In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Jewish Intellectual Women in Europe, 1860–2000: Twelve Biographical Essays by Judith Szapor, Andrea Pető, Maura Hametz, and Marina Calloni, eds.
  • Sarah S. Painitz
Judith Szapor, Andrea Pető, Maura Hametz, and Marina Calloni, eds., Jewish Intellectual Women in Europe, 1860–2000: Twelve Biographical Essays. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2012. 431 pp.

Jewish Intellectual Women in Europe is a fascinating collection of biographical essays on the lives and work of twelve little-known women. Most of the women discussed in this volume hailed from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet in important ways, the book presents a shift in perspective from research that has focused largely on the German-speaking Jews of the imperial capital of Vienna. By focusing on female voices from a broad range of geographical areas that include not only Vienna and Budapest but also Zagreb, Trieste, Venice, Cluj, and Minsk, this volume goes beyond broadening our understanding of the contributions intellectual women have made to Central European culture and asks us to reconsider what we mean by “Central Europe.”

The women under consideration here made their mark in a wide variety of ways, which contributes to the interdisciplinary appeal of this book. They were writers, salonists, educators, journalists, political activists, musicologists, social scientists, psychoanalysts, and more. Several of the women pursued work in multiple intellectual arenas. Many were pioneers, and all led extraordinarily courageous lives. The best essays paint vivid pictures of their subjects’ accomplishments. We learn, for example, what it was like to be the [End Page 150] first woman to teach at an Austrian or German university (Elise Richter) and what obstacles were overcome by the first female rabbi (Regina Jonas). We see how women participated in some of the first work in empirical social research (Käthe Leichter) and in the leadership of the Russian Jewish revolutionary movement (Esther Frumkin).

The best contributions present biographical detail in rich historical and social context, thus bringing to life not just an individual but also a specific place or time. Thus, we are immersed in Jewish communities in Italy (Amelia Rosselli), the lives of Jews in Russia (Frumkin) and in “Red Vienna” (Leichter), the Zionist movement in Austria (Martha Hofmann), Zagreb in the 1930s (Vera Erlich Stein), and the lives of Jewish women in Trieste (Alma Morpurgo). These essays are able to create a dialogue between the biographical, the personal, and the private on the one hand and the historical, the social, and the public on the other, with each illuminating the other. The impact of the complex relationship between the public and the private is apparent in the work of several women. Judith Szapor writes that Cecile Wohl, for example, embodied the cosmopolitan world of bourgeois Jewish Central Europe, her greatest achievement her salon in Budapest. Yet her success was limited—her salon was part of the private sphere and as such is preserved only in anecdotes and lists of famous visitors. Other contributors use the private to illuminate their subject’s public persona. In her essay on Regina Jonas, Claudia Prestel provides a deeper and more complex perspective on the first female rabbi’s work through a sensitive and thorough analysis of Jonas’s private correspondence with her lover Joseph Norden.

Mobility and fluidity—in regard to both geography and identity—characterize most of the women under consideration in this collection. To some degree, their gender and their Jewishness influenced their perspectives, their relationships, their intellectual pursuits, and their work. The spectrum represented is wide: Some fought for women’s rights and identified themselves as feminists, some saw their gender as incidental, some were Zionists or observant Jews, some were assimilated or converted. Indeed, as the essays demonstrate repeatedly, their self-understanding as women and Jews was remarkably fluid. Some readily changed their perspectives and opinions—Rosselli on the Zionist question, for example. Others, such as the writer Juliane Déry, clearly struggled with their search for self-definition. The essays further make clear that these women were remarkably mobile, settling—often several times in their lives—throughout Europe and even in Ceylon (Edit [End Page 151] Gyömrői), Palestine/Eretz (Hofmann), and Chile (Morpurgo). Ultimately, their Jewish heritage profoundly affected...

pdf

Share