Mandatory Separation details a number of interconnected transformations—of religious traditions, of political identity, of educational practices—that collectively shaped the history of modern Palestine and later, the state of Israel. It began from an observation that many “enlightened” figures in 19th and early 20th century Jewish and Arab Muslim circles blamed customary forms of religious education for a whole host of communal woes. Whether they spoke of the incomplete integration of European Jews into their national communities or the political weakness that enabled the colonization of Arab lands, modernizers were quite certain that the problem had much to do with the narrowness of traditional religious schooling, the supposed neglect of “practical” subjects, and the pedagogical backwardness associated with the heder and kuttab (Jewish and Islamic communal schools). This excerpt, taken from Chapter Four of Mandatory Separation, uses literature as a window into this modernist critique. It also gestures at one of the overarching arguments advanced in the book, namely, that the reform and rationalization of religious education was a pet project of the British colonial administration as well — though each party came to the table with distinct ideas as to what that entailed! For British administrators, religious education served as a source of potentially “universal” values that were thought to transcend the political tumult, whereas Jewish and Muslim leaders tended to view modernized religious education as the cornerstone of their respective nationalist projects. In sum, Mandatory Separation details this contestation over what religion is and how it is supposed to function socially and politically — questions that, I might add, are very much still alive today.

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Musty Rooms and Medieval Masters

If education was to become the germ of social transformation, as modernists argued it should, the first line of attack involved discrediting existing modes of religious learning as backward and socially debilitating. Literature served as one of the primary vehicles for advancing such critiques, and depictions of the ẖeder, talmud torah and kuttāb [Jewish and Islamic communal schools] assumed a remarkably similar form in writings of Jewish and Arab intellectuals despite their otherwise distinct milieu: the schoolroom is dark, musty and dirty, lacking in the necessary furnishings; the teacher is foolish and abusive; rote memorization is promoted over real understanding, the texts studied are inappropriate for young children; the language is corrupted, either by the Yiddish of the melamed (teacher) or the vulgarities of colloquial Arabic.

The portrayal of the ẖeder as a “schoolroom of hell” was a recurring trope in Haskalah literature aimed at discrediting the old social order, so much so that any positive aspect of this education was forcibly repressed in furtherance of the maskilim’s ideological agenda.^[i] The paradigmatic condemnation of the ẖeder came in Shelomo Maimon’s autobiography, in which he stated that “the defective approach to teaching, deriving from the ignorance of the teacher, prevented the student from attaining systematic knowledge of either the Hebrew language or the Bible.”[ii] In other words, the deficiencies of the ẖeder were responsible for depriving the child of an intimate connection to his authentic Jewish heritage. In addition to its pedagogic shortcomings, maskilim often depicted the ẖeder as a place of physical violence directed against young children by the teacher and his assistant. In Avraham Bar Gottlober’s memoirs, for instance, the ozer (assistant) is so abusive that children perish from his beatings.[iii] Similarly, In Yehuda Lieb Levine’s autobiography, a stick-wielding melamed kills the writer’s brother at the tender age of six. Even more astoundingly, the author recounts that he himself is nonetheless sent to the same ẖeder with the same savage teacher, until his father relents and agrees to hire private tutors instead.[iv] Within this literature, the abuses of the teacher are mirrored by the filthy conditions of the school, which is almost without exception portrayed as dark, dirty, and lacking space—both physical and psychological—for children to develop freely and flourish. If the Enlightenment marked a high point in the concern for the individual as an autonomous, self-fashioning agent, the ẖeder represented the narrowness of the corporate Jewish community in which collective welfare was continually privileged over individual growth.

Yet, as Avraham Holtzman has shown, the ẖeder was not without possible redemption. Rather, for Zionist writers, it could serve as a vehicle for the preservation and further development of the Hebrew language and culture but only on the condition that it be drastically transformed. The clearest articulation of this latent potential appears in Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s short story “Safiaẖ” (Aftergrowth), in which the protagonist attends two different ẖederim. The first is characterized by the usual darkness, yiddishkeit, and physical filth, while the second offers a manifestation of what the ẖeder could be: still steeped in classical Jewish texts, but now conducted in Hebrew, often outdoors, and absorbed in tales of biblical heroism rather than with the ritual laws stemming from Leviticus. This impulse to reconstitute an institution—or an entire tradition—by returning to core texts, languages, and ideas was not unique to Zionists but emblematic of a larger modernist phenomenon that stressed the primacy of one’s roots. While interest in this project, which placed renewed emphasis on the Hebrew language and the Hebrew Bible (i.e., Old Testament), began with European maskilim, these interests grew more critical among Zionist thinkers and activists. The more-committed ideologues among the latter tended to view the diasporic existence of the Jews and its trademark cultural artifacts—chief among them the Talmud, Yiddish, and other “foreign” languages—as a blip in historical time and ultimately insignificant to a national past and future rooted in the Land of Israel.[v]

