CHAPTER EIGHT

Educators and Ambassadors

Jewish Women in the Regency

On the evening of Friday, April 14, 1809, the Royal Dukes of Cambridge, Cumberland, and Sussex visited the Great Synagogue in London. The visit was arranged by Abraham Goldsmid, a wealthy Jewish banker, and it was significant enough that famous satirist Thomas Rowlandson immortalized it in not one but two caricatures.

The first pokes fun at the three royal dukes, replacing their heads with cheese and butter (indicating their general uselessness as political movers and shakers and pointing out the role they played as largely ceremonial royal family members with very little actual power). The royal dukes bow to the rabbi and assembled Jewish men behind him, shown dressed in flowing robes with beards to match.

The second drawing shows the interior of the Great Synagogue. While it still features all the stereotypical anti-Semitism that peppers Rowlandson’s other drawings of Jews, the majesty of the space cannot be denied. Light filters in from the high windows, illuminating an enormous room, so large it takes five massive chandeliers to light it. The male congregation sits, facing a large podium in the middle upon which the rabbi stands. In the balcony the Jewish women watch behind a screen.

It was reported that after the dukes visited the synagogue they retired to the home of Abraham Goldsmid to enjoy a “sumptuous entertainment [and] grand concert.”¹

Our popular conception of the religion of the aristocratic circles of the Regency defaults to Christian. Almost every Regency romance published by a major publisher features an entirely Christian cast. (One amazing example of a major series featuring Jewish characters in the Regency, The Courier Series by Nita Abrams, is sadly out of print.)

If we include any Jewish people in our storytelling of nineteenth-century England it is usually in the slums of Whitechapel. Whitechapel was a poor neighborhood where many Jews lived. Its name became synonymous with Jack the Ripper and his brutal murders later in the century. Around fifteen thousand Jews lived in England in 1800, with the majority of them in London. Within this group was also a vibrant, active, and wealthy community of Jews living across England.

They faced an interesting dilemma: assimilate or maintain their religious practices even if it meant they would be discriminated against by their fellow aristocrats.

Judith Montefiore and her fellow wealthy Jews in England and America chose education as their tool of choice in fighting anti-Semitism. As an extremely wealthy Jew connected to many of the aristocratic Jewish families around the world, Judith Montefiore understood the unique position she was in as a potential ambassador for her religion. She was not the only woman in that position, and those who were, were highly aware of the impact they might have.

While Judith reigns as the so-called first lady of Anglo-Jewry, there were other remarkable Jewish women in the early nineteenth century who joined her in her mission to advance the reputation of Judaism in the wider world. In examining the role of Judaism in Regency England it is necessary to travel beyond the borders of the English islands. The Jews of Regency England did not live and think in isolation. Through letters and visits, increasingly far-flung Jewish families kept in close contact with one another, even as they moved around the world.

This global network of Jews in the nineteenth century was concerned about and actively working to engender a new reputation for the Jewish people. After centuries of anti-Semitic depictions in fiction, women like Rebecca Gratz pushed back, encouraging Christian authors to examine their prejudices and do better, while others, like Grace Aguilar and the King sisters, provided their own, uniquely Jewish writings.

JUDITH MONTEFIORE

No discussion of Judaism in the nineteenth century can occur without mentioning Judith Montefiore. Judith, née Cohen, was a prolific writer who kept journals detailing her life and travels, as well as the first published author of an English-language kosher cookbook.

Born in 1784 to a wealthy Ashkenazi Dutch family that had settled in London, Judith was lucky to be raised in a family that privileged education. She learned French, German, Italian, and Hebrew (rare among women of her station). Later in life she learned Arabic. Judith kept careful diaries throughout her life, but sadly only three complete journals survive. The journals are the meticulous, mannered words of a writer with an eye to publication, rather than deeply personal musings, but they offer a wealth of information about Judith and her world.

In 1812 Judith married the ambitious, up-and-coming banker Moses Montefiore. Her sister Hannah had recently married his cousin Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the head of the Rothschild banking family in England. The two marriages strengthened the connections between the families and proved very successful, financially and otherwise. But the match might not have been an obvious one at first. Judith was from an Ashkenazi family, while Moses’s family was Sephardic. Intermarriages were rare, if not unheard of.

