“The inferior status of women was not merely an inherited folk prejudice but a tradition rooted in the Talmud and the Codes, the sacred sources of Judaism.”1 Ben-Zion Gold’s observation on the attitude of orthodox circles of his youth in Radom finds support in rabbinic sources. According to a much-quoted dictum by the Talmudic sage Rabbi Eliezer, he who teaches his daughter Torah is teaching her promiscuity.2 This view was endorsed, if in less colorful terms, by such venerated authorities as Maimonides in the twelfth century and Joseph Karo in the sixteenth. In its most extreme form, it was pressed by the Munkácser rebbe into a questionable interpretation of the Talmud. Referring to a famous passage in which Beruria, the learned wife of a rabbi, is commended for urging her husband to pray for the repentance rather than the destruction of evildoers, the rebbe declared that since it was “both obvious and certain that the Talmud did not take the opinions of a woman seriously,” the text could safely be set aside.3
The woman in traditional Jewish society in eastern Europe was usually dependent for most of her life on her father or husband. She was good for bearing children, for household work, sometimes also for helping to run the family business, but not for the most serious department of Jewish life, religious scholarship. Folk doggerel might express some ambivalence about her exact status:
Finef finger hot a khap!
Five fingers in a catch!
Four legs on a bed
dray ekn hot a krepl,
Three corners on a dumpling
tsvey ekn hot a shtekn,
Two ends on a stick
eyns iz a yidene
One is a Jewish woman
nit zi lebt, nit zi shvebt
She neither lives, nor floats in the air
nit afn himl, nit af dr’erd.4
Neither in heaven, nor on earth.
But as between a son or a daughter there could be no doubt about a father’s preference: “Beser a zun a beder, eyder a tokhter a rebbetzin!” (“Better a son, even one who is a bathhouse attendant, than a daughter, even one who is a rabbi’s wife!”)
A girl might attend the early classes of heder but she was barred from higher levels of Jewish study. As an adult, she could not be counted toward a minyan, nor play an active role of any kind in the synagogue. Indeed, strictly orthodox women in eastern Europe seldom attended services, save on a limited number of festivals, such as Simhat Torah, and when they did so, were confined behind a screen or, in larger, modern synagogues, in a gallery. The bat mitzvah confirmation ceremony, initiated in the United States in 1922, did not become common there until the 1940s and was almost unknown in interwar Europe, save in isolated cases such as that of the future painter Charlotte Salomon in Berlin in about 1929.
Among the neo-orthodox in Germany and elsewhere, the female sex was granted a little more latitude. Their womenfolk attended synagogue more frequently, for example on the Sabbath morning, but not on the eve of Sabbath or festivals, as they would be at home preparing the festive meal. Whereas in eastern Europe women did not sing zmires (zemirot, Sabbath hymns) at the table with their menfolk, in neo-orthodox families in Germany they often did so.
One of the major innovations of non-orthodox congregations was to enhance the role of women, although in the interwar period they still sat separately from men at most Liberal services. The Prinzregentenstrasse synagogue in Berlin, opened in 1930, was the first in the city in which men and women sat together.
In the nineteenth century the main purpose in life of a young woman in the shtetl and in Sephardic communities of the Balkans was marriage, usually before the age of twenty. An unmarried daughter in her late twenties was a shame to her family and an object of pity. Arranged marriages were common and the shadkhan (matchmaker) performed a vital social function into the early twentieth century. For a time, the profession had its own magazine, published in Vilna. Among the Romaniotes (Greek-speaking descendants of Byzantine Jews) of Ioannina, in northern Greece, in 1939 “it was still the custom for parents to select the mates for their children. After the two sets of parents had come to an agreement, generally through the matchmaker (proxenítis), the father announced the betrothal to his son or daughter as a fait accompli.”5 Even in the relatively modernized environment of a city such as Cracow, the matchmaker was still “an indispensable institution” in the 1930s.6 Jewish migrants from Galicia took their marriage customs with them and in the interwar period strictly orthodox girls in Vienna were often married off to spouses chosen for them by their parents. In new environments the shadkhan was transformed into a modernized equivalent, as in the matchmaking section of the Paris Yiddish newspaper, Parizer haynt.
