When Jews Went to Sunday School

An astutely written history book hopes to illuminate Sunday schools’ heyday, immersing the reader in such a way that she might imagine herself living in it. At the same time, this study should provide insight into the realities of the present. In Jewish Sunday Schools (New York University Press, $39.00), Laura Yares, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards, takes  on both of these tasks and rises to the occasion. It’s not only about the history of one aspect of American Jewish education, but offers us a lens on current Jewish communal anxieties regarding gender. 

If the name Rebecca Gratz rings a bell, you’ve probably had some level of Jewish feminist education. Gratz opened the first Jewish Sunday school for children, in Philadelphia in March 1838, based on the model of Christian Sunday school. Concerned about the impact of everpresent Christian missionaries seeking to lure Jewish children into joining the ranks, Gratz’s version sought to show young Jews that “their tradition had a repository of spiritual and moral lessons that was more than equal to those boasted by the Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Baptists down the street.” In other words, Sunday schools introduced the concept and the method by which Judaism could be taught as a religious tradition, the way Christianity was and is. 

It did not take long for the revolutionary concept of Sunday school, as well as its curriculum, to be derided by critics as being nothing more that “female religious domesticity” (73 percent of the almost exclusively volunteer base of Sunday school teachers in 1924 were women, and 27 percent men), who emphasized the lack of knowledge women had of Hebrew and classical Jewish texts. Male Jewish leaders were anxious about the so-called feminization of Jewish education, and that the Judaism being taught by women in Sunday schools lacked intellectual rigor. In fact, Yares points out, the limitations of the Sunday curricula brought attention to the fact that most Jewish women were lacking in the level of education available to and prioritized for men, thanks to the pervasive notion that women were “natural” educators (also known as the Culture of Domesticity or the Cult of True Womanhood). Jewish children and a Jewish home were the primary responsibility of women, since their innate spirituality made them uniquely qualified to raise children who would be committed Jews. 

The fear of “feminization” succeeded in blotting out the accomplishments of Jewish women in educational and activist spaces. Mathilda Lemlein, Julia Richman, and Ella Jacobs of the Jewish Chautauqua Society brought their experiences in the public school system to Sunday school teachers, leading to more robust curriculum and pedagogies, making it possible for Jewish students to be on the same educational level as their Christian peers. It was the National Council of Jewish Women who intervened after noticing that while Jewish women were the primary instructors at Sunday schools, administrative decisions were made by men (an issue still very much still at play in today’s Jewish communal structures). It also created study circles, in which Jewish women were encouraged to shirk the belief that the Torah was “too deep for them, or that it was the property of the few—the theologians.” While some applauded these efforts, Jewish women were consistently reminded that, if they were not careful, intellectual pursuits would distract them from the most important roles they could fulfill, those of wife and mother. 

“Women’s bodies have too frequently been made the scapegoat for American Jewish communal anxieties,” writes Yares, and anyone who’s been to synagogue or taken in almost any kind of Jewish media will recognize this claim that Jewish women aren’t having enough children, they’re not getting married, or they’re marrying non-Jews. 

Pinning larger anxieties about Jewish continuity and assimilation solely on women did not then, and does not now, address deeper concerns as to how American Jews function in a setting where religion is understood through a Christian lens. The introduction of the Sunday school model into Jewish education by women prompted a ceaseless and ongoing questioning of modern Jewish American identity dynamics, including what it means to exist as a religion, a culture, and an ethnicity. 

Chanel Dubofsky is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY.