Making the Bible Modern: Translating Biblical Culture for Jewish American Children in the Early Twentieth Century

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-43
Author(s):  
Penny S. Gold
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
American Children

Rising from the Gutter

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Speaking

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.

Gender, Health, and the Problem of “Precocious Puberty” in Meiji Japan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Izumi Nakayama
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Precocious Puberty ◽  
Physical Growth ◽  
Japanese Children ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Stature ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Children

Mishima Michiyoshi, a Japanese pioneer of school hygiene, believed that Japanese children experienced precocious puberty, resulting in underdeveloped and inferior physical stature in comparison to European and American children. This analysis of comparative anatomies interpreted the inferiority of the “Japanese” body as embodiment of its diminutive status in politics and civilizations. This chapter shows how intellectuals, government bureaucrats, school hygienists, and pediatric specialists viewed and interpreted children’s bodies and their physical growth, illustrating the complex interactions between ideals of civilization and gendered norms in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan.

The Hunan Bible Institute (Biola-in-China): A Stronghold of Fundamentalist Bible Training in China, 1916—1952

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-144
Author(s):  
Kevin Xiyi Yao
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Christianity In China ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Fundamentalist Movement ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Bible Schools

The Protestant Church in China has been deeply shaped by the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century. As happened in America, Bible schools featured very prominently in the movement in China. The Hunan Bible Institute (HBI) was one of the most important Bible schools, and thus constitutes a good case study for this kind of key fundamentalist institution in China. By tracing its historical trajectory from 1916 to 1952, this study argues (1) that HBI embodied the vision and rationale of the fundamentalist theological training and (2) that HBI was not just a school, but also a platform where some of the most influential figures and ministries of the Chinese fundamentalist camp converged. It became a hub of spreading dispensationalism within China, and a powerhouse of the revivals sweeping across the country in those decades. This fact highlights the critical roles and significance the Bible schools held for the fundamentalist movement in China of the early twentieth century. (3) HBI’s identity as ‘Biola-in-China’ demonstrates a deep interrelationship between the fundamentalist camps in China and America. The strong, but troublesome relation between HBI and Biola attests to intensifying tension between the Chinese Church’s independence and foreign missions’ control. By training church leaders and providing a fundamentalist ministry platform, HBI exerted considerable influence on the formation of conservative Protestant Christianity in China.

Affective Narratives: Harlem and the Lower East Side

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 777-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHERINE ROTTENBERG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Way

This paper begins by juxtaposing contemporary discourses on Harlem and the Lower East Side, arguing that the processes of iconization of these two neighborhoods have been very different. Whereas the iconicity of Harlem has always been shot through with ambivalence, the Lower East Side has come to signify a relatively unambivalent sacred space for US Jewry. The second part of the essay then traces the representations of Harlem and the Lower East Side back to early twentieth-century African American and Jewish American novels, claiming that critically analyzing the theme of ambivalence in these texts – and, more specifically, how ambivalence manifests itself differently within each literary tradition – is key to understanding not only why Harlem and the Lower East Side have undergone parallel but divergent processes of iconization, but also the way Jews and blacks have been positioned and have attempted to position themselves in relation to dominant white US society.

Wellspring of Inspiration: TheMandarin Union Versionand Modern Chinese Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-177
Author(s):  
JOHN T. P. LAI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Chinese Poetry ◽  
Chinese Translation ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
May Fourth

Coinciding with the May Fourth new cultural and literary movement, the publication of theMandarin Union Version, the vernacular Chinese translation of the Bible, in 1919 had a profound impact on the formation of modern Chinese literature. This paper examines the ways in which theUnion Versionprovided a novel source of imageries, poetic genres and worldviews for the experimentation of modern Chinese poetry during the Republican period, particularly between the 1920s and 1940s. Revering the Bible as the Holy Scripture, young Christian poetess Bing Xin (1900–99) spontaneously expressed her religious sentiments and commitment by composing a series of “sacred poems” as her own poetic response to the striking beauty of biblical images. Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), a renowned May Fourth Chinese writer and intellectual, regarded the Bible as a treasured anthology of Jewish literature and appreciated the humanistic values embodied in the teachings of Jesus. Placing the biblical references of the wilderness, Jesus's universal love and Moses's legalistic position in the forefront, Zhou Zuoren's poem“Qilu,”or “Crossroads,” captured the perplexity of his contemporary intellectuals, Zhou himself included, in their sabbathless search for cultural rejuvenation and national salvation during the transitional and tumultuous Republican era. An ardent admirer of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Chinese modernist poet Mu Dan (1918–77) studied their poetry at the Southwest United University in Kunming during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Imbued with biblical allusions, for instance, the fall of humankind and the loss of paradise, Mu Dan's poems, like“She de youhuo,”or “The Temptation of the Serpent,” articulate his penetrating critique of modernity. These works of poetry represent the multiple voices and diverse reactions of the early twentieth-century Chinese poets towards theUnion Versionwhich had not only firmly established its canonical status as the predominant Chinese translation of the Bible used by the Protestant Church, but also emerged as a literary tour-de-force to propel the evolution of modern Chinese poetry.

