The School of Bourgeois Religion: Jewish Children, Emotions, and the Hebrew Bible

Children’s literature, conceptualized as a means of enculturation, is a vehicle for transmitting a society’s or community’s shared values, and is designed to mould children’s behaviour according to what is thought appropriate. As such, it is a powerful cultural agent and consequently a valuable source in the historical study of emotions. This article sets out to explore what can be gained from looking at literature designed for the religious education of Jewish children as sources that shed light on the role of emotions in the process of religious modernization in Judaism. Based on the assumption that feelings are to be viewed as a form of knowledge which is transmitted, acquired, and acted out in specific cultural contexts, several criteria for analysing the verbalization, representation, and use of emotions in Jewish children’s literature are outlined by focusing on the subgenre of Jewish children’s bibles. This analysis allows us to explore how emotions unfolded in educational literature, and how they became an integral and transformative part of religious knowledge, self-assertion, (re)definition, and identity formation at a time of tremendous change for Judaism.

Between Love and Misogamy: Changing Perceptions of Marriage among German Jews, 1750–1800

Marriage is a central and binding institution of Jewish life. However, as a historical construct, it was never a static, immutable structure. This article focuses on the changing attitudes towards marriage among German Jews in the second half of the eighteenth century. It discusses how rational considerations external to the couple’s personal needs and desires started losing ground, while its function as a framework for emotional and erotic satisfaction intensified. As marriage was increasingly perceived in terms of self-fulfilment, many pursued happiness through matrimony, embracing the new idea of the love marriage. Although this idea developed from contemporary trends in non-Jewish society, maskilic authors used Jewish sources to maintain this position, trying to present it as consistent with tradition rather than as a break from it. The emergence of a romantic discourse was not the only transformation in the perception of marriage. The individualism that impelled the notion of a love marriage led to another type of discourse among Jewish women and men: the discourse against marriage. Using the perspectives of continuity and change, the article seeks to discern the role that Judaism and Jewish sources played in discourses about misogamy and the modernization of the traditional institution of marriage.