Joshua Prawer

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." Prawer died in Jerusalem on April 30, 1990.

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". To Prawer, it is the settlers' refusal to assimilate and their reconstruction of a European-type society on foreign soil, as well as the persistence of indigenous institutions without any interference, that mark the Crusader settlement as colonialist. His thesis is that the economy, society, and institutions of the Latin states are best understood in the light of their colonial status. The 1980 book Crusader Institutions collected a number of his earlier publications and expanded upon them with revisions and new chapters. The book continues his treatment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem as a European colonial product but focuses attention on five topical areas, while throughout employing the tools of textual criticism and commentary on sources. Especially prominent is his coverage of the status and administrative role of burgesses, which had not received such attention before. In his last years, he published a book on a topic of especial interest to him, The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which examined the tightly knit isolated Jewish communities of the Levant, the Jewish philosophical feuds they engaged in, and their dreams of restoring Israel.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.