“Monkeying with the Bible”: Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Bryan Bademan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American English ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Language

AbstractDevotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the history of the Bible in America: the public reception of University of Chicago professor Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation (1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization.

Ancestors and Sacrifice

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-246
Author(s):  
Ross Kane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This chapter takes the arguments built over the last two chapters and applies them to two contemporary syncretisms in African Christianity. It argues in favor of Christian ancestor reverencing as a practice that enhances understandings of the divine Logos at work in all human cultures, long before people in a culture consider themselves Christian. It then argues that a Dinka bovine sacrifice ritual, described based on the author’s ethnographic work, enhances understandings of Christian atonement insofar as it challenges individualized and transactional views of sacrifice. It also discusses considerations that inform theological judgments about which syncretisms might be incorporated into Christian tradition and which might not. It does so by examining two syncretisms in Africa that ultimately prove too challenging to incorporate into Christianity—Afrikaner nationalism in the early twentieth century and the Friday Masowe apostolics’ rejection of the Bible.

The Bible

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Chapter 4 begins with a discussion of attitudes towards biblical criticism in the 1820s and introduces the Irish career of Samuel Davidson, the first British ‘martyr’ to modern criticism. The next section examines Presbyterian biblical scholarship during the mid-nineteenth century with particular emphasis on biblical commentators and missionary explorers who used their first-hand experiences of the Middle East to defend the plenary inspiration and authority of Scripture. There then follows an examination of the wholehearted opposition of Irish Presbyterians to ‘believing criticism’, especially as it developed in the Free Church of Scotland. The final section describes how believing criticism came to be accepted by a number of Presbyterian writers in the early twentieth century, most of whom either spent their careers away from Ireland or came to the colleges from other churches.

The Baptist Endeavours in Biblical Translation in China before the Chinese Union Version

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-364
Author(s):  
DANIEL KAM-TO CHOI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Chinese ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Biblical Translation ◽  
English Baptist

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to present a historical review of the Bible translation of Baptist missionaries in China before the publication of the Chinese Union Version (CUV) in early twentieth century, especially the significance of the Baptist translations in this period. This study will also discuss the differences in translation approaches and practices of the Baptists from other denominations.The history of Chinese Bible translation by the Baptists started when English Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman (1768–1837) and his Armenian helper Johannes Lassar (1781–1835?) published their translation of the whole Bible in 1822 in Serampore. In the 1840s, the Protestant missionaries from different countries and missions decided to translate the Bible into classical Chinese with standardised terminologies for the names and terms in the Bible. This version was known as the Delegates’ Version and was the most important project of common Bible before the CUV. However, it uncovered heavy hiccup and disputes in translating, especially the difficulties in translating religious terms into Chinese. Their biggest point of contention was which, Shen or Shangdi, was the suitable translation of the word “God.” Furthermore, the Baptists insisted Shen as well as Jin (which meant “immerse”) for baptism, while the others recommended Xi (which meant “wash”). In the end, the Baptists withdrew from the translation committee and translated several versions in classical Chinese only by themselves between the 1840s and the 1870s. Until the early twentieth century, Baptist missionaries dedicated themselves to translating the Bible into various Chinese dialects.Although the Baptists had excellent achievements in the history of Bible translation, they had only played an insignificant role in the project of the CUV and shared the consequent of the CUV after its publication. This paper aims to investigate the work of the Baptists in several aspects, including their translation approaches and problems as well as their significance in the history of Chinese Bible translation.

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