Joshua Prawer

Joshua Prawer (יהושע פרַאוֶור; November 22, 1917 – April 30, 1990) was a notable Israeli historian and a scholar of the Crusades and Kingdom of Jerusalem.

His work often attempted to portray Crusader society as a forerunner to later European colonialist expansion.

He was also an important figure in Israeli higher education, was one of the founders of the University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University, and was a major reformer of the Israeli education system.

Prawer was born on November 10, 1917, to a prosperous Jewish merchant family in Będzin, a small city in the Polish part of Silesia.

He grew up speaking Polish and German, learned Hebrew, French, and Latin at school, and after joining a Zionist group, learned Yiddish as well.

He immigrated to Palestine in 1936, where he learned English, and became a student of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

An invitation to study at the university was one of the few legal ways for Jews to enter the British Mandate of Palestine at the time.

His mother died at the outbreak of World War II, and most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust.

Prawer found that he was unhappy with mathematics, and his father suggested he study history instead since he had always enjoyed history in high school.

His professor, Richard Koebner, an Anglophile historian of imperialism, set him on the course of studying the Crusader colonies in the Holy Land.

The close ties to Koebner were likely to have instilled in Prawer his interest in the history of settlements and colonialization.

Prawer began his teaching career at the Hebrew University in 1947 and (after fighting in the 1948 siege of Jerusalem) soon rose through the faculty ranks.

He became deputy dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1953 to 1955, was made professor and chair of medieval history in 1958, was dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1962 to 1966, and served as prorector at the university in the years 1975–78.

In the process, he succeeded in making the university into a "global center" for Crusade Studies, and trained many future Israeli historians in that specialty.

Prawer has been described as an outstanding teacher and lecturer who combined thorough preparation with a charismatic style.

He was often invited to lecture abroad.

Between 1957 and 1959, at the request of David Ben-Gurion, he chaired the Pedagogic Secretariat of the Education Ministry which was responsible for setting up new norms for Israeli secondary education.

He fought against graded fees and for wider free compulsory education, and gave high priority to social integration and the rights of Sephardi students.

During that time and as advisor to education minister Zalman Aranne afterwards, he helped draft the principles for teaching "Jewish awareness" that were incorporated into the primary and secondary school curricula.

In 1963–65, he chaired a committee of experts bearing his name that recommended a radical reform of the entire Israeli education system.

Its suggestions included making preschool enrollment universal for disadvantaged children, shortening elementary school to grades 1–6; admitting all pupils without tests into integrated junior high schools (grades 7–9), raising the age of free compulsory education to fifteen (later raised to eighteen), establishing two-year and three-year comprehensive schools that provided a choice of tracks towards either a vocational diploma or a matriculation certificate, further integrating students of different skills and social classes, and establishing a new curriculum division in the Ministry of Education and Culture.

Together with Professor H. Hanani, Prawer initiated the mechina university preparatory programs in 1963, which were originally intended to provide an additional year of study for Sephardic students after discharge from the defense forces, but were later expanded to include foreign educated students and immigrants.

In addition to his work at the Hebrew University, Joshua Prawer was involved in the creation of other Israeli institutions of higher learning, namely Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and especially the University of Haifa, where he was the first dean and academic chairman in the years 1966–8.

Prawer was a key contributor to Israeli government policy as well.

Prawer served as chief editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica from 1967 onwards, with volume 21 the first to be published under his tenure.

He advised and helped shape the Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem, and was asked to advise the government on cultural agreements with other countries.

In an interview a year before his death, Joshua Prawer said his message for the Jerusalem of today is "that it is a universal city, belonging to all cultures and conquering time."

The plan was approved by the Knesset and government, which allocated substantial resources to it, and the program began to be implemented in the summer of 1968.

Prawer died in Jerusalem on April 30, 1990.

Prawer was part of a cadre of historians, including Claude Cahen and Jean Richard, who freed Crusader studies from the old conception of Crusader society as an exemplar of pure, unchanging feudalism that spontaneously emerged from the conquest.

This view, which originated with feudal jurists in the thirteenth century, was held to by modern historians since the early thirties.

Through the work of Prawer, particularly his two papers from the fifties, and his colleagues, Crusader society began to be seen as dynamic, with the nobility gradually putting checks on the monarchy.

The combined efforts of these historians led to a surge of new research into Crusader society.

Prawer's research extended to a wide variety of other aspects of the Crusader states.

Among the topics he addressed were land development projects and urban settlement, agriculture, the Italian quarters of port cities, the types of landed property, and legal issues in the Assises des Bourgeois.

One of Prawer's best known works is the Histoire du Royaume Latin de Jérusalem, which won

him the Prix Gustave Schlumberger of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

The two-volume work presents the Crusader states as a working immigrant society, and shows the importance of immigration and labor shortages.

Another book by Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, which was intended for a larger audience, was more controversial.

In it, he portrays the crusaders as a society of Frankish immigrants living in complete political and social segregation from the local Muslim and Syro-Christian population, and terms this phenomenon "Apartheid".