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 traditional Jewish patterns of charity (ẓedakah) with the new forms of denominational philanthropy conducted by Christian women.38 In nineteenth-century Germany, on the other hand, Jewish women initially conducted their charitable work along more-traditional lines. They doled out poor relief, cared for the female dead as they had for generations through the female ḥevrah kadisha (burial society), gathered money to provide dowries for poor brides, and administered funds to ensure that indigent Jews had the means to celebrate holidays. Gradually they also expanded their philanthropy, creating women’s societies organized according to the latest concepts of “scientific charity” and concerned with the education of girls and the welfare of children. By the end of the nineteenth century their philanthropic activity enabled them to forge connections across confessional lines with other German women.39 In France as well, Jewish women continued traditional forms of ẓedakah while engaging in the types of modern philanthropy conducted by bourgeois Catholic women.40
Although most Jewish women in the West expressed their Jewish sentiment primarily through private devotions in the home and sectarian philanthropy, there emerged a handful of exceptional individuals who saw it as their responsibility to use the written word to accomplish the defense of Judaism as well as the task of educating other Jewish women, who would then influence their children. They based their activity upon the modern expectation that women would serve as the primary inculcators of Jewish consciousness in children, just as Western bourgeois culture saw mothers as the first teachers of moral values to the younger generation.41 In traditional Jewish society in eastern Europe in the eighteenth century a few women had composed tkhines, petitionary prayers in Yiddish intended for a female audience.42 In central Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, metaphorical descendants of Sarah bas Tovim and Sarah Rebecca Rachel Leah Horowitz, two authors of collections of tkhines, also wrote prayers in the vernacular (in German or English) and with a modern sensibility. The poet Penina Moise (1797–1880) of Charleston, South Carolina, composed the first American Jewish hymnal (and served, incidentally, as the director of Congregation Beth Elohim’s Sunday School).43 In 1855 Fanny Neuda (1819–1894), widow of one rabbi in Moravia and sister of another in Vienna, wrote a German prayer book for women. Stunden der Andacht (Hours of devotion) was so popular that by the 1920s it had gone through twenty-eight editions and had also been translated into English.44
The most prolific and influential of these Jewish women writers who addressed religious themes was England’s Grace Aguilar (1816–1847), of Portuguese Marrano descent. In her short life of thirty-one years, she wrote a number of books about Judaism, in addition to novels, poems, and translations.45 Apologetic in tone, they were designed to instill pride in Jewish readers and reinforce the faith of Jews fully at home in Western culture. Aguilar saw her role as defender of the faith against widely accepted Christian disparagement of Judaism. In her 1845 volume The Women of Israel, which surveyed Jewish history with particular attention to the biblical era, she was anxious to prove that the position of women in Judaism was higher than in any other culture. “[I]t is impossible to read the Mosaic law,” she asserted, “without the true and touching conviction, that the female Hebrew was even more an object of the tender and soothing care of the Eternal than the male.”46
Aguilar’s defense of the high status of women within Jewish tradition, though intended to provide rationales for loyalty to Judaism, derived from assumptions about gender and assimilation widespread among acculturated Jews of her generation. In Aguilar’s view, Jewish women had a special religious vocation, or “mission,” “as witnesses of that faith which first raised, cherished, and defended them.… A religion of love is indeed necessary to woman, yet more so than to man.”47 Because of woman’s natural spirituality, Aguilar urged the Jewish woman, in contradiction of traditional Jewish custom, to dedicate the gift of her “silvery voice and ear for harmony” not only to pleasing man but also to singing God’s praises in his sanctuary as well as teaching songs of thanksgiving to her children at home.48 In fact, Aguilar highlighted the role of Jewish women as teachers of their children. But rather than seeing this role as a recent addition to women’s tasks, she asserted that its source was “our ancient fathers, whose opinion is evidently founded on our holy law.”49 “To the women of Israel, then,” she concluded, “is intrusted the noble privilege of hastening ‘the great and glorious day of the Lord,’ by the instruction they bestow upon their sons, and the spiritual elevation to which they may attain in social intercourse, and yet more in domestic life.”50
Aguilar’s The Women of Israel suggests the double-edged implications of the bourgeois gender division that placed religion and the inculcation of religious sensibilities within the female domain. On the one hand, Aguilar manifested a strong loyalty to Jewish faith and to Jewish distinctiveness; she expressed a firm belief in woman’s inherent religiosity as well as in her physical and mental inferiority to man—doctrines that we might label profoundly conservative. On the other hand, on the basis of her understanding of women’s religious mission, she championed women’s religious education and the ceremony of confirmation for both sexes—innovations we could rightly see as progressive.51 In fact, she recognized the opportunities that her own time offered Jewish women, and she concluded her book with a call to the women of Israel to take advantage of their new opportunities, for, in her words, they were now “free not only to believe and obey, but to study and speak of their glorious faith.” Anticipating some aspects of twentieth-century feminist analysis, she even recognized that the gendered division of labor in nineteenth-century Western societies provided women with advantages not enjoyed by their husbands and brothers: “it is fully in [women’s] power so to do … yet more so than men; for the ordinances and commands of our holy faith interfere much less with woman’s retired path of domestic pursuits and pleasures than with the more public and more ambitious career of man.”52
By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, acculturated middle- and upper-class Jewish women living in Western societies had taken to heart the message of women’s potential for religious and social influence in both the domestic and the public sphere, as the image of the “New Woman” expanded the legitimate field of female activity. The writers and the editor of
