The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany

by Marion A. Kaplan

A social history of Jewish women in Imperial Germany, this study synthesizes German, women's, and Jewish history. The book explores the private--familial and religious--lives of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and the public roles of Jewish women in the university, paid employment and social service. It analyzes the changing roles of Jewish women as members of an economically mobile, but socially spurned minority. The author emphasizes the crucial role women played in creating the Jewish middle class, as well as their dual role within the Jewish family and community as powerful agents of class formation and acculturation and determined upholders of tradition.

Genres: History, Germany, Nonfiction, Judaism, 19th Century, Jewish

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Marion Kaplan is Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She is the author of Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany and a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Reviews

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is primarily a history of Jewish women in Germany from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Kaplan consciously decided to leave “women” out of the title so that people would view her book as part of Jewish history rather than primarily as Women’s history, and the point is a good one: women were 50 percent of the Jews of Germany and of their history. They can tell us lots about German Jewry and we need not feel like an inquiry into this subject is overtly gender-studies-ish; instead, it’s framed as the story of how Jewish German families made their way to the middle class.
Kaplan has a fascinating chapter about the mania of housekeeping. This fit in with the general bougeois Cult of Domesticity, although Kaplan seems to think that the upwardly-mobile, ladder- climbing-aspiring Jews took the housekeeping thing even more seriously. Women were very proud to be in the homes, to raise their children, and to keep their houses in fantastic condition. Teaching piano was a really, really, really important part of raising middle-class kids. Many Jewish women made the decisions about the size of their families, and tended to keep them small (2-3 kids), even before this was a general trend across the German Empire. It seems that acculturated German Jews tried very, very hard to be the opposite of the anti-Semitic stereotypes; hence they tried to speak softly, keep body gestures to a minimum, keep small, neat families, etc.
The most fascinating chapter, probably, surrounds domestic religious observance. Since Jewish women had fewer religious obligations to keep in the first place (they were always reading novels while the men went out to mincha, as one memoir puts it), the decline in religious observance which affected outward and communal expressions more than it affected the home meant that men lost their traditions more quickly than women did. Jewish women were sometimes lighting Shabbos candles and singing Jewish songs long after their husbands had dropped all religion. Jewish food--sometimes even the outlines of kashrut itself--remained in place in many homes. Even Heinrich Heine wrote odes to Cholent.
There’s also a very interesting chapter about marriages, dowries, and the economics of marriage. Over time, the romantic notion of love coming before marriage started to get in the way, and the shadchanim would try very hard to orchestrate ways for the man and woman to meet “naturally,” ie. so that they would think it was unplanned when in fact it had been negotiated all along. There were also a lot of first-cousin marriages, especially among the rich. Mayer Amschel Rothchild had 14 grandchildren who married first cousins (Woah!!!).
Although women were usually not employed out of the house (unless they themselves were pretty poor), it was a mark of respectability to be involved in charities. There were loads of charitable organizations, of both the traditional and modern structures, and Jewish women led many of them with enthusiasm. Even for non-religious women, gemiluth chesed was a significant religious value.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My brain is absolutely fried at the moment but Kaplan makes some really interesting points about how essential women were to the making of the Jewish middle class: both Jewish women, through their active roles in the community, and German goysische women (and German goyish society at large) passively creating a society that Jews desired to imitate. Kaplan brings in fascinating evidence from Jewish women's testimonials, as well as empirical evidence she's collected, in order to synthesize conclusions about what Jewish men and women (and non-Jewish men and women) thought about Jewish women's participation in various fields versus what the actual data shows. Super interesting book and would recommend reading a chapter at a time (instead of over the span of two days like I had to do).