By the 1930s, Jewish women, even in the shtetl, were marrying later than a generation earlier and Jews were marrying later than gentiles all over Europe. By 1931 the average age of marriage for Jewish women in Poland was twenty-seven.7
In earlier times nearly all Jews had married. But by the 1930s this was no longer the case. In western Europe a growing minority of men and women remained single throughout their lives. The numerical imbalance of sexes after the First World War, particularly in the Soviet Union, led, for the first time in modern history in eastern Europe, to the presence in Jewish society of large numbers of never-married women. In Byelorussia in 1939, for every 1,000 unmarried Jewish men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine, there were 1,687 unmarried Jewish women.8
Upon marriage, Ashkenazi Jewish women in eastern Europe had traditionally shaved their heads and henceforth worn a wig (shaytl). Actually, the practice was relatively modern, probably dating only from the late eighteenth century, and had been opposed by the Hatam Sofer as an innovation. By the 1930s it was confined to the strictly orthodox. The form of female head covering varied according to location, milieu, and degree of religiosity. For some, a headscarf covering all the hair was deemed adequate. In the case of wives of Hasidic rabbis, wigs were regarded as unsatisfactory and a headscarf was de rigueur. The maternal grandmother of Fritz Worms, child of a middle-class orthodox family in Frankfurt in the 1930s, wore a shaytl, “a tightly woven, upside-down bird’s nest,” but his mother did not.9
Regular recourse to the mikveh (ritual bath), required of women in preparation for marriage, after menstruation, and after the birth of a child, was confined to similar circles. On the Sabbath afternoon orthodox women in the shtetl would read the Tsene-rene (literally “Go Forth and See,” from Song of Songs 3:11), a popular Yiddish adaptation of biblical tales, designed “for women and uneducated men,” as the earliest extant edition, published in 1622, put it.10 Some would recite tkhines (supplicatory prayers in Yiddish) at home. At the conclusion of the Sabbath they would say the Yiddish prayer “Got fun Avrom” (God of Abraham) to greet the new week.
Among Hasidim the separation of women remained quite strict: men would dance only with other men. But in broader society, even in the shtetl, such customs were changing. A memoirist from the town of Piotrków-Trybunalski in central Poland recalls that at wedding feasts in the 1930s, although men and women sat at separate tables, often in separate rooms, they would dance together.11 To the traditional folk dances, the freylekhs, the sher, and the skotshne, were now added the foxtrot, the Charleston, and the rumba. Even a small town such as Baranowicze boasted a “dancing academy.”
There is no evidence that Jewish men behaved worse than other men toward their womenfolk. Given that drunkenness was much less common among Jews than gentiles, Jewish wives probably suffered less physical harm than others. But as the sensational press and the courts showed, they were by no means immune from violence at the hands of their husbands. The plight of the maltreated wife was a common theme in shund (“trash”) literature and in popular song:
Good evening, Brayne
di beste shkheyne, mayne! …
My dearest neighbor! …
nekhtn hot er mikh geshlogn.
Yesterday he beat me
broyn un blo hot er mikh gemakht. …12
Left me brown and blue. …
Those women who suffered ill treatment had limited options. Religious divorce was entirely in the gift of the husband. Civil divorce was hard to obtain almost everywhere, save in the Soviet Union.
The divorce rate among Jews nevertheless rose rapidly in the interwar period. The increase was marked in eastern as well as western Europe. In Kovno, for example, it rose, as a proportion of marriages, from 60 per thousand in 1925 to 140 in 1937.13 This figure is presented with a caveat: a sofer (scribe) competent to prepare a get (religious bill of divorce) was not available elsewhere in Lithuania, so most would-be divorcers from the provinces came to Kovno to obtain the document, thus elevating the statistics for the city. All the same, the trend was clear.
In the Soviet Union, where divorce was easier to obtain than anywhere else in Europe, the Jewish rate rose dramatically: in Leningrad in 1936 it reached 298 per thousand of all Jewish marriages.14 Rates such as this were much higher than for non-Jews and also higher than for Jews in earlier times. They demonstrate that the supposed cohesion of the Jewish family was by this time conventional myth, not social reality.
A unique form of distress was experienced by agunot, “chained women,” who could not remarry because they were unable to obtain a get. Some such women had been abandoned; others were widows of soldiers who had fallen in wars but whose deaths were unrecorded; and in a few cases husbands were incompetent or stubbornly refused to grant a get. Jewish law required that a husband must either be proven dead or consent to a divorce before a wife might remarry.
