MORRIS, NATHAN

MORRIS, NATHAN (1890–1970), English Jewish educator. Born in Novogrudok, Russia, Morris went to England in 1909 and became a teacher in the Liverpool Hebrew Higher Grade School directed by J.S. *Fox, subsequently serving as headmaster of the institution (1912–20). Morris was founder and headmaster of the Glasgow Hebrew College, where he served from 1920 until 1929, when he was appointed education officer of the Jewish Religious Education Board of London, a post he held until 1940. When the ravages of war threatened Jewish schooling in Great Britain, he founded and directed the Joint Emergency Committee for Jewish Religious Education (1940–45), which set up classes for children in places far removed from the large population centers. At the end of the war, Morris was invited to take charge of the programs of the Central Council for Jewish Religious Education in the United Kingdom and Eire and of the London Board for Jewish Religious Education (both 1945–48).

With Israel's independence, he helped to found the Jewish Agency's Department of Education and Culture and served as its director from 1949 until 1959, when he retired and returned to London. Morris wrote various Hebrew textbooks and educational manuals, but his most important work was the three-volume study on the history of Jewish education from the tannaitic period to the present, Toledot ha-Ḥinnukh shel Am Yisrael (1960–64). The study is a monumental work and the first of its kind in Jewish historiography.

[Judah Pilch]