Joseph Gutmann

This article deals with the pedagogue and rabbi Joseph Gutmann, on the politician see Josef Gutmann .

Joseph Gutmann (born December 15, 1865 in Beverungen , Westphalia province , † January 23, 1941 in Paris ) was a German educator and rabbi . From 1895 to 1900 Gutmann was the headmaster of the Marks Haindorf Foundation in Münster .

Life

Gutmann was born in 1865 as the son of the Jewish elementary school teacher Isidor Gutmann. He spent his earliest childhood in Rees on the Rhine. In 1873 the family moved to Vlotho . The primary school there offered French lessons, Gutmann was also taught English and Latin by his father, which is why he was the first Jewish student to be accepted into the higher private boys' school in Vlotho in 1877. The family moved to Minden in 1880, where Joseph Gutmann switched to the Realgymnasium. In 1882 he left this with the completion of the Unterprima .

His father planned for him to train as a businessman because the family did not have the money to study at university. Joseph Gutmann, however, decided to become a teacher, which is why he entered the teachers' seminar of the Marks-Haindorf Foundation in Münster in autumn 1882. In February 1883 he passed the religion teacher examination and in 1885 passed the first teacher examination at the Catholic teacher training college in Büren .

From 1885 to 1888 Gutmann worked as a teacher and cultural officer in the Jewish community of Gera . There he passed his Abitur in 1888. He then studied mathematics, German, English and French at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin . In addition, he trained as a rabbi at the College for the Science of Judaism . In September Gutmann doctorate with the theme " studies of the Middle English poem the Buke of the Howlat " at the University of Halle Dr. phil. Instead of embarking on a university career afterwards, Gutmann worked as an educator in a Berlin orphanage. In 1894 he passed the examination for the higher teaching post in Berlin. Gutmann met Felix Coblenz during his student years in Berlin . At his suggestion, he applied for the position of director of the Marks-Haindorf Foundation in 1895.

He held this post until September 30, 1900. In that year Gutmann took over the management of the Jewish middle school for girls in Berlin. In 1911 he was appointed head of the teacher training institute and boys' school of the Berlin Jewish community. As before in Münster, Moritz Meier Spanier became his successor in Berlin . He remained the head of the boys' school until his retirement in 1930/31. From 1927 he ran the high school of the “ Prussian State Association of Jewish Communities ” in the same building , where elementary school teachers were taught Hebrew and religious subjects. Gutmann was a member of numerous Jewish committees in Berlin, including the “ Association for Jewish History and Literature ”. In numerous lectures he pleaded for the strict separation of Jewish religious education and Hebrew in order to adapt more closely to the customs of Christian religious education. In addition, Gutmann, like Meier Spanier, was trend-setting in adapting Jewish religious education to modern principles of pedagogy .

In 1939, Joseph Gutmann published his greatest work in Berlin, " A Guide to Reading the Bible ", the distribution of which was hindered by the policies of the National Socialists. In the same year he left Germany and was thus able to avoid the Holocaust : Together with his wife he emigrated to Paris, where he died in 1941.

literature

• Heinemann Stern : Why do they actually hate us? . 1970, pp. 353f.
• Susanne Freund: Jewish educational history between emancipation and exclusion - the example of the Marks Haindorf Foundation in Münster (1825 - 1942) . Verlag Schöningh. Münster u. Paderborn 1997. pp. 353 ff. ISBN 3-506-79595-3
• Joseph Gutmann: From Westphalia to Berlin . P. 36 ff.
• Joseph Gutmann: 'History of the Jewish Teacher Training Institute in Berlin, Part II (1909-1925)'. Berlin undated (1926)
• Hans Chanoch Meyer (Ed.): Joseph Gutmann: Life and work of a Jewish educator . 1977