The Beginning of the End: Jews, Children, and Enlightenment Pedagogy

Author(s): Iris Idelson-Shein

Source: The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Summer 2016), pp. 383-395
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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 FORUM
T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 106, No. 3 (Summer 2016) 383–395

The Beginning of the End:

Jews, Children, and Enlightenment
Pedagogy
IRIS IDELSON-SHEIN
Goethe Universität

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow
up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day, when she was two
years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower
and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather
delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh,
why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed
between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she
must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the begin-
ning of the end.1

T H U S B E G IN S J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911), which introduced

to readers one of the classic tales of children’s literature. The tale of Peter
Pan, the child who refused to grow up, contains some of the essential
qualities of the genre. Like every good children’s story, it carefully com-
bines adventure with domesticity, playfulness with pedagogy, wild imagi-
nation with everyday concerns. Over the years, Peter, Wendy, Captain
Hook, and Tinker Bell have captivated children and adults alike in
numerous book, stage, and film adaptations. And yet at the heart of this
rich repertoire is a certain ambiguity. For in all truthfulness there is no
original, no real Peter Pan. Readers who wish to familiarize themselves
with the original tale find themselves somewhat like the frustrated Mrs.
Darling, whose futile attempt to catch Peter leaves her with only his
shadow in hand.
Peter Pan appeared for the first time in J. M. Barrie’s The Little White

1. J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (1911; repr. New York, 1912), 1.

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2016)

Copyright 䉷 2016 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
All rights reserved.

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384 JQR 106.3 (2016)

Bird, published in 1902 as an adult novel. The figure was then reworked
into several of Barrie’s plays and stories. However, it is not through these
original, surprisingly dark versions that most readers today know Peter
but rather through other writers’ and artists’ more light-hearted adapta-
tions of the tale.2 The elusiveness of the eternal child is indicative perhaps
of the illusiveness of childhood more generally. As Mrs. Darling’s com-
ment to her daughter emphasizes, childhood is a state of constant transi-
tion, it is a slippery present that is forever seeping through our fingers,
always haunted by its future—“the beginning of the end.” This flux lies
at the very heart of the modern concept of childhood, and it is this
changeability that the genre of children’s literature addresses. Modern
children’s books are there not only to entertain but also to educate, they
address not only the child of the present but also, and perhaps more
importantly, the adult of the future.3
In fact, Peter is in good company; several other heroes of the modern
children’s library, such as Robinson Crusoe or Lemuel Gulliver, are like-
wise mere shadows of their earlier selves, which appeared in books tar-
geting adults. Like Peter Pan, these children’s heroes are displaced,
and their ghost-like quality permeates the genre. Indeed, there is no real
Peter Pan precisely because there is—as Jaqueline Rose has famously
argued—no real children’s literature. According to Rose, children’s litera-
ture is not really for children at all; rather, what it addresses is a cultural
construct, a “child” concocted to fill the needs of adults. One cannot,
therefore, discuss children’s literature, indeed one cannot discuss child-
hood, without unpacking some troubling questions about us, the adults
who produce children, and our culture, language, and hidden agendas.
When we invoke children, argues Rose, “it is above all our investment in
doing so which counts.”4

2. See Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s
Fiction (1984; repr. Philadelphia, 1993), 66–68; Anne Hiebert Alton, introduction
to J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (Peterborough, Ont., 2011), 10–14.
3. The development of children’s literature is often presented as a progress
from the purely pedagogic to the primarily pleasurable. For a classic study, see
Mary F. Thwaite, From Primer to Pleasure in Reading: An Introduction to the History
of Children’s Books in England from the Invention of Print to 1914 (London, 1963).
More recently, however, scholars have challenged this view. For a survey, see
David Rudd, “The Development of Children’s Literature,” in The Routledge Com-
panion to Children’s Literature, ed. D. Rudd (New York, 2010), 4–7.
4. Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 13. For some other discussions, see Jack Zipes,
Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter
to Harry Potter (New York, 2001); Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature:
Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford, 1994).

