The consequences of embourgeoisement for gender relations within Judaism
The emancipation was followed everywhere with prompt and striking effects, Jewish penetration of the middle classes was swift as attested in 1833 by historian Isaac Markus Jost[1] : “Everybody who was a child thirty years ago can bear witness to the unbelievable changes that have taken place with us and around us. We have made a one thousand year leap in history.
Assimilation exercised a profound attraction on a majority of Jews. Throughout the 19th century, Western and Central European Jewish communities went through a twin phenomenon of urbanisation and gentrification. Given a still hostile environment in Russia, the movement was not as widespread but remained significant, notably during the liberal era stretching from the 1856 Crimean defeat to the assassination of reforming tsar Alexander II in 1881. Besides banking and trading, where some Jews made good skills acquired during the pre-emancipation era, several sectors held great attraction: the law, medicine, higher education because they lead to professions affording both remuneration and social status. Many also got involved in politics in the second half of the century, especially in France.
Assimilation implied that Jewish men spent less time studying the Torah and more in social pursuits. Obviously, emancipation, placing them mostly in contexts where the Jewish reference was less and less pervasive, made it more difficult for men to observe the commandments. Furthermore, the bourgeois ethos gradually adopted by the majority of Western and Central European Jews held religiosity for a feminine value. One of the upshots of assimilation was thus to place – at least theoretically – the responsibility for Judaism in the hands of Jewish women. Now, the 19th century reform of Judaism that went hand in hand with emancipation – a much less influential trend in France than in Germany in particular – did not surrender the keys to the Jewish religion to women, far from it. Not only did they not gain any further admittance to the synagogue, but they were still no closer to any solid religious education, especially as the notion of an intrinsic Judeity, supposedly indwelling unprompted in all “Jewish minds”, gradually prevailed. Even the promoters of religious education for Jewish girls felt impelled to mention it. “The Torah is not taught to Jewish girls but the spirit of the Torah no less suffuses their mind from the cradle”: went the axiom of the day. It can still be found one century hence in the explanation offered by Ernest Gugenheim, France's Chief Rabbi for the exemption from mitzvoth: “Women stand biologically, from their innermost being, open to sanctification.” Such assertions represented obstacles for women who sought to develop a deeper religious education for their sisters in the faith.
At the same time, what with modernity and the growing powers of a secular state busy wresting many prerogatives once the preserve of religious authorities, the control of morality slipped away little by little from rabbinic hands henceforward shorn of all temporal authority. While rabbis maintained some influence over the proper conduct of Jewish families, they were left with precious little means of enforcement. As a result, question of morals were essentially left to the family to handle and this task majorly got devolved to women. And yet, if it had then become more difficult for men to observe the commandments how had it become easier for women to help them from the privacy of their home?
And what home are we talking about? Rachel Biale, author of Women in Jewish Law, asserts in her book that, in the Jewish tradition, a woman has no public role and that the home is her realm. How, then, does emancipation-driven modernity alter the deal? The traditional home was not sealed: a woman responsible for its upkeep would have to undertake a modicum of work in order to enable her husband to study the Torah. It follows that, though not enhanced in her role, she had contacts with the outside world, contacts that would dwindle with gentrification. The home would henceforward be synonymous with the house and its four walls. Thus this domestic Judeity – some say concealed Judeity – reassured men and allowed them to assimilate without major soul-searching in the society around them. This brought about a masculinisation of Jewish men on whom the upkeep of the household would rest along with the opportunity to establish and improve their social status.
