A Gendered Integration Revisited: Work and Integration of Jews in Norway, 1900–1942

When Johanne Selikowitz passed away in 1931, she was remembered by the cantor of the Mosaic community as a woman who had made a considerable number of sacrifices for her children. Not only was her house strictly “Jewish,” but she also fulfilled every possible duty and function expected of a Jewish wife.¹ Such descriptions of the ideal of female domesticity were common in the Norwegian Jewish magazines but reflected only a small part of a Jewish woman’s daily life in Norway in the first four decades of the 20th century.

In this article, I discuss a topic that has been largely neglected or overlooked among Scandinavian and Jewish gender historians—the working lives of women in the periphery of the Jewish diaspora. My focus is on women with modest backgrounds, and how they contributed economically to making a new life in a country where strangers from outside Northern Europe were a rarity.² More specifically, and inspired by research on more recent immigration and integration strategies, I examine the participation of Jewish women in the labor market.³ Thus, I will address the following three sets of interrelated questions: To what extent were Jewish women involved in wage labor, and did their employment patterns change over time? How, and to what extent, were gender, class, marital status and ethnicity decisive factors for their integration in the labor market? And most importantly, to what extent did working Jewish women contribute to the social integration of Jews in Norway before the deportations in November 1942?

This study highlights some of the shortcomings in the literature on gender and integration among Jews. I argue that an understanding of identity formation as situational and particular, as well as open ended and dynamic, is a useful starting point for discussions on integration as the outcome of paid and unpaid work among Jewish women in Norway.⁴ Moreover, the ensuing discussion will show that while ethnicity was important, it was not the crucial factor for a comprehensive understanding of integration among Jews. In order to identify and highlight specific characteristics of Jewish integration, I will primarily compare my findings with the work of the non-Jewish female population of Norway. I will also briefly compare the Jewish women of Oslo with their counterparts in other European countries and the U.S. I conclude with some brief remarks on whether small communities were more prone to assimilation or dissolution than larger Jewish communities.

As the Jewish population of Norway was small, no more than 2,100 individuals out of a population of 2.95 million at the outbreak of World War II, and the statistics collection procedures of the Norwegian state were well developed at the time, Jews are easy to separate from the general population.⁵ City directories and local and national censuses provide reliable information for all (working) citizens.⁶ Moreover, for the self-employed, their names and the nature of their businesses are most often stated. In addition, a questionnaire issued by the Nazi authorities in Norway in January 1942 provides valuable information, as all individuals from the age of 15 and above answered numerous personal and work related questions. And biographies and digitalized interviews with elderly Jews conducted in the early 2000s, as well as articles in Norwegian Jewish periodicals, have contributed to an even more nuanced understanding of Jewish settlement in Norway.⁷ Using these, I am able to follow individuals from the start of their working lives and until they were deported or went into exile in Sweden in 1942.⁸

While they provide a unique glimpse into the life of women in a small community, the above sources are not without shortcomings. On the one hand, only women who were “heads of households” (mainly widows) or working full time were classified as having waged labor. Accordingly, those who helped their spouses in a store or worked part time elsewhere when necessary were categorized as “homemakers”. On the other hand, women listed as owners of a store may not have worked there full time. In the city directories, “homemakers...