Introduction

Jewish and Christian Education Media: What One Should Know in Order to Position Oneself in Relation to Other Denominations and Religions?

Religious education has changed fundamentally since the beginning of the nineteenth century. An ‘explosion of knowledge’ in all fields of research has left a lasting impression on the functions, topics, institutions, and methods of religious education. Philologists, theologians, and historians of religion have expanded the available knowledge of the manifold movements and tendencies in Judaism, Christianity, and other religious groups. They have also subjected traditional religious knowledge (grounded in the Torah, the Bible, or the Qu’ran, for example) to thoroughgoing historical criticism. What can count now as definitive, certain knowledge in Judaism or Christianity? How can religious educators represent such knowledge in the texts and practices employed in religious education and educational media? What can scholars and students learn about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from religious textbooks and other literature designed to be used in educational settings? What kind of knowledge might one use for constructing one’s own faith and one’s own religious point of view? If these textbooks do, in fact, present such essential knowledge, how do they talk about other religions? Finally, which knowledge must a person have gained in order to position themselves vis-à-vis other denominations and religions?

Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, historians, theologians, and scholars of education alike have used the term “Orientalism” to refer to Western attitudes towards and stereotypes regarding Middle Eastern culture. Researchers exploring religious life in the time of Jesus or Muslim life in the period of the Reformation, for example, have widely used the concept of Orientalism. For example, people developing Christian art and Christian educational media shared “a common practice to represent biblical Jews as if they were Muslims.”1 The book Orientalism and the Jews, edited by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, provides striking examples which are of particular relevance for this volume. To take one instance, during the nineteenth century, it “became more common to imagine biblical Israelites wearing not the Turkish turban but the Arab headscarf or kaffiyeh.”2 In both cases, the Orient played a central role in constructing European culture and pictures in educational media “helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image.”3

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s Die Bibel in Bildern, first published in 1860, provides a telling example.4 The illustrated Bible addressed children and adults alike. This common practice was based on the prevailing nineteenth-century notion of childhood as “an incomplete state of adulthood to which formal and informal education is the conduit.”5 The book included a popular image of the Parable of the Good Samaritan which depicted him in the traditional garb of a Turk, wearing a turban. Many reprints of this illustration can be found in Christian textbooks and in learning materials for school courses in religion, even today.6 Remarkably, these images from Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s book were also reprinted in Jewish educational media.7

The present volume discusses the media of religious education in Jewish and Christian families, schools, and congregations. Such media include children’s Bibles, catechisms, and sermons. In addition, individual chapters address phenomena such as printing and publishing in the nineteenth century, Jewish teachers’ training in the Age of Emancipation, and the professionalization of Protestant clergy who served as teachers of religion. All chapters are devoted to the reflection on broader processes of knowledge production and on the impact of science and scholarship on a wider audience. More importantly, they offer distinct answers to questions regarding the history of religious education and knowledge production within the context of Christian and Jewish religious education. The scholars who contributed to this collection of essays explore the interplay between religion, education, and knowledge production in religions during the nineteenth century. They focus on distinctive patterns and practices as well as on the entanglements between them. Most articles draw on papers delivered at an international conference devoted to the topic “Religious Knowledge and Position Taking in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of Educational Media” that took place at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main in 2018 and brought together scholars associated with two different collaborative and transdisciplinary research projects.8

1 The Research Project on “Religious Positioning”: Framing the Question – Part I

One of the contexts of this volume has been the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art funded LOEWE research hub “Religious Positioning: Modalities and Constellations in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Contexts,” based at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and the Justus Liebig University Gießen. The starting point and basic assumption of this interdisciplinary project was the conviction that religious diversity (including its destructive as well as its creative and enriching elements) belongs to the reality of most contemporary societies. Interreligious encounters, communication, and positioning represent an option and a “dialogical imperative”9 for the peaceful coexistence of religious communities in the respective societies or in entire neighbouring cultures in many regions of the world. Current political debates about the social and cultural consequences of the unprecedented numbers of migrants and refugees fleeing from ethnic conflicts, wars, and poverty demonstrate that religious and cultural pluralization – as well as the prejudices, fears, and conflicts triggered by the latter – are representing an increasingly significant challenge. This may be one explanation for the fact that much research is currently being devoted to questions concerning religious diversity and the difference and conflicts between religious traditions. Further, it may explain the potential for tolerance and dialogue inherent in religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The way these three religions deal with plurality is as multifaceted as the many models for confronting the challenge of competing truth claims that have emerged within those traditions throughout different historical contexts. While they may tend towards more exclusivist, traditionalist, or even fundamentalist strategies of demarcation, they are clearly also capable of more liberal thought patterns that are open to dialogical approaches towards plurality and difference and that provide efficient instruments for a peaceful negotiation of conflicting differences.10 The latter traditions are marked by the ability to recognize and embrace plurality as a defining element of cultural reality and to include it in their theological self-understanding as well as their practice of interreligious encounters.

From different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives and encompassing a variety of historical, theological, philosophical, sociological, and empirical approaches, the project explored the many facets of religious plurality and diversity. It also explored religious difference as a fundamental category of interreligious and intercultural encounters.11 In contrast to interreligious concepts of pluralism and dialogue which aim at relativizing or eclipsing differences, the underlying assumption of this project was that religions position themselves vis-à-vis other interpretations of normative questions regarding truth and values. They engage in such positioning both within their own pluralistic traditions and with regard to competing religious and secular worldviews. Religions are positional and, as a consequence, conflicted. This does not mean that they are necessarily incapable of dealing with diversity since conflicts do not need to be qualified as principally negative. They should be perceived in their ambivalent, potentially destructive, and creative or integrative function.12

The second assumption has to do with the sheer existence of the differing Other, which forces religious traditions to position themselves and thereby in the sense of a representation or affirmation of their own self-understanding. This means that, because of the challenge by an Other, this encounter or confrontation with a differing tradition is a relational process that cannot leave one’s own self-understanding untouched. This complex reality can be defined and experienced in very different ways: as enriching plurality; as irritating difference (incompatible with one’s own convictions and values); and even as fundamental threat to one’s own self-conception.13 The differing experiences of diversity result in a multiplicity of options for dealing with them. One aspect is the relativization of...