1

Self-Creation

THE BABY GIRL who grew up to become Ernestine Rose was born into three oppressive situations. First, she belonged, as she said later, to “the down-trodden and persecuted people called the Jews, ‘a child of Israel.’ ” Second, she was also “a daughter of poor, crushed Poland,” the nation that had been so “partitioned” among Austria, Prussia, and Russia before she was born that it ceased to exist as a separate state. Finally, both Polish and Jewish cultures devalued women, considering them to be less important than men and, ideally, subordinated to them. And yet this remarkable young person found the strength to rebel against these adverse circumstances. In part, her singular ability to reject oppression stemmed from some advantages in her upbringing. But it also came from the core of her personality—her unusual ability to re-create herself in opposition to conditions she deplored.¹

As Jews, she and her family were part of a permanent sub-group within Christian Europe, which continuously treated them as separate and unequal beings. Virtually all Jews were Orthodox then, and since her father was also a rabbi, life within her household would have been especially observant of Jewish law and practice. The food her family ate, the clothes they wore, the language they spoke, the sabbath they honored, as well as all the prayers, rituals, and holidays they celebrated differed from those of the Polish Catholic community that surrounded them. When this family’s only child was born on January 13, 1810, her being female rendered her mother ritually impure for twice as long as a newborn son. If her parents gave her Hebrew first names, they have been lost, as have the given names of both her father and mother. Polish history since 1800 has been so turbulent that many records no longer exist.² Rose consistently told her biographers that she had been named “Ernestine Louise Susmond Potowsky.”³ (Since she changed her last name when she married, I refer to her as “Rose” after 1836, and “Potowska” before.) “Ernestyna” is a Polish name and she seems to have been called this during her early teenage years. “Louise” was a popular German name in this period, used to honor Queen Louise of Prussia, who shortly before Ernestine’s birth had pleaded for her nation with its conqueror, Napoleon. “Susmond,” a Germanic surname, may have been Ernestine’s mother’s maiden name. In the United States, Polish names are ungendered and always used in the masculine form, like “Potowsky” or “Potowski.” But in Poland, last names are gendered and Ernestine and her mother would have been called “Potowska.” As a married woman, Ernestine Rose completely dropped her maiden last names and used the middle initial “L.” for Louise.

Rose never revealed much about her private life, but she did consistently relate a few anecdotes about her childhood. The earliest took place when she was five. Her parents sent her to a local school, most likely a Jewish heder. There ten to forty students in a class, with girls and boys routinely mingled together in the early grades, would have learned rudimentary Hebrew from a male teacher. These schools taught by rote learning and practiced harsh discipline. Ernestine’s first rebellion occurred there.⁴ She refused to return to class because she had been punished for doing something no one told her was wrong. With this act, she demonstrated the sense of justice that became so important a part of her character. “I was a rebel at the age of five,” she later proudly declared about this incident, adding that “submission to wrong was wrong in itself and opposition to wrong was right in itself.” Her father then allowed her to study at home with him.⁵

Like many feminists, Rose barely mentioned her mother in her public accounts of her childhood. In contrast, her father loomed large. One of the chief rabbis of the city, he “was respected for his knowledge, his virtue, and a bit for his wealth,” she later asserted. As a rabbi, he functioned as a religious teacher authorized to make decisions on issues of Jewish law. Custom held that girls would learn to read Yiddish, a Judeo-German language written in Hebrew characters, with perhaps a short time at school to master phonetic Hebrew so they could understand Bible verses, prayers, and blessings. Boys, on the other hand, studied Hebrew intensively so that they could read and study Torah—the first five books of the Bible. Tradition forbade such study for girls, since it held that their limited mental capacity would only “pervert” the texts’ meaning. This difference divided Jewish men and women into two unequal groups. “There was a clear hierarchy, and the male sphere was higher and more prestigious,” writes a Jewish historian. “Women were prevented from entering the men’s arena by being deprived of formal traditional Jewish education; men had no temptation to go into the women’s sphere because it was culturally degraded… . Knowing Hebrew was essential to maleness; allowing females to know it would let them have access to maleness and threaten male identity and the gender hierarchy.”⁶

