Jüdische Kinderbibeln in der Zeit der Haskala

Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg hat Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (1921-2007) herausragende israelische Gelehrte in englisch- und deutschsprachigen Veröffentlichungen in Europa und Nordamerika bekannt gemacht. Die zu diesem Zweck von ihm begründete Reihe Studia Judaica bietet heute ein Forum für wissenschaftliche Studien und Editionen aus allen Epochen der jüdischen Religionsgeschichte.

The present study aimes at a detailed examination of the Jewish Childrens Bibles that were published between 1796 and 1821 and are part of the literary production of the Jewish Enlightenment. It describes the corpus and provides three detailed and representative analyses, contextualizing their results in the religious, cultural, literary and educational discourses of the time. In addition, the analysis of the Hebrew texts found in these Childrens Bibles provides one of the first substantial contributions to the study of the Hebrew language used at the time and in the intellectual context of the Berlin Haskala. The book demonstrates that Jewish Childrens Bibles should be understood in terms of intra- and interlingual cultural translations. The study builds upon the results of the preceeding study of the same author With the Bible into the Modern Age. Origin and Development of Jewish Childrens Bibles. While the latter provides a comprehensive description of the genre in terms of literary, social and religion history, from its emergence in the Jewish Enlightenment until the 21st century, the present volume focusses exclusively at the Childrens Bibles of the Haskala, serving as an important literary and pedagogical medium for it and thus contributing to it. As a result, the corpus of Mascilic Jewish Childrens Bibles is a crucial source for the understanding of the Jewish Enlightenment, especially in regard to the popularization and the pedagogical implementation of its concepts and visions.

Dorothea M. Salzer, Potsdam University, Germany.