Similar problems arose in the case of a widow whose husband had died without offspring. The brother of the deceased (the levir) was required, according to rabbinic law, to perform the ceremony of halitzah, releasing the widow from the requirement to marry him and thus enabling her to marry another person. Problems arose where the levir was absent, mentally ill, an apostate, or simply refused to perform the ceremony.
Although the problem of aginut affected the orthodox most acutely, many moderately religious widows balked at the prospect of defying Jewish law and tradition blatantly by ignoring these requirements, thus not only rendering themselves ineligible for religious remarriage but also marking any children of a future marriage indelibly with the stigma of bastardy.
The word mamzer, generally translated as “bastard” though often used as a general term of opprobrium, was, in Jewish law, reserved for children of forbidden degrees of marriage. Children simply born out of wedlock were not technically regarded as mamzerim. The mamzer was, in effect, an outcast from the Jewish community (“A mamzer shall not enter the congregation of the Lord,” Deuteronomy 23:3). Hence the peculiar horror of women in the awful limbo of aginut. Rabbinic authorities had wrestled with the issue unsuccessfully for centuries. It remained a stark reminder of the second-class status of women in orthodox Judaism.
Thousands of women in eastern Europe were affected, because of the upheavals between 1914 and 1921 and because large numbers of young men had emigrated, mainly to the Americas, promising, but often failing, to return later to collect their wives. In Vilna a Committee for Women’s Defense sought to alleviate that problem by trying, in cooperation with similar bodies in other cities and countries, to locate missing husbands. But they had limited success.
The difficulty of obtaining divorce from a recalcitrant husband gave rise to many tragic cases and sensational newspaper stories. Desperate women might resort to a “corner-shop rabbi” (vinkl-rov) who sold his services for dubious purposes. In 1939 a special session of the Warsaw rabbinical court heard a case concerning a certain Yaakov Yagodnik. A few years earlier, as a yeshiva bokher in Ostrów, he had married a rich young woman from Białystok. He became chronically ill and she asked him for a divorce, which he declined to grant. She and her relatives were alleged to have held him in a Warsaw hotel room with a corrupt cleric in attendance. There they induced Yagodnik to sign a get without his being fully conscious of what he was doing. Subsequently the validity of the document was challenged by the rabbi of Ostrów. Such, at any rate, was Yaakov’s side of the story. Unfortunately, we do not have his wife’s version, nor the decision of the court.15
Fewer Jewish than non-Jewish women bore children outside marriage. In Budapest in 1929 only 4 percent of Jewish births occurred out of wedlock, compared with 22 percent among non-Jews. The very rarity of Jewish illegitimacy, in the sense of births to unmarried parents, however, meant that cases, when they occurred, particularly in the small community of the shtetl, were a source of scandal and shame.
An unmarried Jewish mother who could not persuade the Jewish father of her child to marry her before the birth could hardly remain in the shtetl and would be compelled to leave for the sheltering anonymity of a city or for America. Before departure, she might hand over the illegitimate child to nearby peasants (who might see the gift as an extra pair of laboring hands) or place the infant in an orphanage, if one were available. Under a false name, perhaps claiming to be an aunt, she might send money periodically to cover expenses for the child’s upkeep.16
If, however, the father were not Jewish and she married him (illegitimate children being the most common catalyst of such, still relatively infrequent, outmarriages in the shtetl), she would dishonor her family twice over: exogamy, after all, was hardly less of a disgrace than illegitimacy. Such couples too, with the child, would often move away—and appear from time to time among the arriving lists of steerage passengers on ships docking at Ellis Island and other ports of disembarkation in North America.
In the early twentieth century, Jewish women in much of Europe threw off many of the shackles that had previously bound them. They played a role quite out of proportion to their numbers in the feminist movement all over the continent. They moved into previously all-male spheres, acquired political rights inside and outside Jewish communities, and often preceded male Jews in opening doors to acculturation in non-Jewish societies.
The reasons for all this were probably connected to the Jews’ high level of urbanization and to the decline in fertility, which occurred earlier and faster than among surrounding populations. Early and widespread use of artificial birth control among Jews was both a cause and a symptom of women’s ability to free themselves from the constrictions of traditional Jewish society.
