Introduction
In the context of Jewish historiography, the term « emancipation» first refers to the progressive access of European Jewry to full citizenship in the 18th/19th century. As a result, research has long focused on this emancipation's implications for men; in the last twenty years it has striven to review its impact on women. Indeed the upheavals wrought by emancipation are just as significant for the latter. Traditional Jewish worship is essentially the affair of men; numerous commandments do not apply to women – the study of the Torah not least among them. The mainstay of a woman's role is procreation and the upkeep of an environment conducive to observing the mitzvot[1] .
In the 19th century, the enacting of Jewish emancipation legislation ushered in most European Jewish communities a desire for social integration. Indeed, in some instances, the prior integration of Jewish communities was set forth as an argument in favour of their accessing citizenship. Now, as European Jewry integrated the middle classes, its inner social order was turned upside down. Jewish women, frequently rubbing elbows with their neighbours without in traditional Judaism, found themselves henceforward confined to their home. Whereupon it now fell to the men, once committed to the study of the Torah, to be the breadwinners. How did Jewish women react to this double internment? What were their religious demands? How would they now share in the elaboration and the sustainment of a Judaism all at once religion, community and culture?
