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.