The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (review)

Book Reviews 105 his presentation offemale deities and women's roles in religion as well as his passion for achieving egalitarianism today without rejecting all ofbiblical tradition. Carol Meyers Department ofReligion Duke University The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England, by Michael Galchinsky. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. 275 pp. $17.95. Michael Galchinsky's fascinating and important study focuses on the period between 1830 and 1880 when Jewish women in ViCtorian England rejected their traditional exclusion from Jewish communal discourse and literary endeavor and began to publish novels, histories, periodicals, theological tracts, and conduct manuals addressing the situation of an Anglo-Jewry caught between the desire for emancipation and acculturation while simultaneously endeavoring to maintain a distinct collective identity. This flowering of Jewish women's writing in Victorian England is a unique phenomenon among Jewish subcultures at that time and one which has not been much noticed by previous scholars. Moreover, Jewish women wrote and published in Victorian England at a time when Jewish men wrote very little. Authors such as Marion Moss Hartog, Celia Moss, Grace Aguilar, Judith and Charlotte Montefiore, and Anna Maria Goldsmid were recognized by their contemporaries as the most significant theorists ofEnglish Jewry's entry into the modern world. The indigenous literature they produced in English helped to invent and to maintain a distinct Anglo-Jewish communal identity. Moreover, a gendered reading ofthis literature reveals the particular strategies and contributions offemale writers who argued simultaneously for Jewish emancipation in the Victorian world and women's emancipation in the Jewish world. At the same time, analysis of the Christian context to which these Jewish women's historical romances, domestic fictions, and religious writings responded provides important insights into Victorian liberalism, orientalism, and conversionist goals. English Jewry grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, expanding from a community of 20,000 in 1815 to 250,000 by the end of the century, swelled in large part by immigration from Central and Eastern Europe. A relatively new and prosperous community without well established communal institutions or traditions, Anglo-Jewry experienced modernity and debates over political emancipation and religious reform in ways quite different from larger and longer established Jewish communities on the European continent. Certainly in the early decades of the nineteenth century the major issue for English Jewry was the successful establishment ofrapprochement between the 106 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 community's Sephardim, who tended to be suspicious of communal authority, and the more recently arrived Ashkenazim. Efforts at political emancipation were approached in pragmatic ratherthan ideological ways; nor was religious reform an overwhelming concern in a highly tolerant community whose overwhelming desire was to become emancipated and acculturated into the broad-minded and liberal English environment. Jewish women, however, wanted different things from emancipation and religious reform, and for them the two movements were inseparable. As Galchinsky writes, "The external emancipation of Jews from England's oppressive laws suggested to them the possibility ofan external eml!Jlcipation ofwomen from Judaism's oppressive laws" (p. 30). Women called for a place in the synagogue next to men, equal education, and access to biblical and rabbinic texts through translations, ifnot the original, as well as for the establishment of a ceremony for girls commensurate to the Bar Mitzvah. While their claims to such modem freedoms were dismissed or denigrated by men, who feared· that the separate spheres for men and women demanded by traditional Judaism might collapse ifwomen were educated, women persisted in writing about issues of class and gender discrimination within the Jewish community, frequently pitting "modem" young women against "traditional" patriarchal figures in their stories and novels. While Jewish men who supported religious reform also a,rgued for the centrality of women's education, their efforts were ineffective and unenthusiastic. Galchinsky demonstrates that "it was primarily Anglo-Jewish women who both polemicized for the expansion of female education efforts in their writing and spearheaded the practical realization of a Jewish Girls' School and Jewish women's literature" (p. 67). Jewish women's motivations to become active agents of religious reform and advocates for changes in the status of women originated in traditional Jewish practice, which...