It is widely accepted within anthropology, education, sociolinguistics and beyond, that language learning as a process happens across contexts, as students participate in multiple complex learning systems and make connections through and across these.  Ignoring these connections has consequences for pedagogy, classroom experience, and learning outcomes.  A wide range of powerful research examines language learning across home, school, and other contexts and highlights what is lost when teachers overlook students’ language and literacy learning experiences in different contexts (cf. Bronkhorst & Akkerman 2016).

However, there remains a dearth of research detailing the specific ways secular and religious language and literacy learning processes intersect.  Some emerging research examines the learning of a single language (Avni 2014; Rosowsky 2016), while other work illustrates multiple language learning processes within highly observant communities wherein religion frames all language learning (cf. Fader 2009).  Yet studies of language learning complexities, challenges, and exclusions experienced by religiously minoritized students attending both secular schools and religious afterschool programs (as the majority do in many traditions, cf. Pomson 2010) remain rare (Meyer 2016; Badder 2022 are some exceptions).  

 I suggest that uncertainty about the place of religion in our contemporary, conflict-laden moment, narrow understandings of secularism, and misunderstandings of the value, use, and meaning of religious language and literacy have led scholars to silo religious language to religious spaces and to view any appearance of religious language practices outside of those spaces as a problem, if not a direct threat, to secular education (cf. Dallavis 2011; Sarroub 2002).  In the process, as Skerrett (2013) powerfully argues, myriad continuities and opportunities for effective and meaningful learning are being missed, to the detriment of students and scholarship.  Indeed, in ‘secular’ spaces, religious understandings and viewpoints get articulated, very often in ways that do not align with or directly contradict their manifestations in the lives of religious communities (Badder 2024).

My research aims to investigate the intersections of literacy ideologies and language learning experiences encountered by religious students enrolled in secular schools in Europe across the contexts of their everyday lives.  Specifically, I zoom in on a Jewish community in Luxembourg, where French and Biblical Hebrew language and literacy are brought into contact and conversation in complex ways that subvert expectations for religious and secular language use and boundaries.

This cohort presents an interesting case for three reasons.  First, the Luxembourgish state has recently been working to secularize, including detaching itself from connections with religious communities and removing religion from the public realm.  Second, French holds an awkward space in Luxembourg.  Historically a language of prestige, it is tightly interwoven with ideologies of laicité and rationality and echoes of colonial memories.  French is also the last official language taught in the state school curriculum and graduates from the Luxembourgish system often report feeling less competent in French.  Additionally, existing research shows that teachers cite having French (or another Romance language) as a reason that students are unable to access the university education track (Horner & Weber 2008).  Third, the Jewish community at the heart of this research has simultaneously experienced its own rapid internal changes.  As members grapple with these changes and their implications, they are experiencing new forms of uncertainty about their community, its history and future.  In response, French has emerged as a point around which they seek to cohere as a community.

This paper therefore explores how students in a Luxembourgish Jewish congregational school program make sense of the ways French and Hebrew overlap, zooming in on how such connections shape student understandings and experiences of Hebrew, themselves as Hebrew users, as Jews, and as students in secular schools.  

The questions I am asking and the theoretical frames on which I draw in my research have certain implications for my methods and methodology. First, I am interested in processes; second, my questions involve the details, actions, and interactions of everyday life; and third, in order to address these issues, I need to have access to these interactions as they unfold and as people work to make sense of those unfoldings. To this end, my work is primarily ethnographic. Ethnography and its methods, including participant observation, enable me to get beyond universals and consider the specificity of people’s everyday experiences while calling attention to “the political stakes that make up the ordinary” (Biehl 2013: 574). The inspiration for my current project emerged in 2017 during a separate course of research. In 2022, I returned to this project and began new focused fieldwork, which is ongoing. In that time, I have been attending organized events at or organized by the synagogue community with whom I am working, such as services, lectures, memorials, etc. Importantly, I have also been sitting in on the classes of this synagogue’s congregational school. I have also been able to spend time with people in more informal settings, such as dinners at home and social gatherings. In the coming months, I plan to continue this fieldwork, including conducting a series of interviews with families in the congregational school.

Based on my fieldwork to date, I am working through several big questions. What does it mean that French, an apparently universalistic and ‘secular’ language with its own cultural imperatives and imperial histories is being taken up by and tracked onto this Jewish community in Luxembourg? What does it mean that not only is French being taken up, but also framed in very similar ways to religious Hebrew? What does it mean that the ways in which French is valued and the roles and import associated with it very clearly diverge from the ways it is valued and its import in secular spaces, especially schools? And relatedly, what does it mean that there is a clear language policy operating in the congregational school classroom that creates hierarchies that are the inverse of those outside that classroom? By way of conclusion, I can tentatively offer the following: the students in this congregational school are keenly aware of the de facto language policies, hierarchies, and exclusions in their congregational and secular state schools and in many ways reinforce those through their discursive actions. At the same time, however, they also find ways to undermine those policies and hierarchies through playful language use, translanguaging, making new linguistic connections, and reflecting thoughtfully about whether and how French and Hebrew are related. Though the future remains uncertain for many of these students – indeed, some have already left Luxembourg for reasons attributed to issues of language and identity – they nonetheless continue to carve out novel and creative means through which to think through and value their linguistic capacities and identities.

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