In Germany, in particular, Jewish women were much more mobilized than non-Jews into women’s organizations. Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), who headed the moderately feminist Jüdischer Frauenbund, founded in 1904, was a founding figure in German-Jewish and international feminism. (She later became famous as Freud’s case study “Anna O.”) Her organization combined feminism with Jewish communal activism. It organized resistance to “white slavery” and engaged in social work among the sick, the elderly, children, delinquents, prostitutes, and female Jewish convicts. By 1929 the Frauenbund had a membership of fifty thousand women, drawn mainly from the middle class.
Both Pappenheim and the organization were quite conservative in their social attitudes, embracing the concept of motherhood as a primary function of the female sex. On religious grounds, the Frauenbund rejected birth control and abortion, though, given the demographic data, there can be no doubt that many of its members utilized artificial contraceptives. At the same time, it sought to open career opportunities to women. While formally neutral in politics and religion, the Frauenbund campaigned for women’s rights, combated anti-Semitism, and was sympathetic to the international feminist-pacifist movement, in which Jewish women from several countries were leading participants. It was not actively hostile to Zionism but kept its distance. Pappenheim’s obituary, written by herself, supposedly for a Zionist paper, called her “an old and active enemy of our movement, though one cannot deny that she had Jewish consciousness, and strength. She believed herself a German but was an assimilationist. What a pity!”17
Unlike many women’s associations, the Frauenbund was not dissolved upon the Nazi takeover of power, since it could hardly be absorbed into the Nazi women’s organization, but it functioned after 1933 under police surveillance. Between then and 1938, when, like most Jewish organizations, it was closed down by the government, it focused on helping Jews in need and on assisting prospective emigrants to prepare for their departure.
Alice Salomon, “the German Jane Addams,” was a pioneer of women’s social work in Germany and another major figure in the international women’s movement. In 1908 she established the Soziale Frauenschule in Berlin and in 1925 the German Academy for Women’s Social and Pedagogic Work. Salomon had grown up in an enlightened, secularized household in which religion played next to no role. “We never celebrated anything other than the Christian festivals at home and knew nothing of Jewish laws or customs.”18 In 1914 she converted to Lutheranism—“the most important decision I have ever taken, a decision that I took out of belief.” During the Nazi period she belonged to the anti-Nazi Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church). Like many converts, she continued to regard herself as in some sense Jewish. In 1933 the government forbade her to enter her school. Faced with demands for the dismissal of Jewish teachers and students, she chose to close down the academy. She annoyed the Nazis by continuing to play a public role in international women’s affairs until her expulsion from Germany in 1937.
In the Netherlands too, Jewish women were prominent in the feminist movement, through both the Council for Jewish Women and general women’s organizations. Aletta Jacobs (1854–1929), a suffragist, pacifist, and advocate of birth control, was the first woman to enter a Dutch university (Groningen in 1871). Insisting that she was a “world citizen,” Jacobs withheld support from the Council of Jewish Women, whether “out of political [or] out of religious conviction.”19
The next generation of Dutch Jewish feminists, however, were less inclined, or found it less easy, to shrug off Jewish identification, as the issues of anti-Semitism and Palestine became impossible to avoid. Like some male Jewish politicians, they sometimes deliberately chose to remain in the background for fear of provoking anti-Jewish reactions. Occasionally, they nevertheless felt it necessary to take a stand on Jewish issues. In 1939, for example, Rosa Manus, one of the leaders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, established during the First World War, engaged in a wrangle with an Egyptian delegate at an International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting in Copenhagen on the subject of Jewish refugee immigration to Palestine.20
Within Jewish communities no less than outside, women had to fight hard to obtain equal rights, including the right to vote. Nearly all orthodox authorities in eastern Europe and Germany in the interwar period strongly opposed women’s involvement in politics in any form, whether as voters or as candidates for office inside or beyond the community.
In Poland only those who were taxpaying heads of household could vote in kehillah elections. The exclusion of women from participation in the political life of the kehillot was challenged by women’s groups such as the Farband fun Yidishe Froyen, a left-Zionist organization, but they had no success in changing the law. Although both sexes could vote in parliamentary elections in interwar Poland, the turnout of Jewish women at the first general election, in 1919, was lower than that of Jewish men and of non-Jewish women. Some Hasidic rebbes permitted women to vote in elections to the Polish parliament (to have done otherwise would have greatly reduced the influence of the orthodox) but the general orthodox approach remained in principle unchanged. Of the total of 107 Jewish deputies and senators elected to the two houses of the Polish parliament in the interwar period, just one was a woman.
