WHEN DID THE CURRICULUM CHANGE . . . Part 2

HISTORY OF TALMUD TEACHING

[the following are excerpts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud_Torah for readers’ brevity]

Talmud Torah  schools were created in the Jewish world, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, as a form of religious school for boys of modest backgrounds, where they were given an elementary education in Hebrew, the scriptures(especially the Torah), and the Talmud (and halakha). This was meant to prepare them for yeshiva or, particularly in the movement's modern form, for Jewish education at a high school level. The Talmud Torah was modeled after the cheder, a traditional form of schooling whose essential elements it incorporated, with changes appropriate to its public form rather than the cheder's private financing through less formal or institutionalized mechanisms, including tuition fees and donations.

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The father was traditionally the sole teacher of his children in Jewish history (Deut. xi. 19). The institution known as the bei rav or bet rabban (house of the teacher), or as the bei safra or bet sefer (house of the book), is said to have been originated by Ezra and his Great Assembly, who provided a public school in Jerusalem to secure the education of fatherless boys of the age of sixteen years and upward. But the school system did not develop until Joshua ben Gamla the high priest caused public schools to be opened in every town and hamlet for all children above six or seven years of age (B. B. 21a).

[. . .] The Talmud was a central focus of the education of males from the beginning of Jewish settlement in Europe. Boys generally began studying Talmud somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10 (occasionally earlier), after completing an elementary course in the study of the Torah, generally lasting three years. While most students completed their studies around the age of 14, the most promising students, if they had sufficient financial wherewithal, would go on to study in a yeshiva, sometimes for an extended period. As Jews began to move east in large numbers (starting at the end of the fifteenth century and extending into the early sixteenth), they brought with them the same commitment to the study of the Talmud; it was the central focus of all educational efforts, from the most elementary to the most advanced.

How Talmud was studied in Eastern Europe depended to a considerable degree on where—that is, at what level—it was studied. As one would expect, methods in the elementary school differed significantly from those implemented in the yeshiva. Our information regarding ways in which Talmud was approached in the elementary school, or heder, is drawn from limited sources, such as ideal curricular statements (among them the minutes from 1551 of the society for Talmud Torah in Kraków), critics of the Jewish schooling system throughout the generations, and the memoirs of often disaffected adults, mostly dating from the nineteenth century.

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In particular, at the end of the fifteenth century in a number of Bavarian towns, new methods of study that came to be known as pilpul emerged. While the term is found in the Talmud itself, denoting incisive argument, the new methods went beyond the types of incisive argument found in the Talmud to an entirely new way of analyzing and thinking about the Talmud. […] See Natan Note Hannover in his elegy for Polish Jewry after the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising (gzeyres takh vetat), Yeven metsulah (1653):

This was the order of study in Poland: Each day they learned a halakhah; that is, one page of Gemara with the commentary of Rashi and the Tosafot was called a halakhah. All the sages and students would go to the yeshiva . . . and develop pilpulim one with another until the rosh yeshivah arrived. Everyone would present the difficulties they had discerned in the halakhah, and he would respond to each one. After that, they all fell silent, and the rosh yeshivah would offer his novel insights. After he offered . . . his . . . insights the rosh yeshivah offered a ḥiluk, in which he raised difficult questions regarding . . . [the presence or absence of] abbreviated formulations, or contradictions [between] the Gemara, Rashi, and the Tosafot, and resolve them. But the resolutions also contradicted one another, and thus he would offer a second resolution to a difficulty . . . until the halakhah stood in its clarity.   (Israel Halpern, ed., 1944/45, pp. 83–84)

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Most prominent in calling for—and reportedly implementing—new methods in Talmud study was Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman (1720–1797), known as the Gaon of Vilna. The Gaon followed earlier critics of Polish Talmudic scholarship in calling for a more systematic approach to Jewish learning, beginning with the study of Bible and grammar, moving on to the study of the Mishnah and other early texts, and only then embarking on study of the two Talmuds, with special attention devoted to establishing correct texts. For the Gaon, the goal of Talmud study was always both local—to establish the best possible text and to understand the passage under discussion as fully as possible—and global: to see the passage as part of the larger document in which it was embedded, and perhaps even more, to see how it fit into the seamless world of oral Torah in its entirety. Such an approach could never be satisfied with the wholly local approach of the pilpulists, nor could it accept the limited range of texts (parts of the orders of Nezikin and Nashim in the Babylonian Talmud) that made up the standard curriculum of Polish yeshivas (and of most yeshivas throughout the Jewish world since early medieval times).

Also critical in transforming Talmud study in the eighteenth century was Aryeh Leib Gintsburg (1695/96–1785) of Minsk, Volozhin, and, later, Metz. Although in his yeshiva he frequently engaged in pilpul with the students, when he came to write his classic work, Sha’agat Aryeh, he explained that he did not include any of his pilpulim because “it is all vanity and of evil spirit.” In his published work, he embraced a more global method of studying Talmud, in which it was deemed unacceptable to try to understand any given passage without recourse to all relevant material, wherever it was to be found.

(cont’d)