Likewise, critiques of the kuttāb among Arab-Muslim intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were part of a larger movement of renaissance, or nahḍa, which focused considerable attention on social reform through a return to Islam’s essential core.[vi] The kuttāb, associated with the backward masses and the sheikhs who taught them, who were themselves often ignorant of “true” Islam, served as a favorite target of scorn. This was not necessarily a modernist trope, as the Arabic language has no shortage of proverbs dedicated to the supposed foolishness of the kuttāb teacher – “stupider than a kuttāb teacher” being a frequent insult. Such claims were already being countered in the ninth century CE when the famed writer al-Jahiz defended the lowly kuttāb teachers, who “like any other class of men” included “the superior and the inferior” alike.[vii] Yet these critiques assumed a sharper quality in the writings of nahḍa intellectuals, many of whom began their education within katātīb, pursued advanced studies in European cities, and returned to their native lands with a passion for political and social reform.[viii] These writers were not just criticizing the kuttāb in the abstract but measuring its deficiencies in comparison to contemporary European models and linking its shortcomings to the political and cultural status of the nation as a whole. In this regard, the modernist critique of the kuttāb was not a mere continuation of medieval jesting.

One of the more famous—and entertaining—treatments of the subject can be found in al-Ayyam (The days), the autobiography of Taha Hussein. His account references the physical violence often found within katātīb, but the teacher (mockingly referred to as “Our Master”) and his assistant (“the ‘Arif” or “knowing one”) are primarily faulted for their dishonesty, corruption, and blatant opportunism. The teachers are seen as benefiting from a well-established bribery ring, wherein children offer dates, sugar, and money to secure their teachers’ favor or, at the very least, to mitigate their blows. The teacher treats young Taha with benign neglect—purchased through such bribes—and allows him the freedom to play and converse with other children while almost completely ignoring his studies. His abiding interest remains his own financial gain in the form of school fees, food, drinks, clothing, and other gifts given after a child’s memorization of the Qur’an. This “capacity for falsehood” is what remains with the author even after the Qur’anic verses dim from his memory.[ix]

During the Mandate period, Taha Hussein’s autobiography would became required reading in one of Palestine’s most prominent nationalist schools, al-Najah in Nablus. The modernist critique of the “vile kuttāb” reached a fevered pitch within institutions like al-Najah, which positioned itself as its enlightened antithesis. Textbooks authored by the school’s headmaster, Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, reflected a heightened awareness of the link between traditional schooling, public ignorance, and political weakness. For instance, writing of the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, Darwaza singled out its educational failures as one of the government’s key offenses:

The [Ottoman] government was not interested in opening schools and educating the country’s children, because education opens people’s minds, makes them aware of their rights, and spurs them to demand them. Pupils would learn reading and writing in the vile katātīb… sitting on the earth, and the teachers who taught them did not know much of anything. And their salaries did not come from the government, but [they] would rather take bread from every child.

The situation of governments in Europe was much better than this state because they convened representatives of the people, created assemblies out of them, and consulted (tashāwara) them in everything they wanted to do. They took an interest in the country’s condition and improved schools and roads, while no citizen dared to accept a bribe. As a result of this the countries of Europe progressed, while the Ottoman countries became degenerate and weak.[x]

As we have seen, the Ottomans did open many public schools in Palestine in the decades prior to the First World War, making this characterization more significant in terms of what it tells us about contemporary Arab nationalist thinking than the Ottoman education record itself. In particular, it is worth noting the attention Darwaza draws to the lack of furnishings and other school equipment and the fact that the teacher was paid not by the state—as would befit a true modern country—but in the form of bread from each student.

A further element of the modernist critique sprang from the association of communal schools with popular forms of religiosity, particularly with mysticism. Anxiety over the influence of Hasidism in European Jewish communities was widespread among the rationalist proponents of the Haskalah, who charged the movement with fostering a culture of illogic and superstition.[xi] Eager to find a place for Jews within the emerging social and political order promised by legal emancipation, Hasidism represented a major obstacle that threatened the attainment of a pluralistic accord founded on reason. Conversely, it was the medieval figure Maimonides and his famed adoption of Aristotelian logic that maskilim looked to as a source of inspiration for the modern Jewish renaissance.[xii] Within the spectrum of communal figures that undermined the Enlightenment sensibility, the ẖeder teacher was among the worst offenders. A recurring trope in this literature charged him with provoking superstition and anxiety within children who, so afraid of ghosts, would recoil from their own shadows. Furthermore, this educational culture of irrationalism was thought to represent the source of the (male) Jew’s supposed physical and spiritual degeneration. It is within its walls and at the hands of its cruel teachers that the Jew emerges as weak, uncultured, and disconnected from nature.[xiii]

