ABSTRACT
During a long and active life, Abraham Golomb witnessed the rise and the decline of the modern Yiddish schools to which he was deeply committed. His experiences as a Yiddish educator were central to the development of his thinking, as he admitted himself in his autobiography, which is a valuable source for the history of the modern Jewish school system. Yiddishism was based on the assumption that Jews would—and should—evolve from a traditional ethno-religious community into a Yiddish-speaking modern nation. The first step to achieve 'integrated Jewishness', argued Golomb, was to understand that the Jewish people should be culturally independent from the non-Jewish world. Golomb tended to illustrate his ideas with examples fromjewish history, and his understanding of jewish history was basically historiosopluc. Golomb admitted that Israel was important for the Jewish people since it was the only place in the world where Jews had achieved real territorial independence. Golomb agreed with many tenets of Zionism, particularly of Labour Zionism.