Moses Montefiore was a larger-than-life figure, and in understanding what he saw as his life’s mission we can truly begin to understand the relationship among Jews around the world during the nineteenth century. Moses Montefiore made a fortune trading on the London Stock Exchange and decided to use that fortune to fully devote himself to his Jewish philanthropic endeavors.

Judith was delighted at her husband’s religious devotion and was his complete partner in achieving his goals. She traveled with him to Damascus, Russia, and Israel five times (one trip to Israel was unthinkable for most people, let alone a woman at the time). Judith was acutely aware of the power of philanthropy to help Judaism’s reputation, especially among the elite circles she moved in. In her diaries she writes about inviting friends to celebrate Shabbat with her family at their home in Ramsgate, with the clear belief that if they saw the rituals and prayers they would understand both the similarities and the differences in their religions, and perhaps respect would grow.

Judith is also credited as the writer of The Jewish Manual: or Practical Information in Jewish & Modern Cookery; with a Collection of Valuable Recipes and Hints Relating to the Toilette, which was anonymously published in 1846. The manual is considered the first English-language kosher cookbook. It reflects Judith’s elite status, as it’s written for someone with servants, but it also shares tips and tricks for making popular English recipes kosher by replacing lard and eliminating shellfish.

In her introduction Judith writes,

We hope, therefore, that this unpretending little work may not prove wholly unacceptable, even to those ladies who are not of the Hebrew persuasion, as it will serve as a sequel to the books on cookery previously in their possession, and be the medium of presenting them with numerous receipts for rare and exquisite compositions, which if uncommemorated by the genius of Vatêl, Ude, or Carême, are delicious enough not only to gratify the lovers of good cheer generally, but to merit the unqualified approbation of the most fastidious epicures.²

Judith understood that her cookbook was more important than a simple book of recipes and should really be considered as a part of her larger practice of philanthropy. Of course the recipes themselves are important, because they make kosher cooking accessible. (In particular, it’s interesting to see Judith take a popular sauce like béchamel and explain that it could never be truly kosher—but then provide a simple substitute recipe.) By normalizing the practice, however, Judith was actually doing something far more radical.

Along with the recipes, Judith includes beauty tips and moralizing paragraphs. Her cookbook fits squarely in the tradition of nineteenth-century etiquette books. In this way Judith positions the young Jewish hostess she is writing for within this tradition as well. Her audience is no different from their Christian counterparts, except for simple dietary modifications.

According to her diaries, Judith was an outgoing and gregarious person who made it a point to befriend people, especially when traveling. She and her husband systematically and intentionally expanded their social circle beyond the Jewish community in London. They socialized with many important thinkers including Thomas Hodgkin, a Quaker doctor who discovered Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

After Judith’s death in 1862, Moses put her name on everything he could to honor her memory. He also established a rabbinical teaching school at her beloved home of Ramsgate. Thanks to his generosity, the Montefiore name has remained prominent in Jewish history, and Moses himself is frequently lauded as one of the most important Jewish men of nineteenth-century England. Judith is often mentioned as an aside in the greater story of Moses, but her diaries (the few that survive) tell us a much more complex, intertwined story of a couple that grew together in their goals toward the advancement of the Jewish faith.

REBECCA GRATZ, RACHEL LAZARUS, AND JEWISH LITERARY MUSES

Judith Montefiore was not the only Jewish woman of the nineteenth century focused on education and outreach. Indeed, she was joined by a vibrant community of wealthy Jewish women living across the United States. They were an active, engaged group, working hard to codify and provide Jewish education to children, as well as more charitable services. Like Judith, these women inherently understood the dual power of charity and education to secure a respected place for their religion in the popular imagination.

These early American Jewish women also understood the power of art and worked hard to ensure positive portrayals of Jews.

In 1815 Rachel Mordecai Lazarus wrote to Maria Edgeworth to note the anti-Semitism on display in her popular 1812 novel The Absentee. (This letter is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Rebecca Gratz.)

Maria responded, and the pair struck up an epistolary friendship that eventually inspired Maria to “write” her wrongs in the 1817 novel Harrington, which featured a sympathetic Jewish heroine, Berenice Montenero. Unfortunately, Maria’s solution to Berenice’s Jewishness and the problem it presented was to have her father reveal at the end of the novel that she wasn’t Jewish at all; the hero Harrington can marry her without his family’s disapproval and societal censure.

For both Christians and Jews of the nineteenth century, it is clear that the question of marriage, and interfaith marriage in particular, is a deeply important one.

