Lost Love: The Untold Story of Henrietta Szold, Journal and Letters (review)

America's story of women's activism turns on moments of personal revelation, what Betty Friedan in 1963 called "clicks." Since the mid-nineteenth century, women frequently mobilized only after realizing that they had been exploited by men who had taken their labor for granted. One hundred fifty years ago, Victorian values professed that by being submissive and pious, offering service to men and to God, women would civilize men, uplift their families, and ultimately find happiness under the care of appreciative menfolk. Thus, for example, women abolitionists organized for suffrage after their male co-activists disparaged women's rights. Toward the end of the century, the Women's Christian Temperance Movement began seeking public policies to protect domestic life, i.e., women. In both instances, thousands of women joined these causes because they grew to believe that women's lives were too valuable both in their own right and, more importantly, to the health of society, to be left under the disappointing care of individual men. Often these were deeply pious women, and their political action commonly rested on the dedication to others that marked their Victorian ethos.

So it was with Henrietta Szold. Born in 1860, she imbibed the commitment to service to family, community, and to God that characterized her era. Although, as Baila Shargel points out, Szold was part of a group of Jewish intellectuals who grappled with modernity and twentieth- century challenges, until the painful events documented in this profound volume shattered her confidence in male protection, she believed that "self-abnegation" comprised a woman's happiness. For 23 years, working under the title of Secretary of the Jewish Publication Society, Szold singlehandedly translated, edited, proofread, prepared indexes and appendices, and corrected manuscripts submitted for publication. Although she advised the Executive Committee regarding manuscripts, her opinions often were overruled. She received little pay.

Szold was uniquely qualified to serve JPS as she did. At her parents' Baltimore home she learned German and was trained by her father, Rabbi Benjamin Szold, in Hebrew and Judaica. Shargel writes, "From her earliest days she had expedited his Hebrew scholarship, even conducted serious academic discussions with him at table in German while the younger girls chatted about lesser matters in English" (p. 6). Later, in the wake of her father's death, Szold would play a similar role for many of the faculty at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In 1902, Solomon Schechter, the new president of JTS, agreed to her request to enroll in the Seminary as a special student to acquire the advanced studies she believed essential to edit her father's papers. In return, she offered informal weekly English lessons to the JTS faculty. At the Seminary, Szold met Louis Ginzberg, the young, single, brilliant professor of Talmud, recently arrived from Germany and in desperate need of a translator to help him prepare both his lectures and his manuscripts. By her own account, Szold fell immediately in love for the first time in her life. Thirteen years older than Ginzberg, she remained deeply self-conscious about her age throughout their long and deep relationship. To express her devotion and create a bond with him she became Ginzberg's personal English tutor, editor, translator, and indexer. Occasionally he gave her raw data in German and she returned to him a manuscript in English. Shargel points out that for Ginzberg's magnum opus, his four volume, Legends of the Jews, Szold was more co- author than editor.

In return, Szold asked only Ginzberg's company. For several years, he ate meals at her home several times each week, and the two shared countless walks in Morningside Park and along Riverside Drive, especially after Sabbath services. Adding to their discussions in her home, at the Seminary, on walks and park benches, the two corresponded, especially during their travels to visit...