Already before Mendelssohn’s time individual Jews in Germany and Austria distinguished themselves in literature and science. But the education of the masses was almost entirely confined to Bible and Talmud. With the popularization of secular knowledge the necessity for schools arose and the first institution of this kind was founded in Berlin as the “Jewish Free School” in 1778. The efforts of Emperor Joseph II to promote secular culture among the Jews of Austria led to the establishment of a primary school in Prague in 1782. Others followed in different cities: the Wilhelm Schule of Breslau was founded in 1791; the Herzog Franz-Schule in Dessau in 1799. Higher schools were the Jacobson Schule in Seesen in 1801, the Samson Schule in Wolfenbuettel in 1803, and the Philanthropin in Frankfort-on-the-Main in the next year. Even in Eastern Europe, where religious fanaticism was bitterly opposed to secular education, such schools came into existence like the one founded in Tarnopol by Joseph Perls in 1815. The Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in 1860, made it one of its principal objects to establish schools for secular education in the Orient, and it now has a great number of schools which it maintains in Turkey, Northern Africa and Asia, extending from Palestine and Asia Minor to Persia and Mesopotamia. With the growing number of schools the need for special training schools for Jewish teachers arose. The first of these was founded in Berlin in 1825. More important was the need for training schools for rabbis. The old method of education by which every young man who devoted himself to study was a Talmudic scholar was discontinued in Western Europe. On the other hand, it became necessary to give the rabbis a more systematic training. The first modern school of this kind was established in Padua, then under Austrian rule, in 1829. Later the Yeshibah of Metz was transformed into a Rabbinic seminary and subsequently transferred to Paris. In 1854 the Rabbinic seminary of Breslau was founded and this was followed by the establishment of similar institutions in European countries. In 1875 the first Rabbinic seminary in America, the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, was opened. In New York the Jewish Theological Seminary was established in 1886. Various educational institutions devoted to special needs, such as the school for the deaf-mutes opened in Nikolsburg in 1845, and later transferred to Vienna, and the first Jewish institute for the blind established in the latter city in 1872, deserve to be mentioned in this connection.