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).
1
Paradoxes of Assimilation
“All of us who were still children thirty years ago can testify to the incredible changes that have occurred both within us and outside us. We have traversed, or better still, flown through a thousand-year history.”1 So stated the German Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost in 1833 in a public letter to a hostile Prussian bureaucrat. Jost took pride in the great strides that his Jewish contemporaries had taken in moving, as it were, from the Jewish “Middle Ages” into the German “Modern Age.” Their efforts to assimilate economically, culturally, and psychologically, he asserted, deserved approbation and support.
In presenting Jewish assimilation as a rapid and quasimiraculous journey of self-transformation, Jost articulated the view of the Jewish intellectual elite, who embraced the possibilities of civic equality and social and cultural integration offered by the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century political liberalism. Assimilation quickly became the central ongoing issue of debate within Jewish communities in the modern period. First promoted by both progressive Jewish leaders and Christian supporters of Jewish emancipation (the conferral of civic rights), it was later decried by Zionist activists and Orthodox spokesmen as a betrayal of the Jewish people and of Jewish tradition. “Assimilationist” became an epithet of opprobrium. It has not been easy even for scholars of the Jewish past to explore the varieties and meanings of Jewish assimilation in the last two centuries in a nonpolemical way, although recently a sympathetic understanding of the ideology and identity of assimilated Jews has emerged, particularly among Jewish historians in America but also among some scholars in Israel. A number of historians have suggested that the blunt term “assimilation” obscures the varieties of behavior and the nuances of identity that characterize modern Jewry. The term “assimilation” often does not convey the multiple influences that together forge individual as well as collective identity, the different social contexts in which various aspects of identity are expressed, or the coexistence of the desire for full civic integration with the retention of what we might today call ethnic particularism.2 With that caveat in mind, I will use the term “assimilation” in this study because both proponents and opponents of the accommodation of Jews to the norms
