A Tale of Two Catechisms: Education, Generational Conflict, and Geographical Division in Nineteenth-Century American Judaism

Abstract

A Tale of Two Catechisms:Education, Generational Conflict, and Geographical Division in Nineteenth-Century American Judaism Laura Yares (bio) In the second issue of his English-language newspaper The Israelite, published in July 1854, Isaac Mayer Wise offered his appraisal of the current state of American Jewish education in an editorial column acerbically titled "What Should Be Done?"1 He had been in the United States for just eight years, but with characteristic belligerence Wise showed no hesitation in decrying what he deemed the "pitiable deficiencies" of the American Jewish educational scene. He admitted that he was no admirer of the Jewish Sunday school, pioneered by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 and replicated in Jewish communities across the country. As an institution of Jewish learning, he complained, it was superficial in scope, hardly capable of offering the intense training in Hebrew language and literature that he deemed necessary for the education of American Jewish children. Such educational curricula, he argued, required instruction by educators trained in the Jewish textual canon, as Wise himself had been.2 Yet he retained his principal animus for catechisms, short question-answer primers that were popularly used in Sunday schools to teach the basics of Jewish religion through rote memorization. "It appears to us," he opined, "that catechisms were written in imitation of Christian schools, for the purpose of giving to the pupil who does not study the Bible a superficial knowledge of his creed as the author understands it." Wise's appraisal was not inaccurate. In most Jewish Sunday schools, students were drilled in catechisms rather than required to study the Torah in Hebrew. Memorizing catechetical questions and answers offered an expedient means to instill a basic understanding of Jewish religion in the [End Page 283] few hours that classes convened each week. Few mid-nineteenth-century American Jewish parents were interested in pursuing more intensive Jewish education for their children, particularly as free public schools opened across the country. Rote memorization of catechisms was the dominant pedagogy used in American Jewish Sunday schools throughout the nineteenth century. Wise may have been idealistic when it came to Jewish learning, and indeed nostalgic for his own Jewish education in Europe, but he was also pragmatic.3 Within a few years, as he carved out a leadership role within the emergent American Jewish Reform movement, Wise would not only become a supporter of the Jewish Sunday school but would also author a catechism that would become one of the most popular texts used in American Jewish schools for decades. This article explores Wise's embrace of catechisms as an educational technology and his attempts to standardize catechetical instruction to advance his platform of American Jewish unity based on moderate reform. His efforts would be thwarted by a new generation of Reform rabbis at the end of the nineteenth century who would challenge not only Wise's moderate approach to Reform Judaism but also the ideological monopoly of American Jewish thought by a self-appointed leadership class based in Cincinnati. In most historical surveys of American Jewish education, catechisms have been dismissed as overtly Christian incursions on Jewish pedagogy, representative of the assimilationist approach to Jewish education characteristic of the nineteenth-century Sunday school movement.4 This article argues that, while nineteenth-century catechisms may not offer paradigms for Jewish pedagogy, as sources of print media they transcended the classrooms of American Jewish Sunday schools and served as a conduit for ideological, geographical, and generational power struggles in American Judaism writ large. [End Page 284] CATECHISMS IN AMERICAN JEWISH EDUCATION As a genre of introductory Jewish theological writing, catechisms can be situated within a long tradition of synthesizing Judaism for popular consumption. From Maimonides's Mishneh Torah to Joseph Albo's Sefer ha-ʿiqqarim, primers and codes have offered guides to Jewish theology and outlined the demarcations between Judaism and other systems of religious thought.5 As a specific print medium within this broader tradition, however, Jewish catechisms are a particular product of modernity.6 Typically short texts presented in the form of question and answer, Jewish catechisms offered concise explanations of Jewish thought, and were believed to constitute an effective pedagogical tool to convey the essentials of...