Challenges of Equality: Judaism, State, and Education in Nineteenth-Century France

7. Jewish Education and Jewish Space

134 7 Jewish Education and Jewish Space In the autumn of 1903, the Baroness de Rothschild offered to pay for the expansion of the Paris Consistory’s Jewish education courses. Classes would move to more convenient locales; new classes would begin where necessary, and supervision of the lessons would become more systematic.1 The consistorial leaders agreed, and in January 1904 the Baroness covered the cost of moving the classes held in Montmartre from the rue Nicolet to a larger building on the rue Nobel. She also paid the teachers’ salaries and the rent and heating.2 Altogether, the Baroness de Rothschild committed an initial sum of more than 11,000f, plus future support of 5,000f per year. The Baroness’s contributions symbolized the gradual transformation of consistorial education policy over nearly three decades. By prohibiting the Consistory from accessing certain revenue sources, financial anticlericalism had narrowed the field of consistorial activities and circumscribed Jewish space. Consistorial Judaism found new utility by adapting its role as a moral force that could facilitate the French national goal of immigrant absorption. Yet the Consistory’s own goals remained decidedly Jewish . Consistorial teachers prepared Jewish children for the bar mitzvah and intitiation religieuse, but often outside the civic realm. The narrower definition of Jewish civic space thus required a simultaneous redefinition of both the Consistory’s educational priorities and French Judaism’s civic presence. The growth of the French school system also encouraged these changes, rendering the goal of a national system of Jewish schools unattainable . Ultimately, the combination of anticlerical politics, financial realities, 135 Jewish Education and Jewish Space and shifting sensibilities hemmed in the Consistory, compelling its leaders to refocus their educational mission. In orienting their educational efforts toward supplementary programs of religious instruction, consistorial leaders also reconceived French Jewish space. Decades of marginalization had insulated Jewish schools against the dynamics of financial anticlericalism. While the Beyfus case made it harder to receive legacies, the absence of a central, fixed system of financial support for Jewish education had forced Jewish school leaders to develop independent sources of revenue. Larger institutions either communalized or located private funding within their local communities. Any civic funds that a Jewish primary school received tended to come from the municipality rather than the state. As a result, fluctuations in the national religious budget had little direct effect on Jewish schooling. The institutional expansion of public education had a more profound impact. Under the Third Republic, the national system began to dominate French primary education. As Grew and Harrigan have convincingly argued, the growth of the national education budget followed rather than drove the spread of schools. School enrollments led to larger budgets rather than more schools attracting more students.3 Rising spending on schools thus testifies to increases in the numbers of institutions under state control, deeper government involvement, and to growing acceptance of the system among French parents. Between 1875 and 1907 (two years after passage of the law separating church and state in France) the public education budget grew from 78 million francs to more than 283 million francs. Remarkably, this sum represented twenty-five times the amount spent in 1837, while the total budget for the entire French central government had increased only fourfold during the same period.4 The city of Paris alone reported a primary school budget of more than 14 million francs in 1900.5 Such figures dwarfed consistorial school spending (nearly 100,000f in 1894–95), rendering moot any question of competition between public and Jewish schools. The Ferry Laws rendered primary education both free and obligatory, and gradually moved to eradicate Catholic domination of the system. Equally important, the French public schools represented the most practical avenue for gaining entrée to French secondary education. Public education had become more accessible, more affordable, and therefore more appealing. The ideological appeal of the public schools received practical reinforcement from the civil authorities. Grasping the situation, consistorial leaders abandoned hopes of opening new schools and instead worked to strengthen their existing institutions . In larger cities, Jewish schools tended to assume communal status 136 C H A P T E R 7 and were absorbed by the civil educational apparatus. For example, the Paris Consistory’s schools for boys and girls at the rue des Rosiers had received municipal subsidies ever since their establishment in 1857. In response to the growth of the schools, the...