Abstract
How then, could they let their children read a book purporting to be history but which they knew to be historically inaccurate? In a sense, they were asking themselves, "What should the Bible mean to modern Jews?" This question is at the heart of Laura Yares's new book, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in the Nineteenth Century. At the heart of a Sunday school movement that moved the focus from Jewish knowledge to religious character development was the following principle: "The American Jewish primitive child could redeem itself through the cultivation of rational intellect and modern civility, taught according to their primitive nature while they awaited their intellectual coming of age" (159).