But Rabbi Potowsky treated his only child like a surrogate son, teaching Ernestine Hebrew in depth and having her intensively study Torah. When Ernestine interrogated her reading and asked questions, as Jewish boys were supposed to do, her father declared that “little girls must not ask questions.” This “made her at an early day an advocate of religious freedom and woman’s rights,” she later told an interviewer, “as she could not see, on the one hand, why subjects of vital interest should be held too sacred for investigation, nor, on the other, why a ‘little girl’ should not have the same right to ask questions as a little boy.”⁷ She must also have been aware of the traditional Jewish morning prayer, in which a woman thanks God for having made her according to his will, while a man thanks God for “not having made me a woman.” As an adult, Ernestine Rose condemned other gender disparities in her upbringing, like limited education. Without equal opportunities to study, women’s minds become “cramped and stifled” because they cannot “expand under bolts and bars.” “And yet,” she added, “amid all blighting, crushing circumstances—confined within the narrowest possible limits, trampled upon by prejudice and injustice, from her education and position forced to occupy herself almost exclusively with the most trivial affairs—in spite of all these difficulties, her intellect is as good as his.” She also deplored preventing girls from exercising because it was not “fashionable” or “feminine.” “The boy may run, the girl must creep,” she added, blaming such restrictions for her “feeble health” as an adult. She also criticized having her ears pierced, calling it a “barbarous, irrational practice” that caused her “pain and suffering” from infection “for months.”⁸

The bulk of her reminiscences, however, focused on religious battles with her rabbi father. He fasted twice a week, a stringent practice that left him weak and dispirited. When Ernestine asked why he did this, Rabbi Potowsky answered, “Because God wants it.” “If God wants to make you ill and punish you,” she replied, “it is not good, and since it’s not good, I don’t like it!” Her questioning expanded to include almost all the Bible verses she studied.

“It is necessary to believe, because God has spoken,” her father said.

“But what proves that it is God?” …

“Tradition proves it, my daughter.”

“But father, isn’t what you call tradition what you have seen and heard from men? Are we supposed to believe in what we can’t see and hear, especially when we can’t understand it?”

“Shocked and alarmed, her father ended the discussion,” Rose reported, “telling her that a young girl did not need to understand, nor reason about her faith, but only to believe and obey.”⁹

Ernestine’s doubts increased. As a young girl she challenged her religion’s strict insistence that no work be done on the Sabbath by combing her hair then. Her father severely criticized her for doing this: under current practice hair could be combed just to smooth it—if any strands came out, it was considered work and so, condemned. At twelve, Ernestine decided to test God’s approval of such strictures. Her community mandated keeping the Sabbath holy, even “to the breaking of a piece of straw.” Taking a stalk in her hands one Saturday, she told God she did not want to disobey him—“I would rather die”—but she could not believe that this rule came from him. If it did, would he send her a sign? When nothing happened, she broke the straw and “with the same act broke with the God of Moses and began her break with any personal God.”¹⁰

With this defiance, she also broke with her father, whom she said she “worshipped” and had “made into her God.” Because of her “remarkable affection” for him and her “great delight in his company,” she seems to have gone through the motions of practicing traditional Judaism for another two years. But when she turned fourteen, “she renounced her belief in the Bible and the religion of her father, which brought down upon her great trouble and persecution alike from her Jewish friends and from Christians.” As late as 1960, elderly residents of her city insisted that she had been called “Ernestyna Heretyczka”—“Ernestine the Heretic.” For her own part, Ernestine Rose commented in 1852 that

she was the same as every other human being born into a sect. She had cut herself loose from it, and she knew what it cost her, and having bought that little freedom, for what was dearer to her than life itself, she prized it too highly to ever put herself in the same shackles again. … The moment a man has an intellectual life enough to strike out [on] a new idea, he is branded as a heretic. ¹¹

For the rest of her life Ernestine Rose rejected any religious belief and identified as an atheist. For her, it was all or nothing. She went from being an observant Orthodox Jew to repudiating every precept she had been taught. Later, she argued that this break characterized all Jews who questioned their religion. “The Christian can change, and change, and change again, and still remain a Christian,” she wrote, referring to those people who rotated between different Catholic and Protestant denominations. But “the Jew can only make one change. There is but one step between his religion and Atheism… . [I]‌f the Jew takes one step in advance, he is out of darkness into the broad light of day.” This assertion probably reflected the absence of any modernization or “Reform” option within Polish Judaism, which remained a bastion of traditional orthodoxy in this period.¹²

