הלפרין. הקרב על תלמידים יהודים בבתי הספר המיסיונריים הנוצריים של המנדט

Middle Eastern Studies, 2014 Vol.
50,
No.
5,
737–754,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2014.886574


The Battle over Jewish Students in the Christian Missionary Schools of Mandate Palestine
LIORA R. HALPERIN*
Re.ecting on the progress of Hebrew schools in 1953, 50 years after the foundation of the Hebrew Teachers’ Federation in 1903, Aharon Ne’eman, a retired teacher, called the revival of Hebrew the organization’s .rst achievement. The teachers, he said, had zealously promoted Hebrew against ‘parents who demanded the study of French, [then] the language of clerical work; Arabic, the language of the country; and Yiddish, the language of the home’ as well as against ‘intellectuals ... who rec­ommended teaching the sciences in European languages’. Against all these forces, Ne’eman wrote, the teachers persevered in their commitment to Hebrew ‘through deep faith, great passion, and a fundamental revolution’.1

The success of the Hebrew Zionist educational system lay to a great extent in side­lining a decentralized network of foreign language educational institutions and ele­vating a Zionist Hebrew national education that would become the nearly exclusive provider of schooling for Jewish youth. Although the best known of these foreign language schools were run by Jewish philanthropic organizations, one important spear of this ‘fundamental revolution’ was targeted against the Christian missionary schools that had been schooling the primarily Orthodox Jewish students whose parents preferred Christian education to secular (and presumably heretical) Jewish schools.
Arieh Saposnik argues that, taken together with the ‘Language War’ over the eventually failed proposal to teach scienti.c subjects in German at a Jewish-German sponsored technical university,2
the Ottoman-era battle against the missions was ‘a decisive campaign that seemed to .rmly lay in place the foundations of a national culture in the Jewish Yishuv [settlement] of Palestine’.3
The Jewish scholarship on missionary schools similarly treats this as an Ottoman-era story.4
But although the in.uence of European missionary institutions had largely passed by the British man­date period, these schools did not disappear entirely and, I argue, they maintained a curious hold on the Jewish imagination well past the point when education in Jewish Palestine ceased to be de.ned by its relationships to more powerful European Jewish and non-Jewish organizations claiming footholds in the Near East.5
Indeed, the tiny
*Department of History, 234 UCB, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, 80309­0234, USA. E-mail: liora.halperin@colorado.edu

© 2014 Taylor & Francis
Jewish student population that continued to be schooled in Christian missionary institutions became a topic of recurrent concern for Zionist educators, Hebrew lan­guage advocates, and municipal bodies that saw in the persistence of Jewish enrol­ment in these schools not only a throwback to a past of foreign dependence but also, we see, a worrying reminder of a persistent and ever-real present and future in which European language skills could be useful or leveraged by those who wanted jobs in certain economic sectors, particularly commerce, international business, and govern­ment service. Jewish study in an Anglican mission school was thus not a bizarre choice by misled Jews (as critics would have it), but an intelligible if unusual option within a growing set of English-language learning settings for Jews in British man­date Palestine, a network whose existence has been obscured by assumptions of Jew­ish autonomy within Palestine and a general lack of contact between the emergent Jewish community and the British overlords of Palestine. The history of these discus­sions reminds us that despite a historiographic separation between Jewish and Chris­tian histories in the mandate period,6
the increasingly independent Jewish polity was not entirely detached from a land that was under Christian rule and the object of Christian interest.
The period between the French Revolution and the First World War has been called the ‘Great Century’ of Christian missionary activity.7
Missionary schools began to expand in Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Tan­zimat reforms made it increasingly easy for European institutions to open schools, charitable organizations, and commercial enterprises in the Ottoman lands. They became particularly popular with middle and upper class families in Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century, as these families started sending their children there and as European consulates began to open; the .rst was the British consulate in 1839.8
By the turn of the twentieth century there were over 1,300 foreign missionary schools in Palestine and Syria, a ‘bewildering diversity’ of institutions, in the estimation of Abdul Latif Tibawi.9
Despite the Christian orientation of these schools, upper and middle class Muslims also sent their children these, particularly their daughters.10

With the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the end of the Ottoman Empire’s sup­port for European intervention in Palestine, the missions all but disappear from any Jewish history of Palestine, giving way to a narrative that emphasizes national self-suf.ciency. But a small number of Jews continued to enrol in the remaining mission­ary schools in Palestine and their hold in the imagination of both Jewish observers and on Christian teachers within the schools themselves is both curious and telling. In this article, I focus on Jewish enrolment in schools associated with the British Anglican mission and in particular the girls’ schools associated with that mission, although I address Jewish rhetoric about Jewish enrolment in missionary schools more generally. This choice has a twofold justi.cation. On the one hand, it derives from a particularly fruitful source base: the correspondence of one Susannah Peirce Emery, a teacher at the English High School for Girls in Haifa, to her mother, held at the Middle East Centre Archives at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a series of associated records in that collection, including alumni journals and other correspon­dence from schools associated with the Jerusalem and the East Mission of the Angli­can Church between 1919 and 1948.11
Through her meticulous correspondence she offers comments about the Jewish student population that have not been acknowl­edged by other studies of the girls’ education in mandate Palestine.12

Second, the choice of the English schools enables insight into the speci.c language contributions of these programmes within a Jewish society increasingly oriented toward English as the preferred European language. English was, Ben Zion Dina­burg (Dinur) wrote in 1939, ‘the chief conduit of European in.uence’, a language that even the Zionist schools themselves realized might ‘help Jews escape the degen­erative effects of the East and establish a functioning European society’.13
To study in an English-language school was not simply to participate in a nearly bygone insti­tution, but to operate in one peripheral segment of an emerging .eld of English-language studies in a culture that, with the passage of the mandate years, would .nd English skills to be bene.cial for certain sectors of society oriented toward the private sector and bureaucratic employment either in British or Jewish institutions.14

In the dominant Zionist view, Jews, in contradistinction both to the Palestinian Arab community in Palestine and to other communities under British rule, remained able to dissociate nearly fully from their colonial context and thus were able to develop their national culture in relative isolation from the rapidly strengthening global language.15
Though indeed the level of Jewish autonomy was distinctive, a .rm commitment to a Hebrew-only education did not preclude token foreign lan­guage instruction in Zionist settings during the mandate period – usually English from the .fth grade level onwards, and Arabic or French in the high school years. Moreover, a growing sense of the global and local value of competence in a Euro­pean language in general, and English in particular, led some families to deem the limited foreign language study in Zionist schools insuf.cient and to seek more exten­sive language-learning study elsewhere, both in special commercial schools overseen by the Zionist movement, in extracurricular or adult education programmes and, indeed, in missionary schools.
What English-language learning opportunities existed in the Yishuv beyond the lim­ited courses in the Zionist schools were present on the margins of Jewish society and on the outside of a system that is well known for de-emphasizing European language study in its larger ambivalence about ‘general studies’.16
The number of Jewish stu­dents educated in Christian institutions during the mandate period was tiny, though early numbers are dif.cult to ascertain precisely. Of 26,832 Jewish students accounted for in a 1925–26 survey, only 334 were studying in Christian schools, as opposed to 3,444 in Jewish philanthropic institutions (the French Alliance Israeelite Universelle, or the British Anglo-Jewish Association).17
Noah Nardi’s 1945 survey of education in Palestine includes more precise numbers of Jews in missionary schools for the years from 1932 to 1942, which remain relatively stable and without a clear upward or downward trajectory, ranging between a low of 773 in 1938–39 to a high of 1,278 in 1941–42 but with enrolments most other years in or around the 900s. This number, however, constituted a smaller and smaller percentage of an ever grow­ing total Jewish student population. The 898 students in missionary schools in 1932– 33 were 2.3 per cent of the total student population whereas the 1,278 students in missionary schools in 1941–42 were only 1.4 per cent.18
An article on education in Tiberias gave more speci.c numbers for one school in that one city: of nearly 1,000 Jewish students, 25–35 were studying in the school of the Italian mission. It noted that there were families where the sons would study at the Talmud Torah, the Ortho­dox religious school, while the girls would study at the Catholic missionary school.19

