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Introduction

The beginning of my graduate studies in Jewish history coincided with my introduction to feminism as a social and intellectual movement. That encounter shaped my self-definition as a Jewish woman and opened my eyes to the absence of women from all that I was studying. As a graduate student I became an activist in the nascent Jewish women’s movement and joined with two friends in writing a popular history of American Jewish women, The Jewish Woman in America, published in 1976.¹ That book, however, was not directly connected to my academic program, and I viewed it as a digression from my “serious work.” As a scholar I focused on my chosen area of specialization, the history of modern French Jewry. The field of general women’s history was just achieving recognition. Within Judaic studies the first stirrings of interest in recovering the history of Jewish women manifested themselves in the early 1980s and had little impact in the field beyond a small coterie of primarily female scholars and students.

When given the option to prepare papers for academic conferences, however, I increasingly chose subjects related to women’s history. The publication of these papers, in particular my anthologized article on the 1902 female-led New York kosher meat boycott, brought the specific experience of Jewish women to the attention of scholars of general women’s history and raised questions about the implications of women’s history for Jewish historians.² As feminist theory has exploded and historical studies of women have proliferated, I have become all the more eager to apply the exciting perspectives that have emerged in general women’s history to the field of Jewish history. The invitation to deliver the 1992 Stroum Lectures offered me an unparalleled opportunity to do so.

Like many historians of modern Jewry, I had addressed the issue of assimilation in many different contexts—examining the adaptation of immigrants from eastern Europe in both French and American settings and exploring the impact of emancipation upon a particular community of traditional Jews, the village Jews of nineteenth-century Alsace. My work on village Jews reflected my desire to prod Jewish historical scholarship to be more inclusive in its concerns, to recognize that the concentration on urban male elites, and on intellectuals in particular, provided only a partial picture of the historical experience of Jews in the modern period. Although the male Jewish leadership of urban Jewish centers determined the agenda of Jewish communities and spoke for all Jews in official documents and in the Jewish press, the experience of most Jews—women and Jewish men who did not reach leadership ranks—was not necessarily subsumed in statements by those who represented them in public records. Given the impact of assimilation in modern Jewish history, it seemed critical that interpretations of the ways in which modern Jews adapted to the societies in which they lived and fundamentally reshaped their identities be based upon as wide a segment of the Jewish population as possible. Generalizations about assimilation were useful only insofar as they took into account the specific social contexts in which individual choices became collective behavior. At any time and place, the social contexts of women and men differed because of the gendered nature of social roles.

I have attempted to accomplish two linked tasks in this book: to reclaim the experience of Jewish women as they accommodated to the socioeconomic and ideological challenges of modernity in western and central Europe, eastern Europe, and the United States, particularly in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; and to explore the role of ideas about gender in the construction of Jewish identity in the modern period. I hope that my research and analysis will stimulate scholars in several disciplines to conduct further studies. My aim is to challenge, and I welcome responses that critically examine my assertions. Most importantly, I hope that scholars in the field of modern Jewish studies who have not specialized in issues of women’s history or gender will recognize the potential of research in these areas for expanding and, at times, transforming our understanding of fundamental aspects of Jewish historical and cultural development. Although the inclusion of women and gender in the writing of history is important in itself, it is not, in historian Gerda Lerner’s terms, simply a matter of “add women and stir.” Feminist scholarship has aspired to, and achieved, more than “filling in the gaps” of information about half of humanity. In historical scholarship it has challenged such basic paradigms of the field as periodization and the determination of what is deemed historically significant. As I have suggested elsewhere,³ in Jewish historiography of the modern period research on women and gender has already expanded our conceptualization of Jewish religious life to include the subjects of domestic religion and personal spirituality. Women’s history has also altered our understanding of the nature and definition of community among Jews and has revealed hitherto unrecognized complexities in the issue of assimilation. With this book, which draws upon studies by many of my colleagues as well as upon my own new research, I hope to demonstrate that to be valid an examination of the processes of Jewish assimilation in the modern and contemporary periods must include women and gender in its design.

