Penny Schine Gold

Making the Bible Modern: Translating Biblical Culture for Jewish American Children in the Early Twentieth Century

Religious traditions-whether embodied in rituals, beliefs, or textsare kept alive over the centuries through a delicate balance of continuity and change. In Judaism, a central force of continuity has been the Bible, and one cannot imagine a Judaism without it. Yet, as happens with aU sacred texts, only the external form of the Bible has remained the same. The words have been transmitted intact, but the meaning of the words has changed, as social, cultural, and religious transformations have made.new demands on the text. The ways in which the Bible has been used and transmitted have also changed over time, with the most profound changes coming in the two periods of revolutionary change in Judaism and Jewish life: the first following the destruction of the second temple in 70 C.E. and the second following legal emancipation in Europe in the nineteenth century.l