Translating Judaism: Jewish Catechisms and Manuals and the Re-Definition of Jewish Religious Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century

In the late eighteen-century Central Europe maskilic authors and pedagogues established a new genre of Jewish books, textbooks that aimed to instruct Jewish children and young adults on Judaism, history, literature and Hebrew. They were part of pedagogic innovations that challenged ‘traditional’ Jewish education, aimed to broaden the curricula by including secular subjects, embraced new didactic methods and re-defined ‘Jewish’ knowledge.

Jewish religious textbooks, mainly manuals and catechisms, belonged to this new genre and aimed to present an authoritative account on Judaism. I understand these textbooks as products and instruments of cultural translations, as means to translate and re-define Jewish knowledge into new textual modes and patterns of thought. They embraced universal ideas and universalized categories such as religion and morality while presenting a systematic account on the foundations of Judaism. Moreover they transmitted a new kind of social knowledge in response to the challenges of modernity. Jewish religious textbooks were as well objects of literal translations. They presented passages from core texts of Jewish tradition in German. And numerous German-Jewish textbooks were translated into other European languages or served as an archetype for subsequent publications in Europe and North America.

In my lecture I will analyze these textbooks as means to re-define Judaism and Jewish knowledge. Thereby I intend to show that the transformation of Jewish education was crucial to the making of modern Judaism. Furthermore this lecture as the proposed session aims to highlight the influences and interdependencies between modern Jewish thought and Jewish education.