Pre-Mandatory Era (1880-1918). 

Education in the small yishuv, numbering about 25,000 in 1880, largely resembled the traditional types prevailing in Jewish communities elsewhere. 

The Jews of East European origin maintained the traditional heder, talmud torah, and yeshivah, where Yiddish was the language of instruction; the Sephardi and Oriental Jews sent their boys to the kutab,2 where they studied in Ladino or Arabic. 

A little Hebrew was taught, mostly as the sacred tongue. 

Few girls, if any, attended the schools. Several attempts to establish modern schools were made in the second half of the 19th century. 

In 1856 the Laemmel School was founded in Jerusalem by a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family to provide secular and religious education in German: its "modernity" aroused much opposition. 

In 1864 the Evelina de Roths- child School for girls was opened in Jerusalem; in the 1870s it was transferred to the ownership of the Anglo- Jewish Association, changing its medium of instruction from French to English. 

In 1870 the Alliance Israelite Universelle established the first agricultural school in the country-Mikveh Israel.