Gender and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identities

Introducing the subject of gender into a historiographical debate has the tendency to destabilize conventional wisdom. This is certainly the case in the question of the construction of modern Jewish identities. I use the plural form here because identity is inherently shifting rather than stable; it derives from the interaction of individual psychology and experience with prevailing social and cultural norms. Living in many different political, class, and cultural contexts and functioning as individuals as well as members of a self-defined and other-defined group, Jews constructed a variety of identities in the modern period.

Despite this fact, there is a master narrative of modern Jewish identity. ¹ In shorthand form, it is defined as a consequence of Enlightenment and emancipation, and it is framed historiographically in terms of loss. Jews in the modern world perceived a wealth of social opportunities available to them, but their secular education and social mobility were accompanied by a series of changes that entailed surrender of power and traditional cultural forms. In the modern period, Jews experienced the loss of communal autonomy and a profound challenge to their traditional religious belief. This was accompanied by a decline in religious practice, as measured by public behavior such as synagogue attendance, and the waning of the authority of their religious leaders.

Jews constructed a modern self in accordance with the social standards and values of the larger Christian society. This experience of a new political status led in Western and Central Europe to a Jewish identity articulated officially in terms of belonging to a group that was defined (at least ostensibly) by its religion, a religion that marched hand in hand with middle-class values and aesthetics. It led in Eastern Europe to a Jewish identity increasingly articulated in terms of secular ethnicity, even as a substantial segment of Jews in the region remained traditional in religious practice and self-definition.

This master narrative of the shaping of modern Jewish identity was derived from the pronouncements of male communal leaders and intellectual spokesmen, who understood their lives as a decisive, and often traumatic, break with the past. As one of the first modern Jewish historians, Isaac Marcus Jost, put it in 1833, "All of us who were still children thirty years ago can testify to the incredible changes that have occurred both within us and outside us. We have traversed, or better still, flown through a thousand-year history." ² The master narrative reflected the experience of Jewish men who achieved enormous social mobility, often in no more than two generations. The Jewish women who experienced a similar mobility, primarily in central Europe, were generally invisible or dismissed. Their mobility was seen as derivative of their husbands' status or as tainted by their abandonment of Judaism. ³ Jewish women's experience was largely irrelevant to the historical narrative. The Jewish community was male in its self-presentation and, in the eyes of historians, so was modern Jewish identity.

Gender-sensitive historians have challenged the master narrative's presumption of the uniformity of the experience of Jews in modern Europe. They began by contesting the implicit assumption that studying an articulate male elite acting in public sufficed for understanding the behavior of all Jews or the dynamics of Jewish identity formation. In doing so, they demonstrated not only the importance of gender prescriptions but also the significance of differences in levels of urbanization and social class. In particular, they suggested that what happened within the family, in the interactions of husbands and wives, parents and children, was crucial in identity formation and pointed to the anxieties attending the reconstruction of identity by a minority in a semi-hostile environment. Steven Lowenstein, for example, framed the emergence of modern Jewish identity in Berlin from 1780 to 1830 as a family crisis occurring in a specific social, economic, and cultural climate. ⁴ In her study of middle-class...