In 1819 Sir Walter Scott published his own answer to the question with his medieval romance, Ivanhoe. His Jewish heroine, Rebecca of York, sacrifices her own happiness for that of the Christian heroine Rowena and Christian hero Ivanhoe. Rebecca is in love with Ivanhoe after nursing him back to health, but she steps aside so he may marry Rowena and live happily ever after. (Rebecca’s happily ever after isn’t worried about or explicated on the page.) Because of this, Scott’s Rebecca is often cited as one of the first positive portrayals of a Jewish protagonist in fiction by a Christian writer.

It has long been rumored that Scott based his paragon of virtue on a real woman: Rebecca Gratz.

Indeed, the rumor was so persistent and widely spread that Rebecca herself believed she was the inspiration for the character, writing to her sister-in-law in 1820, “Have you received Ivanhoe? When you read it, tell me what you think of my namesake, Rebecca?”³ There are many superficial similarities between the real Rebecca Gratz and Ivanhoe’s Rebecca. Perhaps most important, they both famously remained unmarried, holding their Jewish faith close while living (and perhaps even falling in love) among Christians.

Born into the wealthy Jewish community in Philadelphia in 1781, Rebecca Gratz dedicated her life to charitable work, founding and leading many important institutions like America’s first independent Jewish women’s charitable society, the first Jewish Sunday school, the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum, and the first Jewish Foster Home in Philadelphia.

One of twelve children, Rebecca spent a good chunk of her life helping her mother nurse her ailing father, and then lived with her three bachelor brothers. Letters indicate that Rebecca fell in love with a Christian man, and chose to remain unmarried rather than convert or enter into an interfaith marriage.

Rebecca was dedicated to improving the reputation of Judaism in elite circles. This meant founding and supporting a number of charitable institutions, as well as helping others do the same.

Rebecca wasn’t the only young Jewish woman dedicated to education. The aforementioned epistolary activist Rachel Mordecai Lazarus was as well. Born in Virginia in 1788, she was the eldest girl in a family of thirteen. Her family moved to North Carolina when she was three, making them the only Jewish family in their small town. The family opened a boarding school in 1809, where Rachel was an educator.

As noted, Rachel read a book by her father’s favorite author, Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee (1812), and was disappointed to see an anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews, particularly in the character of a mean coachman named Mr. Mordicai.

Rachel wrote to Maria Edgeworth, expressing her disappointment:

Relying on the good sense and candour of Miss Edgeworth I would ask, how it can be that she, who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice: should even instill that prejudice in the minds of youth! Can my allusion be mistaken? It is to the species of character which where a Jew is introduced is invariably attached to him. Can it be believed that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious, and unprincipled? Forbid it, mercy.⁴

Both Maria and her father responded to Rachel’s letter. Both letters are kind and conciliatory, thanking Rachel for writing and promising amends. But Maria goes a step further. She tells Rachel she is writing a new book to make up for her past mistakes and asks if she might send a copy to her for her perusal when it’s done.

SPOTLIGHT ON MARIA EDGEWORTH

Maria Edgeworth is one of the most famous and important Anglo-Irish writers of the nineteenth century. Publicly lauded in her own time, she has also enjoyed a celebrated legacy in death. She wrote novels, children’s stories, and educational treatises alone and with her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth and stepmother Honora Sneyd.⁵

Raised by progressive-thinking parents, Maria attended school until she fell ill at fourteen and returned home to be tutored by her father. Richard Lovell Edgeworth fathered twenty-two children in his lifetime, but still paid an enormous amount of attention to his brilliant daughter Maria. The pair worked together on managing the Edgeworthton Estate, where Maria developed her opinions about land management and tenants’ rights, as well as coauthoring Essays on Practical Education in 1798.

Maria had something in common with Jewish women writers of the time. As an Anglo-Irish writer, Maria was forever trying to rehabilitate the image of the Irish in books like Castle Rackrent. But this similarity did not inspire her to any kind of generosity toward Jews in her work, and her early books are littered with anti-Semitism.

In 1809 Maria published her most ambitious book, Tales of Fashionable Life, and was paid £1,050, making her the most commercially successful author of her time.

Maria established and maintained friendships with many leading writers in her day including Sir Walter Scott and Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the latter of whom named Maria as an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1837.

