Jewish literature explicitly addressing children as readers started to emerge in the late 18th century, in the wake of the Jewish Enlightenment. The proponents of Jewish Enlightenment conceived the increased engagement with the Hebrew Bible as a way to build on Jewish traditions, while at the same time engaging with new ideas and expectations with respect to Judaism, that were articulated and followed by both Jews and non-Jews. As a result, the genre of Jewish Children's Bibles emerged, offering a selection of texts of the Hebrew Bible, often in a reworked version. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Jewish Children’s Bible became the most popular genre of Jewish religious educational media. The selection and revision of the Biblical texts presented in these books followed a specific pedagogical, philosophical, and religious agenda, in an explicit effort to correspond to both the requirements and needs of the children as well as the expectations of their respective social contexts.
The present study is based on numerous analyses of Jewish Children’s Bibles, their underlying concepts, their design, and of the texts contained in them, applying different methodological perspectives, especially religious history, history of literature, philology, and cultural studies. Bringing the insights emerging from these analyses together and combining them, the book aims at providing, for the first time, a comprehensive history of Jewish Children’s Bibles, from the beginning in the late 18th until the 21st century, contextualizing the different manifestations of the genre within the social and religious processes of transfer, transformation, and innovation that happened at their time.