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 JEWS AND ENLIGHTENMENT PEDAGOGY—IDELSON-SHEIN 385

Rose’s claims have caused a small revolution within the intimate field
of English children’s literature studies. They have been debated,
defended, and defamed—often at one and the same time—by many of the
field’s central theorists.5 But as far as these theories have reached, their
impact outside the field of English children’s literature is rarely felt.
Indeed, while Rose’s 1984 study caused a proverbial earthquake in the
English-speaking world, the libraries of nurseries around the world have
gone unshaken. And yet it is precisely in studying the history of Jewish
children’s literature that we may find Rose’s provocative perspective par-
ticularly fruitful.
From its modest beginnings in the last quarter of the eighteenth cen-
tury, and well into the twentieth century, Jewish—and particularly
Hebrew—children’s literature has been unashamedly ambiguous in terms
of its target audience. The genre began to take form in the decades sur-
rounding the end of the eighteenth century with a corpus of Hebrew and
Yiddish translations of German children’s books. The production of such
translations was extremely popular among the maskilim, members of the
Jewish Enlightenment, so much so that during the first three decades of
the nineteenth century it became something of a maskilic initiation rite.6
The fondness of the maskilim for such translations stands in stark con-
trast to their poor reception among the Jewish reading public. Unlike
their German source texts—which enjoyed a great deal of popularity—
maskilic children’s books addressed a target audience that was virtually
nonexistent. The greater part of this corpus was written in biblical
Hebrew and densely packed with intertextual allusions, which would
have rendered them all but impenetrable for Jewish children of the time,
whose native tongue was Yiddish.7 Moreover, these books (even those

5. On Rose’s impact and her enduring influence in a discipline to which she

herself does not belong, see David Rudd and Anthony Pavlik, “The (Im)Possibil-
ity of Children’s Fiction: Rose Twenty-Five Years On,” Children’s Literature Associ-
ation Quarterly 35.3 (2010): 223–29.
6. Zohar Shavit, “Literary Interference between German and Jewish-Hebrew
Children’s Literature during the Enlightenment: The Case of Campe,” Poetics
Today 13.1 (1992): 41–61.
7. Shavit, “From Friedländer’s Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe: The Begin-
ning of Hebrew Children’s Literature in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
33 (1988): 388–415; “Hebrew and Israeli Children’s Literature,” in International
Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. P. Hunt (London, 1996),
783–88; Tal Kogman, The “Maskilim” in the Sciences: Jewish Scientific Education in
the German-Speaking Sphere in Modern Times (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 2013), esp. 72,
76, 86, 103–4, 114, 129. On the ambiguity of the target audience in later Jewish
texts, see Kerstin Hoge, “For Adults and Children Alike: Reading Bergelson’s
‘Children’s Stories’ (1914–1919) as Narratives of Identity Formation,” in David

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386 JQR 106.3 (2016)

that were written in Yiddish or German in Hebrew characters) employed

much duller storytelling techniques than their non-Jewish equivalents,
omitting the illustrations, direct speech, frame narratives, and other child-
enticing motifs that appeared in their source texts and, in general, show-
ing little regard for the need to appeal to the child-reader.8
This disregard for children in maskilic children’s books is evident not
only in the texts’ narration but also in their external presentation. Take
for instance Barukh Lindau’s Reshit limudim (Beginning of studies,
1788)—a Hebrew translation of Georg Christian Raff’s Naturgeschichte für
Kinder (Natural history for children, 1778). Significantly, in contrast to
his German source text, which identified its target readership in its very
title, Lindau made no mention of children on the cover of his book. The
same phenomenon is found in other maskilic translations of German chil-
dren’s books.9 If, following Gérard Genette, we understand a book’s title
page and other framing elements (the paratext) as literary devices meant
to ensure a better reception and understanding of the text, we are left
with the impression that the obfuscation of the target audience in maskilic
translations of children’s books was deliberately done.10 But then, how
are we to explain this dissonance between the genre of the source and its
translation? More pointedly, who, if not children, were these books
intended to reach?
Previous attempts to tackle this issue have focused on the alleged
incompetence of the maskilic translator or that of the Jewish reader.11
Unable to engage with more sophisticated texts—so the argument goes—

Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. J. Sherman and G. Estraikh