The socialist movement was theoretically committed to equality of the sexes but, in this period, rarely practiced what it preached. Whereas men of Jewish origin played a major role in the leadership of the Austrian Social Democrat Party, women, whether Jewish or gentile, occupied only secondary roles. In the Bund, theoretically committed to sexual equality, women remained distinctly secondary. Its women’s organization, Yidishe Arbeter-froyen Organizatsye, never amounted to very much and in 1939 only about 10 percent of the party’s members in Warsaw were female. The best-known woman in the Bund’s leadership after the Russian Revolution, Ester Frumkin, joined the Com-Bund and later became a leading figure in the Soviet Communist Party and in the Evsektsiia.
In Germany, vigorous campaigning by women’s groups gained them the vote in communal elections in all the major communities except Cologne by 1929. But women rarely played more than a subordinate role in communal life, generally finding themselves confined to what was regarded as the female sphere—charitable activity, care of children, and so forth. After 1933 the Jüdischer Frauenbund was unsuccessful in its demand for representation in the leadership of the Reichsvertretung. Its head, Leo Baeck, explained that women and men differed in their capacities: “While men possessed perspicacity and foresight, women had the gift of being good listeners … of being able to recognize the needs of mankind … and of shaping an evening with warmth, dignity and substance.”21
Women had had the right to vote within the Zionist Organization since 1898 but nearly all the Zionist leaders were men. Though some Mizrachists felt that the election of women candidates would breach the walls of modesty between the sexes, the religious Zionist movement decided to support women’s suffrage and the right of women to be candidates for political office. Women did not, however, play any significant part in Mizrachi politics or in the affairs of other Zionist parties in Europe.
The Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), founded in 1920, had branches in all the European communities. Its membership was generally middle-class and it devoted its efforts mainly to fund-raising. Women Zionists, while active in their own sphere, were often regarded as exotic intruders if they ventured into broader domains. Dora Gross-Moszkowski, who used to travel around Polish towns in the 1930s, lecturing on behalf of the Zionists, recalled one occasion when, arriving in a town to speak in the local synagogue, she was told that “as a woman I could not lecture on the platform, in front of the altar [sic], without special permission from the rabbi. I waited outside for three hours for his consent.”22
In the Soviet Union, the subjection of women was a frequently voiced item on the Communist charge sheet against Judaism. At the heder trial in Vitebsk, one of the expert witnesses for the prosecution cited with relish the oft-quoted daily prayer in which the orthodox Jewish man thanks God that he was not born a woman.23 The Russian Revolution opened up political life to women. It also provided them with new educational opportunities and, in principle, enabled them to participate on an equal basis with men in the work-force. Jewish women such as Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin had played a full, indeed disproportionate, role (as compared with non-Jewish women) in the revolutionary movement before 1917. After the revolution, however, they disappeared from leadership positions. Ester Frumkin, one of the last representatives of the type, was sidelined after the dissolution of the Evsektsiia in 1930 and imprisoned in 1937.
Notwithstanding the work of women like Pappenheim, efforts to build an international Jewish women’s movement met with only halting success. The first world congress of Jewish women met in Vienna in 1923. A second, in Hamburg in 1929, was attended by delegates from fourteen countries, eleven of them European. The orthodox German-Jewish newspaper Der Israelit opposed the demand of the congress for women’s voting rights in communities, quoting the psalmist’s adage “kol kevodah bat melekh pnimah” (Psalms 45:13, “The king’s daughter is all glorious within”), traditionally interpreted as meaning that the woman had no place in public life.24 The congress resolved to form a World Federation of Jewish Women, “to unite Jewish women of the whole world, without wishing to disturb the national feelings of individuals or their practical activity in their homelands.” The Depression and the rise of Nazism, however, eliminated any prospect of realizing the resolution.25
Yet if the record of political achievement by Jewish feminists was nugatory, Jewish women spoke more loudly and confidently in their own voices in this period. Even the strictly orthodox started to assert themselves. In 1938 the Lublin yeshiva celebrated the siyyum (conclusion) of the seven-and-a-half-year cycle of study of the daf yomi of the Talmud. Thousands of rabbis, yeshiva students, and pious delegates from all over the world gathered for the festivity. But an unprecedented note was sounded when a group of women tried to attend the ceremony, stirring male opposition. They were eventually permitted to enter a closed-off balcony. The assembled crowd waited impatiently for the proceedings to begin. After a while, the presiding rabbi mounted the platform and announced, “The siyyum will not take place so long as the women won’t leave the yeshiva.” They refused to budge. Eventually a compromise was agreed: the ceremony took place in the open air. After the formalities, fireworks were set off and singing and dancing (males only) continued until four the next morning.26
“The assimilation of a people,” wrote Joseph Roth in 1927, as he observed east European Jewish immigrants in Paris, “always begins with the women.”27 Roth, whose ear was peculiarly attuned to the social nuances and cultural cadences of the Habsburg lands (he was a native of Brody, eastern Galicia), expressed a view that, at least in the case of the Jews, concords with historians’ findings.
