Jewish Education and the “Spiritual Problems of Rationalism” under the Reign of Nicholas I

Abstract

The article discusses the reasons that caused public Jewish schools founded at the time of the Jewish educational reforms in the Russian Empire in the 1840s, to restrain from hiring foreign instructors. Based on the analysis of historiographic sources, it is shown that the de-cision was mainly due to the discrepancy between the original modernist vision of the reform and the traditionalist nature of its implementation.