(Oxford, 2007), 117–28.
8. Shavit, “Ha-rihut shel h.adar ha-Haskalah be-Berlin,” in Ke-minhag Ashkenaz
u-Polin: Sefer yovel le-Chone Shmeruk, ed. I. Bartal, E. Mendelsohn, and C. Turnian-
sky (Jerusalem, 1993), 194–207. Of course, there are several exceptions. See,
e.g., David Zamość, Robinzohn der eingere: Ein lezebuch fir kinder (Breslau, 1824);
Baruch Shenfeld, Musar haskel (1811; repr. Berlin, 1859).
9. E.g., the translations of Campe’s children’s travel tales in Moses
Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-arets ha-h.adashah kolel kol ha-gevurot ve-ha-
ma‘asim asher na‘asu le-‘et metso ha-arets ha-zot (Altona, 1807); Khaykl Hurvitz,
Tsofnas paneyakh (Bardichev, 1817); Anon. [Menachem Mendel Lefin?], Oniyah
so’arah (ca. 1815; repr. Warsaw, 1854).
10. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987; trans. Cam-
bridge, 1997), 2.
11. See, e.g., Tal Kogman, “Yetsirat dimuye ha-yed‘a ba-aratsot dovrot ha-
germanit bi-tekufat ha-haskalah” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2000), 56;
Rebecca Wolpe, “The Sea and Sea Voyage in Maskilic Literature” (Ph.D. diss.,
Hebrew University, 2012), 77.

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 JEWS AND ENLIGHTENMENT PEDAGOGY—IDELSON-SHEIN 387

Jewish writers and readers alike favored German children’s books as

a source for scientific and historical knowledge. This approach proves,
however, highly problematic. In fact, recent research into the sources
of scientific knowledge in maskilic translations has revealed a confident
translator, who was much better versed in the scientific achievements of
his day than previously imagined. Lindau, for instance, supplemented his
Hebrew translation of Raff’s book with information derived from such
highbrow sources as George Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Carl von Linné,
and Anton Friedrich Büsching.12 Similarly, Pinchas Hurwitz, whose sci-
entific discussion in his 1797 Sefer ha-brit was largely based on contempo-
rary maskilic works, seems to have turned also to other, perhaps non-
Jewish, sources and was apparently particularly well acquainted with the
medical and metaphysical debates of his time.13
As for their belief in the abilities of their readers, of course, in blurring
the boundaries between the Jewish adult and Christian child, the
maskilim conveyed an extremely paternalistic approach to their Jewish
readers, thus accentuating what they perceived to be the dire need for
Jewish acculturation. And yet had the maskilim taken heed of their read-
er’s actual needs, they would hardly have produced these verbose texts
in a dead language, heavily encumbered with biblical allusions and
ancient words. Indeed, as Zohar Shavit notes, it was ideology, not prag-
matism, “that served as the main motivating force in the creation of
Hebrew children’s literature . . . and determined its distinguishing fea-
tures.”14 It would seem then, that the reasons for the maskilim’s resort to
children’s literature run deeper than mere scientific or cultural incompe-
tence.
Perhaps the unavailability of a target readership for maskilic transla-
tions of German children’s books is not merely an idiosyncrasy of this
corpus but rather provides the key to its understanding. I suggest viewing

12. Iris Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race

during the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2014), 117–24.
13. Ressiane Fontaine, “Natural Science in Sefer ha-Berit: Pinchas Hurwitz on
Animals and Meteorological Phenomena,” in Sepharad in Ashkenaz: Medieval Knowl-
edge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, ed. R. Fontaine, A. Schatz,
and I. Zwiep (Amsterdam, 2007), 157–81; David B. Ruderman, A Best-Selling
Hebrew Book of the Modern Era: The Book of the Covenant of Pinh.as Hurwitz and Its
Remarkable Legacy (Seattle, Wash., 2014), esp. 43–56, 67–74.
14. Shavit, “Friedländer’s Lesebuch,” 389. See also ibid., 390–91; Louise
Hecht, “Um die Judenschaft in Böhmen . . . der bürgerlichen Bestimmung
immer näher zu bringen: Jüdische Schulen und Schulbücher in Böhmen,” in
Kommunikation und Information im 18. Jahrhundert: Das Beispiel der Habsburgmonar-
chie, ed. J. Frimmel and M. Wögerbauer (Wiesbaden, 2009), 278.