Ernestine’s loss of faith led to a painful struggle with her father, who “tormented” his daughter, both because of “the tenderness which he had for her and his interest in her salvation. The battle between these two beings who cherished each other was as unproductive as it was long and cruel.” Ernestine’s defection from Judaism coincided with her puberty. Her community expected all to marry, ideally the girls at sixteen and the boys at eighteen. Parents normally arranged their children’s unions, since it was assumed that teenagers could not choose wisely for themselves. Rose told her interviewers that her father betrothed her to a man of his own choosing when she was fifteen and a half, to bring her back “to the bosom of the synagogue.” Her mother had recently died and left Ernestine a large inheritance. The engagement contract mandated that if Ernestine did not go through with the marriage, her fiancé would keep most of her legacy.¹³

“Jewish daughters were not bold enough to wrench free from the restraint of unbending customs that in reality enslaved them,” wrote a Polish Jewish feminist two generations younger than Ernestine. “A girl did not even have the audacity to oppose the match that her father made for her.” But Ernestine Potowska did. This engagement roused her sense of injustice. Believing that marriage should be between two equals and that she could not “marry a master without finer feelings whom she did not love,” she begged her fiancé to release her, weeping and throwing herself at his feet. She told him that she did not and could not love him. He replied that since she was both beautiful and rich, he would not break the engagement, reminding her that if she did not go through with it, he would keep a large portion of her inheritance. He then brought a suit to possess her property at a district court in the city of Kalisz. Ernestine decided to go to this court to plead her own case.¹⁴

Where did she find the backbone to take such an unprecedented step? Part of her strength came from her previous experience of defying her father’s paternal and rabbinic authority. Part came from her own bravery. But part also came from the heritage of the city where she grew up, Piótrkow Trybunalski, the site of the Polish Royal Tribunal—its Supreme Court—from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. This name is never abbreviated and the city prides itself on being “the cradle of Polish democracy and parliamentarianism.” Ernestine Rose believed deeply in justice and the power of law throughout her entire life. Some of this conviction came from her Polish home city.

There Ernestine experienced both hope for reform and discrimination. Conditions for Jews in Poland during her years in Piótrkow Trybunalski worsened, but bore little resemblence to the extreme antisemitism that drove so many to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jews had flocked to Poland in earlier times because they considered it a haven from persecution; by 1800 the largest Jewish community in the world lived there, primarily in cities and towns. The restricted ghetto of the Polish shtetl belongs to a later era. When Ernestine was born, Jews constituted almost 50 percent of her city’s population of 4,000 and had many interactions with their Christian neighbors.¹⁵

Like the rest of Poland, Piótrkow Trybunalski suffered the dismemberment of the nation. In 1793, the city came under Prussian rule, which made little difference to its inhabitants. For the next twenty-odd years, the entire European continent experienced the ideological wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era. These struggles particularly affected Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities as they learned of French reforms. Revolutionary France had overthrown its ancien régime of separate, unequal, medieval “estates” in favor of a modern nation-state peopled by citizens with equal rights. The new system embodied the ideals of Enlightenment philosophy, which questioned traditional arrangements and assumed that progressive change was both possible and desirable. Why should kings have absolute power? Why should there be a state-supported church? Was religion the only true way of understanding the world, or should science and reason replace it? If so, why should peasants and Jews remain under legal and religious liabilities? Shouldn’t they be liberated from oppression, or, in the terminology of the day, “emancipated”? Throughout her life, Ernestine Rose remained a child of the Enlightenment, believing in its ideals and philosophy, first encountered in her youth. “I remember I was but a little child, hardly able to understand the import of words, that I had already listened to them who pronounced it the Republic of the United States of America,” she recalled in midlife, “and even then, though unable to appreciate the import, the nobility of it, yet somehow or other it touched a vibrating chord in my heart, and I thought, if I live to grow up a woman, O how I should like to see a Republic!”—that is, a government without a monarch. Those who interviewed her during her lifetime asserted that the concept of “emancipation” underlay Rose’s lifelong beliefs.¹⁶

