Jewish Education: A Cognitive Sociological Interrogation of the Historical Narrative

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Jewish Cultures

Abstract

The history of Jewish education and the religion’s tradition of learning have been cited by numerous sociologists and social psychologists to explain present day Jewish achievement. Yet on closer inspection, claims to a universal tradition of learning are suspect. For one thing, the sociologist Nathan Glazer notes a disconnect between the “big tradition” and the lived experiences of many Jews who nevertheless achieved academic success. And what is more, this glorified history of Jewish education has been called into question by a number of historians, according to whom Jewish education during the Roman period and the Middle Ages was not nearly as ubiquitous as most presume. According to Hezser, Kanarfogel, Morris and others, Jews during those periods were not universally formally educated and many were illiterate, despite being commemorated otherwise. Drawing on the literature in cognitive sociology that points to the ways in which group identities are reified by collective conceptions of the past, as well as the ways commemoration itself is shaped by prevailing attitudes, I trace this reflexive relationship as it relates to the narrative told of Jewish education. I examine the ways the narrative about Jewish education and literacy changed over time reflecting and reinforcing conceptions about Jews and education. The contribution of a cognitive sociological approach is important as it bypasses the oft-debated questions of historicity, interrogating instead why the historical discourse has changed over time and what the implications of the changing narrative have been. I argue that the current narrative with its, to use Eviatar Zerubavel’s term, “deep history,” may serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy along the lines that Lee and Zhou have put forth to explain Asian-American achievement, and the turn from social psychology to cognitive sociology further enriches this explanation.

Author

• Miriam Moster, The Graduate Center, CUNY