Kolloquium: Religion, Emotion, and Emotional Religion in Jewish Children's Bibles

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2017 colloquium

Dorothea M. Salzer, Universität Potsdam

Religion, Emotion, and Emotional Religion in Jewish Children's Bibles

The first Jewish Children’s Bibles were published during the Enlightenment when the Maskilim set out to reform traditional Jewish education. These textbooks are adaptations of the authoritative biblical text, which aim to convey its relevance to contemporary life. Therefore, these Children's Bibles follow the pedagogical, philosophical, but often also the political agenda of their authors. Jewish Children’s Bibles, thus, represent a hermeneutics of strongly situation-bound character aiming at an interpretation and transformation of the biblical text according to the needs of contemporary Jewry on the verge of modernization. In her lecture, Dorothea Salzer will ask about how emotions are evoked, described and construed in this context.

Dorothea M. Salzer is an assistant professor at the Institute for Jewish Studies and Religious Studies, University of Potsdam. She studied Jewish history as well as German literature and language in Vienna, Berlin, and Jerusalem, and received her Ph.D. in Jewish studies in 2008 from the Freie Universität, Berlin.