brenner, M. Z. Feierberg, U. N. Gnessin, and Gershon Shoffman – part of the elite in the rabbinic tradition who rebelled against it – helped create a new basis for Jewish education, using ancient Jewish texts as in the past, but as part of an essentially secular national movement.
