Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Paula E. Hyman
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Yale my work in progress on gender and assimilation was assisted by colleagues in a number of settings. I am particularly grateful to the Whitney Humanities Center Fellows and to the Women’s Studies Faculty Council, who listened to early versions of my arguments and offered suggestions for further research and refinement of my major points. Two groups of students in my undergraduate course on women and Judaism stimulated my thinking, as did my then graduate student Beth Wenger. It is a pleasure for a scholar to be part of an institution that encourages the building of bridges across fields and disciplines and thereby promotes intellectual creativity.
I was fortunate to work in libraries and archives with rich resources for the study of modern Jewish history. To the staffs of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, the YIVO Institute, the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, as well as the libraries of Yale, I express my gratitude.
Several colleagues read one or more drafts of this book and offered encouragement, editorial advice, and constructive criticism. At each stage—conducting my research, preparing the lectures for presentation, and transforming the lectures into a book—I could count on Richard Cohen, Debórah Dwork, Marion Kaplan, and Deborah Dash Moore. For fifteen years Marion Kaplan has stimulated my thinking about Jewish women, and her research has been invaluable for my own. As usual, Deborah Moore has spurred me to my best work through her multiple roles as friend, editor, and partner in debate. The book is the better for their concern; I alone am responsible for its deficiencies. Many thanks to my editors Naomi Pascal and Pamela Bruton for their support and commitment to high editorial standards.
My family has shared in this endeavor, listening with more patience than could be expected to tales culled from memoirs of forgotten women. My husband, Stanley Rosenbaum, read each draft with an eye to crafting a narrative for the intelligent but nonspecialist reader. My daughters, Judith and Adina, have inspired me with their continued enthusiasm for this project, even as over the course of two years they heard more about one female activist, Puah Rakowski, than they ever dreamed of. Their lives are the continuation of the tale I have tried to tell, and it is to them that I dedicate this book with great love.
Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History
The Roles and Representation of Women
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