ABSTRACT
The history of Jewish education is one of tradition, synthesis and change, though some groups have always been more resistant to change than others. In the modern period, Zionism brought about a revolution in Jewish education, particularly through the revival of spoken Hebrew. Before 1939, Zionism was attacked for often-contradictory and antithetical reasons: Zionism was either ‘reactionary’ or too ‘progressive’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Socialistic’, ‘clerical’ or ‘anti-religious’. Some rabbis were displeased not just with Jews who lived outside the land of Israel but also with the practice of bringing the dead from abroad to be buried in the land. Jews ideally should live in their land, not in the Diaspora. The self-destructive ideology of religious anti-Zionist groups has little scholarly credence – except to those who campaign to de-legitimize the Jewish state.