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388 JQR 106.3 (2016)

the production of this library as a primarily symbolic act, whose main

value was not pedagogic but rather performative. In this context, it is
worth bearing in mind that, as Jeremy Dauber reminds us, “at times,
maskilim wrote to gain the appeal and social approval of non-Jewish
audiences, not [merely] to convince Jewish audiences of their positions,
even if they were writing in Jewish languages.”15 Thus, Rose’s categorical
rule—that it is the investment in invoking children that matters—
becomes all the more poignant. “The child” of what we must now term
maskilic pseudo-children’s literature is a cultural construct, harnessed by
the maskilim to promote some other agenda besides the education of
actual Jewish children. In order to understand precisely what this agenda
was, we must first trace the contours of the image of the child as it
evolved in the Enlightenment.
If the child of children’s literature can be said to have been the progeny
of any one man (of course, it cannot), this man would probably be John
Locke, whose modestly titled An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1689) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) set the tone for
pedagogic literature for centuries to come. Locke depicted the child’s
mind as “white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas,” and
argued that the first impressions made during infancy “have very impor-
tant and lasting Consequences.”16 This view was promptly adopted by a
cohort of influential pedagogues and philosophers, such as Richard Hurd,
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Johann Bernhard Basedow, Claude Adrien
Helvétius and, most notably, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Thus, Hurd
argued in 1764: “The man depends entirely on the boy; and he is all his
life long, what the impressions, he received in his early years have made
him.”17 Helvétius agreed, remarking: “The inequality in minds or under-
standings, is the effect of a known cause, and this cause is the difference
of education.”18 These and numerous other such utterances promoted a
view of the child as unformed and radically perfectible. They thus
entailed an extreme kind of anthropological environmentalism that
ascribed differences between human beings to various contingencies such
as education, climate, diet, or customs. Such views were characteristic of

15. Jeremy Dauber, Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the
Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford, Calif., 2004), 40.
16. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 3 vols. (London,
1722), 1:32; Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693), 2.
17. Richard Hurd, Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel (1764; repr. London,
1771), 76.
18. Claude Adrien Helvétius, A Treatise on Man (1774; trans. W. Hooper, Lon-
don, 1777), 92.

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 JEWS AND ENLIGHTENMENT PEDAGOGY—IDELSON-SHEIN 389

European anthropological thought in general during the first half of the

eighteenth century, but they gradually declined toward the end of the
century, which saw the rise of more rigid understandings of identity and
the emergence of the modern concept of race. Anthropological environ-
mentalism persisted however in pedagogic thought, in which we find per-
haps the most malleable image of man, the most flexible understanding
of identity to be espoused in the decades surrounding the end of the
eighteenth century.
The maskilim were quick to pick up on the new pedagogic discourse,
expressing the same kind of radical environmentalism that appeared in
the writings of their non-Jewish peers. In his classic Divre shalom ve-emet
(Words of peace and truth, 1782), for instance, Naphtali Herz Wessely
argued—following Locke—that education must begin in early childhood:
“For while the heart is like a new and smooth paper, it is easy to write on
it the words of truth, which will remain thereupon inscribed.”19 A similar
picture was painted by Judah Leib ben-Ze’ev in his Hebrew-German
primer, Bet ha-sefer (The school, 1802), where children are presented as
“soft and young/happy and sharp/ . . [their] hearts are pure/and clean of
guilt.”20 Alongside the commitment to the sensualism of Locke and his
disciples, one senses here also a certain nostalgia, which posits childhood
as a kind of ideal state of nature, characterized by harmony, innocence,
and health. Such nostalgic undertones are amplified in the Polish maskil
David Zamość’s translation of Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Sittenbüchlein
für Kinder (Conduct book for children), in which the purity of childhood
is juxtaposed with the decadence of adulthood: “Your life [children] is
called the natural life, whereas the life of [the adult] is that of softness
and pleasure, which weakens our strength and thins our bones, until we
are quite powerless. But you have chosen the good life, and your bones
are healthy and strong.”21

19. Naphtali Herz Wessely, Divre shalom ve-emet (Berlin, 1782), 1. On Locke’s
influence on Wessely and other maskilim, see Harris Bor, “Enlightenment Values,
Jewish Ethics: The Haskalah’s Transformation of the Traditional Musar Genre,”
in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. S. Feiner and D. Sorkin (Oxford, 2001),
55–58.
20. Judah Leib Ben Ze’ev, Bet ha-sefer (1802; repr. Vienna, 1836), 85–86. The
poem is a loose translation of Christian Overbeck’s Das Kinderspiel. On the rela-
tively lenient translational norms of the Haskalah, which allowed translators to
divert freely from their source texts, see Shavit, “Friedländer’s Lesebuch,” 385–
415; Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam, 1995),
131–39.
21. David Zamość, Tokhah.ot musar (Breslau, 1819), 18. Compare Joachim
Heinrich Campe, “Sittenbüchlein für Kinder,” in Sämmtliche Kinder- und Jugend-
schriften, vol. 9 (1777; repr. Braunschweig, 1831), 12–13.

