A Multifaceted Image of Jewish Women at Belgian Universities during the Interwar Period

Since the end of the nineteenth century, many East European Jewish women migrated to the West to have access to higher education. This paper studies their experiences by reconstructing their image; multifaceted and changing across time and space, this image influenced their decisions and shaped their life trajectories. It varied according to the observers' perspective and their relationships with the women under analysis. To understand this image, these women will be examined through various eyes: those of their parents, male students, local Jews, lovers and their own. Also, this will allow us to illustrate how they struggled for their emancipation through higher education. They often traveled long distances by themselves. They sometimes lived with their boyfriends before marriage. Emancipated and secularized, they entered a man's world and frequently excelled.

Many East European Jewish women decided to migrate and study at West European universities. The critical change in terms of education for East European Jewish women occurred in the early nineteenth century, when the first secular girls' schools opened in Warsaw and Vilnius. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a high proportion of these women were literate and accustomed to the written word. They could read Yiddish and Hebrew and began to acquaint themselves with Polish, German and Russian.¹

Before the work done by Shaul Stampfer, historians did not take into consideration the fact that the non-Jewish education that women also received was extremely important to their emancipation.² Many factors contributed to this secular education, from the dictates "He who teaches his daughter Torah teaches her tiflut (foolishness),"³ to the development of public schools for women, and finally to the familial labor division that requires a wife to know the local spoken languages in order to run the business. Jewish women were highly represented in the first women's courses in 1870s and 1880s Russia, but quotas for Jews were soon established. This is why women had to migrate to pursue their education.⁴ Jewish students' migrations were, however, just part of several massive waves of Jewish migrations, which resulted in a third of East European Jewish populations migrating to the West, mainly to the United States, from the end of the nineteenth century to the Second World War.⁵ These migrations were encouraged by various factors: the adverse effects of rapid modernization on traditional Jewish society, a deepening socioeconomic crisis, intensified anti-Semitism and the success of nationalist movements. In addition, access to university was restricted for Jews and for women. Numerus clausus discriminating Jews were imposed from 1887 in Russia and from the 1930s in Poland.⁶ In Bessarabia, Romanian replaced Russian as the language of instruction and Jewish students preferred to study abroad in French instead of learning Romanian. As a result, Belgian institutes of higher education were deliberately opened to foreign students; these students would go on to enhance the reputation of these schools and as they would become the future elites in their home countries, they were seen as the best agents to promote Belgian economical and political interests.⁷ Belgium had a good reputation in this period: it was a successful industrial country. Its universities and especially schools of engineering were recognized worldwide. There were four universities in Belgium: two state universities in Ghent and Liege, one Catholic university in Louvain and a free university in Brussels. Brussels Free University (Université Libre de Bruxelles, ULB) was founded in 1834 by a group of intellectuals linked to freemasonry with the aim of counterbalancing Louvain Catholic University.⁸ Despite the principles of tolerance, non-dogma, free inquiry and progress of humanity incorporated in the university's statutes, women were only admitted in 1880 and their presence was severely criticized by professors and male students. Belgium is a small country and these universities could not function with an intake of only Belgian students; they needed to attract foreign students, and they did so very successfully.⁹

Another reason for studying in Belgium was that French was the language of instruction. Those who could not go to France preferred to come to Belgium, since...