In some societies women may be more resistant than men to modernizing influences, but among east European Jews, the reverse seems often to have been the case. In orthodox circles until the early twentieth century, the very fact that females were automatically excluded from many hadorim, from the talmud torah, and from the yeshiva meant that such education as girls received was likelier to include elements of modern, secular, non-Jewish culture. As a result, Jewish women in eastern Europe, it has been argued, turned into “engines of acculturation.”28 This remained true in the age of compulsory elementary education. In Poland, in particular, Jewish women, educated in Polish rather than Yiddish, often became actively engaged in Polish culture. The Zionist leader Yitzhak Gruenbaum, for instance, recalled that while his father shut himself in his study to read a Hebrew newspaper, his mother “opened a window” for him “to Polish literature.”29
Even among the orthodox, however, attitudes to girls’ education were beginning to change. The German neo-orthodox thinkers Hirsch and Hildesheimer had approved of girls’ education—within certain limits: girls were not, for example, judged fit to learn Talmud. In 1933 the revered Hafets Hayim issued a similar ruling, though he went so far as to permit girls to study Pirkei Avot, the most popular and accessible tractate of the Talmud (also one of the shortest).
The advent of universal compulsory primary education confronted the orthodox with a challenge. If they did nothing, girls would receive an entirely secular education. Yet the very notion of incorporating girls into the heder/talmud torah/yeshiva system seemed unthinkable.
The solution was the network of Beys Yankev (Bet Yaakov) religious girls’ schools, the first of which was founded in Cracow in 1917. Its initiator, Sarah Schenirer, was anything but a rebel. Influenced by the ideas of Hirsch and blessed in her endeavor by the Belzer rebbe, she persuaded the Agudist movement to support the creation of a countrywide system of such schools. Beys Yankev developed rapidly in the 1920s and eventually spread to Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and Romania. Teachers, all of whom were female, were trained at a seminary in Cracow established in 1931. The main focus of study in the schools was on the Bible, Jewish religion, and Hebrew language and literature. The language of instruction for these subjects was Yiddish. Secular subjects such as literature, history, geography, music, handicrafts, and gymnastics were studied in Polish (or other local language). The curriculum also provided vocational courses in bookkeeping, typing, sewing, child care, nutrition, home economics, and nursing—a telling commentary on the limited occupational opportunities available to most girls, especially those from orthodox homes. Pupils were obliged to dress modestly and to say prayers twice a day. Some religious authorities, notably the Munkácser rebbe, disapproved of what they regarded as Beys Yankev’s too progressive approach to female education, but in general the orthodox took pride in the movement’s achievements.
Much has been made of the significance of these schools. Ben-Zion Gold, whose sisters attended them, argues that Beys Yankev “liberated its members from the inferior station that tradition had assigned them, turning the gender difference from inferiority to distinctiveness.”30 By 1937, two years after Schenirer’s death, the 250 Beys Yankev schools taught 38,000 pupils. But none was a gymnasium and only fourteen were full primary schools. All the rest were afternoon classes that cocooned Jewish girls in an orthodox environment after they had finished the day’s study in state primary schools. Very few such girls progressed to a gymnasium and only a handful to university.
