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Creating American Jewish Religion: Training Teachers in Biblical Criticism at the Jewish Chautauqua, 1893-1923

Sun, December 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Beacon Hill 1 Complex

Abstract

The application of the category of religion to Judaism by Jews in modernity – with all of its attendant inauthenticities – has been well noted in recent scholarship. This paper will ground the philosophical process observed by scholars of modern Jewish thought in a concrete setting: the training of Jewish teachers in biblical criticism by the Jewish Chautauqua movement from 1893-1923. Whereas early American Jewish educational texts largely proceeded from the presupposition that the bible could be given to children as a textbook of history, at the turn of the 20th century American Jewish educators who became responsive to historical critical research were forced to re-evaluate the role of the bible in Jewish education. The Jewish Chautauqua movement, particularly through its summer institute for training teachers, was influential in introducing historical criticism to Jewish education, and to the production of a new conceptual understanding of the role of the bible. At the Jewish Chautauqua the bible was presented to Jewish teachers as one among a spectrum of tools at the educator’s disposal in the pursuit of the principal aim of “Sabbath school” education: the cultivation of religion. The case of the Teacher’s Assembly at the Jewish Chautauqua demonstrates both the ambiguous and complex status of the bible in turn of the century American Judaism, as well as the uneven process by which Judaism became a “religion” in America. How the bible actually could function as a potent instrument of modern religiosity was an intellectual conundrum that beset American Jewish educators throughout the last decades of the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th.

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