It is particularly important that Maria and Sir Walter Scott maintained such a close friendship, writing to each other often, as they both wrote books featuring Jewish characters, which were received very differently. While Maria got letters like Rachel Lazarus’s, encouraging her to rethink her attitude toward Jews, Scott’s Jewish character Rebecca was praised by her own namesake Rebecca Gratz.

(BACK TO RACHEL LAZARUS)

Maria took Rachel Lazarus’s criticism to heart and published Harrington in 1817, which was her attempt to respond to the criticism in a direct, fictionalized way. In Harrington the titular hero falls in love with a young Jewish woman, Berenice Montenero, and has to examine his own and society’s anti-Semitism.

Rachel’s words of education literally appear in Harrington. Maria lifted a passage from one of Rachel’s letters and put it into the text, and Rachel was flattered. “It is impossible to feel otherwise than gratified by the confidence so strongly, yet so delicately manifested, by the insertion of a passage from the letter in which I had endeavored to give an idea of their [Jews’] general standing in this country.”⁶

But Rachel wasn’t completely satisfied with Harrington and she couldn’t keep her disappointment to herself, writing to Maria, “Let me therefore, without dwelling longer on its many excellences, confess with frankness that in one event I was disappointed. Berenice was not a Jewess.”⁷ Rachel writes that her father came up with a reason for Maria’s decision, that it must have been to make Berenice’s father seem even more noble, a reason she accepts.

When Maria responds she admits she didn’t have a reason for making Berenice half Jewish and thanks Rachel’s father for his generous suggestion.

Their correspondence doesn’t end there. The pair exchanged letters for the rest of their lives, and their descendants carried on the tradition afterward. After her death, Rachel’s sister Ellen continued writing to Maria, and upon Maria’s death to her stepmother and sisters, and so on and so forth. The correspondence between the extended Lazarus family and the Edgeworth family spans 127 years.

The conversation—both real and imagined—between American Jewish women and English writers in the Regency period resulted in those same writers examining their prejudices and making changes to their work. It’s particularly interesting to see the different way Jewish women influenced literature, some with purpose, like Rachel Lazarus, and others through simply existing, like Rebecca Gratz.

GRACE AGUILAR

Born in 1816 to Emanuel and Sarah Aguilar, Portuguese Jews who settled in London after fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition, Grace arrived smack-dab in the middle of the Regency. While she’s traditionally associated with the Victorian era, Grace is a product of the Regency era. By studying her life and her work we can see how the ideas of the early nineteenth century directly affected the next generation of Jewish thinkers.

Grace was not a healthy child. She suffered from a number of ailments and illnesses, including a bout with measles in 1835 that seriously weakened her overall health. But Grace’s diaries and letters show us that she was still an active young woman, traveling with her family, dancing with friends, and learning the piano and harp. All of which would have been expected activities for a young, middle-class Christian woman.

Grace’s father served as the parnas (lay leader and administrator) for London’s Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest temple in London still in continuous use. (Today it is called Bevis Marks Synagogue.) He had his own bout with ill health in 1828, and the family moved from their home in Hackney to the Tavistock and Teignmouth areas of the Devon coast.

Both the Aguilar parents took an active role in educating Grace and her younger brothers, Emanuel and Henry. Grace was raised on stories from Emanuel about the Portuguese Sephardic Jews who escaped the Portuguese Inquisition by pretending to convert to Catholicism but still secretly practicing Judaism, passing this mixed religion on to their children.

It’s clear from later writing that Grace was always special. She was a voracious reader and diarist, keeping a diary from the age of seven, which has sadly almost totally been lost. One short volume, giving us a glimpse of twenty-eight-year-old Grace, survives. Along with her insightful thoughts on religion, Grace shares the regular day-to-day activities of a middle-class woman in the nineteenth century. She writes about enjoying dancing and singing and spending time with her friends and family.

Like her contemporaries Judith Montefiore and Rebecca Gratz, Grace believed deeply in the power of education. She was concerned first and foremost with teaching the next generation, and the materials she prepared for her own brothers’ religious education were eventually published as The Spirit of Judaism in 1842 by Isaac Leeser, editor of the American Jewish periodical The Occident.

But Grace was also very interested in educating the wider world about Judaism.

After the family’s move to Devon, Grace was removed from the close-knit Jewish community of London and exposed to a much broader Christian world.

