Abstract

The mere mention of nineteenth and early twentieth-century “Jewish Vienna” conjures up images of assimilated Jewish men such as Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, who made tremendous contributions to the cultural life of Vienna while disseminating provocative and radical concepts of gender and sexuality. Yet, in addition to this burgeoning Jewish cultural avant garde, there was another flourishing “Jewish Vienna” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, comprising ordinary men and women, rabbis, teachers and lay leaders, who together established a vibrant Jewish community and focused their energy on sustaining the many Viennese religious and cultural institutions that would remain active through the turn of the twentieth century. This article aims to uncover a portion of this lesser-known Jewish Vienna: the Viennese Orthodox Jewish community, which, already in the early and mid-nineteenth century, was helping shape the religious and cultural values of the Jewish community at large. In particular, I focus on the construction of gender in two unusual responsa by Rabbi Eleazar Horowitz, the primary nineteenth-century Viennese halakhic authority, as a lens through which to view the nineteenth-century Orthodox perspective on what would become, by the turn of the century, a widely contested and radical set of beliefs about what it meant to be male and female.

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