Sites of Learning in Eastern and Central Europe during the Fin-De-Siècle

Abstract

The focus of this book will now shift and turn toward educational institutions and alternative sites of learning in Central and Eastern Europe during the Fin-De-Siècle. One can better contextualize Jewish intellectual life against the backdrop of schooling and alternative sites of learning such as the famous coffeehouse culture of Vienna. How Jewish intellectuals were schooled marks a trajectory of their thinking. If anything, by studying the oppressive nature of European schooling, one better understands what it is intellectuals were up against. Does a good scholar have to be oppressed in order to become an original thinker? I do not know the answer to this question, but it seems to me that oppression creates a certain kind of oppositional thinking. All of the Jewish intellectuals mentioned in this book are oppositional in their thinking, and they each contributed something unique to the canon. By elucidating a historical setting of educational institutions during the period in which these intellectuals lived, questions may be more adequately formulated about intellectual work and the ways in which intellectual work gets done in the midst of oppressive environments. These questions are not only important to ask in order to understand European Jewish intellectuals; similar kinds of questions can also be raised about American Jewish intellectuals who suffer similar kinds of oppressions.