On The Characteristics Of Early Jewish Education

The Jewish people are a special exception among all the nations. People are always surprised that it can survive through so many ordeals in the history. It has a huge contribute to the civilization of human beings, which is totally disproportionate compare to its population. Even today, it has a big influence to the international economy and politics. Behind all of these miracles, it has the shade of its own religion—Judaism. If we take Judaism as the spirit of the nation, then the religion education is the main means to form this spirit. The primary reason we select this topic is we think it is a better way to understand the Judaism and the western culture behind it. We believed that the tradition of loving wisdom and abiding the contract are all have some connection with such religion education. At the same time, we also want to make some correct to the fashion opinion of confusion between "the religion education" and "the Christian education". We take it for granted that every religion has its own way to educate believers. Considering the centuries-old history of Judaism and the tremendous amount of vast literature, I only select the early period of Judaism to study, which is focus on the original period and the Rabbi period, not only for this is a critical period for the form of the religion, but also for it has obtain the basic characters of the Judaism education later.The thesis is composed of five parts. A definition of the early Judaism and meaning of the paper is given in the introduction. Jewish studies and religious education research in particular are among the new field of studies in Chinese academic circles. Because of its recent history, many of the issues are yet to be cleared off. But due to the effort made by a number of the scholars in recent years, the scopes in these areas have been both widen and specified. However, some of the concepts are now yet well defined. So the author tries to clarify the basic concepts of Jewish studies and demonstrate the academic significance of this thesis in the first chapter. The second chapter of the thesis is an introduction to the main content of Jewish religious education. As the Jewish understanding of Torah deepened, the early Jewish religious education has formed its basic format and education itself in Judaism has become a religious discipline. The third chapter of the thesis is to review the constant changes and improvement of the religious education formula through the different stage of Judaism in history from Jewish family, temple, to synagogue. The fourth chapter of thesis is about the complicated bodies ofthe religious teachers in Jewish history and how each group of them carry out the teaching function to form a chain of Jewish education system. Last but not least, we try to draw some conclusions about the main characters of early Judaism education form the research above: strong belief to the god and the selected people; impartibility of the religion education and civil education; same respect to the loving wisdom tradition and ethical values; association between religion education and vocational education; good balance between the family education and institution education.Because it is a new area, it is very hard to find any Chinese or English information. I have tried to collect the data from the Library of Shan Dong University, the National Library in Beijing, the Library of Lutheranism in Hong Kong. For short of the information and limits of my research ability, most of what I did in this dissertation is to collect the original materials and do some simple analysis, without too much original idea. I only wish it will give some helps to the researchers later.There are many similarities between the Jewry and Chinese, for the Chinese people is always called as "eastern Jewry" in the west. In terms of both are on its road to national revival, I think there must be much we can learn from each other. Apart from religion, both of us are like to pursuit the wisdom and respect the education. I wish we could do greater contribution to the peace and prosperity of the world in the near future; this is one of my dreams during the research process.