Between Maternity and Modernity: Jewish Femininity and the German-Jewish "Symbiosis"

The article addresses the question of a German-Jewish "symbiosis" in the context of three bodies of text that are geared towards German-Jewish woman readers. Raphael Breuer's Diary of a Jewish Woman Student (1907) and Else Croner's The Modern Jewess (1913), as well as the women's journal Die jüdische Frau (1925-1927), aimed to define and regulate Jewish femininity in ways what would safeguard the continuity of the Jewish tradition and the Jewish people within a highly assimilatory German society. The shift from a proudly assertive stance on Jewish femininity to an apologetic response to a prevalent antisemitic discourse, marked by World War I, vividly illustrates the limitations of gender-specific national discourses that attempt to write "difference" onto women's bodies.