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390 JQR 106.3 (2016)

Of course, such musings are not unique to Jewish pedagogic literature;

to a great extent, the perception of childhood that has endured since the
publication of Rousseau’s Émile (1762) entailed a reversal of earlier
understandings of growing up as purification. From Rousseau we have
learned to think of childhood as innocent, and of growing up as a form of
decay—a tragic albeit necessary losing of innocence: “Oh, why can’t you
remain like this forever!” But, to be sure, the glorification of childhood
in pedagogical texts can only be half-hearted, for it is the purpose of such
texts to educate, to bring childhood—this “beginning”—to its successful
end.22
And indeed, the sentimentalization of childhood in the works of
Zamość and Ben Ze’ev notwithstanding, maskilic depictions of the uned-
ucated Jew were far from idealized, offering their readers not Peter Pans
but much darker images of demons, carcasses, and brutes. Thus, for
instance, Moses Mendelssohn of Frankfurt (not to be confused with his
famous namesake of Dessau) explained that “without the h.okhmot [secu-
lar studies] man has no advantage over beasts, indeed—he is worse than
a beast.”23 And of course, there was Wessely’s outrageous (yet oft-
reiterated) assertion that “a Talmudic scholar . . . who has no education
. . . a carcass is better than he.”24 For pedagogic thinkers, then, a child
who refuses to be educated—refuses, in other words, to grow up—is no
child at all; he is an invalid, a degenerate, a savage.
It is not surprising, then, to find that from its beginnings in the second
half of the eighteenth century and into the present, children’s literature,
and pedagogic thought more generally, have been characterized by a fas-
cination with the image of the savage. From Defoe’s Man Friday, through
Kipling’s Mowgli, to Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily, “savage peoples” have occu-
pied a privileged position in European writing for children. This ubiquity
of the “savage”25 is particularly noticeable in early maskilic translations,
which are dominated to a great degree by tales of colonial conquest and
colonization, as well as descriptions of “exotic” lands, peoples, flora, and
fauna.26 Underlying this ubiquity is an often unvoiced assumption that
children are naturally drawn to savages and may easily identify with
them.

22. On nostalgia in children’s literature, see Andrew O’Malley, Children’s Lit-

erature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (New York, 2012), 13.
23. Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-arets, 1. For some other examples, see
Idelson-Shein, Difference, 159, 225, nn. 29–30.
24. Wessely, Divre shalom ve-emet, 4.
25. For reasons of convenience, this term appears henceforth without scare
quotes.
26. Idelson-Shein, Difference, 154–55.

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 JEWS AND ENLIGHTENMENT PEDAGOGY—IDELSON-SHEIN 391

Indeed, there exists, in modern pedagogic thought, a constant kind of

slippage between the image of the child and that of the savage. This slip-
page has been widely discussed by scholars, who have unveiled its dis-
tinct colonialist utility. The likening of colonized peoples to children often
served to imagine European colonization of the non-European world as
a benevolent, almost natural expression of parent-like authority and con-
cern. However, the child-savage analogy not only served to promote the
actual colonization of the non-European world but was also harnessed to
acculturate and, in a sense, to colonize the European child.27 Often, the
discursive closeness between the two images is merely implied, as in the
above quotations from Zamość and Ben Ze’ev, in which the portrayal
of childhood as a kind of precultural, preliterate state of nature recalls
contemporaneous depictions of the “noble savage.” Other times, it is
made almost explicit, as in Rousseau’s Émile, which refers to the child as
a “natural man”; or in the works of Campe, which, as Susanne Zantop
has observed, “equated colonization with education, the domestication of
little savages.”28
Campe’s children’s stories were extremely popular among the maskilim
and dictated the nature of Jewish children’s literature for generations to
come.29 It is not surprising therefore to find in this literature the colonial
analogy not only reproduced but expanded upon. Thus, in what appears
to be the Hebrew translator’s own original addition to Campe’s Discovery
of America, Mendelssohn-Frankfurt writes: “The Children of India, in
their good hearts and ignorance are like a small child, who empathises
with whomever he encounters . . . and who is innocent and can imagine
no evil.”30 The analogy continued to be reproduced in later texts. In 1871,
for instance, Kalman Schulmann argued that the indigenous Australians
are “in their manners and deeds like children, whose souls are a mixture
of good and evil.”31
Though widespread in European children’s literature in general, the
conflation of the child and the savage assumes a unique significance in

