Present! Jews in public schools in Habsburg Galicia

In the late nineteenth century, the majority of Jewish children in Galicia started to attend public schools, an influx which began after liberal school reforms which turned schools into public institutions, independent of the church and by law open to all children, and which created tools of enforcing compulsory educational requirements. Although in Galicia a number of Jewish secular schools were operating, the majority of Jewish schoolchildren studied in non-Jewish institutions, outside the Jewish space. This article focuses on the numbers of Jews attending public schools as well as the percentage of Jewish children receiving obligatory education, the geographical distribution of schoolchildren, gender patterns, and the relationship between school and cheder attendance. Jewish schoolchildren are compared with cohorts of Christian students, both Roman and Greek Catholic. The article is based on a vast array of quantitative sources. It offers a new perspective, as previous research has tended to focus more on the avoidance of school by the traditional Galician Jewry than on the fact that most children went to schools and received secular education on the elementary level.