In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
responsible for preserving and maintaining local Jewish life, was the paradigm that shaped America’s Jewish settlements. Thus, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the only Jewish institution in a given community was the local Sephardic synagogue, which provided for the ritual needs of its members and punished religious transgressors for disobedience to authority. Orthodox practice prevailed within the walls of such Sephardic synagogues which meant that colonial Jewish women sat apart in upstairs galleries during services and participated in worship only passively (cf. Sarna, 2004: 12–20; Raphael, 2003: 43; Faber, 1998: 268).
The American Revolution, the ratification of the Constitution, and the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791 contributed to the transformation of Jewish religious life in America. On the one hand, these momentous events resulted in “equal footing” for all religions in America but, on the other hand, as Jonathan Sarna points out, “the nationwide democratization of religion that followed from these developments” culminated in the 1820s “in the first dramatic turning point in the history of American Judaism: the collapse of the unified ‘synagogue-community’ and its replacement by a more pluralistic and diverse ‘community of synagogues’ ” (2004: 37, xvii–xviii).
In truth, this pioneering Sephardic immigration of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could hardly be called a wave. The Jewish population remained relatively small: in 1700 there were as few as 200 Jews in the New World, and according to the first federal Census of 1790, approximately 2,500 Jews – less than 0.1 percent of the population – lived in the thirteen states on the East Coast of the United States (Pencak, 2008: 10). By 1820, there were still only about 6,000 Jewish settlers in the United States, dispersed in small communities throughout the country. The first Sephardic community dwindled because of assimilation and intermarriage, but they still maintained a strong sense of connection with the world Jewry. They lived as patriotic citizens, yet, at the same time, they were trying to hold on to their distinct Jewish identity. Jewish women carried the major responsibility for maintaining the household and transmitting the practice of their faith to the next generation, as they had done for centuries wherever they lived (cf. Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 537; Raphael, 2003: 46; Greenberg, 2006: 554–555). Eli Faber summarizes their roles and positions in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America in such a way:
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[…] Jewish women in colonial North America occupied traditional positions and played traditional roles within the Jewish community as well as the larger society. They could not serve in positions of leadership in either the Jewish or the general community, and they are not known to have had their own social organizations. (1998: 267)
Hasia R. Diner and Beryl L. Benderly in their classic work on the history of Jewish women in America, Her Work Praise Her, give evidence that a striking number of Jewish women entered business in colonial America as well, although few functioned as businesswomen in their own right. The majority of Jewish women, whether married or single, who were active in business, either cooperated with their male relatives or served as ancillaries to their husbands, assisting them as clerks or administering their businesses when they traveled (2002: 43–60).
The second major immigration wave took place between 1820 and 1880, when approximately 200,000 Jews arrived from Central Europe. It was this new group of Ashkenazi emigrants from Central Europe, mostly Germany, who revitalized the American Jewish community as they arrived in large numbers after 1840. In 1840, there were 15,000 Jews in America; 20 years later, in 1860 there were between 150,000 and 200,000 (Sarna, 2004: 375). These Jews settled farther inland than the first Sephardic wave of immigrants, dispersing across almost every state and territory of the United States, from New England, through the Midwest, the Great Plains, the South, to the Far West, although they also settled down in New York and Philadelphia and other cities that had already had well-established Jewish communities. The majority of these second-wave immigrants were non-Orthodox who had already embraced liberal Reform Judaism in Europe propagating a Jewish identity that was wide open to acculturation and assimilation in the New World. Thousands of Jewish men and women migrated to America with a view to taking advantage of ‘golden’ opportunities rather than finding relief from persecution. They succeeded to a considerable extent, both personally, culturally and economically, and they built grand synagogues in major cities throughout the United States (Greenberg, 2006: 555).
The early American Jewish communities were characterized by male majorities. In most American Jewish communities, women tended to arrive later, after their husbands had achieved some economic stability. The new Jewish immigrant men worked hard to fit into American society and achieve their goals, beginning as peddlers and often becoming successful shopkeepers or businessmen. So widespread was Jewish peddling that in 1840, 46 percent of all Jewish men made a living this way, and by 1845, the number rocketed to 70 percent (Diner, 1998: 503–505).
Jewish women who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe to America came from the same social classes and had the same incentive as the men did. As Hasia R. Diner points out, “[a];s daughters of the poor, they not only left to follow or meet potential spouses, but they too were victims of economic change [that is], the modernization of economies of much of Central Europe which severely undermined the basis of traditional Jewish economy” (1998: 502). Jewish women ←20 | 21→in this period worked mostly as the wives and daughters of petty shopkeepers. The success of dry-goods stores owned and operated by the Jews in almost every Jewish community depended equally upon the labors of men and women, adults and children. Jewish immigrant women of this period, whether married or single, worked in other ways as well. Many of them created their own businesses, such as boarding enterprises, clothing businesses, dry-goods stores, grocery stores, in essence, as Diner remarks, “keeping alive what seemed to have been a long standing European Jewish tradition” (1998: 504). It goes without saying, that Jewish women of this period played a crucial role in the family economy; without their contribution, it could not have existed and thrived.
It can truly be said, as Stanley Nadel notices, that “German Jews shaped and reshaped in fundamental ways much of the culture and many of the institutions that characterize Jewish America” (2008: 24). Strongly influenced by the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), they brought with them from the Old Country ideas of religious reform, establishing Reform congregations, independent benevolent societies and social service organizations, such as burial societies, orphanages, day nurseries, old-age homes, medical clinics, maternity hospitals, soup kitchens, shelters for widows, and the like. Many of these philanthropic organizations were created, operated, and supported by Jewish women, for example Ladies’ Hebrew Benevolent Societies, popular in many Jewish communities throughout the United States, and a National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) formed in 1893 to promote “Jewish religion, philanthropy and education, and the work of social reform – as well as opposing all religious persecution” (Nadel, 2008: 32). These Jewish women’s associations, which did quite well at fund-raising, put a lot of effort and money into providing charitable relief to the Jewish poor, paying special attention to alleviating the suffering of the Jewish female poor. Thus, all those charitable organizations built by liberal Jews in the nineteenth-century America not only helped Jewish women to integrate into the new American society, but they also served as powerful models for Jewish women of future generations (Diner and Benderly, 2002: 110–116).
The era of the German Jewish immigration also changed women’s relationship to Judaism as a religious system. Migration to America challenged the division of Judaism into public and private spheres, which corresponded to the male and female domains respectively. The migration made the observance of home-centered, private Jewish ritual life, closely tied to women’s activities such as, for example, abiding by kashrut (the dietary laws) and niddah (the family purity laws), more difficult and less frequently fulfilled. As far as the public sphere is concerned, it has to be noted that over the course of the period between 1820 and 1880, Jewish women began to assume a more public presence in the observance of Judaism. American Jewish women began to attend synagogues on a regular basis much more often than they would have if they had remained in Europe. Consequently, the public, synagogue-centered practice of attending services became an important area of women’s piety. Although they continued to sit in the women’s section, the female worshippers often outnumbered men during Sabbath morning services. The ←21 | 22→preponderance of women at Sabbath services may have influenced the leaders