27. See Jo-Ann Wallace, “De-Scribing the Water Babies: ‘The Child’ in Post-
Colonial Theory,” in De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. C. Tif-
fin and A. Lawson (New York, 1994), 176; Perry Nodelman, “The Other: Orien-
talism, Colonialism and Children’s Literature,” Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly 17 (1992): 29–35.
28. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolo-
nial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, N.C., 1997), 105.
29. Shavit, “Literary Interference,” 50–51.
30. Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-arets, 49.
31. Kalman Schulmann, Mosde arets (Vilnius, 1871), 12.

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392 JQR 106.3 (2016)

the context of maskilic prose. As we have seen, the maskilim produced

their translations not specifically for children but rather for the (nearly
nonexistent) general Hebrew reader. They thus drew an implicit analogy
between the images of the child and the Jew. How, then, did the
maskilim tackle the colonialist implications of this analogy? Did maskilic
translations transcribe the colonialist image of the child into the image of
the Jew? Did they present Jewish acculturation as “the domestication of
little savages”?
Let us look more closely at Mendelssohn-Frankfurt’s choice of terms
in the above citation. The word “children” appears twice in this
discussion—once to liken the natives to actual children (the text uses
the Hebrew term na‘ar katon—small child32), and another time to refer
to them as “the Children of India” (bene Hodu). The latter usage evokes
the image of the Children of Israel (bene Israel). But what is the con-
nection among these three “children”? Is the triangular conflation—
children, natives, Jews—merely incidental, or is this an integral feature
of this text and of maskilic translations more generally? Of course,
interpreting allusions is tricky business, and even more so in the
maskilic context, given the maskilim’s insistence on biblical Hebrew.
And yet biblical terms and passages that originally referred to the Israe-
lites (particularly in the context of the Exodus) are repeatedly used by
Mendelssohn-Frankfurt and other maskilim (such as Menah.em Mendel
Lefin or Barukh Shenfeld) to describe colonized peoples.33 Consider,
for instance, Mendelssohn-Frankfurt’s description of the colonization
of America which invokes Exodus 2.24: “The children of India sighed
by reason of the bondage.”34 Such allusions would have no doubt reso-
nated strongly among contemporary Hebrew readers, who would have
picked up on the implicit analogy between the woes of the Native
Americans and the Israelite bondage.
Such consistent allusions seem to hint toward the maskilim’s identifi-
cation with the colonial peoples described in their texts. And yet closer
scrutiny reveals a more ambivalent approach. In fact, maskilic authors
identified at one and the same time not only with the colonized peoples
appearing in their translations but also with their colonizers. Indeed, an

32. On usage of the term “na‘ar” to indicate child in premodern Hebrew, see
Tali Berner, “Children and Childhood in Early Modern Ashkenaz” (Ph.D. diss.,
Hebrew University, 2010), 15.
33. See Idelson-Shein, Difference, 165–70. For a useful framework for discuss-
ing maskilic allusions, see Dauber, Antonio’s Devils, 36–66.
34. Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-arets, 89.

