Inventing bourgeois Judaism: Jewish culture, gender, and religion in Germany, 1800--1870

This study examines the transformation of Jewish culture from pre-modern, rabbinic, and halakhic Judaism, defined by practices of male learning and ritual observance in which women occupied an inferior and marginal position, to Judaism as a culture of bourgeois religiosity in which religious sentiment and bourgeois aesthetics, Bildung (harmonious formation of the heart and the intellect) and Sittlichkeit (morality) figured prominently, and in which the hierarchical division between men and women subsided.;In the introductory chapters, an investigation of the periodical Sulamith, of homiletic literature and other contemporary publications reveals that Reform and modern Orthodox Jewish leaders idealized women's religiosity, emphasized the importance of mothers, and extolled Jewish family life. Moreover, they encouraged men to cultivate a Judaism understood as shaped by feminine values and principles.;Subsequently, an analysis of changes in the culture of prayer and in synagogue worship indicates that German Jewry came to highly value religious practices, such as flexible prayer in the vernacular, which formerly had held little prestige and had been considered female realms of activity. In fact, newly introduced elements of Jewish worship such as synagogue choirs and confirmation ceremonies included women in an unprecedented fashion.;As this study lays out, the increased equality between men and women in Jewish culture resulted from the decline of halakhic Judaism and from the popularization of new, competing, bourgeois religious practices and sensitivities, which addressed women and men alike. An investigation of women's entry into the world of Jewish voluntary associations confirms that, when practices of religious learning and communal Hebrew prayer lost some of their defining force in Jewish life, women gained access to arenas in which they used to play a peripheral role. The concluding chapter thus details how women assumed new functions as educators, activists, authors of religious literature, translators, and friends and allies of rabbis who no longer understood themselves primarily as rabbinic scholars. In nineteenth-century Germany, this study holds, the gender order of Jewish society and Judaism as a religious culture underwent a dramatic transformation.