Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Paula E. Hyman
behavior that had developed in the nineteenth century retained much of their power, only gradually succumbing to the blurring of the boundaries between domestic and public realms. For most of the modern period, then, Jewish women display fewer signs of radical assimilation than men.
If one examines statistics on the most-extreme manifestations of assimilation—that is, intermarriage and conversion—Jewish women throughout the Western world have “lagged behind” their brothers until the present day.12 In Germany, to give but one example, between 1873 and 1882 only 7 percent of all Jewish converts were women. Moreover, men and women seem to have converted for different purposes: women, primarily to join with a non-Jew in marriage, their main vehicle of social survival and upward mobility; men, primarily to overcome obstacles to their professional advancement. Although both men and women converted to obtain social mobility, the gender division of public and domestic spheres determined the nature and timing of their decisions about radical assimilation. Only as lower-middle-class Jewish women entered the workforce in increasing numbers at the turn of the twentieth century and thereby had increasing contact both with non-Jews and with antisemitism did the proportion of female Jewish converts rise. Yet, at 37 percent of Jewish converts in Germany in 1908 and 40 percent in 1912, the conversion rate of Jewish women still remained substantially below that of men.13
Among Western Jewish communities of the modern period, there is only one exception to the generalization about women’s lower rates of intermarriage and conversion. In Berlin in the years between 1770 and 1799, 60 percent of the 249 Jews who converted to another faith were women, and as the rate of conversion zoomed in the following decade, women again took the lead.14 Most prominent among these women was a small coterie of some two dozen women generally referred to as the “salon Jewesses.” Celebrated as witty and charming, they took advantage of a short-lived, Romantically inspired openness on the part of intellectuals and penurious nobility to the company of wealthy and cultivated Jewish women to make their mark in society and to enter into socially advantageous marriages with non-Jews (conversion was necessary because civil marriage did not exist). Dorothea Mendelssohn, Henrietta Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, and their fellow salon Jewesses temporarily found in Berlin literary “high society” a celebrity impossible in Jewish society, where entertainment was largely gender-segregated and women’s role as hostess and muse was neither developed nor admired.15
Despite the anomaly of their situation, the salon Jewesses have most often been discussed not in terms of their specific social and cultural context but as paradigmatic of Jewish women’s experience as they confronted modernity. Such fine historians as Michael Meyer and Jacob Katz have suggested that the salon Jewesses typify the vulnerability of Jewish women to the blandishments of secular Western culture because of the failure of the Jewish community to provide them with any significant Jewish education.16 For most Western Jewish women, however, this argument is not borne out by evidence, for, as the historian Deborah Hertz has shown, the salon Jewesses deviated significantly from the experience of other Jewish women.17
Among the vast majority of Jews who neither converted nor intermarried, there does appear to have been a significant gender difference in Jewish practice and identity—but in the opposite direction from the example of the salon Jewesses. Marion Kaplan’s history of middle-class Jewish women in Imperial Germany, for example, persuasively demonstrates that the same men who absented themselves from the synagogue and who saw themselves, and have been described in the historical literature, as thoroughly assimilated—indeed as prototypical assimilated Jews—lived in families where their wives continued to take cognizance of the Jewish calendar and its rituals. This occurred even as the traditional observance of many public practices waned among central European Jews.18 The dispute between Sigmund Freud and his wife, Martha, over the lighting of Sabbath candles is, therefore, not idiosyncratic but representative of a widespread gendered difference in attitudes toward religious tradition.19 Most Jewish women seem to have been eager to maintain Jewish rituals within the home, the domain that fell under their jurisdiction, and unlike Martha Bernays Freud, most seem to have prevailed. The rich collection of German Jewish memoirs and diaries from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, written largely by men, includes numerous assessments of the family as nonreligious and assimilated while mentioning in passing that mothers taught their children Jewish prayers or even prayed regularly at home. Women seem to have persisted in ritual observance even after their husbands had abandoned these practices. A German Jewish woman born in 1862, for example, recounted sardonically in her memoirs that her mother fasted and prayed on Yom Kippur whereas her father found it “easier to fast after a hearty breakfast.”20
In Victorian England, where the Anglo-Jewish elite encountered little discrimination and felt comfortable with a modest display of religiosity, Jewish women of the upper classes expressed a religious sensibility that was considered appropriate to their social class. Indeed, Todd Endelman has found that, as among assimilated central European Jews, “[t]he wives and daughters of communal magnates appear to have been more concerned with spiritual matters” than were their male kin.21 Thus, the wife and children of the liberal politician Viscount Herbert Samuel regularly attended Sabbath services, while he limited his synagogue participation to the High Holidays. Although Samuel abandoned the traditional Judaism of his youth after losing his faith while at Balliol College, Beatrice Franklin Samuel did succeed in persuading her husband to refrain from working or traveling on the Sabbath.22
The inclusion of gender in the study of Jewish assimilation thus introduces for consideration the domestic realm, which has tended to disappear from historical view. Given the privatization of much of Jewish behavior in the wake of emancipation, historians must enter the Jewish home to assess the nature of Jewish assimilation. To do so, they have to work assiduously and creatively, mining resources like memoirs, diaries, personal correspondence, and material culture to bridge the division of public and private spheres and to explore the tensions between public and private selves. To offer just one suggestive example: A recent museum exhibition on the Dreyfus Affair included in the section on the Dreyfus family a decorative cloth that had been displayed on the wall in the Dreyfus home.23 What does it signify when a highly assimilated Jewish family, often depicted as alienated from the Jewish community and Jewish tradition, chooses to display a cloth visually celebrating the three pilgrimage holidays of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles? Surely it suggests a more complex identity as assimilated French Jews than we might have previously imagined.24
The persistence of Jewish ritual and of the expression of religiosity among Jewish women in assimilated families, as well as phenomena like the Dreyfuses’ interior decor, illustrates how attention to gender and to domestic life challenges conventional views of assimilation. Gendered difference in religious behavior was by no means limited to the European scene in the second half of the nineteenth century. Considerable evidence of a similar gender division in religious practice exists among second- and third-generation Jewish families of central European origin in America. By the end of the nineteenth century commentators allude to the “feminization” of the synagogue, a phenomenon parallel to the feminization of the Protestant churches described by a number of historians. Typical is an 1897 remark of one Jewish woman, who wrote of Reform synagogues of the time, that “year in and year out, for many long years, … [the rabbis’] efforts in sermon and lecture have been prepared for and delivered to congregational audiences composed almost exclusively of women.”25
This depiction of the greater retention of Jewish ritual observance by middle-class Jewish women than by their male kin is not intended to suggest that women were by nature more loyal than men to Jewish tradition. Rather, it points to the fact that middle-class gender norms of behavior eroded traditional patterns of Jewish practice among men while facilitating a measure of Jewish ritual observance among women. The comparatively high degree of religiosity of assimilated Jewish women is thus, in itself, a female form of the project of assimilation. By the middle of the nineteenth century western Jews had adapted themselves, and their Judaism, to the prevailing bourgeois model of female domesticity, the so-called cult of domesticity. This ideology called upon women to create a peaceful domestic environment free from the stresses of the larger society and devoted to the preservation and transmission of traditional morality, while men assumed the burden of earning a living and governing society. Religion fell naturally