Montefiore is asked to judge the Old Yishuv, 1875.

Here are a few excerpts from a travel diary of Moses Montefiore from his 7th trip to the Holy Land, in Sept. 1875. He was then 90 years old.

The truth is there are a couple of dozen interesting things worth excerpting, but here are three:

1. Here we see him mentioning his receiving an invitation to attend the corner-stone laying ceremony for Meah Shearim "a new row of houses."




2. Here he mentions receiving a delegation from a yeshiva; the delegation consisted of the yeshiva. The yeshiva, which consisted of Turkish Jews, was called Yeshivat Ekhad, because there were 13 members (13 = the gematria of ekhad, which means "one").




3. Finally, here is an account of a demonstration of how well the little girls were learning in their Beis Yaakov school, meant to counter a report to the contrary, which really merits its own post. But see more below.





The English is from "A narrative of a forty days' sojourn in the Holy Land" (London 1875) and the Hebrew from Sippur Moshe Ve-rushalayim (Warsaw 1876). Here's a facsimile of his Hebrew signature, in the Hebrew version:



Alluding to the bad report concerning the Yishuv (which we now call "the Old Yishuv") one of the points raised was that the level of education was very bad; the Sephardim having a very poor level, but far superior to the Ashkenazim, and in both cases, education for girls and women was utterly lacking, with illiteracy in any language being the rule. One point specifically raised was that the Sephardim at least teach [their boys] Hebrew, Arabic, and 'Leshon Espagnol', while the Ashkenazim only teach Hebrew.

In an open letter to Montefiore Rabbis Mayer Auerbach and Samuel Salant attempted to rebut each point of the critique. In the case of this one about education they reply defending the mode of education which, they claim, is identical among Sefardim and Ashkenazim, is rooted from the days of Sinai, and is meant to deeply root principles of the faith. It follows Hazal's order, 'mikra, mishna, gemara,' and essentially needs no defense. However, once these have been imparted, who is against secular studies or languages? They acknowledge that languages and various sciences like astronomy and math are indeed important even for Torah study. They invite Montefiore to see for themselves if the girls are uneducated, and as we saw above that the girls whom Montefiore saw were not!

Here is an excerpt from their letter. I do not publish the entire excerpt, or more of it here, because I want to save it for a future post.