Beyond the Rabbinic Curriculum: Secular Education in Jewish Amsterdam”

• In Event: Power and Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Rabbinate

Abstract

In any consideration of the vaunted religious training intrinsic to the mission of
Yesibat Ets Haim, it is crucial to investigate the character and impact of its core instructional
foundations and systems. What do we know about the way primary education was
conducted and the extent to which the curriculum trained pupils in the basics of language,
grammar, and mathematics? Were Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese (or perhaps Latin) taught
formally? Perhaps such instruction was performed in private tutorials outside the confines of
the school or even in the home? Beyond the fundamentals, to what degree were students
expected to have some knowledge of the natural sciences and the creative arts? Is it safe to
assume that the study of what we might ordinarily classify as the humanities and social
sciences was subsumed under or restricted to topics and disciplines already contained in the
religious instructional canon? From the evidence of the library collections of some of the
religious leaders of the community and from other, literary evidence, it is clear that secular
culture had penetrated deeply into the consciousness of the Sephardic community by the
middle of the seventeenth century. It is also clear that intellectual and other relations with
non-Jews were part of the fabric of the community. Did the Jewish primary and secondary
educational curriculum, intentionally or not, promote or, on the contrary, attempt to curtail
the growing awareness in the community of the general culture and of the evolving
intellectual and doctrinal ferment in the Dutch Republic? Did Christian Hebraists and their
contacts with the Jewish community play any role in limiting or expanding the scope of the
curriculum in the Jewish school system? Not merely for the sake of comparison, but to
illuminate by counter-example, what were the tendencies in, what was the profile and scope
of non-theological general education in Christian Dutch schools at this period? Notarial
records and other Jewish and non-Jewish sources may help shed light on the possible impact
of the yesiba and its students and scholars not merely on secularizing trends among Jews, but
on Jewish economic activity and any social accommodation between Sephardim and the
surrounding society.

author

• Aaron L. Katchen, Brandeis University