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960 l MULTIDENOMINATIONAL MOVEMENTS—THE ORDINATION MOVEMENT Hunt, Elizabeth Johnson, Diana Hayes, and Ada Marı́a IsasiD ı́az led the discussion in numerous theological works. The 1990s brought fresh historical and anthropological insights to the issue. Karen Jo Torjensen’s When Women Were Priests (1993) showed that women did indeed fill priestly roles in the early centuries of Christianity. The work of archeologist Giorgio Otranto of Italy bolstered that conclusion with iconographic evidence. See “Notes on the Female Priesthood in Antiquity ,” translated from Italian in Priesthood, Precedent and Prejudice: On Recovering the Women Priests of Early Christianity in Mary Ann Rossi, “Priesthood, Precedent and Prejudice: On Recovering the Women Priests of Early Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies 7 (1991): 73–94. JEWISH WOMEN’S ORDINATION Pamela S. Nadell IN 1889, ON the front page of Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent , the writer Mary M. Cohen (1854–1911) asked, “Could not—our women—be ministers?” (Nadell, 1). That question launched a century-long debate over Jewish women’s right to ordination. Not until 1972 did the first American woman shatter the historic tradition of an exclusively male rabbinate, and then women became rabbis only in Reform Judaism. Thereafter, the battle over women’s ordination continued—and continues today in Orthodox Judaism. When Cohen first raised the idea of women rabbis, she did so against the backdrop of the nineteenthcentury woman’s rights movement. Although best known for demanding woman suffrage, the vote women won in 1920, the Seneca Falls Convention’s Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions in 1848 railed against men for excluding women from the learned professions— from medicine, law, and the ministry. During the nineteenth century a few women managed to break into these professions, becoming the first female doctors, lawyers, and clergy. In the 1850s Antoinette Brown Blackwell and in the 1880s Anna Howard Shaw challenged their churches and became the first women ministers in, respectively, the Congregational Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church Conference. Thus, American Jews joined their Protestant neighbors as they turned to the problem of ordaining women. In the 1890s the question Cohen raised swirled beyond Philadelphia. In particular, it struck a chord among those in the most liberal Jewish denomination, Reform Judaism. As Reform developed in the nineteenth century, its leaders often proclaimed their intention of emancipating women in the synagogue. Thus Reform rabbis were the first to break, in 1851 in Albany, New York, with the custom of seating men and women separately during worship, and Reform Jews celebrated this as evidence of their progressive stance on women. Contemplating women in the rabbinate, therefore, seemed consistent with Reform’s championing new religious rights for women. Not surprisingly, then, some girls and women found their way into classes at Hebrew Union College (HUC), the Reform rabbinical seminary established in Cincinnati in 1875, but none seems to have been considered a serious candidate for ordination. In the 1890s California ’s Ray Frank (Litman, 1861–1948) won acclaim for her lay preaching, teaching, and leading religious services . The press nicknamed her “the girl rabbi of the golden west” and asked her: “What would you do if you were a rabbi?” (39). In 1897, in a Reform Jewish newspaper, twenty-six prominent American Jewish women weighed whether or not women should occupy the pulpit. Fifteen could imagine exemplary women, properly trained, as rabbis. Nine believed that not only did a woman’s essential nature deny her this calling but that when “the crowning jewel of woman, motherhood, comes to bless her,” the woman rabbi would find the struggle to balance family and career far too difficult (52). Nevertheless, Hannah Solomon (1858–1942), the founding president of the National Council of Jewish Women and a Reform Jew, boasted: “We are receiving every possible encouragement from our rabbis, and should women desire to enter the ministry, there will be no obstacles thrown in their way” (45). Yet where were the women who wanted to be rabbis in the 1890s and early twentieth century? The Jewish women Mary M. Cohen claimed only needed a bit of encouragement to become rabbis have not left their names for the historical record. But after World War I women seeking ordination left a trail for the historian to follow, as they drove the debate about women rabbis from the realm of the abstract to the actual. The first was Martha Neumark (Montor, 1904–1981). At fourteen, Neumark, the daughter of Hebrew Union College Professor David Neumark, became a student at the seminary. There...

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