Faith-based history education: the case of redemptionist Religious Zionism

ABSTRACT

Modern historical research challenges religious education by undermining the arguments in favour of the existence of a supreme power who is responsible for patterns of reality. This article explores how the new generation of history textbooks of Religious Zionism, one of Israel’s ideologically most influential populations, cope with this dilemma. Two international models of faith-based history teaching that we characterize the ‘national-religious’ and the ‘divine’, analyse the novelty and singularity of these textbooks.

The analysis reveals that the new Religious-Zionist textbooks surmount the gap between faith in divine responsibility for human events and professional research and analysis of these events by creating a hybrid learning process that has two parallel interpretive dimensions. The first presents a historical process that remains formally true to the principles of reason and the discipline, although segueing to tendentious content at sensitive junctions. The second explores a metahistorical dimension in which these principles are bracketed with and subjugated to a theological, metaphysical, interpretation of history.

The findings concerning both the two international models and the unique historiosophical stance of the Religious-Zionist textbooks provide fertile soil for future research on faith-based history teaching in a variety of theological, political, and social contexts and circumstances.

KEYWORDS:

• History education
• Religious Zionism
• faith-based history teaching
• national-religious model
• divine model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Har Bracha Yeshiva site, retrieved 25 January 2018, http://yhb.org.il/?page_id=5 .

2. Rabbi Melamed figures importantly in the Arutz Sheva media group. Furthermore, a series of works on religious law that he published, Peninei ha-halakha (Pearls of the halakha), is immensely influential among Religious Zionists at large.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roy Weintraub

Roy Weintraub is a Ph.D. candidate at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, specializing in history teaching in Israel. His current research, advised by Professor Eyal Naveh, focuses on the development of the historical consciousness in Israel’s State-Religious education system.

Eyal Naveh

Eyal Naveh is a professor of history at Tel Aviv University and at the Kibbutzim College of Education. He is the founder and chairperson of the Israeli Institute of History Education and currently heads the Academic Council at the Kibbutzim College of Education. Alongside his academic publications, Professor Naveh wrote seven textbooks for the Israeli K-12 education system. He also coordinated and advised the Israeli-Palestinian Two Narratives history project.