Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Paula E. Hyman

In nineteenth-century Germany, on the other hand, Jewish women initially conducted their charitable work along more-traditional lines. They doled out poor relief, cared for the female dead as they had for generations through the female ḥevrah kadisha (burial society), gathered money to provide dowries for poor brides, and administered funds to ensure that indigent Jews had the means to celebrate holidays. Gradually they also expanded their philanthropy, creating women’s societies organized according to the latest concepts of “scientific charity” and concerned with the education of girls and the welfare of children. By the end of the nineteenth century their philanthropic activity enabled them to forge connections across confessional lines with other German women.³⁹ In France as well, Jewish women continued traditional forms of ẓedakah while engaging in the types of modern philanthropy conducted by bourgeois Catholic women.⁴⁰

      Although most Jewish women in the West expressed their Jewish sentiment primarily through private devotions in the home and sectarian philanthropy, there emerged a handful of exceptional individuals who saw it as their responsibility to use the written word to accomplish the defense of Judaism as well as the task of educating other Jewish women, who would then influence their children. They based their activity upon the modern expectation that women would serve as the primary inculcators of Jewish consciousness in children, just as Western bourgeois culture saw mothers as the first teachers of moral values to the younger generation.⁴¹ In traditional Jewish society in eastern Europe in the eighteenth century a few women had composed tkhines, petitionary prayers in Yiddish intended for a female audience.⁴² In central Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, metaphorical descendants of Sarah bas Tovim and Sarah Rebecca Rachel Leah Horowitz, two authors of collections of tkhines, also wrote prayers in the vernacular (in German or English) and with a modern sensibility. The poet Penina Moise (1797–1880) of Charleston, South Carolina, composed the first American Jewish hymnal (and served, incidentally, as the director of Congregation Beth Elohim’s Sunday School).⁴³ In 1855 Fanny Neuda (1819–1894), widow of one rabbi in Moravia and sister of another in Vienna, wrote a German prayer book for women. Stunden der Andacht (Hours of devotion) was so popular that by the 1920s it had gone through twenty-eight editions and had also been translated into English.⁴⁴

      The most prolific and influential of these Jewish women writers who addressed religious themes was England’s Grace Aguilar (1816–1847), of Portuguese Marrano descent. In her short life of thirty-one years, she wrote a number of books about Judaism, in addition to novels, poems, and translations.⁴⁵ Apologetic in tone, they were designed to instill pride in Jewish readers and reinforce the faith of Jews fully at home in Western culture. Aguilar saw her role as defender of the faith against widely accepted Christian disparagement of Judaism. In her 1845 volume The Women of Israel, which surveyed Jewish history with particular attention to the biblical era, she was anxious to prove that the position of women in Judaism was higher than in any other culture. “[I]t is impossible to read the Mosaic law,” she asserted, “without the true and touching conviction, that the female Hebrew was even more an object of the tender and soothing care of the Eternal than the male.”⁴⁶

      Aguilar’s defense of the high status of women within Jewish tradition, though intended to provide rationales for loyalty to Judaism, derived from assumptions about gender and assimilation widespread among acculturated Jews of her generation. In Aguilar’s view, Jewish women had a special religious vocation, or “mission,” “as witnesses of that faith which first raised, cherished, and defended them.… A religion of love is indeed necessary to woman, yet more so than to man.”⁴⁷ Because of woman’s natural spirituality, Aguilar urged the Jewish woman, in contradiction of traditional Jewish custom, to dedicate the gift of her “silvery voice and ear for harmony” not only to pleasing man but also to singing God’s praises in his sanctuary as well as teaching songs of thanksgiving to her children at home.⁴⁸ In fact, Aguilar highlighted the role of Jewish women as teachers of their children. But rather than seeing this role as a recent addition to women’s tasks, she asserted that its source was “our ancient fathers, whose opinion is evidently founded on our holy law.”⁴⁹ “To the women of Israel, then,” she concluded, “is intrusted the noble privilege of hastening ‘the great and glorious day of the Lord,’ by the instruction they bestow upon their sons, and the spiritual elevation to which they may attain in social intercourse, and yet more in domestic life.”⁵⁰

      Aguilar’s The Women of Israel suggests the double-edged implications of the bourgeois gender division that placed religion and the inculcation of religious sensibilities within the female domain. On the one hand, Aguilar manifested a strong loyalty to Jewish faith and to Jewish distinctiveness; she expressed a firm belief in woman’s inherent religiosity as well as in her physical and mental inferiority to man—doctrines that we might label profoundly conservative. On the other hand, on the basis of her understanding of women’s religious mission, she championed women’s religious education and the ceremony of confirmation for both sexes—innovations we could rightly see as progressive.⁵¹ In fact, she recognized the opportunities that her own time offered Jewish women, and she concluded her book with a call to the women of Israel to take advantage of their new opportunities, for, in her words, they were now “free not only to believe and obey, but to study and speak of their glorious faith.” Anticipating some aspects of twentieth-century feminist analysis, she even recognized that the gendered division of labor in nineteenth-century Western societies provided women with advantages not enjoyed by their husbands and brothers: “it is fully in [women’s] power so to do … yet more so than men; for the ordinances and commands of our holy faith interfere much less with woman’s retired path of domestic pursuits and pleasures than with the more public and more ambitious career of man.”⁵²

      By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, acculturated middle- and upper-class Jewish women living in Western societies had taken to heart the message of women’s potential for religious and social influence in both the domestic and the public sphere, as the image of the “New Woman” expanded the legitimate field of female activity. The writers and the editor of the American Jewess, for example, often referred to women as “queens of the home,” who were meant to bring about the “reign of religion” and “reinstate the Sabbath to its old glory.”⁵³ At the same time, Rosa Sonneschein, the editor of the magazine, called for women to serve as synagogue trustees and members of Sabbath School boards.⁵⁴ In England Lily Montagu, daughter of a prominent Orthodox family, became a central figure in the movement of Liberal Judaism, convinced that women had a contribution to make as spiritual leaders.⁵⁵ Building upon the accomplishments of the earlier female charitable associations and upon female activism within the larger society, Jewish women established important, nationwide organizations in the United States, in Germany, and, on a smaller scale, in England. Jewish women who had been active in secular women’s clubs founded the National Council of Jewish Women in Chicago at the time of the World’s Fair in 1893. With a membership of almost 50,000 by 1920, it carried out social welfare work and educational programs. It provided well-organized assistance and models of middle-class behavior for needy east European Jewish immigrants and spearheaded the fight against Jewish involvement in the international traffic in prostitution. For the spiritual and cultural growth of its own members, it promoted self-education in Judaism.⁵⁶

      The National Council of Jewish Women gave female Jewish leaders the opportunity to present their views of women’s role within Judaism. Speaking on “Woman in the Synagogue” at the 1893 Jewish Women’s Congress, which gave birth to the council, Ray Frank, a woman who had served as a lay preacher in the frontier conditions of the American West, demonstrated how Jewish women could utilize the doctrine of “true womanhood” to enhance their own status and selfesteem, even while it constrained their aspirations.⁵⁷ Frank accepted as self-evident the idea that women were naturally more spiritual than men and that “religion [was] impossible without woman.”⁵⁸ Surveying the important role of women in the survival of the Jews from biblical days to her own time, she defended Judaism’s treatment of women and its recognition of mothers as teachers. “When the Lord said to Moses, ‘And ye shall be unto Me a nation of priests and a holy nation,’” she asserted, “the message was not to one sex.”⁵⁹ Indeed,