In exploring the interaction of gender and assimilation in modern Jewish history, I am well aware that I could not possibly include all aspects of such a complex phenomenon within the format of a series of lectures. All Jews in the modern world have confronted the need to adapt themselves in some respect to the demands of the larger society and to the challenges posed by new ideologies and economic patterns. Jewish responses to these demands and challenges are best analyzed with the sociological concept of assimilation. The geographical and chronological parameters of the subject of gender and assimilation in modern Jewish history therefore coextend with modern Jewish history itself. Even “limiting” myself to Europe and the United States and focusing, with some exceptions, on the century 1850–1950, I have not exhausted the material relevant to the theme. Yet, the multinational comparisons I have drawn are sufficiently complicated to justify some significant omissions. In focusing on Europe and America, I necessarily defined as outside the concerns of this book the experience of ḥalutzot (women pioneers) in the prestate yishuv (Jewish society in Palestine) and their struggles to realize the equality that Zionism seemed to promise them. Likewise, I could not include the adaptation of the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East to Western culture through their contact with colonial regimes or with the educational institutions of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The stories of the ḥalutzot and of Sephardi Jewry are compelling; no consideration of gender and assimilation in modern Jewish history is complete without them. I hope that colleagues with greater expertise in these areas than I have achieved will continue the important work that has begun in these areas.

As I pursued my research and writing, I decided that I could legitimately simplify my narrative by focusing on the distinction between Jews whose assimilation occurred within western and central Europe and the United States and those whose assimilation took place in the different conditions of eastern Europe. True, there were significant variations in the political, economic, and cultural development of Germany, France, England, and the United States. Yet, there were sufficient common features among these countries and their Jewish communities to allow for generalizations about a “Western model” of gender and assimilation. All of the Western nations offered some degree of civic equality to their Jewish populations and developed similar concepts of middle-class gender roles. By the last third of the nineteenth century, as a result of acculturation and upward social mobility, all of their relatively small Jewish communities were generally defined by their middleclass characteristics. Despite changes in women’s actual social roles, the prescriptive power of the Western model prevailed at least until the middle of the current century. The Western model differed from what I define as the Eastern model of gender and assimilation. The latter derived from the political and cultural environment of multiethnic east European states that rejected Western-derived notions of civic equality. These states contained relatively large, and overwhelmingly non-middle-class, Jewish populations that retained such significant markers of distinctiveness as the Yiddish language and aspects of traditional Judaism. Because of their different environments and positions in their respective societies, “Western” and “Eastern” Jews constructed alternative versions of Jewish identity and approached gender roles and their relation to assimilation in distinguishable ways.

After analyzing the gendered processes of assimilation, and the representations of women that accompanied assimilation, in Western and Eastern societies, I turn to those Jews who brought together the two models in their own experience of assimilation: the eastern European Jewish immigrants who established large Jewish communities in the countries of the West, particularly the United States. Challenging elements of the Western model that rigidly limited the public role of women and spiritualized them as mothers, eastern European immigrants and their children contested the boundaries between domestic and public life that characterized middle-class gender norms. As they integrated into middle-class American culture, however, immigrant Jewish men and their sons—like their predecessors in Western societies—played out their ambivalence about their own identity as Jews in non-Jewish societies in gendered terms. Jewish men represented Jewish women as responsible for the burdens of Jewishness they had to bear.

Among these burdens was the conflation of Jewishness and femininity in Western societies, with the consequent anxiety of Jewish men about their own masculinity. The last chapter investigates the effect of the association of Jews with the weaknesses commonly attributed to women upon some segments of the Jewish community. The book concludes that the gendered differences in the experience of assimilation and the growing representation of women as the primary transmitters of Jewish culture shaped modern Jewish identity on the battleground of sexual politics.

1. Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: Dial Press, 1976).

2. Paula E. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70, no. 1 (Sept. 1980): 91–105; reprinted in The American Jewish Experience, ed. Jonathan Sarna (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), pp. 135–46, and in Ethnicity and Gender: The Immigrant Woman, ed. George E. Pozzetta (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), pp. 81–95. See also my “Culture and Gender: Women in the Immigrant Jewish Community,” in The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact, ed. David Berger, Social Science Monographs (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1983), pp. 157–68.

3. “Gender and Jewish History,” Tikkun, Jan.–Feb. 1988, pp. 35–38; “Feminist Studies and Modern Jewish History,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, in press).