In 1791, France emancipated its Jews by abolishing all laws that made them separate and unequal. In 1807, it briefly applied this to all of Poland. However, Piótrkow Trybunalski’s Jewish population, despite free interactions with Christians, still suffered from antisemitism. A large painting depicting a “blood libel”—Jews supposedly murdering a Christian child to use its blood in a religious ritual—hung on the outer wall of one of the city’s main churches. In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna concluding the wars, Poland was given to the czar of Russia as his personal kingdom. From then on, conditions worsened for Polish Jews. In 1822, when Ernestine was twelve, Piótrkow Trybunalski ordered that its Jews be expelled—a standard gambit that could be overturned by paying a fine. Three years later, a large fire devastated the Jewish section of the city. Ernestine Rose later denounced “Russian tyranny in her own country, Poland,” recalling that the government seized some land belonging to her family “without a farthing of compensation!” But the situation of Jews in Piótrkow Trybunalski remained relatively favorable. “The history of Piótrkow Trybunalski consists in the perpetual struggle of the Christians and Jews,” a Polish historian wrote in 1850. “In spite of numerous restrictions they managed to squeeze into the town. The more severe the authorities were, the more resourceful they were. Now they triumph: they constitute half of the population.”¹⁷

In this period, Jews often used Polish courts, as Ernestine decided to do. She could not have successfully presented her case to a rabbinic council, which naturally would have sided with her father and fiancé. By going to a Polish law court, she joined a number of other Jewish women who appeared there as both plaintiffs and defendants. Showing remarkable initiative, Ernestine hired a sleigh and driver to take her the sixty-five miles from Piótrkow Trybunalski to the district capital of Kalisz. She had just turned seventeen and the weather that winter was extremely harsh. In the course of the trip, the sleigh broke down. The driver wanted to wait until the following morning to fix it, but Ernestine persuaded him to go for help that night, since her case began the next day. He left and she waited alone, “wrapped in furs … from 11:30 at night until 4 in the morning on an immense plain of snow, listening to the howls of packs of starving wolves.”

Arriving at the court in time, Ernestine presented her case personally, as lawyers were rarely used in these proceedings. She successfully argued that she should retrieve her inheritance “by proving to the judges that she should not lose her property because of an engagement she did not want.”¹⁸ The court records for this case have been lost, as have so many other Polish documents.¹⁹ Yet Rose’s account rings true, in tune with her other actions, values, and beliefs. This triumph became the foundation story of her self-created adult identity as an advocate for personal independence and women’s equal rights. Throughout her life, she referred back to her impressive victory as proof of what women could accomplish. “I have known a case in a foreign land under despotic rule, pleaded by a woman,” she told a Cleveland Woman’s Rights Convention in 1853;

this was the case of a girl hardly seventeen, who had to go to law to rescue her property staked on such a [marriage] contract, which she could not and would not fulfill; and against all the laws of the land, she gained that cause. How came she to get it? Because she pleaded it, and called down the Justice of Heaven against the laws.

“Laws” in this instance almost certainly refers to the Jewish laws of the Bible as well as secular law. But “the Justice of Heaven” seems an odd phrase for a committed atheist to use. Rose revered justice all her life, with a passion she almost certainly first absorbed in Piótrkow Trybunalski. “I have faith, unbounded, unshaken faith in the principles of right, justice, and humanity,” she declared in 1861. She probably invoked heaven to give greater weight to her argument before her Christian women’s rights audience. Rose also maintained that “above all things” women “want to be able to plead our own cause before the courts of justice; we want to be in the jury-box, to judge our own sisters; we want to be in the judge’s chair.” If her health were better, she argued in midlife, “I should study law—not to make the ‘worse a better cause,’ but for the purpose of maintaining justice—justice to man as well as to woman.”²⁰

