Enlightened Jewish Women in Berlin by Natalie Naimark-Goldberg (review)

Enlightened Jewish Women in Berlin (first published in English as Jewish Women in Enlightenment Berlin, Oxford: Littman, 2013) belongs to the broadening scholarly trend toward examining the past in general and modern Jewish history in particular through a gendered lens. The book focuses on about a dozen Jewish women who were prominent within the Jewish milieus of the German Enlightenment at the turn of the nineteenth century, including such well-known women as Rahel Levin and Dorothea Mendelssohn, as well as more obscure personalities like Sara and Marianna Meyer, Fredchen Liebman and Esther Gad. These women moved in the same social circles but did not comprise their own distinct, organized group, despite sharing social and cultural characteristics. All were born in Germany—most of them in Berlin—during the 1760s and 1770s, to families of the economic and intellectual Jewish elite. They grew up in an environment that was receptive to European culture and to non-Jewish society, and they displayed similar patterns of acculturation that manifested as well in their stylish, not identifiably Jewish external appearance. Other shared features included their gradual abandonment of western Yiddish in favor of High German; their consumption of general culture (literature, theater etc.); their adoption of modern ideas, including an incipiently feminist outlook; and a progressively laxer observance of the religious commandments. These processes were conducive to profound assimilation into non-Jewish society, ultimately resulting, in most cases, in conversion to Christianity and intermarriage.

Until recently, most research on the Enlightenment was done from a masculine perspective. When and if women were considered, it was to examine Enlightenment attitudes towards women and gender. Women were regarded as passive objects of the masculine intellectual world, and those who stood out were seen either as muses who inspired noted male intellectuals or as exploiters of those connections, mainly for social advancement. Naimark-Goldberg’s study joins a relatively new trend that casts the spotlight on women who were active in Enlightenment milieus and elucidates the processes that they underwent from their own perspective. This trend emerges from a feminist outlook, but also from new approaches to historical research that shift the focus from great thinkers to broader social strata, in order to understand how these were affected by the new intellectual patterns. Recognizing the Enlightenment as a process extends the inquiry from ideas to the social and cultural frameworks via which and within which those ideas were propagated. They also deconstruct “historical experience” into the divergent experiences of various groups and individuals in different places and periods.

Consistently with these new trends, a number of important studies dealing with women’s place in Jewish Enlightenment milieus have been written since the late 1990s. Naimark-Goldberg’s study nonetheless stands out in several ways. First, unlike several studies, most of them written in Israel, that have focused on east European women in Hebrew maskilic circles in the nineteenth century, Naimark-Goldberg’s work focuses on women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Berlin. Second, instead of concentrating on women’s place in the Enlightenment salon, Naimark-Goldberg examines a much broader array of practices. Third, rather than dealing with one or even several individuals, her book surveys a larger group of women. In this manner, not only is the story of the Jewish women of the German Enlightenment amplified to include topics never previously treated, but what Joan Scott famously called the “useful historical category” of gender illuminates the entire subject in a new light and affords a fresh understanding of the relationships within enlightened society.

Naimark-Goldberg’s work is also distinctive in pursuing the voices of the women themselves, taking as its main sources the texts they authored, mainly letters and memoirs, but also articles and literary pieces. This makes them visible as independent women with desires and opinions of their own—some of which herald a nascent feminist awareness. A main reason for our erstwhile perception of women as having been only very...