Not Simple Arithmetic

Not Simple Arithmetic NOT SIMPLE ARITHMETIC by Karla Goldman Karla Goldman is an assistant professor ofAmericanJewish history at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. She is engaged in the study of the genderedness ofAmerican Jewish experience through her historical study of nineteenth-century American Judaism, and through her recent role as the first woman faculty member at HUC-JIR's Cincinnati campus. 101 As Miriam Peskowitz tellingly suggests, the use of a formulation like "women in ..." reveals an approach to the past which sees women's experience as separate from or "other" than normative experience. Peskowitz carefully considers the problematic implications of "adding" Jewish women to a story of which they have always been a part. In so doing, she complicates the task of someone like me who is engaged in a study of the"place of women in the development ofAmerican Judaism."1 Yet by pointing out the pitfalls of believing that we can either simply add women to Jewish exp~rience or suddenly provide an integrated story by including gender as a "category of analysis," Peskowitz provides a critical context for thinking about the gendered nature ofJudaism even when the subject under study is the addition of women to male-defined realms. Much of my study focuses on the emergence of women's presence in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American synagogue. Examination of the evolving status of women in relation to this realm, traditionally defined almost exclusively by male dominance and female marginality, unavoidably devolves into the kind of approach challenged by Peskowitz. And yet attention to "women and the synagogue," reveals the nineteenth- 'Karla Goldman, "Beyond the Gallery: the Place of Women in the Development of American Judaism,» (ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1993). 102 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 century American synagogue as a site in which the centrality of women's absence to the definition' of the synagogue became both explicit and suddenly unacceptable. For acculturated nineteenth-century American Jews, the synagogue, so often encountered as an exclusively male sphere, became a site of female religiosity. Non-Jews who visited eighteenth and nineteenth-century North American synagogues often noted women's marginal presence at Jewish worship. In the context of a society that saw religiosity and piety as requisite female characteristics and that was accustomed to seeing that piety express itself in the public venue of the church, the gendered inflexibility of the synagogue was starkly exposed. Male Jewish leaders were presumably distressed by the observations like that ofone 1744 non-Jewish visitor to New York's synagogue who reported that the women "of whom some were very pritty [sic], stood up in the gallery like a hen COOp.,,2 Dissonance between the space given to women in the synagogue and emergingwestern thought about the appropriate religious status ofwomen was not limited to America. Jewish leaders in western and central Europe also displayed an awareness that many of the gendered practices of traditional Judaism, including the ones that were exposed to public view in the synagogue, were not well suited to the expectations of a modern age. A committee ofthe 1846 German Rabbinical conference, for example, observed that "the house of God was as good as closed" to a Jewish woman and demanded redress. An 1846 questionnaire addressed to potential chief rabbis in France inquired what each candidate would do to assure women a more dignified and pleasant position in Jewish worship.3 What is striking about the American Jewish response to this sort of concern is how much the physical structures ofJudaism adjusted to the perceived need to treat women with more respect in the public sphere of religion. The 1763 Newport, R.I. synagogue, the second synagogue to be built in the thirteen colonies, found the model for its interior design in the SpanishlPortuguese congregations of Amsterdam and London. The Newport building, however,. distinguished itself from its forbears by 2David de Sola Pool and Tamar H. de Sola Pool, An OldFaith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654-1954 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 453. 3Protokolle der dritterl Versammlung deutscher Rabbiner (Breslau, 1847), p. 264. For translation see W. Gunther Plaut, The Rise...