The numbers in the Christian secondary schools were more signi.cant. In the autumn of 1920, 30 of the 100 girls in the secondary school of the Anglican Jerusalem Girls’ College were Jewish.20
This tendency to .nd Jews in the secondary schools (but not in the primary schools) derived in part from the fact that the missionary schools were one of the few settings in Palestine where children could have single-sex educa­tion in the secondary years. According to Miss Warburton, the headteacher of the English College, Jerusalem secondary school, in a November 1920 committee report, this was due to the fact that the Jewish schools were co-educational in their second­ary schools, ‘with the result that many better-class parents refused to send their girls under such conditions’.21
Indeed, according to Nardi’s statistics from 1941–42, 56 per cent of the students in non-Jewish schools were female.22

Although these numbers were small enough to be statistically insigni.cant, they were notable within the schools themselves. A report from the English College, Jeru­salem, from 1920 called it ‘very notable’ that Muslims were attending the college, and that ‘there were also Jews’ (ten of the 72 students that year).23
This meant that nearly one in seven students was Jewish.24
The Jerusalem Girls College in 1919–20 had 206 Christians, 22 Jews (mainly in the secondary school) and 12 Muslims (mainly in the primary school).25
Susannah Emery, whose comments we will be returning to, often commented on enrolment numbers. On 7 October 1933 she recounted that ‘there are more Jewish girls this term, about eight or ten, and one Jew­ish boarder’.26
In May of that year Emery had noted that this was out of a total enrolment of about 150.27
In 1935 Emery did a more rigorous count and found that out of 175 students, 26 (or 15 per cent) were Jewish.28
The Jewish students were clearly clustered in the very upper classes, though, such that in the sixth (highest) grade, more than half were Jews.
The value of Jewish enrolment in Christian institutions appears to have been some­what mixed from the standpoint of the institutions themselves. Emery expressed her frustration with the non-Christian elements in 1935: ‘one third non-Christian is quite enough and the school is full enough’.29
‘There are too many Jews’, wrote Emery again in 1941, ‘especially in the highest classes.’30
Of the students to whom she refused entry in May 1942, all were Jews, again an indication that despite the small numbers, demand on the part of Jews for this type of education met or exceeded sup­ply.31
But if on some level non-Christian students compromised the Christian charac­ter of the school, from the perspective of the British Anglican mission itself, even a small Jewish presence was evidence of an inclusive attitude, consistent with an overall commitment to Christian universalism. Rennie MacInnes, head of the Jerusalem Girls College, emphasized the school’s multinational character, writing in 1922 that the pupils come from 10 different nationalities, and stressing that this motley group had already learned ‘much of the esprit de corps which is so marked a feature of any good British or American school’.32
The head of St George’s Boys’ School framed this as a paternalistic civilizing mission: ‘All the young men of Palestine, of all reli­gions, are simply clamouring for us to educate them, not merely to teach them English, but to give them what we regard as an education.’33
Such a goal nonetheless was often welcomed among the students who indeed wanted a modern education.34

Despite the small place of the missions in the overall education of Jews in the Yishuv and perhaps the quaintness of mentions of Jews in the writings of the schools themselves or in Emery’s correspondence, the disproportionate attention paid to them indicates that they aroused a national fear that had persisted from the late Ottoman period and not been entirely quashed by the blatant success of the Zionist educational project. Nardi notes: ‘Though these children represent less than 1 per­cent of the total number of Jewish children attending schools, they constitute a prob­lem of vital concern to the Jewish community.’35
Let us examine why this might have been the case.
Mandate-era protests, including those against European institutions, were the heirs of a more recognized late Ottoman protest tradition. Both religious and secular Jewish institutions boycotted the Anglican schools as early as the 1830s, seeing them as threats to the religious and national character of the Jewish community. Rabbis in Jerusalem threatened with excommunication families who sent their children to these schools. In the early years of the twentieth century, Zionist groups took up the anti-mission mission with particular fervour. In the spring of 1913, the labour Zionist newspaper Ha-Po‘el Ha-Tza‘ir (The Young Worker) reported that ‘the war against the mission is now the most powerful public action being taken by the enlightened’.36
According to an article in Ha-Herut (Freedom), the Sephardic newspaper in Jerusa­lem, the desire for a French education was ‘a contagious disease, which threatens to consume body and soul alike’.37
The late Ottoman .ght against the missions was framed as an internal .ght directed at the ultra-Orthodox, whose students were the most likely to attend the schools; ironically, their opposition to the Jewish – but fer­vently secular – Zionist schools exceeded their suspicion of explicitly Christian insti­tutions.38
Saposnik notes how the term ‘avodah zarah (foreign worship, originally a term for idol worship) was used to describe this foreign schooling, just as it was used to describe contact with foreign labour, products, and institutions in other settings.39

