Established in 1906 by Jewish painter and sculptor Boris Schatz,[1] Bezalel is Israel's oldest institution of higher education and is considered the most prestigious art school in the country.

It is named for the Biblical figure Bezalel, son of Uri (Hebrew: בְּצַלְאֵל בֶּן־אוּרִי), who was appointed by Moses to oversee the design and construction of the Tabernacle (Exodus 35:30).

Bezalel's 460,000 sq ft main campus is located adjacent to the Russian Compound in the city center.

[4] As of 2023, Bezalel offers ten bachelor's departments and five masters programs; it employs more than 500 lecturers and enrolls 2,500 students (2,200 undergraduate; 300 graduate).

[5] In 1903 Boris Schatz proposed establishing an art school directly to Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism.

It moved to a complex of buildings constructed in the 1880s surrounded by a crenelated stone wall, owned by a wealthy Arab person.

[9] Bezalel's first class consisted of 30 young art students from Europe who successfully passed the entrance exam.

[11] In addition to traditional sculpture and painting, the school offered workshops that produced decorative art objects in silver, leather, wood, brass, and fabric.

The artists blended "varied strands of surroundings, tradition and innovation," in paintings and craft objects that invokes "biblical themes, Islamic design and European traditions," in their effort to "carve out a distinctive style of Jewish art" for the new nation they intended to build in the ancient Jewish homeland.

[19] Decorative ceramic tiles with figurative motives with both biblical and Zionist scenes were created in the 1920s at the Bezalel School, with some surviving until today.