Back in the winter of 1827, however, Ernestine faced a difficult new situation after her courtroom triumph. She had stayed in Kalisz “somewhat longer than she expected and on her return found that her father had solaced himself in his loneliness during her absence by taking to himself a wife, a young girl” the same age as Ernestine. She later said only that she “could not harmonize” with her new stepmother, but this brief phrase almost certainly contained a welter of difficult emotions: shock, anger, jealousy, and sorrow. Not wanting “to force her father to take the side of one or the other in the disputes and conflicts that she foresaw,” Ernestine decided to leave home. Her father’s house had “become distasteful and unpleasant to her,” she explained. “She longed also for a wider field of action. She had youth, good health, and an abundance of energetic daring. She determined to seek her fortune in the great world.” Leaving much of her inheritance with her father and taking only enough to support herself “honorably,” she left her birth family, the Jewish community, and her native land. Continuing her process of self-determination, she decided to go to the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, Berlin.²¹

She deliberately chose Berlin, nearly 300 miles from Piótrkow Trybunalski, when she could have opted for Warsaw, only ninety miles away. The capital of Poland, Warsaw had 150,000 inhabitants, a sizable Jewish community, and enough culture and charm to be called “The Paris of the East.” Two important factors shaped her decision. First, Poland remained a conquered nation, under the “iron yoke” of Russian “despotism,” as Rose later wrote. Referring throughout her life to “my own poor native land,” Rose countered a charge that she had “fled” from there. “It is true I came from Poland,” she wrote in 1854, “but it is false that I was compelled to fly from my country, except by the compulsion or dictates of the same spirit … that induced so many of my noble countrymen. … I left my country, not flying, but deliberately.” In leaving Poland, Ernestine Potowska briefly preceded such famous political exiles as the musician Frederick Chopin and the poet Adam Mickiewicz.²²

Her second chief reason for not going to Warsaw may have been the nature of its Jewish community, which by the late 1820s had embraced Hasidism, a deeply religious movement that prized ecstatic faith, charismatic leaders, and mystical spirituality. Like many other eastern European Jews who wanted a more secular or modern milieu, Potowska headed west to Berlin. The Berlin Jewish community had become known for its universalist Enlightenment values. It prized secular education, and many of its members discarded Jewish traditions, from speaking Yiddish to dressing distinctively to keeping kosher. Berlin Jews were no longer confined to a ghetto but mixed socially with Christians and lived among them in the old city center. Much of this “Jewish Enlightenment” originated with “the Berlin Socrates,” the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who championed a “rational” or reformed version of Judaism, urged Jews to join German society, and initiated a radically new form of social life by mingling Jews and Christians at his Open Houses. Traditional Jews warned their children not to marry “Berliners” or “heretics” (apikorsim)—the two terms had become almost synonymous. Ernestine Rose, on the other hand, later praised Mendelssohn as a “liberal, intelligent, and well-behaved” example of how Jews had successfully modernized. Berlin Jewry provided her with the community in Europe whose beliefs were most congenial to her own.²³

Deciding to go to Berlin was one thing; getting there was far more difficult. In this pre-railroad era, the wealthy rode in their own carriages while the poor walked along the highways. For a middle-class traveler like Potowska, postal coaches provided the only option, but these “boneshakers,” which crammed six to eight passengers into their dark, stuffy interiors, were known for their lack of comfort and speed. Most of the roads on this almost 300-mile journey were unpaved and dirty, filled with potholes and ruts, and coaches moved at only three miles per hour.²⁴

Potowska also faced the special perils of traveling as a young woman alone. When the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt sent his daughters to Rome at that time, he insisted they wear male clothing so that they would not be sexually molested. A German guidebook of 1811, which presumed all travelers to be male, advised passengers to carry their own pistol, lock, and bedding with them, to guard against their fellow voyagers, predatory innkeepers, and vermin. Female Jewish merchants rarely went on business trips because of these dangers, leaving journeys to their male relatives. But travel by single young women was not unheard of in these years. Potowska almost certainly knew Gotthold von Lessing’s extremely popular play of 1767, Minna von Barnhelm, in which the spunky, independent heroine successfully goes alone to Berlin to find her missing fiancé. In addition to this fictional example, respectable women traveling alone appear in memoirs as well. In 1820, the English economist Thomas Hodgskin reported that in small German inns, a number of beds would be placed in the same room. “On more than one occasion,” he wrote, “I have seen decent female travellers sleep in the same room with gentlemen and from their never remarking that the practice was curious or offensive, it may be inferred that it is general.”²⁵