The latter-day .ght against the missions shares some of these features, but with the national tenor even more intensi.ed and more existentially nervous – at issue was not the hopes for a nation in potentia but the palpable limitations of a nation in actuality. While, indeed, the threat of the missions was on a basic level religious, the tenor of the .ght now spoke not primarily to the fear that a few individual ‘souls’ might be lost to a competing spiritual or even national project. Rather, present in this rhetoric is the sense that the national system as a whole might be insuf.cient even despite the evident growth of a fully Hebrew-run primary, secondary, and university pro­gramme. Speci.cally, the language we .nd here re.ected a concern that the Hebrew educational system was not in fact capacious enough to answer to all needs of all stu­dents within the Yishuv, speci.cally those students whose career interests involved going beyond the con.nes of an all-Hebrew society and .nding a place in the multi­lingual space of a globalizing commercial world. This fear was not baseless: some parents in the Yishuv indeed wanted their children to gain good schooling in Euro­pean languages and considered the missionary schools a reasonable means to this end even within a society committed to the promotion of Hebrew.
Before pursuing this discourse further, it is useful to situate its tenor – and in partic­ular its concern about the linguistic dimensions of foreign education – in the context of the broader system of foreign language – and especially English – study that was emerging over the course of the mandate period in two other key settings: in a series of schools of commerce, overseen by the Zionist authorities, and extracurricular English study programmes, which were privately run. Data on enrolees in the schools of commerce, of which there were at least four (two in Tel Aviv, and one each in Jeru­salem and Haifa) indicates that their student body was notably middle class (not weal­thy) and included mostly average, not high achieving, students looking for training to get a decent job.40
A good number of students at the Safra School in Tel Aviv, for instance, were new immigrants who were simultaneously enrolled in remedial Hebrew courses. A gender disparity in enrolment is also worth noting. In 1942, the inspector for the schools, Yosef Azaryahu, recorded that there were many more girls than boys in the Safra School. ‘It appears’, he wrote, ‘that the girls tend to be the ones who aspire to clerical work and it is they who have the greater chance of realizing their aspirations.’41
The predominance of women presumably arose from the fact that of.­ces liked hiring female secretaries and typists and so being female in fact opened par­ticular career paths, but only for those with the requisite professional, including language, skills.
The speci.c career ambitions of the Safra School’s enrolees are signi.cant, and they suggest motivations that were also apparently shared by the number who made their way to the missionary institutions. In his 1937 report about the Tel Aviv School of Commerce, another commercially oriented institution, Eliezer Rieger, who was at that point the head of the Education Department at the Hebrew University in Jerusa­lem, noted that ‘there aren’t many students of the spoiled types who .nd a place in the larger institutions in the country. Because of this there is less chutzpah and more diligence among the students and perhaps less imagination’.42
It appears, then, that schools of commerce attracted middle-income or lower-income students, not children of the wealthy or the well-connected. In this sense, the Yishuv differed from other territories in the British Empire where knowledge of English and acquisition of white-collar skills was directly correlated with proximity to the anti-colonial national project.43
In a letter, a former student named Carmella Zuckerman recalled that she had wanted to study art or music, but her parents had protested, saying that she did not know what was best for her and that it would be better to ‘learn a trade’.44
Dina Pugatzki had a similar experience. She had intended to learn medicine or become a pre-school teacher, but ‘for various reasons’ was not able to pursue those goals and decided on a clerical career.45
Shulamit Yerushavsky entered the school ‘such that [she] wouldn’t be groundless [netulat karka’] in [her] life’ and with the perception that clerical work was a way to ‘do something practical’.46
These students, all women, related clerical work, and its associated language learning, to self-advancement within a setting of otherwise limited options, either for reasons of .nances or assess­ments of their own capacities.
The commercial schools did not wish to emphasize foreign languages over Hebrew and in fact claimed to offer excellent Hebrew education. Moreover, students appear to have been deeply nationalist and committed to goals of Hebrew economic growth. Nonetheless, students were also adamant about the importance of foreign language study. In a letter written after graduating, one Yitzhak Zamir advised that the school ‘should be sure to teach an additional foreign language beyond English. The French language also is making inroads in the .elds of banking and industry, such that an obligation rests upon the graduating student to learn it and to achieve competence in it by the time he leaves the school’.47
Another student, Margalit Libman, reported that she had found a job in a government institute, the Institute for Foreign Com­merce. Her duties engaged her language skills, as she was in charge of managing all the administrative matters of the of.ce ‘and making contact both with producers in Palestine as well as buyers and visitors from abroad who are interested in industry’. While she was thankful for her language knowledge, she admits that the study of German would have been helpful and wished that she had taken up the study of that language, too.48

The second setting for English-language study outside the standard Zionist pro­gramme consisted of private language classes. In 1939, J.S. Bentwich, the chief inspector for English in the Hebrew schools, received an inquiry from Mr Allan Drinkwater, the director of the London publisher and bookseller Longman’s Green & Co. Drinkwater, noting an increased number of orders for books oriented toward English learning for adults and asking whether there were in fact language pro­grammes in Palestine that teach English to adult immigrants.49
In fact, Bentwich replied, there had indeed been several efforts to teach English to adults – some within the Yishuv itself. The English Committee of the Jewish Agency, in addition to its work developing an English-language curriculum for the Zionist schools had also set up a committee to teach the language to adults and worked with the British Council to build a central English library. This cooperation indicates the recognition on the part of some Zionist leaders and educators elements that English promotion was important. But of.cial British–Zionist partnerships represented only a small portion of the adult education in English. ‘The bulk of adult teaching is still done by private teachers, in small groups, and is practically unorganised.’50

This unorganized adult English teaching, because it was done by private institu­tions, is undocumented in the of.cial Zionist archives. What documents do survive indicate the existence of English courses at institutions called the Golden School of English in Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv School of English and Berlitz schools in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv.51
English courses were also offered at the Hebrew University and the Workers’ Seminary in Jerusalem, the School of Law and Economics in Tel Aviv, and the Hebrew Technical Institute in Haifa.52
An extract from a letter from
C.A.F. Dundas to Lord Lloyd in 1941 noted: ‘The Jaffa Institute [referring to the British Institute in Jaffa] and the Tel Aviv School of English are both making prog­ress. The latter is, I think, rapidly becoming a real force in the life of the town.’53

Adults seem to have signed up for these courses out of a vague, usually unrealized desire to improve their economic situation or gain the more intangible bene.t of acquiring a connection to the then-ruling power. The director of an institution called the Tel Aviv School of English, writing to a woman who had previously expressed interest in the school, was encouraging: ‘In a time like the present, a knowledge of English is essential and may even be the factor that will decide your future.’54
Whether or not this statement was true in this woman’s case, demand for English courses exceeded supply. With the opening of a British Institute location in Tel Aviv – a branch of the global institution that offered English courses around the globe – English seekers had a more developed option for English courses and cultural activities.55
It appears from British Institute statistics from May 1943 that the largest constituency was of Polish origin (206 of the 749) and the second largest constituency was of German origin (145). These are small numbers relative to the total population, but it should be noted that there were waiting lists at the British Institute, an indication that demand for English courses exceeded supply.56
Corre­spondence between one religious Zionist community, Kvutzat Rodges (a collective settlement later known as Yavneh) and the Palestine Post, the English-language newspaper in Palestine, requested that copies of newspapers be sent to serve English classes for adults in kibbutzim, or collective settlements.57
Some number of adults, the vast majority of whom, we can assume, had little exposure to English before they came to Palestine, were .nding that they wanted a bit of English knowledge regardless of their general commitment to the Hebrew project.
Resistance to the missionary schools, then, can be framed within the broader cli­mate of expanding (if limited) foreign language study in the mandate period. In this context, it is not surprising that one of the key early actors in this .ght was the Bat­talion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language, founded in 1921 by students at the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv, a particularly passionate group within an institution itself symbolic of the Hebrew revival project. The Battalion was known for its zealous activism on behalf of Hebrew and its opposition to foreign languages, which it conducted through letter writing and other advocacy campaigns, as well as occasional intimidation tactics and vandalism.58
In 1925 the group sent a letter to a member of the Tel Aviv municipality, L. Pochovsky, demanding that he explain why he was sending his children to non-Hebrew schools. In this case, Pochovsky responded that the choice was his personal prerogative. Indeed, the intense collec­tivist ethos of the Hebrew school system all but ensured that those who did choose alternatives for their children were those who felt strongly independent and individ­ualistic about education. But the Battalion represented – and advocated for – an intrusion of this collectivist ethos into the personal lives of all Jews in the Yishuv. A 1928 statement of principles of the Battalion listed as a main ‘defence’ objective ‘war against schools whose language of instruction is not Hebrew’.59
A .yer from the Battalion, addressed to major Zionist institutions, used strong language in speaking of widespread apathy about this phenomenon, however, suggesting that perhaps Pochovsky’s individualist ethos was more widespread. The missions were drawing students, the .yer implied, because of a lack of commitment to Hebrew education – considerations of budget details (heshbon ha-prutah) were overshadow­ing a serious moral reckoning (heshbon ha-nefesh) about the cultural health of the nation. Evoking Mordechai’s biblical admonition to Esther not to remain silent, lest her family be killed, the Battalion rebuked the Zionist Organization, the world­wide umbrella organization for the Zionist movement, as well the greater public not to remain apathetic about cuts to Hebrew education that endangered the Hebrew language.60

