The teaching of Jewish history in Israel is an evolutionary process, says a curriculum specialist who notes that Israeli schoolbooks of the 1950s taught nothing about the Holocaust.
Students today spend 15 to 18 hours of study related to the Holocaust, up from guidelines in the 1970s calling for just two hours of Holocaust study, according to Israel Bartal, head of the curriculum committee of Israel’s Ministry of Education.
“Israel is a democracy with diverse views of what is history and how it should be taught,” said Bartal at an Israel update luncheon at Chicago’s American Jewish Committee office in June. “It is not like Soviet historiography, which forbids alternative ways of thinking.”
The meeting gave Bartal an opportunity to respond to a wave of criticism aimed at changes in the history curriculum taught in secular Israeli high schools. Bartal has worked with the Ministry of Education on high school curriculum for some three decades.
“Jewish history did not begin in 1948 and criticism of how Jewish history is taught in Israel did not start in the 1990s,” he said.
That criticism has been fueled by books and articles by and about “post-Zionists” in Israel and most recently by the writing of Yoram Hazony, a former adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, and director of the Shalem Center, an Israeli research and policy institute.
Bartal explained that secular high schools are required to follow the guidelines his committee developed for teaching history, but schools have a choice of nine different history textbooks. The texts are written and published in Israel’s free market and not by the Education Ministry.
He cautioned some 40 concerned listeners not to leap to judgment about how Jewish history is taught in Israeli schools, based on what they are reading in American publications. Much of the criticism is based on superficial extracts and reviews of what is being taught and not a thorough examination of the actual curriculum, he argued. Some of the most severe criticism has been aimed at one of the nine textbooks in use.
History is not what is happening today, but rather today’s interpretation of yesterday’s events. “Israel today is not the Israel of 1948. Whenever there is cultural change some segment of society will be unhappy,” Bartal said.
“It is because of those responses to change that people outside of Israel most often learn about the changes. The question to ask is, ‘What vision does the author have in criticizing the Israeli curriculum?'”
The debate on the nature of Israeli history and historiography goes back at least to the 1930s. Early Zionist historians were influenced first by 19th century German scholars and then by Russian socialists. High school textbooks of the 1950s reflected those early influences. The Ministry of Education in the early years had more control over curriculum and texts.
A major revision of high school curriculum in the 1970s was influenced by the then-new Western European and American approaches to teaching history.
History books in the 1950s concentrated on the impact of Eastern European Jews and their culture on Israel, but in the 1970s — as one example Bartal cited — Israeli historians began to study Sephardic Jews and Sephardic culture and their impact on Israeli history and society. The Holocaust also became an area for study.
Current guidelines also call for more information on the experience of Jewish communities in the diaspora.
“In secular schools no Bible was taught as history in the 1960s under (David) Ben-Gurion,” Bartal said.
“In the 1970s, Bible was added to the history curriculum of secular schools.” (Religious schools teach Bible as sacred text.)
“Under the Rabin government, the amount of Bible in the history curriculum was reduced,” Bartal said, noting that history is not the only subject where teachers nurture a sense of identification with the Jewish people and the state.
Born in Israel of parents who survived the Holocaust, Bartal wrote and researched the history of the Israel Defense Forces as an officer in the IDF History Unit. Until the curriculum reform of the 1970s, Israeli children did not learn about the War of Independence, Sinai campaign and Six-Day War, Bartal said, “because it was too politicized to teach.”
The politicization of history continues with the criticism of the changes, said Bartal, who heads the curriculum committee voluntarily. The new guidelines “are too liberal for extreme nationalists; they want history with (their) agenda.”
Asked what he would like his own children to learn about Israel’s history, Bartal said, “I want my children to have information that was hidden in earlier books.”