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, as assimilation was proceeding apace in the cities of Europe and the United States, articles critical of Jewish women began to appear regularly in the Jewish press in Germany, France, England, and the United States. Rather than noting the gender differences in Jewish practice which we have documented and chastising men for their defection from the Jewish community, these articles blamed women, particularly mothers, for the signs of radical assimilation that were capturing the attention of Jewish critics. Certainly, this criticism is not wholly surprising, for, as we have seen, bourgeois ideology conferred on wives and mothers responsibility for the moral and religious tone of the home, and Jewish spokesmen had adopted this ideology.70 If the family was no longer succeeding in transmitting Jewish knowledge and loyalty to the younger generation, then the guardians of the hearth had failed in their task. In preparing their sons so well to enter into the institutions of the larger society, mothers were neglecting the inculcation of a Jewish identity. As the Archives israélites noted with regret in 1889, the Jewish woman was not the model of piety she had been only fifty years before: “All the general qualities of the modern woman have developed in her at the expense of the particular qualities of the Jew.” And, therefore, “she leaves her children, unfortunately, in absolute ignorance of their faith.”71
This communal expression of disappointment at the failure of Jewish mothers was by no means limited to the French milieu but was articulated in all the societies which had experienced emancipation and assimilation, irrespective of the levels of social and political antisemitism. In 1875 the London Jewish Chronicle commented, “[P]ossibly there is no feature of the age more dangerous or more distressing than the growing irreligion of women.”72 Similarly, German Jewish spokesmen took women to task for failing in their sacred responsibility. “Women are giants who carry the world on their shoulders by caring for the home,” editorialized one paper. “If the religious home falls, so does the world of religion.”73 In commenting in an 1871 article on the historic piety of Jewish women and the inspiration they offered to their families and communities, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler lamented the neglect by contemporary Jewish women of their time-honored noble task of bringing spirituality to their homes, and this at a time when Reform had granted them a larger role within the synagogue.74 And in Texas, too, in the late 1870s Jewish women were pointedly reminded of their responsibilities: “You as daughters of Sarah and Rebecca ought never to forget that it is your sacred duty … to instruct your children, to give them a religious and moral training.… [R]emember that there is a great debt of responsibility resting upon you, and that you are held accountable for the acts of your children.”75 Some women also participated in the critique of Jewish mothers of their time. In her speech at the 1893 Jewish Women’s Congress, Ray Frank, for example, castigated her peers:
Go to the synagogue on Friday night; where are the people? Our men cannot attend, keen business competition will not permit them.… Where are our women? Keener indulgence in pleasures will not permit them With whom lies the blame? Where are the wise mothers of Israel today? … That we are now in the position of backsliders is owing to us women.76
Fathers are absent from communal discussions about the younger generation, although as lay and rabbinic leaders of the Jewish community they continued to invest time and resources in educational institutions dedicated to the transmission of Jewish culture and identity. In my survey of the nineteenth-century Jewish press of England, France, Germany, and the United States and of public Jewish pronouncements, I have found no references specifically to fathers’ responsibilities for the education of their children or for the inculcation of a Jewish identity nor blame of fathers for the defection of their children from the Jewish community. In the gendered project of assimilation the female sex was at the center.
Yet within the preemancipation Jewish community the obligation to educate children, primarily sons, rested precisely upon fathers. In practice the father’s obligation was socialized, for the male heads of household within a community assumed responsibility for establishing educational institutions for all the children of the community. Indeed universal literacy in Hebrew and familiarity with the biblical text were communal ideals for all males, and many communities provided basic instruction in reading for girls as well. The transfer of the obligation to educate Jewish youth from fathers and communal institutions to mothers, with reduced supplementary assistance from communal institutions, was, as I have suggested, a major aspect of the assimilation of Western Jewry to the norms of the larger society. It permitted Jewish men to pursue success in the worlds of commerce and civic affairs and to assume leadership positions within the Jewish community while relegating the transmission of Jewish knowledge and identity to the domestic sphere and to women, who, incidentally, had fewer educational and material resources to accomplish the task. By focusing, in the case of Jewish communal critics, on the failure of Jewish women to fulfill their assigned role or, in the case of Freud and other Jewish men who had become highly secularized, on women’s eagerness to fulfill it all too well, Jewish men were able to ignore problematic elements within the project of assimilation itself, particularly as they related to their own behavior.
The project of assimilation contained an unacknowledged source of tension: the assumption that limits could be set to assimilation, that Jews would not disappear completely within the larger society, that individual mobility would not conflict with group survival. As the Jewish elite pressed for social and civic equality, their behavior belied that assumption. With each succeeding generation, Jewish learning and practice declined and signs of radical assimilation increased. Men predominated among those who converted and intermarried. Because the bourgeois ideal of female behavior restricted women’s access to the public arena and saw religiosity as a feminine attribute, assimilating Jewish women apparently retained more signs of Jewish identification than did the men in their families. The male leadership of the Jewish community would not renounce the social, economic, and psychological benefits of emancipation and adoption of Western culture nor could it devise an effective strategy for promoting Jewish