A second faction of the community to speak up was the religious Zionist commu­nity, which combined traditional observance with commitment to the Zionist project, and which ran its own stream of Zionist-af.liated schools with a substantial religious component in the curriculum. Religious non-Zionist students had, since Ottoman times, been a chief target for the missionary schools, in part because of their willing­ness to study there to evade the seemingly even more heretical secular Zionists and for this reason they were of particular concern to the religious Zionists. A ‘Memorandum on Foreign Education’, prepared in 1935 by the Rabbi Kook Centre (associated with the religious Zionist Organization, called Mizrahi) laid out the prob­lem. One thousand (Jewish) children, it claimed (it is unclear whether these numbers are precise), were studying in missionary schools, not including other Jewish children who were associated with the schools through the sports teams, clubs, and other extracurricular activities they offered. The children could be divided into two groups, they said: .rst, those whose parents could not afford the tuition at the schools run by the National Council of the Jewish Community, and, second, those whose parents wanted to prepare their children for clerical or commercial jobs and to teach them ‘knowledge of foreign languages – English and French – for which there is a need’. The article pointed out that indeed students prepared this way often did go to work in foreign institutions.61
That same year, Rabbi Pinhas Grayevsky, a long-time leader of the religious community in Jerusalem, put together a pamphlet entitled ‘The War of the Jews Against the Mission’, tracing the .ght from 1824 and the arrival of the missionary Joseph Wolff, a converted Jew, to Palestine in the early 1820s, and re.ecting on the present situation as follows: ‘the question of foreign edu­cation in the country is becoming a serious and sharp question, and those who are close to it are looking with fear at what’s coming’.62

The religious Zionists recognized that several types of responses would be neces­sary to eliminate the attraction of the missionary schools. On the one hand, it would be necessary for the Education Department of the National Council, the Zionist body in charge of most Hebrew schools, to balance their budget and .nd ways to provide opportunities for the poorest children to attend. A different strategy would be required to bring over families of the second type: the coveters of foreign language education: ‘We need to seriously discuss introducing radical changes to the curricu­lum regarding the study of foreign languages, religious studies, and clerical skills and to institute these changes in speci.c areas in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Safed.’63
The missionary schools, it is clear, were not threatening merely to siphon off students on the economic margins who could be duped into attending schools ‘whose purpose’, the memo wrote, ‘is conversion’, but also those middle class stu­dents who might indeed be contributing to the Zionist project itself. If they were to be kept away from the Christian missionary institutions by .nding the necessary lan­guage skills within the Zionist schools they might manage to stay within the fold. Indeed, Grayevsky pointed out that ‘dozens of students are being sent to Europe by these institutions [for further education] and their parents are happy now’, but he expressed doubt whether some parents would not come to regret their decisions later.64

The .ght to convince families to shift their children to the Zionist schools went on over the course of the entire mandate period. Following the 1935 memo, the Rabbi Kook Centre arranged a ‘.lm day’ in Herzliya to raise money for the ‘War against Foreign Education’, a scheme which netted 2,680 Palestine pounds.65
The Jerusalem branch of the Merkaz Ha-Morim, the Teachers’ Centre, concurred that these efforts were worthwhile and communicated to Yosef Rivlin at the National Council that representatives of various parties and institutions in Jerusalem should be organized in this .ght.66
Toward this end, the National Council did indeed send letters to vari­ous municipalities. The letter sent to Haifa and Safed was typical:
We have information that hundreds of Hebrew children are learning at mission­ary schools. Some groups in the Yishuv have tried to do something to save these souls. The Teachers’ Centre is prepared to do its utmost. But the communities aren’t exempt either. We’d like to establish a special committee to deal with this. Please respond to let us know what you will do.67

The discourse on the missionary schools was closely wrapped up with percep­tions of the Zionist capacity to deal with underprivileged students, those who were ‘falling through the cracks’, to use a term from today’s .eld of education. An article on education in Tiberias in 1934 said that especially for girls, the mission­ary schools provided a cost-free education and, moreover, ‘taught more sewing and embroidery’ than the Jewish schools, thus offering girls better chances for employment.68
Another article from 1935, entitled ‘How Long?’, explicitly noted the poorer children who, because of their economic condition, had ‘the cord con­necting [them] to their people ... completely severed’ when they were saved by the mission from life on the street. But the article saved its sharpest criticism for those who had in mind more ambitious professional aims for their children, and thus were willing to send their children even to schools that charged tuition. It noted, moreover, the particularly female face of this phenomenon: parents ‘gave their daughters over to Moloch’ for their own economic bene.t, alluding to the child sacri.ces believed to have been done by the ancient tribes of Palestine. Such parents, the article noted, recognized that the language skills would allow their daughters ‘to compete with girls their age, girls educated in the Hebrew schools, for work in Zionist institutions’ because of their superior knowledge of English and French.69
Noah Nardi, writing his report on education in Palestine for the Zionist Organization of America, mentioned the missionary school enrolment in a section on ‘the underprivileged child’, lumping the 1,000 students in missionary schools at the start of the 1940s with the 5,000 who dropped out of school and the 3,000 who did not attend school at all, commenting collectively in the subsequent paragraph on ‘the problem of unschooled children’.70
Shimon Reshef and Yuval Dror’s history of education follows this pattern, citing the statistic that in 1937 1,500 children in Jerusalem between the ages of six and 12 (or 14 per cent of the children that age) were assessed not to be learning in any school or had turned to the missions for studies, not disaggregating these numbers.71
Schooling outside the boundaries of the Zionist project, for sure, was not functionally equivalent to no schooling at all. In fact, poverty created a new educational calculus for families in which multilingual skills granted as charity by otherwise tuition-charging insti­tutions offered economic opportunities outside the con.nes of the Hebrew project, opportunities that students, especially girls, of certain backgrounds did not wish to or could not pass up at a time of economic uncertainty. Interestingly, and per­haps ironically, it was these poorer children who were ultimately being pushed to a more international, multilingual education than the one the national institutions could provide and, moreover, who were subject to contacts with Christian and Muslim students that were all but inaccessible to the majority of Jewish children.
Nardi’s emphasis on the missions in his 1945 report re.ects the fact that advocacy on this issue continued into the 1940s on the part of religious as well as non-religious organizations, even as the proportion of Jews in these institutions became less and less signi.cant. A Hebrew advocacy organization called the Central Council for the Enforcement of Hebrew in the Yishuv (founded in 1940) took on the missions in one of its various campaigns alongside concurrent campaigns to target foreign-language newspapers, correct misspelled Hebrew signs, and address cases of non-Hebrew speech in commercial and institutional settings. A letter from David Marani, secre­tary, and David Naiger, chairman of the Haifa branch of the organization laid out the problem in clear language, citing the school where Susannah Pierce Emery was headmistress, the English High School for Girls, as one of the chief offenders:
From year to year the incidence of Hebrew parents in the country – and in Haifa in particular – sending their children to English (missionary) schools is multiply­ing. The ‘Holy Light’ school and the English High School for Girls in the Her­zliya neighbourhood are .lling up with Jewish students, female and male. But the Hebrew community is silent.72