What is so fascinating about Grace is that she actively engaged with Christian theology, even attending church regularly. She made a great number of Christian friends and debated them frequently, always honing her arguments about Judaism. In her book Sabbath Thoughts she writes, “It is no credit to be firm and steadfast in your own belief if you are ignorant of that of others…”⁸

Grace believed deeply in the power of debate and education to change the world. She also believed in herself. In 1844 she wrote in her diary, “To be known and loved through my writing has been the yearning and the prayer of my secret heart from the earliest period.”⁹

Through her publisher Isaac Leeser, Grace “met” Miriam Cohen, a cousin of Rebecca Gratz’s who lived in Savannah, Georgia. Grace and Miriam began an important transatlantic epistolary friendship, their correspondence spanning most of Grace’s working life. Miriam’s husband, Solomon, became Grace’s American distributor, and through him Grace’s books entered American Jewish classrooms, including those of Rebecca Gratz.

Grace was careful and conscious of her career choices. While she published in popular Jewish journals like the Voice of Jacob and the Jewish Chronicle, she also submitted her work to popular ladies’ magazines like The Keepsake and La Belle Assemblée. In this way she was sure that her distinctly Jewish writing received a wider audience.

Sadly, the ever-sickly Grace never truly recovered from a final bout of measles in 1847. She died on September 16, 1847. Her mother, Sarah, devoted the rest of her life to editing and publishing Grace’s work posthumously. She even kept writing to Miriam Cohen, maintaining the friendship across oceans and generations.

REBECCA SOLOMON

Like Grace Aguilar, Rebecca Solomon is generally considered a part of the Victorian era. However, because she was one of the first professional Jewish women artists in England, we would be remiss to forget her in this book.

Born in 1832, she was raised in the world that the women of the Regency helped to create. Like many other female artists of the nineteenth century, Rebecca was lucky enough to be born into an artistic family. She was the seventh child of Meyer and Kate Solomon, who emigrated from Germany to England with their family in the late eighteenth century.

The Solomons were a very wealthy manufacturing family who continued to enjoy success upon their arrival in London. The family was so accepted that Meyer was the first Jewish person honored with the Freedom of the City of London, a recognition awarded to those who have made great advancements in their career.

Three of the Solomon children became artists. Brothers Abraham and Simeon trained at the Royal Academy of Arts Schools, while Rebecca, a woman and therefore not accepted at the prestigious institution, trained at the Spitalfields School of Design.

After studying at Spitalfields, Rebecca worked in the studios of important Pre-Raphaelite artists John Everett Millais and Edward Burne-Jones. Her early work fits neatly into the visual world of Victorian painting, with critics noting her humanizing touch.

In the 1850s Rebecca turned to classical and historical painting, the most prestigious and critically valued art one could produce at the time. It’s also the kind of art almost exclusively associated with male artists.

Very few of Rebecca’s original paintings survive. But she was so popular that many of them were published as engravings in newspapers like the Illustrated London News, and we can see her work there.

There are many remarkable things about Rebecca Solomon’s career, but the themes she returned to again and again are her enduring legacy. Rebecca’s art rarely included overtly Jewish themes or subjects (unless she was painting her own family members). Instead Rebecca, like her fellow Jewish women of the nineteenth century, subtly wove the tenets of Judaism through all of her art, focusing on women, children, and minorities and their struggles.

She successfully exhibited at the Royal Academy and in 1859 joined a group of thirty-eight women artists who petitioned for the Royal Academy Schools to admit women.

Rebecca remained unmarried her whole life and lived with her brothers, first Abraham and then Simeon, as was tradition for unmarried Jewish women at the time. It’s not surprising then that Rebecca’s career and reputation were very much tied to those of her siblings. Simeon, in particular, was a popular society figure with a flamboyant lifestyle. This seems to have led to rumors of Rebecca embracing a more exciting lifestyle, including periods of heavy drinking. However, she remained an observant Jew her whole life and an active member of the Jewish community.

Rebecca died in 1886, after being hit by a hansom cab. She left behind a collection of artwork that provides us a unique viewpoint into the time period.

CHARLOTTE DACRE AND SOPHIA KING

There is less biographical information available about Charlotte Dacre and her sister Sophia King than any of the other women featured in this chapter. But that lack of material makes them no less fascinating or important.

