Gender and Jobs in the Jewish Community: Europe at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Until the 1980s, the literature on Jewish women was sparse. Since then there has been a steady and impressive growth of writing on the subject, ranging from the history of salonières (the women of the salons) and the German-Jewish middle-class to works on prostitutes or revolutionaries (those forever-popular heroines, Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg). The most abundant literature on women and Judaism has focused on halakhic prescriptions for (or against) women in an effort to find a usable Judaism for women today. In comparison, the social history of gender and Jews has lagged somewhat behind more philosophical, theoretical, or theological treatments, and the question of Jewish women's participation in the labor force has remained a subset of more general questions. This is particularly true for the social history of Jews in Western and Eastern Europe, in contrast to the numerous studies of Jewish immigrant women in the United States. Indeed, the Lower East Side of New York sometimes seems to represent the whole. ¹

When thinking about working options for Jewish women at the turn of the twentieth century, "seams and bo[a]rders" seem to sum it up. It is not a metaphorical reflection on the netherworld between nation-states that is currently so popular but rather a sober reflection of two of the most important categories of poor Jewish women's work: making garments in the shop, factory, or home; and taking in and taking care of lodgers. Although this image emerges distinctly from research on the United States, the question of gender and jobs in Europe has been much less studied. Given the force of the New York tableau, the question is therefore a comparative one. Do seams and boarders sum it up the world over? Do the New York women--making garments, boycotting overpriced kosher meat, renting rooms à la Hester Street, serving meals, and breaking or fulfilling hearts--represent Jewish women's jobs around the world? And what about their middle-class reformer sisters who came to teach them manners and housecleaning? Can we assume that the same models existed in France, England, Germany, and Russia? Drawing upon my own research on France and upon existing scholarship on other European countries, the purpose of this article is to explore some questions and suggest avenues for further research for a better understanding of Jewish women's role in the labor market within and outside of their communities.

The Problem of Sources

In my early work on Jewish labor in fin-de-siècle (1900) France, why did I not find more information on women? ² Was I not looking in the right places? Was it a question of sources or a question of the period in which I began my research? (Women's history, let alone gender, was not yet a dominant historiographic question.) And why is there still no good monograph on French Jewish women--of any class--although there is finally some important work in progress? ³

First of all, as historians of women know, there is a paucity of sources. Both women (over half the population) and Jews (albeit in inverse proportion to the clamor that the far right makes about their visibility) can be maddeningly invisible at times. How to find them? In the census? Through memoirs? Sources are perhaps particularly problematic for France.

The well-known stumbling block for the social history of French Jews is the "republican" attitude toward religion. A third of a century before the law separating church and state in 1905, one of the first acts of the Third Republic was to declare religion a private matter, henceforth disqualifying it as an item on census questionnaires. Thus, Doris Bensimon-Donath's sources for her detailed Socio-démographie des juifs de France et d'Algérie (The socio-demography of the Jews of France and...