In the view of the activists, these missionary schools, again, were not dangerous primarily for their Christian orientation but for their contribution to linguistic devi­ance on the part of the Yishuv. Marani and Naiger mentioned that if one addition­ally considered ‘the public schools, mostly for commerce, that are increasing the number of hours they devote to English’ and the various courses that prepare stu­dents for the London University Entrance exam (the schools discussed above) one can get ‘an incredible picture of the great number of breaches in the wall of Hebrew education, which threaten the cultural identity of the Yishuv and could lower it to an humiliating Levantine position’.73
The problem posed by the missionary schools, it becomes clear, was not one of foreign intrusion per se, the residue of a situation of Ottoman philanthropy and capitulations to European institutions. It was, moreover, not primarily an issue of religious con.ict or coercion, the issues that had dominated in the late Ottoman period. Rather, in this period the missionary schools were com­pounding a broader cultural conundrum that presented itself over the course of the mandate period: in a situation of economic uncertainty and .nancial crisis, parents were interested in having their children learn English and other marketable skills and some of them were willing or compelled to leave the Zionist fold to do so. The eco­nomic incentives of participating in a more global marketplace and making a living trumped or at the very least complicated a commitment to participation in the Hebrew Zionist project.
The rhetoric of the appeals to the Jewish community, urgent and pressing, is rich in allusions and deeply revealing about the anxieties which advocates brought to a seemingly minor problem. In a letter to the Jewish community committee of Haifa, Marani reminded his addressees that ‘the .ght against foreign institutions is continu­ing’. Their organization was writing letters to parents in the hope that some would transfer their children to Hebrew institutions and newspapers were publishing articles on the subject, the hope being that some parents were confused or misled and could be dissuaded (some apparently were). Posters went up in the streets. One of them, posted around July 1942 was particularly vivid and I will cite it at length to illustrate its imagery and rhetoric:
In recent years the incidence of parents sending their children to foreign schools has increased. Whether out of snobbery or misplaced aims, they are sacri.cing their children to the Moloch of foreign education. These parents are making an error with their children. They are raising rootless Levantines, people who deny the original cultural foundation, who won’t .nd their place in our revitalised country, who will be foreigners in our world and foreigners in their own world. These parents are sinning towards their people: they are compelling Hebrew children – mostly against their will – to be educated in foreign institutions that separate them from their culture and increase the Levantinism and La‘az in the Yishuv.
We declare that every Jew in the land is obligated [hovah] to educate his sons and daughters in Hebrew educational institutions, in which Hebrew is the lan­guage of instruction in every subject. To parents who are educating their chil­dren in foreign institutions we call out: return from your [evil] ways [shuvu mi­darkekhem] and return your children to Hebrew institutions! To parents who want to imitate evil models we warn: don’t go that way, because you are endan­gering your souls and the souls of your children! And from the whole Hebrew public we demand awareness on this vital matter: inform us immediately of any Hebrew child being educated in a foreign institution, that we might convince his parents to move him. Let every person in.uence his friends and neighbours, lest the number of these incidents increase to the point of national self-destruction.74

These posters evoke the pashkevilim, or public posters common in Orthodox neigh­bourhoods today, many of which warn of missionary groups (or supposed mission­ary groups) that might threaten to convert Jews.75
The mentions of people ‘endangering the souls of children’ and sacri.cing children to Moloch, the ancient Near Eastern deity also mentioned in the propaganda by the religious Zionists in 1935, evokes religious transgression. In this case, the danger arises not from the aggressive tactics of the missionary groups, as is common in other posters of this nature, but from the transgression of the parents, sacri.cing their children apparently to appease a foreign god, one of the crudest images of self-negating assimilation. The second paragraph of the appeal is framed in explicitly religious terms: it uses the admonition ‘return from your evil ways’ (shuvu mi-darkekhem), which recalls the words of the prophets Ezekiel and Zechariah,76
and employs the vocabulary of reli­gious obligation (hovah) to impress upon parents the importance of educating their children in national Hebrew schools. Nonetheless, the religious content of the schools themselves are not the explicit focus of the poster; this biblical and tradi­tional language is mobilized to make a different point: the national body is being injured when parents choose to remove their children from it.
The ideal, implies the poster, is education in national Hebrew schools: the Hebrew language itself becomes the marker of proper national behaviour. The inverse, the resort to schools that teach in a foreign language, is a situation of national disintegra­tion, a dual condition of ‘Levantinism and La‘az’. These terms, which recur through Zionist rhetoric on foreign language penetration in the Yishuv, evoke a discourse of national preservation and the threat of chaos that is present throughout contempo­rary writings about language deviance. Levantinism, used frequently to describe a situation of excessive adulation of the West and incomplete national formation, was used frequently by Europeans to describe their colonial holdings in the Levant and the cultural decline produced by low-quality mimicry of Europe. As Gil Hochberg has pointed out, the term came to be used in 1950s and 1960s Israel to refer speci.­cally to immigrants from Morocco, Iraq, and other parts of the Arabic-speaking world, becoming a stand-in for ‘Oriental’.77
In the period of the Yishuv, however, this Oriental or eastern referent was not always operative. Rather, the term was used by Yishuv leaders themselves to critique excessively cosmopolitan trends and cultural mimicry that could evoke the Jewish condition in central Europe as much as it might signal a Near Eastern reality. In its usage prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, moreover, Levantinism was nearly always tied to language and language mix­ing. In other words, the primary symptom of cultural decline and improper mixing was multilingualism; its primary cure was Hebrew promotion.
This brings us, then, to the second term used on the poster: La‘az. Originally used in Medieval biblical commentaries to refer to French or other European languages, the term in the Yishuv (along with its more modern-sounding variant, Lo‘azit, which has the structure of the name of a language) referred to foreign languages in general but particularly European tongues (Arabic was not normally part of La‘az). The meaning was nearly always pejorative, denoting a body of non-Hebrew forces that threatened to unseat Hebrew from its precarious position as dominant national lan­guage. Levantinism and La‘az, the interwoven threats of the West and overeager adulation of it from within the Yishuv, loomed large in the minds of many invested in the creation of a national centre. In this particular case, missionary schools were the purview of these potentially destructive forces, dangerous not only because they brought the foreign into a properly Hebrew society, but because they reminded Jews of their own, quite intensely felt, desire to become part of the West, and the rele­vance, for some and under some circumstances, of gaining skills that might transcend the limits of national particularism.
The missionary schools themselves generally had very little awareness of activism in the Jewish community against them. Emery did appear to get wind of the massive public campaigns in 1942, however. ‘I found’, she wrote, ‘that two important Hebrew daily papers have each had an advertisement every day for a fortnight, warning Jew­ish parents to take their children from mission schools, and that all parents of girls here, who live in Haifa Bay, a suburb, have received letters from the “community council” of the suburb, ordering them to withdraw their children.’78

