The Enlightenment and the Haskalah movement in the First Reich

The general enlightenment period in the First Reich did not immediately include the Jewish community. There were some Jewish Reform schools, dating back to around 1778, and the majority of the parents sent their Jewish boys and girls to what had been traditionally available. The Heder[1] gave all the instructions felt necessary for Jewish boys, and Jewish girls were, of course, not included in the all-male Heder.[2]

With the advent of compulsory schooling for Jewish children by the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish boys AND girls were required to attend either the Protestant or Catholic elementary schools. When they became available, the Jewish Volksschulen schools, which were compulsory for children between five to twelve, taught reading and writing and arithmetic and, importantly, the language of the mother country. This innovation resulted in the disappearance of the Heder as the primary educational vehicle for Jewish children, and the Jewish teachers began to think of themselves as a modern professional group. In July 1847, “The Law on the Situation of the Jews” was passed, which required certification for Jewish teachers in order to allow them to teach in the Jewish schools.[3]

Shmuel Feiner argues that it would seem logical that the Haskalah movement encouraged rather than discouraged women from learning Hebrew. This learning would be in order to understand better what they were chanting in the synagogues, but he points out, this would not be the case.

                      Jewish Femininity in the Emancipation Period in the Reich

Mendes-Flohr asks, concerning the Emancipation, “Why was it not self-evident?” Flohr argues that Europe was reluctant to grant or take seriously the idea of Jewish Emancipation, which was a term first coined in the 1830s concerning the fight for equality under the law of English and Irish Catholics. Later, this applied to Jewish Emancipation.

Karl Marx believed in Jewish Emancipation in Germany because it is precisely the type of society that Jews should seek admittance to. Marx believed that Jews should have full participation in bourgeois society. This participation would mark the first stage in a dialectic that would then lead to universal human Emancipation, which would, in turn, lead to a civil society.

The process of Emancipation continued. The Congress of Vienna marked an important watershed for the Jewish communities of Europe. For the first time, the concept of “Jewish Rights” was passed in an international body, and a resolution to this effect was also passed. There were several caveats, however, even though Jewish communities were represented, their spokesmen were not allowed to speak.

While the congress formed a base for the consideration of Jewish Emancipation, following the defeat of Napoleon and the return of more conservative governments, many German states rescinded the rights granted to the Jews in 1814-1815. This situation was only remedied in 1871 when Prussian King Wilhelm I created the North German Confederation Constitution, which gave Jews both civil and political rights in twenty-two of the confederated states. The Emancipation Edict marked a change in Prussia’s Jewish Educational Policy. Previous to the edict, Jewish education had primarily been in traditional religious schools. These schools were mostly confined to males, and even the Haskalah movement of modernization had not taken the idea of educating females very seriously. The exception to this was the Jewish Reform schools in Berlin and other German cities, which started in 1778.

A Jew in the home and a Mensch in the street was the clarion call of the reformers. The German Jewish reform movement had evolved by the 1840s into a movement that wished to become precisely that: a Jew in the home maintaining a form of Jewish identity and practice, and, in the street, avoiding all non-German conduct. It became essential to offer a form of Judaism that would be acceptable to a modern German Jew. This was true of both Jewish men and women.

In Germany, the Jewish woman’s place was debated by the reform movement. They believed that the subservience of Jewish women before the Enlightenment was a form of orientalism and not suited to the modern German society of the Emancipation Proclamation. The salon also played a part in Jewish assimilation on a social level. Dollinger further argues that Berlin tea-tables contributed to marrying outside of the Jewish community and, in many cases, actually marrying into the ranks of the German upper classes and the German nobility. She maintains that one reason for this phenomenon, at least on the part of the Jewish daughters, was a rebellion against the patriarchal model that had, to some extent, held them back. In most cases, the marriage required conversion to Christianity. The non-Jewish salons in Berlin gradually opened their doors to Jews. The accomplishment of the Berlin salons, both Jewish and non-Jewish, contributed significantly to the integration of Jews into German society at the highest levels. As Germany entered into the era of Bismarck, this integration resulted in creating a situation in which many politicians were either Jewish or of Jewish origin. Many of them were frequent visitors to the salons, both Christian and Jewish.

Emancipation that would continue until World War I changed everything. As the salons evolved, so did their male attendees. By 1800, a young breed of males, who disdained the outward appearance of wigs and powers, began to appear and take part in intellectual discussions. They wrote poetry and engaged in face-to-face conversations. They fought against what they felt was the extreme nationalism of the mature Enlightenment that had been in vogue only 15 years previously. Women, emotion, and essays became important to these young saloon men, and young enlightened nobles began to appear in the early 1800s.        

