Didaktiska reflektioner om judendom, stereotyper och tankefigurer

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of teaching Judaism for students in the teacher-training programme and those training to become clergy in a Swedish milieu. A major challenge in the secular post-Protestant setting is to pinpoint and challenge the negative presuppositions of Judaism as a religion of legalism, whereas the student’s own assumption is that she or he is neutral. Even if the older paradigms of anti-Jewish stereotypes are somewhat distant, there are further patterns of thought which depict Judaism as a ‘strange’ and ‘legalistic’ religion. Students in the teacher-training programme for teaching religion in schools can in class react negatively to concepts like kosher slaughter, circumcision and the Shabbat lift. Even if the explanatory motives vary, there is nonetheless a tendency common to ordination students, relating to a Protestant notion of the Jewish Torah, commonly rendered as ‘Law’ or ‘legalism’. This notion of ‘the Law’ as a means of self-redemption can, it is argued in the article, be discerned specially among clergy students reading Pauline texts and theology. This analysis shows that both teacher-training and textbooks need to be updated in accordance with modern research in order to refute older anti-Jewish patterns of thought. As for the challenge posed by the simplistic labelling of both Judaism and Islam as religions of law, the implementation of the teaching guidelines concerning everyday ‘lived religion’ enables and allows the teacher to better disclose Judaism, Christianity and Islam as piously organised living faiths rather than as being ruled by legalistic principles.