The reasons for this outcry were somewhat baf.ing from the perspective of the British authorities, who felt they had been going out of their way to accommodate Jewish students in an ecumenical spirit. Indeed, as we have mentioned, though the crux of Zionist opposition to missionary schools was linguistic, for their part the mis­sionary schools put effort into offering Hebrew for their Jewish students. In 1927 the Jerusalem Girls’ College and Men’s College stated: ‘The policy of the school has been, while giving an English education, not to lose sight of the children’s nationali­ties. Therefore we employ teachers for Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Armenian.’79
This transnational move pervaded the British Christian understanding of their role within the multi-ethnic landscape of mandatory Palestine. Hebrew was not just one among several languages taught at the secondary level; the Anglican Church in Pales­tine had expressed a special interest in it, part of a broader Christian Zionism that has been noted by scholars.80
From 1919, the librarian at St George’s Cathedral, the seat of the Anglican bishopric in Palestine, was Herbert Danby, a scholar of Jewish literature, a translator of the Mishna into English and, from 1936, the Regius Profes­sor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford.81
A Christian interest in Zionism trans­lated more concretely into an interest in Hebrew teaching to Jewish students. At the English College, Jerusalem, students did not attend Christian services but were taken aside to ‘read some of the Old Testament books in Hebrew’ with a Mr E.W. Ham­mond.82
In 1921 Stacy Waddy at the English College of Jerusalem con.rmed that ‘it is a valuable part of our work to encourage young Jews to learn their own language’. And students indeed studied Hebrew, apparently from a syllabus drafted by Ham­mond and Danby, ‘after consultation with some of the leading scholars amongst the Jewish community here’.83
At the Girls School in Haifa, the Hebrew teacher was apparently one Miss Izkovich (later Ms Tarran),84
whose mother was born in Baku and whose family had remained in Russia.85
In May 1942, apparently, a Dr Betty Nussbaum formerly of Vienna was appointed as a second teacher, a woman with degrees in Botany and Zoology and three years of training in Hebrew language and literature.86
The very act of .nding and maintaining Hebrew instruction for its stu­dents entailed contacts between the Anglican schools and individual Jewish residents of the Yishuv who came into contact with the institutions not despite their commit­ment to Hebrew, but precisely because of it.
And, indeed, the protests and pressures we have described from the side of the Zionist community seem to have had little effect on the already small number of Jews who were sending their children to learn at the British missionary schools: ‘As far as I can observe’, Emery wrote to her mother in the continuation of her 1942 let­ter, ‘the effect [of the Jewish advocacy] has been nil, as we have quite seventy Jewish pupils and I must have refused at least forty new applicants this year.’87
Collectivist and individualist motivations were far more separated in the personal calculi of Pal­estine’s Jewish residents than many in the Yishuv party or local leadership would have liked. In some cases, a factor was money and the attraction of a cheaper educa­tion. But in light of a demand for European language education, sought out mainly by middle and lower class Jewish residents of Palestine, it becomes clear that the multi-ethnic, multilingual setting of Palestine provided a small number of Jews, mostly of a less than elite status, an opportunity to cross boundaries in search of alternative contacts and alternative opportunities. These crossovers are obscured by the Christian record, which tends to be more focused on the Arab population that its schools served, the growth of Arab nationalism, and the development of Arab wom­en’s education, and further brushed over by the historiography on Jewish education, within which it was a numerically insigni.cant phenomenon dwarfed by the massive project of Hebrew education and culture-building. But at the intersection of the Christian and Jewish educational systems in mandate Palestine, we .nd a .eld of curious mutual perceptions and misperceptions, aspirations and assumptions. Within the Jewish community, whose apparent overreaction to a numerically tiny phenomenon has motivated this inquiry, we .nd expressed a set of anxieties about the interface between an increasingly monolingual Hebrew Yishuv and a world that demanded – for some and in certain circumstances – skills, in this case skills particu­larly associated with women’s employment, that could not be provided by a fully nationalist and in the main monolingual educational system.
Notes
1.
A. Ne’eman, ‘Hesegim ve-hasagot’ [Accomplishments and Achievements], in Sefer ha-yovel shel histadrut ha-morim 663–713 [Anniversary Volume of the Teachers’ Federation, 1903–53] (Tel Aviv: Histadrut ha-morim be-Yisra’el, 1956), pp.436–7.

2.
See Y. Ben-Yosef, Milhemet ha-safot: ha-ma’avak le-‘Ivrit [The War of the Languages: The Battle for Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Otzar ha-Moreh, 1984); M. Shilo, ‘Milhemet ha-safot ke-“tenu‘ah ‘amamit’” [The War of the Languages as a Popular Movement], Katedra, Vol.74 (1994), pp.87–119; M. Rinott, ‘Capitulations: The Case of the German-Jewish Hilfsverein schools in Palestine, 1901–1914’, Pales­tine in the Late Ottoman Period (1986), pp.294–301.

3.
A.B. Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.223. Saposnik notes, however, that the missionary schools’ ‘in.uence on the emerging national culture and its place in Zionist activity in general still awaits sustained research’ (p.217).

4.
See Y. Perry, British Mission to the Jews in Nineteenth-century Palestine (London: Frank Cass, 2003);

S. Kochav, ‘“Beginning at Jerusalem”: The Mission to the Jews and English Evangelical Eschatology’, in Y. Ben-Arieh and M. Davis (eds.), Jerusalem in the Mind of the Western World, 1800–1948, Vol.V With Eyes Toward Zion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), pp.91–107; R. Kark, ‘The Impact of Early Missionary Enterprises on Landscape and Identity Formation in Palestine, 1820– 1914’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, Vol.15, No.2 (2004), pp.209–35.

5.
On the relationship between Jewish communities in Palestine and diaspora communities see A.B. Saposnik, ‘“...Will Issue Forth from Zion”? The Emergence of a Jewish National Culture in Pales­tine and the Dynamics of Yishuv–Diaspora Relations’, Jewish Social Studies, Vol.10, No.1 (2003), pp.151–84; S. Ettinger, Y. Bartal and M. Graetz, Yashan mul hadash: pe‘ulotehem shel irgunim Yehu­diyim ‘olamiyim be-Eretz-Yisra’el ba-me’ah ha-19 uvi-yeme ha-mandat [Old in the Face of the New: Activities of International Jewish Organizations in the Nineteenth Century and during the Mandate] (Jerusalem: Shazar Library, Institute for Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1990).

6.
The issue of sectarianism, often with Zionism as its foil, is far more developed with respect to rela­tions within and between the Muslim and Christian populations of Palestine. See scholarship on the place of Christian Arabs in mandate Palestine (vis-a

a-vis Muslims): L. Robson, Colonialism and Chris­tianity in Mandate Palestine, 1st ed., Jamal and Rania Daniel Series in Contemporary History, Poli­tics, Culture, and Religion of the Levant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); N. Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917–1948 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). D. Tsimhoni, ‘The Status of the Arab Christians Under the British Mandate in Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.20, No.4 (1 Oct. 1984), pp.166–92. See also Assaf Likhovski’s discussion of British legal distinctions among Palestine’s population on the basis of religion. A. Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine, Studies in Legal History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp.37–39.

7.
Buoyed by Ottoman capitulations to European penetration, the .rst protestant missionary arrived in the Holy Land in 1818, a dispatch of the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) that evangelized mainly to Arabs. In 1826, the London Jews’ Society, founded in 1809, sent its .rst permanent emis­sary to the Holy Land, with great hopes that the conversion of the Jews would herald the end times.

T. Stransky, ‘Origins of Western Christian Missions in Jerusalem and the Holy Land’, in Ben-Arieh and Davis (eds.), Jerusalem in the Mind of the Western World, 1800–1948, Vol.V, pp.137–54.

