Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America by Laura Yares (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America by Laura Yares Shari Rabin Laura Yares. Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 251 pp. In 1880, Minnie D. Louis described the educational approach of the Sunday school that she superintended: "Hebrew will not be taught, but portions of the Bible will be read and commented upon, pleasant anecdotes told, and the children made to take an interest in their own welfare" (134). In her new book, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America, Laura Yares shows that this vision was not isolated or idiosyncratic but was typical of Jewish Sunday schools in their early history. This now-ubiquitous institution was the novel creation of Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia and other public-minded women of the antebellum era, who were eager to provide religious knowledge to young Jews otherwise vulnerable to the approaches of Christian missionaries. Although the idea proved influential—not least because it did not preclude attendance in public schools—later educators and scholars derided the Sunday school—with its "pleasant anecdotes"—as shallow and ineffective, and almost inevitably so because of its reliance on the unpaid labor of women. Yares's study begins in the 1830s and ends in the 1920s, with a significant focus on the last decades of the nineteenth century. She crisscrosses the United States and moves deftly from local actors to national leaders and organizations. Her primary contribution is a feminist one of restoring historical context and [End Page 243] respect to women like Gratz and Louis. Building on Karla Goldman's work, Yares shows how Victorian ideals cast women as uniquely pious, able to care for children, and thus well qualified to offer religious instruction. Without access to traditional Hebrew and Aramaic text study, Gratz and her disciples initially adapted Protestant educational materials to Jewish purposes. Nevertheless, they did not offer a "lesser" Jewish education, Yares argues, but rather a different one, which built on the knowledge and the resources at hand. It was, importantly, focused on belief, morality, and the Hebrew Bible, presenting Judaism as a respectable religion parallel to other American faiths. Men soon came on board, serving as Sunday school superintendents and as authors of the catechisms that were used in their classrooms. Yares argues that these texts, which rendered children passive receptacles of memorized information, were seen as a rational male counterpoint to an overly sentimental women's religion. (They also offered low-paid rabbis a bit of extra income.) Influenced by European intellectual currents and especially by the Reform Movement, catechisms typically began with the question "What is religion?" and aimed, in the words of one author, to "prove that our faith was a good one" (53). The culmination of a Sunday school education was the confirmation ceremony held during the spring-time holiday of Shavuot, which marks the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. In increasingly elaborate ceremonies, surrounded by symbolic floral arrangements, young people performed rote knowledge of Jewish religion. Yares demonstrates that Sunday schools have always been sites of gendered and intergenerational contact, where adult anxieties are mapped onto the children they are intended to transform. She also highlights several significant changes they underwent. Catechisms gave way to other educational technologies, including magazines, objects, and stereopticons. And with the arrival of eastern European Jewish immigrants, Americanized Jewish women—including Minnie Louis—created mission schools, which aimed to cultivate proper forms of American Jewish citizenship among immigrant children. Sunday school leaders also responded to developments in educational theory, psychology, biblical studies, and comparative religion. For instance, they introduced graded instruction and promulgated theories of children as "primitives" or "savages," parallel to nonwhite peoples in the racist anthropological schema of the day. Perhaps most significantly, Sunday schools that had elevated the study of the Bible had to respond to Darwin's theory of evolution and to higher criticism, both of which cast its authority into serious doubt. In one telling moment, Yares reconstructs a debate about whether Genesis was a suitable introductory text for children; given its fantastical account of Creation, should it be taught to children learning the Hebrew Bible first...