Fin-de-Siècle Rural Teachers in the French Third Republic and in Hebrew Galilee Moshavot

Abstract

In 1882 modern education in both France and the Galilee began a massive and continuous penetration into rural zones, followed by deep tensions between modernist teachers and local conservative populations. Many similarities existed between those two seemingly unconnected rural environments. This article analyzes the essence and the significances of similar features of the above processes and considers whether they might be the result of transnational influences. In both arenas, tensions between teachers and peasants reflected open and hidden social, political, and cultural differences. Peasants could hardly understand the efforts teachers were required to invest; they saw in them threatening representatives of external authorities—the Third Republic in France or the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), the dominant philanthropic association in the Galilee. Main contestations concerned religion, which, for the teachers, became a symbol of all the negative aspects of peasant societies. Teachers also made great efforts to implant notions of romantic nationalism into societies to which such concepts were alien. Such attitudes were translated into thorny conflicts of influence between teachers and parents in rural communities. Consequently, teachers remained in practice socially semi-excluded.