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 JEWS AND ENLIGHTENMENT PEDAGOGY—IDELSON-SHEIN 393

unnamed “we” runs through these translations, allowing the maskilim—

who viewed themselves as harbingers of progress and acculturation—to
identify with such colonial heroes as Columbus, Cook, or Willem Bon-
tekoe; to feel the pride, the shame, and the responsibility of the colonist.
This identification is achieved, among other literary means, by weaving a
complex web of biblical allusions that conflate the “children of Israel” not
only with the “children of India” but also with Europe. A particularly
telling example is offered, once again, by Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, who
uses the exact same biblical passage quoted some two dozen pages earlier
to describe the plight of the colonized—this time to describe the colonists’
travails: “and Columbus cried and sighed by reason of the bondage.”35 By
using the same biblical passage to describe both the natives and the Span-
ish, Mendelssohn-Frankfurt creates a tight semiotic knot, which locates
Jews somewhere between savage and civilized, the colonized and the
colonizer—thus complicating the translators’ identification with one or
the other group.
The means to untangle this knot are offered to us by Peter Pan and his
astute observation that the one thing that all children (except one) share
is that they grow up. Indeed, children’s literature envisions the child as
located between the two opposing groups of colonists and savages, and
its purpose is to allow the child to evolve from the one into the other.
Herein lies the fundamental difference between savages and children. For
while the modern savage is defined by his stubborn resistance to change,
his resilience to “progress”—change is the most fundamental feature of
childhood, and the underlying assumption of modern pedagogy is that
the child is essentially perfectible.36
Viewed in this new light, the appeal of the image of the child for the
masklim becomes clear. As Jews and as cultural mediators, the maskilim
could never fully identify with either the European colonizers or with the
native colonized described in their texts. It was this sense of being in
between that posited children as a perfect analogy for the maskilim.
Indeed, the image of the child offered a much more powerful, much more
precise analogy for Jewish acculturation than both the image of the sav-
age and that of the colonist combined. By depicting Jews as children, the
maskilim inscribed onto the image of the Jew all of the positive notions
now associated with childhood. To envision the Jew as a child was to

35. Idelson-Shein, Difference, 168–69.

36. See Clare Bradford, Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s
Literature (Waterloo, Ont., 2007), 7.

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394 JQR 106.3 (2016)

think of him as belonging to a universal humanity, a humanity transcend-

ing religion, culture, and race.37 The maskilic child-Jew was a natural
man, untouched by the degeneracy that had allegedly afflicted his coreli-
gionists, unexposed to the disfiguring force of rabbinical Judaism, super-
stition, and diasporic life. What better way to address this ancient child,
this nonparticular, non-Jewish Jew, than in biblical Hebrew, the primeval
tongue?
But there was another, more implicit promise that the image of the
child offered the maskilim—the promise of change. In an era that saw the
rise of rigid notions of “racial difference,” it was the extreme malleability
inherent in pedagogic thought to which the maskilim turned. By conflat-
ing Jews and children they delivered a powerful message concerning
Jewish perfectibility, accentuating the notion that even though Jews, like
savages, were less “advanced” than other Europeans, they, too, like chil-
dren, were endowed with the innate ability to evolve, to progress, to grow
up. In the massive borderlands that separated Europe from its others,
Jews and children became allies.
But what about Peter Pan? What about the child who resists adult-
hood? Like numerous other children’s stories, the Darling children’s
adventure in Neverland ends with the children’s return home, to the
warmth and safety of their mother.38 “There could not have been a love-
lier sight,” writes Barrie, “but there was none to see it except a little boy
who was . . . looking through the window at the one joy from which he
must be forever barred.”39 This sad vignette confronts us with a vexed
contradiction that the analogy of the Jewish child entails. For while it is
true that children, by force of their perfectibility, enjoy certain privileges
that are refused other “others,” they are still, as Roderick McGillis has
argued, “the most colonised persons on the globe.” Whereas other coloni-
sed peoples have fought to liberate themselves “from an outmoded pater-
nalism curtailing [their] freedom,” for children, no such liberation can
ever exist. For a child to be free, to be emancipated, she must grow up:
“children only express a postcolonial voice after they have ceased to be
children.”40
Herein lies the fallacy of the promise of the child-Jew; in order to

37. On the image of the child who transcends culture, see Rose, Case of Peter
Pan, 44.
38. On domesticity in children’s literature, see Nodelman, “The Other,” 30.
39. Barrie, Peter and Wendy, 204.
40. Roderick McGillis, “Introductory Notes” to ARIEL: A Review of Interna-
tional English Literature 28.1 (1997): 7–8.

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 JEWS AND ENLIGHTENMENT PEDAGOGY—IDELSON-SHEIN 395

enjoy the privileges of Europeans, the Jew must become a universal

being, forgo his particularity, and finally grow up. The birth of modern
education signaled for the maskilim a new hope for emancipation, equal-
ity, and toleration. But if you ask Peter Pan, it was the beginning of the
end.

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