Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Paula E. Hyman
Modern men were considered too busy with worldly concerns to assume this task. Bourgeois culture thus expected women to be at least moderately religious, certainly more religious than men, since they were deemed inherently more spiritual. The bourgeois division of labor between the sexes also conferred responsibility upon women for religiously based “good works,” including the basic religious education of children. Although traditional Judaism had also recognized women’s spirituality, it had reserved to men the premier manifestation of religious piety: the intensive study of sacred texts. When life in the modern Western world led most assimilating Jewish men to abandon traditional Jewish culture and limit their religious expression to periodic appearances at synagogue and the performance of some communal service, their wives absorbed the dominant societal expectations of women as the guardians of religion.
Bourgeois culture also linked religious expression to familial sentiment. Because so much of Jewish religious ritual is home centered, it was relatively easy for women to meet bourgeois norms. There was less dissonance between Jewish religious practice and women’s daily routines than was the case for men, whose traditional Jewish role was centered in public ritual in the synagogue or house of study. By retaining some domestic aspects of Jewish tradition, including customary foods, and transforming others into ostensibly secular family celebrations, such as the Friday evening, rather than Sunday, dinner, Jewish women fulfilled their prescriptive role and transmitted what the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, in a very different setting, called “domestic Judaism.”26 The general norms of bourgeois society thus reinforced the retention by women of domestic Jewish ritual practice while undermining ritual observance for men.
Men and women alike within Western Jewish communities adopted the dominant middle-class view that women were responsible for inculcating moral and religious consciousness in their children and within the home more generally. According to this view, women were also the primary factor in the formation of their children’s Jewish identity. The conservative role of maternal keeper of the domestic flame of Judaism became a fundamental aspect of the project of assimilation. In the countries of the West, the Jewish press, which emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, frequently expressed this concept of women’s centrality in maintaining the home as the primary site of Jewish sensibility and in transmitting Jewish culture and identity. Interestingly, although women’s roles expanded by the end of the nineteenth century, the rhetoric of the true Jewish woman whose role it was to preside over the domestic sphere, ministering to the spiritual health of her family and thereby strengthening the Jewish community, continued unabated.
As early as 1844 the London Jewish Chronicle commented that because Jewish youth were “externally restrained by political hindrance and by allurements of apostasy … [they] require especial and particular maternal vigilance and attendance.”27 Similarly, in 1852 the Archives israélites, the journal representing progressive Jewish thought in France, depicted a bourgeois Jewish family where gender roles were highly differentiated and where the socialization of its children depended upon the mother:
Our fathers, absorbed by their business, their commerce, their industry, their travels, … cannot follow with a vigilant eye the physical, moral, and intellectual progress of the young family; they abandon that care to maternal solicitude. The woman is the guardian angel of the house; … her religiosity, her virtues, are a living example for the children, whom she has constantly under her eyes.
The journal concluded, “Man exists for public life; woman, for domestic life.”28
The German Jewish press also waxed eloquent about the role of women within their proper sphere. One newspaper in 1895 went so far as to call “the Hausfrau” “a priestess of the home.”29 American Jewish leaders shared this assessment of women’s nature, stressing the long-standing historical role of Jewish women within the home. In 1835 Isaac Leeser, an important leader and later publisher of the newspaper the Occident, declared, in a sermon that proclaimed the inappropriateness of serious education for women, that a woman’s “home should be the place of her actions; there her influence should be felt, to soothe, to calm, to sanctify, to render happy the rugged career of a father, a brother, a husband, or a child.”30 Within a generation the shapers of American Jewish public opinion included a specifically Jewish component to the Jewish woman’s domestic role: the “Mother in Israel,” a Jewish version of the American “True Woman.” In 1876 the editor of a traditionalist Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Messenger, asserted: “The women of Israel have at all times been the conservators of our hallowed creed.”31 The very same year that the German housewife was dubbed a priestess, prominent Reform rabbi Emil Hirsch described her American counterpart as a “Priestess of the Jewish ideal, Prophetess of Purity and Refinement.”32 His colleague in the Reform rabbinate Kaufmann Kohler used the pages of the American Hebrew at about the same time to call upon Jewish women in a similar vein to become “the standard-bearer[s] of religion,” who would “give us again Jewish homes, … a Judaism spiritualized.”33 In recognition of women’s important role as the first (and sometimes only) Jewish teachers of their children, Jewish communal leaders began to emphasize the importance of providing sufficient Jewish education to girls to enable them to carry out their destined maternal responsibilities. As the Archives israélites put it in 1852, “[T]he health of our religion depends henceforth above all on the education of girls.”34
Although Jewish women in the West, who had encountered the challenges of secular culture, accommodated to prevailing expectations of the middle-class woman’s position in the home, they also reshaped the boundaries between the domestic and the public spheres and thereby assumed an expanded role within the Jewish community.35 The female version of the project of Jewish assimilation contained potentially radical elements in addition to its conservative domestic thrust. Middle-class Jewish women in Western societies, particularly in the United States, happily claimed the new definitions of female responsibility for religious socialization of the young and for care of society’s unfortunates. Drawing on these gender norms, and later on the ideology of domestic feminism that conceptualized society as merely the domestic realm writ large, they developed new forms of female Jewish expression. Subsequently, they began to demand communal recognition of their public roles.
In the small, new Jewish communities of nineteenth-century America, whose members were more highly integrated within the larger society socially than within any other contemporary locale, middle- and upper-class women adopted the prevailing American concept that charity was woman’s work. At the same time they expanded the philanthropic activity that Jewish women had conducted in ḥevrot (associations) in the traditional Jewish community. Nearly every Jewish community of moderate size sustained a Hebrew Ladies’ Benevolent Society.36 In Philadelphia, for example, in 1819 the renowned Rebecca Gratz along with several other women who worshiped in the city’s premier synagogue, Mikveh Israel, established the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society. Its volunteers organized home relief and eventually medical care for the local Jewish poor, an employment bureau for women and children, and a traveler’s aid society. Some twenty years later, in 1838, women active in the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society founded the first Hebrew Sunday School in the United States, which became a model for the many others that followed.37 The women who dedicated themselves to philanthropic and educational work among their fellow Jews defined their activity in moral and religious terms. Although they were influenced by Christian models of female philanthropy, they saw their efforts as a safeguard against Christian missionaries who knocked on the doors of poor Jews to offer assistance accompanied by proselytizing. Jewish female activists enjoyed the possibilities for sociability that voluntarism offered them as well as opportunities for demonstrating their skills beyond the confines of their homes.
Similar concepts of female duties and possibilities for self-expression led Jewish women in western and central Europe to express their maternal roles in social institutions dedicated to caring for the Jewish poor and to providing Jewish education. In the small Jewish community of England, Louise Rothschild played a role similar to Rebecca Gratz’s, founding the Jewish Ladies’ Benevolent Loan Society and the Ladies’ Visiting Society in London in 1840. She also helped to administer the Jews’ Free School, a communal elementary school. Rothschild and her fellow volunteers, like Jewish women in the United States, combined