Jewish women's own(ed) religiosity
The criteria defining new womanhood had yet to be figured out. The shape and form of the aforementioned feminine religiosity remained singularly blurred, which inspired several women to address the matter throughout the 19th century.
Their first efforts were often directed at the drafting of a prayer book for women. Best known among the authors of prayer book is Fanny Neuda[1] who published in 1855 Stunden der Andacht (lit. Hours of Devotion), a prayer book in German, especially for women and so hugely popular that it would run to 28 reprints up to the 1920s. Given that earlier publications, printed in the 18th century had, like the Tseno Reno, favoured Yiddish, the choice of German owed nothing to chance. It hardly needs saying that the language of assimilation was German; Yiddish, henceforth demoted to jargon would be associated with the past and the ghetto. The prayer content reflected the shift in the way women viewed their role: No longer passive, women were seen as the prime educator in the acquisition of Judaism, and the heart of the home now made sacred for being seen as a living and true metonymy for Israel.
Grace Aguilar took her reassessment of women's role within Judaism even further. In her essay, The Women of Israel, come out in 1845, she advocates the leading role given women in the Jewish tradition and calls for a few reforms. She invites her coreligionists to better acknowledge the importance of women's role in their children's upbringing (perhaps more in keeping with European middle classes' ethos), which would clearly require a better religious education for themselves. She further advises that women may avail themselves of their natural gift for singing in order to praise God, which went against current practices. At no point does Grace Aguilar mention the introduction of innovation within Judaism. Rather, she alludes to the necessity to reinstate and update too long overlooked ancestral traditions. Never does she bring into question the essentialism presiding over the role distribution between men and women, nay she approves the latter's relative inferiority. However, her use of a conservative rhetoric for the purpose of improving women's condition in the Jewish religion pioneered a formulation still common among religious feminists (whatever their faith, it would seem): It is not Judaism that side-lines women but the rabbis who favour certain interpretations.
Matters concerning the study of the sacred texts or the performance of rituals would not be addressed directly before the 20th century. Nevertheless, the 19th century opened one religious avenue to Jewish women: that of charitable action. Indeed this practice sets the Jewish tradition of (tzedaqah[2] and new bourgeois norms on a common course. Jewish women would commit to such activity in numbers the larger since this social practice – growing, restyled philanthropy, more secular with the century – breached their home seclusion. Some place there women's irruption in or return to the public sphere but such a split between public and private has been disputed. For a start, the boundaries of this public sphere were extremely elusive, which made them easy for men to redefine at their convenience. Besides, given the criteria of bourgeois respectability, a narrowly prescribed social behaviour prevailed. Finally (barring unusual matrimonial circumstances) the purse strings would in the end remain in male hands. Accordingly, this pseudo-public sphere was closer to some kind of extended home than to a space of genuine freedom.
