Yiddish at Home and the King James Bible in School: A Formative Experience for Earlier Immigrant Generations

My father heard Yiddish at home — and the King James Version of the Bible in public school. In later years, he was nostalgic for both.That comes to mind thanks to the decision of the Texas State Board of Education to require students to read at least one excerpt from the Bible each year, as part of a reading list that also includes Dickens and Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, the Board’s view that exposing students to Judeo-Christian tradition held little sway with the Texas American Civil Liberties Union or the state’s liberal press. Feature the Texas Tribune, whose public education reporter told PBS that “Muslims, Buddhists, folks who are not religious at all, right, will be mandated to engage with these materials that have now been required by the state.”One non-Christian who would have been neither shocked nor dismayed was my father, the son of immigrant Jews who attended public school at South Philadelphia. He often recalled excerpts from the Bible in classes filled with Jews along with Irish and Italian Catholics. Indeed, when my father attended elementary school in the 1920s, Pennsylvania state law actually required that a teacher read daily, without comment, a Bible excerpt, to be followed by the Lord’s Prayer in English and then the Pledge of Allegiance.So it was that America assimilated, yes, Americanized, that era’s wave of immigrants, based on the idea summarized well by Matthew Avery Sutton in his new book, “Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity.” Per Mr. Sutton, educators of my father’s era were part of a national leadership that saw the country as “chosen by God for special work” and, yes, building a “shining city on a hill.” Christian-centric, to be sure, but immigrants became patriots. Perhaps not the way we’d choose to expose our new wave of immigrants to American traditions, but we don’t seem to have come up with a good substitute.I can say with assurance that his exposure to the Lord’s Prayer — likely the Protestant version rather than the Catholic “Our Father” — never led to his being confused about his Jewish identity nor enticed to convert. Nor, though, did his exposure to what was clearly a Protestant-centric public education system bother him. Indeed, he was especially drawn toward the end of his life by the English text of the 23rd Psalm, which he would never have heard in the Orthodox Talmud Torah he attended at South Philly. As he approached the valley of death, he recalled the words of the King James Bible, the specific version required in his childhood by the 1913 Pennsylvania state law which required the recitation without comment of ten Bible verses each day. He would quote from it, I think, to test that his memory was still working.He was just as influenced by his exposure to music education; another Pennsylvania state law, and Mozart operas became one of his passions.Ironically, it was a Pennsylvania court case that led to the end of routine public school Bible reading. In the 1963 Supreme Court case of School District of Abington Township vs. Schempp, a Unitarian family successfully challenged the Pennsylvania state laws as a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. That ruling barred “coercive” religious exercises, such as the requirement to recite the Lord’s Prayer. In a 1943 decision, the high court had ruled against mandatory recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, after a challenge from Jehovah Witnesses..Likely to come before the Court is the question of whether assigned Bible reading runs afoul of the Constitution. At least for now, however, Brandon Hall, a Republican member of Texas’s board of education, is right to say, “We are bringing the Bible back into schools this week for the first time in 60 years.”

Yiddish at Home and the King James Bible in School: A Formative Experience for Earlier Immigrant Generations

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