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HOW THE HEBRAIST MOVEMENT TRANSFORMED AMERICAN JEWISH EDUCATION Midway through his announcement of the opening of Hebrew College, Louis Hurwich issued a call to revolution:
With that pointed charge, published on the front page of the August 18, 1921, issue of the Jewish Advocate, Hurwich laid bare the ailing state of Jewish schools: in most, the American-born teachers were young adolescents, insufficiently trained and educated; their lack of status and low pay made it unlikely they would make teaching their career. At the same time, the supply of European Hebrew teachers that had sustained the Hebrew schools—never adequate—had been cut off due to immigration restrictions imposed during the First World War. The remedy, he believed, lay in the creation of a new institutional base for the training of professional Jewish educators—a Hebrew teachers college that would "strike at the very source of weakness in the entire Jewish educational system."
Hurwich's aspirations were not just institutional. He was sounding the themes of a new movement that had arrived in the early 20th century with the influx of Eastern European immigrants to cities across the country. Known as the Hebraist movement, this ambitious attempt to create a vital Hebrew culture in America flourished for a brief period, in the years from the First to Second World Wars. Its proponents urged social change, motivated by the Zionist conviction that building a Hebrew movement in the Diaspora communities was essential to securing the dream of Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael. The revival of the Hebrew language was the movement's first principle, and it mobilized, through committed Jewish educators such as Hurwich, a new system of Jewish institutions to teach and promote Hebrew literacy at every level. The network of Hebrew schools, colleges and summer camps that exist today remains its great, tangible legacy. In order to preserve Jewish life in America, Hurwich insisted, we must change it, and this, explains Dr. David B. Starr, assistant professor of Jewish history at Hebrew College, was the paradoxical platform of the Hebraist campaign. "The Hebraists were both builders and subverters," he says. "On the one hand they were striving to keep Jewish life alive, and on the other they were reforming it, saying we need new texts, new leaders, a new ethos. Hebrew was their primary tool in establishing a renewed Judaism that was culturally, rather than religiously, based." Comprised of a small, elite circle of intellectuals, the majority educated in Europe, the Hebraists saw the Hebrew language as both the unique expression of Jewish heritage and the sustaining vehicle of contemporary Jewish vitality. These were the intellectual heirs of Ahad Ha-am (1856–1927), the Russian thinker and founder of cultural Zionism, who taught that the everyday use of Hebrew would serve as a barrier against the pressures of assimilation and as a spiritual and cultural bridge between the dispersed Jewish communities of the Diaspora and Eretz Yisrael. Coming from a world where Jewish life was being torn apart in pogroms and war, they saw in America, with its growing Jewish population, wealth and ethnic freedom, an opportunity to establish a center for national renewal. The erosion of Jewish identity and literacy they perceived among American Jews gave further point and urgency to their goals, and they worked with revolutionary zeal to present an alternative model, creating a new literature of periodicals, poetry and educational texts. Manifestos and public statements were issued, promoting Hebrew as the path of hope to a "glorious national future." The more mainstream Jewish community leaders, in essence, shrugged. Their interests generally were directed toward relief efforts for the European Jews. What practical use was Hebrew? Even proponents of Hebraism could see, in the movement, the potential for embittered attrition. "Is there no greater national outrage than the fact that those who always praise and exalt Jewish nationalism and at the same time make light of the need to learn Hebrew . . . ?" wrote Moshe Halevi in 1916, in the Hebraist journal Hatoren. To the extent that the community fell short of their ideals, the Hebraists published stinging critiques, further widening the gap. Their list of targets, wrote Dr. Alan Mintz in Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects (Wayne State University Press, 1993) "proves to be a long one": Rabbis who allowed their synagogues to diverge from the bet midrash with its reverence for Hebrew texts; the Yiddish press for being lowbrow and assimilationist; the poverty of immigrant culture, the radicals, the Orthodox, the "uptown Jews"; and, particularly, American Zionists who did not grant Hebrew learning its primacy of place. The Hebraists, in turn, were regarded as elitist and separatist. Even the older generation of maskilim who glorified Hebrew took offense at their political exercise of the language. If there was middle ground, the Hebraists did not seek it. At stake, they believed, was the survival of the Jewish people.