In 1932 the Beys Yaakov Journal conducted a survey of its girl readers, asking questions such as “What problem troubles you most?” “Would you like to be materially independent?” and “Would you prefer not to work at all and just to be a housewife?” The responses were revealing of the extent to which, even in this traditionalist milieu, many girls had absorbed advanced social views:
I am for the emancipation of women; therefore we must be financially independent. A woman must worry about her own destiny, just the way a man does.
After marriage, the husband and the wife must both strive to fulfil themselves.
I’d like to earn my own living.
With despairing realism, however, the last respondent added, “—but does what I want matter?”31
Many Jewish young women in this period, though mainly from non-orthodox backgrounds, managed to take control of their own lives, in particular by gaining admission to colleges or universities. Even before the First World War, Jewish women had been disproportionately represented in central European universities. By the 1930s their numbers increased further—at any rate until their exclusion from German higher education under the Nazis and their limitation by the numerus clausus elsewhere. In 1928–29 women made up 38 percent of Jewish students in Polish universities whereas the proportion of women in the general student population was 27 percent. It often took considerable perseverance for girls to obtain university places and then even more for them to proceed into professional careers.
In traditional society in eastern Europe, it was not customary for Jewish women to go out to work, though they might engage in some form of economically productive activity in the home. In the interwar period, however, force of circumstance compelled even women from orthodox homes to join the workforce, particularly in various branches of clothing manufacture. In the textile factories of Łódź in the early 1930s, a third of the Jewish workers were female. Women’s wages there, as almost everywhere else, were lower than men’s. In the USSR, in spite of nominal equality of the sexes, women’s wages for unskilled work in the late 1920s ranged between 67 and 85 percent of that for equivalent work performed by men.32
In western and central Europe between the wars, most married Jewish women did not work outside the home. In Germany in 1925, for example, only 17 percent did so. Jewish women nevertheless made rapid inroads into the professions and constituted a large proportion of women lawyers and doctors in Germany before 1933. Some characteristically Jewish occupations, however, remained closed to women. In Amsterdam, for instance, only men could be members of the diamond exchange throughout the interwar period.
Nor were Jewish women able to make much headway in another profession that had traditionally been a male preserve: literature. Of forty-nine Yiddish writers represented in the leading Yiddish literary periodical, Literarishe bleter, in 1930, just five were women.33 Only half a dozen or so out of the 102 official delegates to the leftist Congress of Yiddish Culture in Paris in 1937 were women and the assembled writers paid next to no attention to women’s issues.
In May 1927 the Yiddish writer Melech Ravitch published an article deploring the absence of women among Yiddish writers. This evoked a bitterly sardonic response from the poet Kadya Molodowsky.34 A slight but intrepid young woman who bore the burdens of the world heavily on her shoulders, she won acclaim for her early poems about poor women in Warsaw. Molodowsky indignantly rejected the condescension implied in the lumping categorization of “women’s poetry.” When a Yiddish journalist introduced her to his wife as “a good poetess,” she responded with some heat, “I want to persuade you to say ‘a great poetess.’” When he responded with a smile, “I don’t know whether a woman can ever be a great poetess,” she slapped him on the cheek, though she quickly regretted it and added three kisses. “She wanted to make it a hard slap,” he recalled patronizingly, “but she couldn’t. She’s a klayninke [a little slip of a girl] … and can’t administer a slap. She’s better as a singer.”
Moving from her person to her verse, the same critic, writing in the Literarishe bleter in 1933, praised her as expressing and exemplifying the “crisis in the psyche of the Jewish woman” and pronounced her “the champion of the Jewish woman and their poetess.” He detected in her verse the “rhythm of the recitative of the tkhines and the Tsene-rene.” She was an initiator of Jewish women’s revolt but she was “suffocated with fear: the shade of her bobe [granny] has terrified her.”35 Molodowsky found a more sympathetic ear in her fellow poet Rokhl Korn, who maintained that women’s subjugated role placed them in closer contact with day-to-day realities, rendering them best able to achieve, as in the case of Molodowsky, a “happy synthesis of life and poetry.”36
Jewish women writers in other languages had a little more success in breaking through the male-dominated literary establishment. The German expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schüler, for instance, was one of a group of bohemian artists and writers in Berlin in the early years of the century who adopted a conception of Judaism as a modernist, countercultural expression of protest against the assimilatory conventions of their parents. She called her friends “wilde Juden.” Aged sixty-three at the time of Hitler’s accession to power, she was beaten up with an iron rod by a gang of Nazis. She left Germany immediately and spent the next six years in Switzerland.
