Yeshiva means sitting, and its study partners are named for friendship
A yeshiva takes its name from the Hebrew for sitting, the act of settling down to learn. Its most distinctive habit is the chavrusa, a pair of students arguing through a Talmud passage together; the Aramaic word means companionship. The model is ancient, but the modern yeshiva was reinvented in an eighteenth-century Lithuanian town.
At first the word described a learning session, not a building. By the era of the great Babylonian academies of Sura and Pumbedita it had come to mean the institution itself. The Talmud describes adults working most of the year but setting aside two months, Elul and Adar, before the pilgrimage festivals, for concentrated study.
During the Geonic period, from 589 to 1038 CE, three academies dominated Jewish life: Jerusalem, Sura and Pumbedita. Their heads, the Geonim, acted as principals, spiritual leaders and supreme judges for the communities attached to them. Communities could choose which academy to follow; around the Mediterranean most looked to Jerusalem, while Jews in Arabia, Iraq and Iran usually looked to the two academies later based in Baghdad. Each issued its own rulings, and all three were treated as equally authoritative. Voluntary annual contributions and holiday gifts kept them running. The Jerusalem academy was pushed into exile in Cairo in 1127, and the Mongol invasions of the 13th century scattered the other two; nothing ever replaced them.
For centuries afterwards, study happened in the study hall beside each town's synagogue, funded by local taxes. Chaim Volozhin, a disciple of the Vilna Gaon, thought that arrangement failed serious students and founded a dedicated yeshiva in Valozhyn, in today's Belarus. It lasted about 60 years before closing in 1892 when the Russian government demanded secular subjects. Successors at Mir, Slabodka, Telz and elsewhere carry on in the United States and Israel, often under the same names.
In the 19th century Israel Salanter's Mussar movement added regular study of ethical works to Talmud learning, partly in response to the Jewish Enlightenment. Historically only men attended; today non-Orthodox yeshivas admit women, while Orthodox women study in separate seminaries.
Source: Yeshiva
