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

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?” 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. 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