The Berlin salons started fading away until, by 1914, they were virtually gone. 

The decline of the Jewish salons was a terrible loss for both the women who enjoyed the prominence they had for being involved with this project, and also for the entire Prussian society.

The decline of the salon also marked the end of the success that women enjoyed in the literary fields. The final disappearance, she maintains, was a significant loss to the female dilettante. The intellectual elite in Germany’s big cities grew too large for the small living-room-like salons to accommodate them, so new cultural trends replaced the salons. Hertz mentions some of the replacements as being newspapers, journals, lectures, professional societies, political parties, and even parliaments.

Without the salons, Hertz argues, Jewish reform resulted in the creation of a new Jew, the gebildtete, or cultivated Jew. This new Jew spoke fluent, eloquent German, and dressed and behaved like a German, both in the home and the synagogue. The new cultured Jewish man would associate with a cultured middle-class gentile man, replacing the salon combination of a Jewish woman fraternizing with a dissolute nobleman.

Conclusion

This was intended to investigate and answer the following two questions: What was the effect of Haskalah on Jewish women, and in what way did the movement, in combination with the Berlin Salons, alter the Jewish woman’s perception of their role?

Writing the paper, I was amazed and intrigued by the direction the research took in defining and, more importantly, humanizing the feminine aspect of Enlightenment and Emancipation. This paper is indebted indeed to the fine men and women researchers who have shone a needed light on the changing roles of women during this period.

Women were very much a “silent partner” previous to the Enlightenment. Jewish women found their roles changing from the traditional Jewish mother of the pre-enlightenment centuries. She had taught her children how to be a good Jew. At age four or five, she would lose her sons to the Heder, where they would compete intellectually with each other under the tutelage of a rabbi or a learned Jewish scholar, who would initiate them into traditional Judaism.

For her daughters, it was learning a support position, continuing the cycle of passive female support for their husbands. The society was intensely patriarchal, and women had little or no chance of getting an education, let alone learn to read Hebrew and German. Rabbi Abraham Geiger argued that the stereotyped Jewish housewife’s responsibilities were more demeaning than ennobling.

As the creation of a Jewish bourgeois grew as a result of the Enlightenment, Jewish women organized the salon society, which freed them from intellectual inferiority. They became a gathering point for enlightened Jewish and non-Jewish men and women, and, while not organized politically, they attracted some of the great statesmen of the era. The role they played “behind the scenes” contributed to the success of the Congress of Vienna. There were, of course, Jewish representatives (all male) at the congress, but they were only allowed to observe, not speak. The speaking took place in the organized female salons and lavish meals, which attracted politicians and statesmen who wanted a leisurely break from the daily debates and spent the evening with pleasant, literary, intelligent Jewish ladies. It certainly helped that many of the nobility were also members of the salon society.

As this milestone of the Emancipation Proclamation decided on the new status of the Jews, there followed a flowering of formerly latent Jewish potential, for both men and women. Marx believed in Jewish Emancipation in Germany because it was precisely the type of society that Jews should seek admittance to. Marx believed that if Jews attained full participation in bourgeois society, it would create the first state in a dialectic that would be a precursor to universal human Emancipation and civil society. Marx did not differentiate between Jewish men and Jewish women in this matter.

Despite setbacks, the role of Jewish women would never go back to the pre-enlightenment subservient mode that dominated their lives throughout the ages of pain, pogroms, and paternalism. Almost in the blink of an eye (in a historical sense), women emerged from the darkness into the light of the Enlightenment and from there into the bright sun of the Emancipation Proclamation. The final change came in acculturation to what had formerly been unavailable to them. Acculturalization led to assimilation, for example, the marriages of upwardly mobile women to German nobility. It was the salons that facilitated such meetings—Jewish women and men identified with non-Jews in the First Reich, as well as most of Europe. Of course, traditional female roles continued in Eastern Europe for some time, but “civilized Europe” at been changed forever. This situation would face the test after World War I with the rise of anti-Semitism, which enflamed hatred of ever ever-latent feeling of the gentiles against prominent Jews.

Jews never returned to the situation in which they had previously lived. Citizenship had then been granted them throughout Western Europe, and Jewish men and women assimilated into the language and customs of their host country. However, this came at a price. Rabbi Wolf Boskowits, both a Talmudic Scholar and a student of the natural sciences, wrote, “If the nations desired us to assimilate with them only externally, then we would have some excuse for shedding the heavy yoke of exile and becoming like them. But this is not the case…their true desire is not for us to change our garments and the like. Still, they desire our souls and our religion, for they wish us to be like them in our inner selves and not only outwardly.