Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (review)

In 1876, a young Russian Jewish woman named Sarah Nowinsky penned a letter in Hebrew to her grandfather. "Dearest grandfather," she wrote:

"Thou dost know if thou hast not heard, that the first days have fallen and new days have risen to fill their place, in which justice and fairness are meted out not to men alone but to women as well, and the adage: 'Anyone teaching his daughter Torah is as if he is teaching her promiscuity' has tumbled nevermore to rise along with all the prejudices and ancient edicts whose prime is long past; and the spirit of modernity has seized us too in its wings and demands learning and reason from women just as much as from men, and we must obey, if we wish to be numbered among the progressives, lest the men scorn and ridicule us and lest they nod their heads after us, they who hitherto alone plumed themselves on their reason and erudition, and if the meaning of my words is clear to you, you will no longer be surprised that I know the language of our people; for your granddaughter who desires that her dignity be in unison with the community of the intellectual men who move with the times, or should I rather say: the intellectual women who move with the times."

(cited in Parush, 211)

Though she herself was particularly articulate, Nowinsky's learning, passion, and ambitions were shared by many young Russian Jewish women of her day. By the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Jewish women in Russia were maskilot [sympathetic with the Haskalah, the modern Jewish Enlightenment movement of the late nineteenth century], literate in the Russian language, educated in secular schools, with access to published matter that exposed them to modern philosophy, politics, and literature.

In Reading Jewish Women, Iris Parush seeks "to describe the role played by women readers in widening the fissures within traditional [Eastern European Jewish] society, and [to draw] attention to the unique contributions women made to the dissemination of the new ways of thought in the society of their time" (Parush, 3). In certain respects Parush succeeds admirably in this goal, offering scholars of Jewish culture, Eastern European society, and gender history a comprehensive look at the way Jewish women were depicted by and asserted themselves into maskilic [Jewish Enlightenment] culture of the day. What is more, she offers a powerful argument about the empowering nature of marginality within Eastern European Jewish society. Parush's study is, however, moored in the rather more literary than social realm, and in certain respects she presents a static view of modern Russian Jewish, and modern Russian Jewish women's cultures.

Parush's most valuable contribution is to offer a vivid picture of the way women's relationship to literacy, language, and reading was represented by maskilot and by their male peers. In so doing, she reexamines central texts of the Haskalah (foremost among them Hebrew-language memoirs and works of literature) from a new perspective, and unearths a number of documents that have heretofore been neglected (or ill treated) by scholars, including the letters of Sarah Nowinsky. In this accomplishment, Parush's work echoes that of other recent scholarship on women and gender in the Eastern European Jewish milieu, which, as a whole, has not only introduced us to new voices and historical figures, but helped us to reimagine the Haskalah and Jewish modernity more generally.¹

Parush uses sources by and about Jewish women to make a general argument about the place of women, education, and literacy in Eastern European Jewish society. She argues that traditional notions about reading, texts, and gender inadvertently created Enlightened Jewish women. Because Russian Jewish girls were not expected to study Torah (as were Jewish boys), Parush argues, girls' education was less traditional than their male peers. Many girls were schooled in foreign languages and secular texts so that they...