Religious education

• In Event: Transnational potentials in (American) Jewish studies and its various subfields

Abstract

Since the late eighteenth century, Jewish education and scholarship have become subjects of major transformations promoted by maskilim, educators, religious leaders, and philanthropists which altered the organization of Jewish teaching and learning, its contents, methods, and practices. By re-shaping the understanding of Jewish knowledge, Jewish education in its broadest sense became a crucial means in the making of modern Judaism. Previous research has highlighted the significant role of education in Jewish history, but only rarely discussed it in transnational perspective, with research on Jewish philanthropism (i.e. the educational projects of the Alliance Israélite Universelle) being a significant exception.
My paper will explore nineteenth-century Jewish education in a transnational perspective by focusing on the entanglements of German-Jewish and American-Jewish approaches to religious education with respects to its organizational structures and the actors involved, the educational practices and means employed, and the meaning attributed to Jewish education and Jewish knowledge. Against the background of a large-scale German-Jewish migration to America between 1820 and 1880, we encounter educators and religious leaders involved in educational matters, who were engaged in processes of transfer and translation that influenced ideas and concepts of Jewish education in North America. They contributed to the production and circulation of Jewish knowledge through a manifold literary production. We find German-Jewish books that became subjects of translation and adaptation to serve an American audience, reprints of German books and American “originals” authored by German Jews, which altogether were used alongside a growing American-Jewish literature that – to make it more complicated – inspiration by local literary modes and by English-Jewish literature on Jewish religion and education. In addition, we encounter similar structural developments with the establishment of supplementary religious schools on both sides of the Atlantic that by the mid-nineteenth century served the majority of Jewish children in public schools. These commonalities, however, should not mislead us to see simple transfer and one-sided influence where a more complicated story has to be told, about the respective challenges nineteenth-century American and German Jewries were confronted with and the very different political conditions and social and cultural realities they had to answer to.

Author

• Kerstin von der Krone, German Historical Institute Washington DC