With their innovative ideas and practices, the Hebraists revitalized education at the primary level and professionalized Hebrew teaching. The outcome was that modern Hebrew became both the focus and framework of what was, for decades, the most widespread form of Jewish education in America. The sudden ascendance of the term itself marks the shift: Hebrew schools, Hebrew teachers colleges and Hebrew summer camps all came into being at this time as Hebraist educators dispersed across the country, forming an institutional network that extended from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Baltimore to Cleveland, Chicago and Los Angeles. Established at the height of the movement, in November 1921, Hebrew College was a model of the Hebraist approach to education. Indeed, its founder, Louis Hurwich, was an exemplary Hebraist. A native of Lithuania, he had been schooled, like many of his contemporary reformers, in a heder metukan, where Hebrew was the language of the classroom and conversation. It was this European technique that had inspired the Hebraists to introduce the ivrit b'ivrit (Hebrew in Hebrew) teaching method in America, also known as the "natural method" of teaching Hebrew. Hurwich made it the first principle of the College: Hebrew would be the exclusive language for instruction, and the Hebrew courses, its most intensive effort. His appointment of Dr. Nissan Touroff, former director of the Hebrew educational system in Palestine, as the school's first dean set the standard for the faculty. Primarily European scholars and ardent Zionists, they taught the Bible, the Talmud and Hebrew literature and emphasized a nationalist, secular interpretation of Jewish texts and history. Founded as the Hebrew Teachers College, the College, from its inception, included education courses in the curriculum, but this was a training not just of teachers. Graduates, Hurwich envisioned, would become life-long educators of "pioneer character" who would create a "dynamic Jewish consciousness that the dream of the world's Jewry of Jewish rejuvenation in Palestine may be realized." Attending classes daily at the College, in addition to carrying a full-time course load at a liberal arts college, the students found the Ahad-Ha'amic themes of service and self-sacrifice extended beyond the classroom into the fabric of their daily lives: 10 hours of class time a week was required for freshmen and sophomores; 13 for juniors; and 20 for seniors, with practice teaching. "Superior will power must be created," was how Hurwich recorded Dean Touroff's response to such hardships. The sentiment was not unsympathetic—steps were taken to monitor the students' health—but reflected the Hebraist attitude that this was the training of a select cadre of Jewish leaders. Perseverance was rewarded: "Those of us who did continue with this double track were repeatedly told we were special because we were studying in two schools at the same time, carrying a double burden. We were praised for being part of an elite that transcended the pedestrian life of American Jews in the 1930s and 1940s and who, by transcending it, might perhaps save it from itself," wrote Dr. Arnold Band P'45, BJEd'49, MHL'51, HD'87, in Judaism and Education: Essays in Honor of Walter I. Ackerman (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1998). It was an ideal not easily attained. Wrote Band, "Many began, few finished." The daunting time commitment as well as economic considerations were significant factors in limiting the College's enrollments. Yet the numbers grew annually. By the end of the first year, there were 23 students; at the end of the second, 50. In 1923, a two-year preparatory course was added, which later became the "Hebrew High School," and local primary schools began vying to prepare their students for admission. An annex was erected to accommodate more classes. By 1932, the year Hurwich became dean, his vision had been realized: Hebrew College had become a central institution in the educational field of Greater Boston. "A new constructive force had evolved in Jewish America," he wrote in his memoirs. Even as Hebrew College continued to expand, by the start of the Second World War the Hebraist movement had begun to decline. The inexorable progress of American homogenization, with its push toward the suburbs, and the coinciding ascendance of the synagogues and their congregational schools contributed to the demise of the movement, as did its failure ultimately to satisfy the community's need for religious spirit. The emergence of Jewish studies in American universities played a role. And the establishment of Israel, too, redirected the movement's Zionist aim and energy; many of America's talented Hebraist leaders and educators made aliyah. Yet its influence was fundamental to creating support in America for the creation of a Jewish homeland, and the revolutionary concept of making Hebrew an everyday experience remains, for many generations of students, the fulfillment of what the Hebraists attempted. "Memory was the foundation of learning at the Hebrew school," wrote Theodore White HC'36, in his autobiography, In Search of History. "And the memory cut grooves on young minds that even decades cannot erase."
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"In the next five years, no less than 75 percent of the present Jewish teachers in Boston will go over to other professions," warned Hurwich, the superintendent of the Bureau of Jewish Education of Boston. "The inability of the Jewish School to hold its own is sufficient challenge to the American Jewish community to wake up and to create bases for permanent improvement."
That the movement did not disappear into the margins of its own polemic is credited to the Hebraists' takeover of the Jewish educational system, which gave them enormous influence over generations of students. And the reverse is also true: The salvage of Jewish education in America is largely owed to its captors. "The Hebraist takeover of the Talmud Torah schools was a brilliant move," says Dr. Jonathan Sarna P'70, BHL'74, the Joseph H. and Belle Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University. "Whether it was consciously strategic or not, they gained a vehicle for effecting change. Until then, the Jewish schools had been left to neglect—nobody really cared."
Hebrew is thriving at Hebrew College. Including graduate and undergraduate academic Hebrew courses, Hebrew online, Ulpan and Prozdor Hebrew classes, the College currently offers 56 Hebrew language classes to over 470 students. And the demand for challenging Hebrew language instruction is growing.