Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages (review)

Book Reviews 121 aspiration of the Anchor Bible Reference library to appeal to a readership ranging from world-class scholars to enthusiastic general readers. Lester Meyer Department of Religion Concordia College, Moorhead, MN Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages, by Ephraim Kanarfogel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. 213 pp. $19.95. Kanarfogel's book is a significant contribution to the study ofJudaism in the Middle Ages, but its importance reaches beyond that limited field. The main contribution of the book is in its pioneering exploration of Jewish education in the Middle Ages. This book should be ofgreat interest not only to students ofJewish history but also to educators, sociologists, and students ofJewish Law. Kanarfogel opens several new lines of inquiry in social history. He discusses the place of education in the context of the community as an organization and the place of the child in the Jewish group. His work also breaks ground in concentrating on the subjects of children, education, and society. In the first chapter the author deals with the organization of elementary education in the Jewish community, in order to describe the relationship to the child in the educational framework of the era. A central contribution of this work is the discovery that in the communities studied there was no institutionalized educational system of schools whose purpose was to pass on the values of the group to the children. Elementary education in Germany, Northern France, and England was based on the family. Private tutors were brought by the father to act as teachers for his children. This meant that the Jewish family was the social unit responsible for the education of the child, since the child was not handed over to an external educational system. This discovery is most significant, because it provides a basis for an analysis of the relationship between the family and the community in Jewish society. This subject has not yet been studied at all. A number of significant conclusions can be drawn from this diagnosis; Kanarfogel leaves a number of questions open for further research: the status of the family; the obvious comparison to the communities of Spain, where, as far as current research has shown, there was more institutionalization of elementary schools; the significance of the fact that the community organizations did not finance the educational system; and an 122 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 investigation of the status of the synagogue and its role as a socializing institution. The second chapter describes the relationship of the family to the child. The author deals here with the theory first proposed in Aries' seminal book, Centuries of Childhood, during the 1960s. This theory proposes that in "traditional society," that is, before the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, there was no awareness of the fact that a child is a special personality, qualitatively different from adults. Kanarfogel tests these propositions with respect to Ashkenazi Jewish society in the Middle Ages and tries to prove that they do not hold. He does so primarily by describing the unique attitude of the Jews towards children, in which children were viewed as having a particular personality with unique characteristics. This concept is central, and from it all else follows. In the third chapter the author investigates the role of higher education in Jewish society and the relationships between the community and the Yeshivot. In the fourth chapter he discusses the financial backing given by the community to those institutions. Surprisingly, he finds that no organized financial aid was given by the communities to the institutions of higher education. The level of involvement of the Ashkenazi community in supporting the Yeshivot was quite low, particularly in comparison to the Spanish communities. This discovery emphasizes, according to Kanarfogel, the fact that higher education in the Ashkenazi communities was not reserved for an elite financed by the community, but for all members of the community who wanted to learn. The Yeshiva is not known by the name of the city (in other words, the community), as it was in the eleventh century. Rather, it is called by the name of the person who stood at its head, a charismatic teacher ofTorah. In other words...