8.
On the origins of the British consular service see M. Eliav, Britain and the Holy Land, 1838–1914: Selected Documents from the British Consulate in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1997). On non-Jewish activity in Palestine in the nineteenth century more broadly see Y. Ben-Arieh, Jerusa­lem in the 19th Century: Emergence of the New City (Jerusalem and New York: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp.276–366.

9.
A.L. Tibawi, Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine:AStudy of Three Decades of British Administra­tion (London: Luzac, 1956), p.61. Tibawi reviews the English, German, French, and Italian mission school programmes that persisted into the years of the mandate, most often with little to no oversight by the mandatory authorities (pp.61–3).

10.
E. Fleischmann, The Nation and Its ‘New’ Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p.29.

11.
Emery worked as an art mistress at the Jerusalem Girls’ College from 1919 to 1930 and, after a brief sojourn in Britain and Nova Scotia in 1930–32, served as the headmistress of the English High School in Haifa from 1932 to 1948.

12.
Her comments about women’s education more generally have .gured in studies of Palestinian wom­en’s education, most notably by I.M. Okkenhaug, E. Fleishmann, and E. Greenberg. E. Greenberg,


Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow: Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine, 1st ed. (Austin: Uni­versity of Texas Press, 2010); Fleischmann, The Nation and Its ‘New’ Women; I.M. Okkenhaug, The Quality of Heroic Living, of High Endeavor and Adventure: Anglican Mission, Women, and Education in Palestine, 1888–1948, Vol.XXVII, Studies in Christian Mission (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
13.
Letter from Ben-Zion Dinaburg, headmaster of the Hebrew Teachers’ College, to Joseph Azaryahu, head of the Jewish National Council Department of Education (15 Nov. 1939). Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem (hereafter cited as CZA), J17/320.

14.
‘British education’, Inger Okkenhaug writes, ‘meant access to employment within the mandate sys­tem and was in great demand among mainly the Arab but to some extent also among the Jewish pop­ulation.’ Okkenhaug, The Quality of Heroic Living, of High Endeavor and Adventure, p.xiv.

15.
S. Sitton, ‘Zionist Education in an Encounter Between the British Colonial and the Hebrew Cultures’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, Vol.29, No.2 (1997), pp.108–20; R. Elbaum-Dror, ‘British Educational Policies in Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.36, No.2 (2000), pp.28–47; I. Abbady, Benenu le-ven ha-Anglim: nisayon le-nituah ma‘arekhet ha-yehasim she­ben Anglim le-Yehudim u-ven Yehudim le-Anglim [Between Us and the English: An Attempt to Ana-lyse the System of Relations between English and the Jews and between the Jews and the English] (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1947).

16.
N. Reichel, ‘Ben “kartanut” Le-’ofake-tarbut”: mekomah shel ha-haskalah ha-kelalit ba-hinukh ha­‘Ivri be-Eretz Yisra’el 1882–1935’ [Between ‘Provinciality’ and ‘Cultural Horizons’: The Place of General Education in the Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel, 1882–1935] (PhD thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1994).

17.
S. Reshef and Y. Dror, Ha-hinukh ha-‘Ivri bi-yeme ha-bayit ha-le’umi [Hebrew Education in the Days of the National Home] (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1999), p.49.

18.
N. Nardi, Education in Palestine 1920–1945 (Washington, DC: Zionist Organization of America, 1945), p.52.

19.
‘Bate ha-sefer be-Teveryah’ [The Schools in Tiberias], Davar, 16 Jan. 1934, p.3.

20.
Meeting of Committee, Jerusalem Girls School, Jerusalem (27 Nov. 1920). Middle East Centre Archives, St Antony’s College, Oxford, GB165-1061, Jerusalem and the East Mission Files (hereafter cited as Jerusalem and the East Mission Files), Box 40 File 4.

21.
Ibid.

22.
Nardi, Education in Palestine 1920–1945, p.102.

23.
‘The English College, Jerusalem, First Report by the Acting Headmaster (30 Dec. 1920), p.2. Jerusa­lem and the East Mission Files, Box 40 Folder 2.

24.
Ibid.

25.
‘Report on the Work of the First Four Months, October 1919–January 1920.’ Jerusalem and the East Mission Files, Box 40, File 4: Jerusalem Girls’ College: Management Committee Minutes, 1920—26.

26.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (7 Oct. 1933). Middle East Centre Archives, Oxford, GB165­0099, Emery Papers (hereafter cited as Emery Papers)], Box 1, File 3.

27.
Letters from Susannah Emery to mother (5 May 1933 and 7 Oct. 1933). Emery Papers, Box 1, File 3.

28.
Letter from Susannah Emery to Ruth (27 Oct. 1935). Emery Papers Box 1, File 3. This was of course a minority, but what is interesting in the breakdown of .gures is that except for the Greek Orthodox, of which there were 53, there were more Jewish students than members of any other individual sect (there were only six Catholics, 20 Muslims, and 12 Bahai).

29.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (20 Oct. 1935). Emery Papers Box 1, File 3.

30.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (12 Oct. 1941). Emery Papers Box 1, File 6.

31.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (31 May 1942). Emery Papers Box 1, File 6.

32.
‘Jerusalem Girls College’, New York Times, 30 April 1922.

33.
Letter from Stacy Waddy, St. George’s School to E.M. Bickerseth (12 Sept. 1919). Middle East Cen­tre Archives, Oxford, Box 40, File 2.

34.
Inger Marie Okkenhaug speaks of the Anglican Schools as indeed a place that offered a model of modern living for young women in Palestine saying: ‘The Anglican schools offered mainly Arab but also Jewish women, not only a liberal education, but also potentials of new self-perceptions and a sense of different openings and possibilities in life.’ Okkenhaug, The Quality of Heroic Living, of High Endeavor and Adventure, p.300.

35.
Nardi, Education in Palestine 1920–1945, p.102.

36.
Cited in Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, p.217.

37.
Y. Burla, ‘Al ha-‘avodah ha-zarah’. Ha-Herut, Vol.5, No.9 (24 Sept. 1912).

38.
Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, p.218.

39.
Ibid., p.219.

40.
‘Dokh ‘al bikur be-vet ha-sefer ha-tikhoni le-mis’har’, Tel Aviv, Eliezer Rieger, 9–11 Feb. 1937. CZA J17/429.

41.
Y. Azaryahu Dokh mi-bikuri be-vet ha-sefer le-mis’har [Report from my Visit at the School of Com­merce] ‘Safra’ Ba-Tel Aviv based on visit on 2 Jan. 1942. CZA J17/6576.

42.
Pirte-kol mi-yeshivat ha-mo‘atzah ha-pedagogit [Protocol from the Meeting of the Pedagogical Council], 11 Feb. 1937, High School of Commerce. CZA J17/429.

43.
See, for example, M. Adejunmobi, Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa, Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education, 9 (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004).

44.
Letter from Carmella Zuckerman, Tzeror mikhtavim [Bundle of Letters] (Tel Aviv: Safra High School of Commerce, 1945), p.21.

45.
Statement from Dina Pugatzki, ibid., p.24.

46.
Statement from Shulamit Yerushavski, ibid., p.28.

47.
Letter from Yitzhak Zamir in ibid., p.14.

48.
Letter from Margalit Zibman to Safra School Administration in ibid., p.16.

49.
Letter from Mr Allan Drinkwater, Longmans Green and Co. to J.S. Bentwich, Education Depart­ment, Jerusalem Palestine (20 Feb. 1939). CZA J17/6645.

