The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany, and: Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (review)

112 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 he cites are cumulatively impressive. For others to neglect or avoid them would now be harder to justify. He himself displays independence of mind in undertaking this work, one of a family of traits he shows the Jewish tradition to extol. Yet in two respects the book seems unfinished. First, I would have welcomed more extensive theoretical work at the end. It is clear that he refuses various either/ors, that he finds it impossible to treat Judaism in monolithic terms. Neat answers are unavailable to well-worn questions: Is Judaism particularistic or universalistic? this-worldly or otherworldly ? a religion of the group or of the individual? But it is less clear whether this irenic stance, sensible enough at a high level of generality, does his findings justice. For instance, in an earlier chapter we read that "the ultimate fate of the individual for all eternity is Judaism's chief concern." Such a statement appears stronger than a mere redressing of a balance that the present time demands. In short, the status of his case needs more precise elucidation. Second, the subject of sin and moral evil receives too little attention here in light of its central importance in religious thought. It would be highly instructive to see how Jacobs connects the dynamics of evil to the interplay between the community and the individual, whether he looks first to power disparities in communal arrangements, or to a defect deep within the self, or to some combination that defies any single point of origin. One hopes that he turns to both of these matters in future work. Gene Outka Department of Religious Studies Yale University The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany, by Marion A. Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 351 pp. $39.95. Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women inJerusalem, by Susan Starr Sered. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 174 pp. $32.50. Between 1871 and the first World War the Jews of newly united Imperial Germany experienced a period of rapid and dramatic social change as a result of legal emancipation, economic success, and overwhelming urbanization. Poised between their desire for acculturation and social acceptance as Germans on the one hand, and allegiance to their Book Reviews 113 Jewish identity on the other, Germany's Jews struggled against endemic and institutionalized antisemitism to achieve the respectable bourgeois status which they believed would secure their place in German life. While many historians have chronicled German Jews in the Imperial period~a crucial chapter in Western Jewry's continuing confrontation with modernity , few have considered the roles played by women, despite the reality that both Jewish identity and the inculcation of desirable middle-class values were forged under female guidance in the home. Marion Kaplan's excellent and readable study, a recipient of the National Jewish Book Award in 1992, remedies this limited picture, demonstrating conclusively that in Imperial Germany the Jewish family, the source not only of bourgeois culture and education but of Jewish traditions and loyalty, increasingly became a substitute for Jewish religious life. Utilizing memoirs, contemporary journalism, popular literature, and interviews, alongside more traditional historical sources, Kaplan divides her study into two parts, one centering on female activities in the home and the other on women's confrontation with academia and the workplace, and their involvement in service organizations. Part One, "Women and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture," is primarily concerned with a woman's responsibility to make her home a haven from the outside world for her husband's and children's comfort. In a society in which public and private behavior reflected social class, it was the task of the mother and housewife to raise children according to bourgeois criteria of cleanliness and orderliness, see to their acquisition of German literary, musical, and artistic culture, and arrange a pleasant and appropriate social life within a circle of extended family members and suitable friends. And in an environment which was barely tolerant ofJews and Judaism, family and social ties, created and maintained by women, provided Jews with the roots and security they otherwise lacked...