In a similar fashion, Sufism functioned within the metanarrative of Islamic modernism as a barrier that separated Arab Muslims from “authentic” Islam. Sufism and popular customs like visits to the tombs of local saints were derided as sources of unlawful innovation (bid‘a) that had corrupted Islam’s rationalistic foundations. The fact that Sufi practices were closely tied to local and popular forms of piety similarly undermined the idea that true Islam existed in a singular form that was textually determined. Reformers held that mysticism must be forcibly rooted out from Muslim communities—beginning, of course, with schoolteachers—to combat the interconnected slides toward popular ignorance and political subjugation. In his autobiography, for instance, Taha Hussein explicitly identified Sufism as the premier source of social backwardness, noting that “the country people, including their old men, youths, lads and women, have a particular mentality in which is simplicity, mysticism and ignorance. And those who have had the greatest share in producing this mentality are the Sufis.”[xiv]

Despite these failings, the old and corrupt could become the basis of the new and noble if tradition could be stripped down to its elemental core. Though initiated earlier by Jewish and Muslim reformers themselves, this was a process in which the Government of Palestine also became an active participant. But how could such a transformation be enacted? As I argue, the government’s reform efforts operated on two planes that may at first seem contradictory. On the one hand, education administrators supported the introduction of “practical” education within communal schools as a means of inculcating the economic values of industriousness and self-sufficiency. On the other, they insisted that any curricular or pedagogic reforms be in the best interest of preserving tradition itself. Thus, rather than upend customary forms of Jewish and Islamic schooling, officials in the Department of Education viewed themselves as chipping away at the ossified crust of custom to allow the light of religious authenticity to shine through.

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[i] For a review of literary and autobiographical depictions of the ẖeder, see Holtzman, “Ben hoka‘ah le-hitrafkut.”

[ii] Quoted in Ibid., 78-79.

[iii] Gottlober, Zichronot mi yamei ne‘uri. Originally published as a serial in the Hebrew Journal Boker Ore between 1879 and 1886.

[iv] Levine, “Zichron ba-sefer—rishumim mi-toldotai ve-korotai”; Holtzman, “Ben hoka<ayn>ah le-hitrafkut,” 81-82.

[v] Zerubavel, Recovered Roots. The notion that Jewish history in the diaspora was not “real” history because it was characterized by passivity rather than sovereignty also found expression in the Hebrew literature, most famously in Haim Hazaz’s short story “The Sermon.” The story centers around Yudka, a Russian immigrant and reticent man who makes an unexpected announcement before a Haganah committee that he “objects to Jewish history.” As he explains, “You see, we never made our own history, the Gentiles always made it for us. Just as they turned out the lights for us and lit the stove for us and milked the cow for us on the Sabbath, so they made history for us the way they wanted and we took it whether we liked it or not. But it wasn’t ours, it wasn’t ours at all!” Hazaz, “The Sermon,” 236.

[vi] In our contemporary context, the impulse to return to the core or fundamental principles of Islam is most likely to be associated with conservative Salafi movements, yet during the period of nahḍa the same conceptual move helped propel liberal strains of Islamic thought. The relationship between these two very different kinds of fundamentalists has yet to be explored in detail. For a detailed examination of Islamic modernism’s development and influence in Greater Syria, see Commins, Islamic Reform.

[vii] Tibawi, Islamic Education, 36.

[viii] Musawi, Islam on the Street.

[ix] Hussein, The Days, 38. Originally published in Arabic in 1929.

[x] Darwaza, Durus al-tārikh al-‘arabi min aqdam al-azmina ila al-ān, 292.

[xi] The classical account of this fraught relationship appears in Raphael Mahler’s Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, which, despite its plainly ideological bent, reviews many important sources related to the conflict between maskilim and Hasidism. For a more detailed account of these battles, many of which appeared at the communal level, see Wodznski, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland.

[xii] Pelli, The Age of Haskalah, 133n5. As Yaakob Dweck has shown, the embrace of Maimonides as a bulwark against mysticism was already apparent in seventeenth-century Venice. See Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah.

[xiii] Holtzman, “Ben hoka‘ah le-hitrafkut,” 79.

[xiv] Hussein, The Days, 57.

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Suzanne Schneider received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the Deputy Director and Core Faculty of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. An interdisciplinary scholar working in the fields of history, religious studies, and political theory, Suzanne’s research interests relate to Jewish and Islamic modernism, religious movements in the modern Middle East, the history of modern Palestine/Israel, secularism, and political identity in post-colonial contexts. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford University Press), and her writing has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, The Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Revealer: A Review of Religion and Media. She is currently working on a book about religion and violence in the modern age.