One profession remained completely closed to women: the rabbinate. The very idea of women rabbis was laughably unthinkable in the eyes of the orthodox, even though rabbis, unlike priests, were not empowered to administer sacraments or have care of souls. The main Liberal Jewish seminary in Berlin numbered 27 women among its 155 students in 1932 but none was granted semikhah (ordination) there. The first woman rabbi in the world, Regina Jonas, who had graduated from the Hochschule in 1930, was refused semikhah there. In 1935, however, she was granted it privately by a Liberal rabbi in Frankfurt. Although she was never allowed to serve as a congregational rabbi, she preached in Liberal synagogues in Berlin in 1938–39, replacing rabbis who had been arrested or had fled abroad.37
By contrast with this newest Jewish profession for women, the oldest continued, in the uncertain and often desperate conditions of the 1920s and 1930s, to admit and attract recruits.
The effort to counter prostitution and the traffic in Jewish girls, particularly from eastern Europe to south America, stretched back to the early years of the twentieth century. An international conference on the subject had taken place in 1910 but the outbreak of the First World War and the ensuing political and social chaos in eastern Europe had precluded much effective action.
A second conference convened in London in 1927 with seventy delegates from the Jewish communities of seventeen countries, including most of those in eastern and central Europe, but not the USSR, where commercialized sex was held to have disappeared. Speakers alternated between a desire to emphasize the seriousness of the moral danger represented by Jewish prostitution, and anxiety, lest, by painting too alarmist a picture, they might provide material for anti-Semitic propaganda. Thus a delegate from Łódź reported that, according to police records, only 36 out of 218 registered prostitutes in the city were Jewish (one-third of the population of Łódź was Jewish). But a delegate from Vilna pointed out that most prostitution in Poland was unregistered and clandestine. Rabbi Felix Goldmann of Leipzig asserted that it was “dangerous to talk so much about the Traffic and to be incessantly proclaiming our sins to the world.” On the other hand, feminists such as Bertha Pappenheim stressed the untoward effects of agunah and shtile khupe (“silent,” that is, clandestine and/or irregular religious marriage, often organized by recruiters for prostitution) and called for reform in religious law. The proceedings soon deteriorated into altercations between supporters and opponents of orthodoxy.38
The conferees had to contend with the fact that prostitution was legal in several countries and tolerated in many others. There was little doubt that the transoceanic traffic in Jewish girls had not ceased. The conference was credibly informed that in Czernowitz white slave traffic “belongs to three families who have been in the profession for some generations.” It was impossible to touch them. Nor had Jewish prostitutes vanished from European cities. Jewish prostitution may have been no more prevalent than gentile but its very existence punctured another hole in the myth of Jewish family values.
One explanation for the persistence of prostitution had been offered by a writer in a Hebrew journal in 1901. He attributed it to the deleterious effects of “Jargonish [that is, Yiddish] literature of a certain type” as well as “American novels and especially the disgusting scenes they put up on the Jargonish theater [which] deeply subverted the morals of the masses … [casting a] pall on the daughters of our masses, erasing from them any sentiment of shame or modesty.”39
Dubious if taken seriously as analysis of the effects of literature on society, this is surely wrong on one point. Shame seems not to have been erased: how else to explain the fact that the testimonies of the women themselves are lost to history? If we wish to hear them, we can do so only at second hand, mediated through fiction and poetry. Yet the whores who populate the novels of Sholem Asch, the early Warsaw stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the sensational Yiddish press, and the Yiddish stage were more than imaginary figments.
And sometimes an authentic-sounding voice breaks through. In Mordkhe Gebirtig’s song “Di gefalene” (The Fallen Woman), a prostitute bewails her lot:
Ergets shlogt shoyn tsvey der zeyger
Somewhere the clock’s striking two,
s’iz shoyn lang nokh halber nakht
It’s already deepest night
un keyn groshn, keyn fardinstl
And not a penny, not a single job
hot biz itst zikh nisht gemakht.40
Has so far come my way.
This woman stood alone. But she was part of a larger mass of deviants from the conventional norms and values of Jewish society and another sign that these were cracking under the growing pressures from within and without.