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20 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 MAKING THE BIBLE MODERN: TRANSlATING BIBLICAL CULTURE FORJEWISH AMERICAN CHILDREN IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY by Penny S. Gold Penny Schine Gold is Chair of the History Department at Knox College. She is the author of The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, andExperience in Twelfth-Century France (University of Chicago Press, 1985), and is now working on a book on the place of the Bible in American Jewish education during the first half of the twentieth century. ----------------Religious traditions-whether embodied in rituals, beliefs, or textsare kept alive over the centuries through a delicate balance of continuity and change. In Judaism, a central force of continuity has been the Bible, and one cannot imagine a Judaism without it. Yet, as happens with aU sacred texts, only the external form of the Bible has remained the same. The words have been transmitted intact, but the meaning of the words has changed, as social, cultural, and religious transformations have made.new demands on the text. The ways in which the Bible has been used and transmitted have also changed over time, with the most profound changes coming in the two periods of revolutionary change in Judaism and Jewish life: the first following the destruction of the second temple in 70 C.E. and the second following legal emancipation in Europe in the nineteenth century.l 'For the stress on the changes of the modern period as constituting a "revolution," I am grateful to Professor Benjamin Harshav, of Yale University, whose 1994 NEH Summer Seminar helped shape my understanding of this subject. I would also like to thank the American Academy of Religion for a grant that supported an early stage of this project, and Making the Bible Modern forJewish American Children 21 In the wake of the first disruption, the sacred texts that carried the beliefs and practices of the past were canonized into the Tanakh, or Bible, while a new body of texts was also developed-the Talmud and other rabbinic writings-that radically transformed religious practice while it embodied new attitudes. While the Bible-the "old" text-was placed at the center of religious ritual, the newer texts became the backbone of the lived religion now called "rabbinic Judaism." While the first revolution was spawned by exile, the second was initiated by an invitation in-emancipation and Enlightenment. In the course of the modern revolution, the centuries of textual production spawned by the first were rejected. The Talmud and its corollary texts were now seen as embarrassing, even revolting. The Bible, however, was seen as consonant with modern senSibilities, botpliterary and ethical. The rejection of the Talmud was thus paralleled by a commitment to the study of the Bible, and Jews of the modern revolution put at the heart of Judaism the text that the first revolution had subsumed within a medieval discourse. The task of re-forming text was repeated. Just as the rabbis had plucked at, added to, and layered over the biblical heritage in order to shape a new text consonant with the social, religious, and psychological experience of the diaspora, so too modern rabbis, intellectuals, and educators had to confront the ways in which the Bible was discordant with modern discourse and modern ethical inclinations-to translate biblical culture into a new setting. For adults there developed various ways of reinterpreting the Bible to make it modern: for example, the "higher criticism" and Bible-as-literature. But what about for children? The task was urgent. If the Jewish revolution was to succeed-if Judaism was to continue to live, but in new, modern forms-the ideology of that revolution had to be transmitted to children. One specific context in which this task was undertaken was in the United States in the 1920s and 30s, where a first generation ofprofessional educators developed strategies for transmitting the Bible to the children of East European Jewish immigrants. Self-conscious of themselves as a religious minority in America,Jewish educators took on a double task: not only to make the Bible modern, but also to make it consonant with American values. Deborah Dash Moore, Benjamin Sax, and David Amor for their...

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