Charlotte was born around 1772 to Jacob Rey (better known as John King) and Deborah Lara. We have no date for Sophia’s birth. John was a self-made banker and well-known radical thinker. He divorced his first wife under Jewish law in 1785 to marry the widowed Countess of Lanesborough (who was Christian). We don’t know how this step up in social status affected Charlotte and Sophia, but the theme of women being abandoned by men appears frequently in their work.

John was also infamous for an episode involving Mary Robinson, author and onetime mistress to George IV. While his job as a banker might have usually meant that he was not accepted in the highest circles of society, John seems to have had a reputation as a “man of culture” who invited artists and thinkers to his home. It was there he met Mary Robinson, and they struck up a friendship. Mary always downplayed their connection, but John kept many of the letters that they exchanged and embellished on them when he published Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite in 1781.

In 1798 Charlotte and Sophia published their first joint work, Trifles of Helicon, a book of poetry they dedicated to their father. The dedication was somewhat tongue in cheek, as John had recently declared bankruptcy and the sisters wanted to prove that the money he had spent on their education had been worth it.

Like her father’s, Charlotte’s own romantic relationships were complicated. She had three children with Nicholas Byrne, editor of the Morning Post, before they finally married in 1815. Charlotte also worked for Nicholas, writing poetry under the pseudonym Rosa Matilda.

Charlotte published her most famous work, Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, in 1806. It is a Gothic novel unlike many of its contemporaries. Charlotte’s heroine Victoria is a sadistic murderer whose journey more closely follows that of a Gothic hero. Victoria’s sexual knowledge and appetite for pleasure led to moral objections to Charlotte’s work in many reviews. Indeed, Victoria’s downfall comes from her partnership with Zofloya, and Charlotte shows us the dark side of marriage for women when they lose their identity and financial independence.

Charlotte’s style is comparable to her contemporary Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Mary’s husband, Percy Shelley, was a fan of Charlotte’s, but the couple’s friend Byron was not. He referenced Charlotte, using her pen name Rosa, in his satirical poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)—which he wrote after his first book of poems received a brutal review in the Edinburgh Review. In the poem he mocks the leading writers of Romanticism.

Far be’t from me unkindly to upbraid

The lovely Rosa’s prose in masquerade,

Whose strains, the faithful echoes of her mind,

Leave wondering comprehension far behind.¹⁰

Meanwhile, Sophia was publishing her own novels. The first, an anti-Jacobin novel, Waldorf; or the dangers of Philosophy, appeared in 1798. She published five more novels during her life.

The sisters, and their novels, are unique. They don’t fit into the larger theme of Jewish women working to make themselves and their religion more palatable through careful outreach and education. The King sisters refused, in both their personal lives and their work, to toe the line. They resist categorization. They’re a fascinating, compelling example of Jewish women writers in the early nineteenth century.

CONCLUSION

One traditional line of Jewish history traces modern Jewish culture from the Berlin Haskalah (Enlightenment) in the early eighteenth century. Tradition goes that, for the first time, German Jews of the time began to look outside their own insular academic and social circles with a purpose of assimilating and participating more fully in the Christian and secular worlds.

This history is at odds with the history of the Jews in England, especially wealthy Sephardim, who began to assimilate and modernize upon their arrival in England.

And here we can see one of the major difficulties in discussing religion and popular attitudes toward practitioners of a religion. Extant sources can only give us a part of the picture. If we learn anything from the brilliant and complicated Jewish women of the nineteenth century it should be that they existed in this space between acceptance and anti-Semitism. It is not an either-or. They lived with this question every day, and in every way. Their art and lives can only be considered in that context.

As Todd Endelman writes, “They were willing, often eager, to exchange some or many of the values and institutions of traditional Jewish life for the dominant mores of the states in which they lived, either because they believed that such values were necessary for survival or success in the modern world, or because they were convinced that these mores represented a genuinely superior cultural system.”¹¹

It is easy to divest ourselves from theoretical questions like these, but the Jewish women of the nineteenth century lived them every day. Each woman profiled in this chapter chose, over and over, to engage with her Christian and secular counterparts, with an eye to assimilating and educating. “The Jew” as depicted in nineteenth-century caricatures and fiction was very real and harmful to these women and their way of life. They chose to actively fight against these stereotypes in myriad ways, even going so far as to challenge the artists spreading them. They were not passive viewers of cultural norms; they took every opportunity and venue available to them to spread the truth about their Judaism.