50.
Letter from J.S. Bentwich to Mr Allan Drinkwater, Longmans Green and Co. (7 March 1939). CZA J17/6645.

51.
The Berlitz Schools were British institutions that taught primarily in English. See ISA (Israel State Archive) M 170/36.

52.
Letter from J.S. Bentwich to Mr Allan Drinkwater, Longmans Green and Co. (7 March 1939). CZA J17/6645.

53.
Extract from a letter from C.A.F. Dundas, Esq., Istanbul to Lord Lloyd (25 Jan. 1941). The National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW 47/1.

54.
Letter from Director, The Tel Aviv School of English, to Miss Yellin [n.d.] probably 1941. CZA A580/22.

55.
On the history of British Language instruction overseas see A.P.R. Howatt, AHistory of English Lan­guage Teaching, 2nd ed., Oxford Applied Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); A. Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, Language in Social Life Series (Harlow: Longman Group UK, 1994).

56.
‘Statistics of Students, May/June/July/November 1943’, The British Institute, Tel Aviv. The National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW 47/10.

57.
Correspondence from Kevutzat Rodges (Later Yavneh), a religious Zionist community, and the Kib­butz Ha-Me’uhad, En Harod. June–Aug. 1937. CZA S24/91.

58.
On the Battalion see Z. Shavit, ‘Tel Aviv Language Police’, in M. Azaryahu and S.I. Troen (eds.), Tel Aviv, the First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp.191–211; S. Shur, Gedud megine ha-safah be-Eretz Yisra’el 1923–36 [Battalion of the Defenders of the Language in the Land of Israel, 1923–36 (Haifa: Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, Haifa University, 2000); A. Helman, ‘“Even the Dogs in the Street Bark in Hebrew”: National Ideology and Everyday Culture in Tel-Aviv’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol.92, No.3–4, New Series (April 2002), pp.359–82.

59.
‘Gedud megine ha-safah be-Eretz Yisra’el, senif Tel Aviv’ [The Battalion of the Defenders of the Lan­guage in the Language of Israel, Tel Aviv Branch]. Eliasaf Robinson Tel Aviv Archive, Stanford Uni­versity Special Collections, Box 10, Folder 5.

60.
Flier from Gedud Megine HaSafah, 1928. Tel Aviv Municipal Archive (TAMA) 4/141A.

61.
‘Tazkir ‘al ha-hinukh ha-zar’ [Memorandum on Foreign Education], Rabbi Kook Center (8 Jan. 1935), p.1. Aviezer Yellin Education Archives, Tel Aviv, 9.24/84.

62.
P. Grajewsky, Milhemet ha-Yehudim ba-misyon: mi-shnat 584–1824 li-se.ratam-‘ad ha-yom ha-zeh [The Jewish War Against the Missions from 1824 Until Today] (Jerusalem: Committee for the War on Foreign Education of the Merkaz Federation in the Land of Israel, 1935), n.p., introduction.

63.
‘Tazkir ‘al ha-hinukh ha-zar’ [Memorandum on Foreign Education], Rabbi Kook Centre (8 Jan. 1935), p.3. Aviezer Yellin Education Archives, Tel Aviv 9.24/84

64.
Grajewsky, Milhemet ha-Yehudim ba-misyon: mi-shnat 584–1824 li-se.ratam-‘ad ha-yom ha-zeh.

65.
Letter from Rabbi Kook Centre to the Teacher’s Centre (12 May 1935). Aviezer Yellin Education Archives, Tel Aviv 9.24/84

66.
Letter from A.R. Amblinker, Histadrut Ha-Morim to Y. Rivlin (4 June 1937). Aviezer Yellin Educa­tion Archives, Tel Aviv 9.24/84.

67.
Letter from the National Council Administration to Council of the Jewish Community, Haifa; Jeru­salem, Tiberias, and Safed (20 June 1937). Aviezer Yellin Education Archives, Tel Aviv 9.24/84.

68.
‘Bate ha-sefer be-Teveryah’ [The Schools in Tiberias], Davar, 16 Jan. 1934, p.3.

69.
‘‘Ad ematai?’ [How Much Longer?], Davar, 22 Oct. 1935, p.5.

70.
Nardi, Education in Palestine 1920–1945, p.111.

71.
From Y.M. Shelhav, ‘Temurot be-ma’arekhet ha-hinukh ha-Yehudit be-Eretz Yisra’el be-shanim 1932–1939’ [Changes in the Jewish Educational System in the Land of Israel in the Years 1932–1939] (MA thesis, Bar Ilan University 1972), cited in Reshef and Dror, Ha-hinukh ha-‘Ivri bi-yeme ha-bayit ha-le’umi, p.32.

72.
Letter from David Marani and David Naiger, 22 July 1942. Haifa Municipal Archives (HMA) 4469.

73.
Ibid.

74.
Poster: ‘Hoda’ah’ [Notice], July–Aug. 1942. Signed by the Regional Council for the Imposition of Hebrew and the Committee of the Hebrew Community, Haifa. HMA, 4469.

75.
This genre of posters has persisted as a means of warning contemporary religious Jews about the dan­ger of missionary activity in contemporary Israel. See N.B. Bar’oz and M. Friedman, Pashkevilim: Moda‘ot kir u-kerazot pulmus ba-rehov ha-haredi [Pashkevilim: Wall Flyers and Polemical Posters on the Ultra-Orthodox Street] (Tel Aviv: Eretz Yisra’el Museum, 2005).

76.
Ezekiel 33:11; Zechariah 1:4.

77.
G. Hochberg, ‘“Permanent Immigration”: Jacqueline Kahanoff, Ronit Matalon, and the Impetus of Levantinism’, Boundary2, Vol.31, No.2 (2004).

78.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (27 Sept. 1942), pp.2–3. Emery Papers Box 1, File 6.

79.
Letter from M. Maxwell, London Jews’ Society to Rev. E.M. Bickerseth (15 Feb. 1927). Jerusalem and the East Mission Files, Box 40, File 2.

80.
See D.M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); S. Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Chris­tians, Jews,&the Idea of the Promised Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

81.
S. Goldman, ‘The Rev. Herbert Danby (1889–1953): Hebrew scholar, Zionist, Christian missionary’, Modern Judaism, Vol.27, No.2 (2007), pp.219–45.

82.
‘The English College, Jerusalem, First Report by the Acting Headmaster, 30 Dec. 1920, pp.1–2. Jeru­salem and the East Mission Files, Box 40 Folder 2, p.3.

83.
English, French, Arabic, Classical and Modern Hebrew, Classical and Modern Greek, German, Rus­sian, Armenian, Hindustani, Persian, Latin, Italian. Letter from Stacy Waddy, Headmaster of the English College, Jerusalem, to Mr Bedford, secretary of the Oxford and Cambridge examination board. 6 Dec. 1921. Jerusalem and the East Mission Files, Box 40, File 2.

84.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (7 July 1940). Emery Papers Box 1, File 4.

85.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (18 Jan. 1942), pp.3–4. Emery Papers Box 1, File 6.

86.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (3 May 1942). Emery Papers Box 1, File 6.

87.
Letter from Susannah Emery to mother (27 Sept. 1942), pp.2–3. Emery Papers Box 1, File 6.