Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Paula E. Hyman
intellectually equal to men in religious matters and their superiors when it came to practicality. Yet Frank took the opportunity of her address to chastise Jewish women of her own time for failing to prevent the contemporary decline in religious practice and to call upon them to strengthen Judaism from their domestic throne:
[T]o be identical with man is not the ideal of womanhood. Some things and privileges belong to him by nature; to these, true woman does not aspire; but every woman should aspire to make of her home a temple, of herself a high priestess, of her children disciples, then will she best occupy the pulpit, and her work run parallel with man’s. She may be ordained rabbi or be the president of a congregation—she is entirely able to fill both offices—but her noblest work will be at home, her highest ideal, a home.… Nothing can replace the duty of the mother in the home. Nothing can replace the reverence of children, and the children are yours to do as ye will with them.… Mothers, ye can restore Israel’s glory, can fulfil the prophecy by bringing the man-child, strong love of the Eternal, to his Maker.60
Frank’s address reflects the profound internalization of prevailing gender norms even by a woman who flouted those norms by talking from a public, rather than a domestic, pulpit. Similarly, in welcoming women in 1896 to the first convention of the National Council of Jewish Women, Rebekah Kohut, lecturer, writer, and teacher, hailed Jewish mothers’ potential as “saviors of our people.” “Every true Jewess is a priestess.… If not from our ranks, then from where shall come those who shall teach our children by religious example, and kindle within them the sparks of faith, that which will keep … ever glowing the coals of confidence in the God of Israel?”61 Only occasionally did a communal representative dissent from the exclusive emphasis on the maternal religious role. In a speech delivered at the 1893 Jewish Women’s Congress where Ray Frank had spoken, Mary Cohen, a poet, teacher, and communal activist in Philadelphia, praised the inextricable linkage of home and synagogue within Judaism and the importance of domestic ritual, including the preparation of special holiday foods. Cohen’s emphasis on the importance of “kitchen Judaism” necessarily highlighted the woman’s role. “I can never see, in the sometimes punctilious care with which some Hebrew women prepare their homes for the religious festivals, the ground for annoyance or ridicule which it seems to furnish to many critics,” she admitted. But she also referred to the shared responsibility of Jewish parents, rather than of mothers alone: “the synagogue is the home, and the home the synagogue. I mean that the intelligent and devout Hebrew parent is the priest or priestess of the family altar.”62
American Jewish women were not alone in organizing for philanthropic, educational, and communal political purposes. In Germany in 1904 Jewish women established the Jüdischer Frauenbund, which attained a membership of 35,000 within a decade and 50,000 by the end of the 1920s.63 The smaller Union of Jewish Women emerged in Great Britain in 1902.64 The American, British, and German Jewish women’s organizations cooperated in the international campaign against white slavery and lobbied for greater recognition for women within their respective Jewish communities. Despite differences in their specific programs stemming from the nature of their home countries and of their respective Jewish communities, all three of these women’s organizations asserted a distinct role for women as sustainers of Jewish communal life and guardians against defection from Judaism. Without challenging the primacy of home and domestic responsibilities as the proper focus of women’s lives, they reconfigured the boundaries between the domestic and public spheres, although some of their spokeswomen might have been reluctant to acknowledge this. In teaching administrative skills and conferring public positions of authority and responsibility upon their members, they also expanded the range of appropriate female behavior.
In addition to taking upon themselves extensive responsibility for philanthropy and social welfare as part of the middle-class woman’s religious and moral burden, American Jewish women in the twentieth century carried their domestic talents into the synagogue and sacralized the home as the site of Jewish observance. It became their mission to make the synagogue more “homey” and to realize the potential of the home as a sacred sphere for the transmission of Judaism. The synagogue sisterhood conceived as a charitable organization—a synagogue-based Ladies’ Benevolent Society—declined at the turn of the century as philanthropy became professionalized and centralized. Jewish women then turned their attention to the domestic management of the synagogue. National organizations of synagogue sisterhoods, divided denominationally, gave women a visible role within the synagogue. Most sisterhood members devoted themselves to decorating the sanctuary for festivals, serving tea at the Oneg Shabbat, and promoting attendance at synagogue services. Sisterhoods organized sisterhood Sabbaths (special Sabbath services that honored women), performed manifold housekeeping functions within the synagogue, and took a particular interest in the smooth functioning of the religious schools. Some historians have shown that the Reform sisterhood organization provided a platform for the articulation of demands for greater public participation of women in the synagogue.65 Reform sisterhoods, for example, often assumed responsibility for conducting services during the slow summer months. In 1924 the president of the Reform National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods could declare:
Woman has at last found her niche in religious life as well as in civic and political work. We do not find her today relegated to the gallery of the synagogue docilely watching the men of the congregation. Her voice is heard on the Temple Board, her advice is asked in the direction of affairs of the Sabbath School, she is in fact a force in the religious community.66
On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the organization in 1938, its founding president, Carrie Simon, even called for the ordination of women as rabbis.67
In the 1920s sisterhood organizations also elaborated upon the stereotypical representation of the woman’s domestic role as priestess. The Conservative movement’s Women’s League, more concerned with Judaizing the home under female auspices than with feminizing the synagogue, sponsored a number of publications designed to facilitate the Jewish housewife’s ritual task as she enhanced the Jewishness of her home. Most popular was Deborah Melamed’s The Three Pillars, first published in 1927. It outlined the obligations of the Jewish woman in the areas of Sabbath and holiday observance, prayer, and child rearing. The Three Pillars crystallized the by now familiar view of the woman as the religious and moral arbiter of the Jewish family par excellence and called for the education of women to prepare them for their maternal responsibilities. As Melamed wrote, “The importance of the woman in Jewish life cannot be overestimated, and an intelligent Jewish woman bespeaks a certain amount of Jewish training and education.” In describing the Sabbath, she added that “in many homes it is [the Jewish woman] who must assume almost the entire responsibility of fostering her children’s religious life and of transmitting to them that spiritual heritage which has moulded her own.” By encouraging the observance of kashrut, the Jewish mother attained two goals: “character building” and inculcating the sense of belonging to “a special people.”68 To facilitate their members’ fulfillment of their central role in preserving and transmitting Judaism, in 1931 the Women’s League spurred the establishment of a Women’s Institute of Jewish Studies by the Jewish Theological Seminary. Reform and Orthodox sisterhood groups, too, took steps to deepen the Jewish knowledge of their members to strengthen ritual observance in the home and to prepare mothers for instilling a positive Jewish identity in their children.69 The Western, middle-class definition of womanhood thus provided Jewish women with a conservative role but also allowed innovation in expanded educational opportunities for females and a more visible presence in the synagogue.
The adoption of Western bourgeois concepts of female religiosity also had negative consequences for the depiction of Jewish women, at least in the Jewish press. The representation of women and assimilation in public Jewish statements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries diverges markedly from the demonstrable historical record, in part due to the failure to recognize the gender differences in both the timing and the extent of Jewish assimilation in nineteenth-century western and central Europe and America. Exploring the contradiction between female experience and female representation uncovers a fundamental ambivalence about the project of assimilation even among male communal leaders who generally supported it.
In the second half of the nineteenth century,