The word “decent” was key. Most governments tried to keep prostitutes out of their districts. Potowska never mentioned that this was an issue for her. As a young woman traveling by herself, she would have had to master the appropriate demeanor both to repel advances and appear respectable. Travel documents presented more of a problem. An 1817 law gave Prussian border guards the authority to issue entry documents. Those riding in postal coaches and non-citizen Jews needed passports to travel within the Kingdom of Prussia. Potowska reported no difficulty in either crossing the border or traveling through Prussia.²⁶ Settling in Berlin, however, proved far more challenging, and Rose spent quite a bit of time telling her interviewers how she achieved this.

Fearing an influx of Eastern European Jewish peddlers and merchants, Prussian cities forbade “Israelites” to remain there for more than three days. To stay longer, Jews had to have a German citizen post three monetary bonds for them or obtain royal permission to stay. Ernestine Potowska refused to have bonds posted for her. “Either I am or am not capable of doing evil,” she told a Berlin police chief. “If I am, the punishment should fall on my head and not that of anyone else; if not, I do not need bonds.” The police magistrate sent her to a government minister, who “could not break the law on her behalf.” The minister directed her to see the king, Friedrich Wilhelm III.²⁷

Rose then recounted her interview with the Prussian monarch. “Convinced that the law was absurd and thinking that the best way to solve the problem was for the young girl to be baptized, he graciously offered to be her godfather,” he said. Although records documenting this meeting have been lost, Friedrich Wilhelm’s suggestion squares with his practice and beliefs during these years. An affable and friendly ruler, he held brief meetings with petitioners. His youngest daughter was only two years older than Ernestine and perhaps this explains his paternal approach to the seventeen-year-old traveler. In this period, Friedrich Wilhelm III attempted to convert Jews to Christianity. In addition to founding a Berlin branch of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews a few years earlier, he often served as godfather at Jewish baptisms, presenting the new converts with gifts.²⁸

Rose replied to his suggestion that she convert by saying, “I thank you, Your Majesty, but I have not abandoned the trunk in order to attach myself to the branches: if my reason prevents me from being Jewish, it cannot permit me to be Christian.” The perfect aptness of this remark smacks of “l’esprit d’escalier,” the brilliant remark thought of when going down the staircase after an event is over. But this quick-witted rabbi’s daughter had been well-trained in intellectual repartee and indeed may have actually said this. The king then gave her permission to reside in Berlin as long as she wished.²⁹

Ernestine Potowska lived in Berlin for the next two years, from 1827 to 1829. She revealed less about this stay than she did about her interview with the king, reflecting an inexplicable lifelong reluctance to write about Germany and the Germans. When she returned to Europe in 1856, she remained in Berlin for six weeks and barely mentioned it.³⁰ But her early years in this vibrant, growing metropolis proved important for her intellectual development.

The first national capital Potowska ever experienced, Berlin contained 220,000 inhabitants of whom about 5,000 were Jews. She lived “alone, in a modest, little room,” supporting herself on “the money she had brought with her.” She most likely rented a chamber in one of the numerous three- to four-story apartment buildings that thronged Berlin’s side streets. Each housed several families, jumbling Jews together with Christians. She probably lived on one of the cheaper upper stories; more well-off families resided on the first or second floors. Like all large cities, Berlin contained extremes of poverty and wealth, encompassing both “miserable alleys” and “ramshackle houses” as well as “beautiful, wide streets” in the prosperous areas. Its fine monuments—the palace, the university, the library, the opera house, the tree-lined boulevard known as Unter den Linden—clustered in the city’s center. Unlike Piótrkow Trybunalski, Berlin displayed the trappings of modernity: the beginnings of industry and manufacturing, numerous shops, and the first gas streetlamps east of Paris.³¹

In Berlin, Ernestine Potowska mastered German. She had to have spoken some German to be able to converse with the king, but during this period she became expert enough to teach the language a few years later. While spoken German is easy for Yiddish speakers to understand, Potowska also learned to read it. During her time in Berlin, she studied “not dead books, but living ones, with great curiosity.” “Dead books” referred to the Bible she had pored over at home. Reading “living books,” presumably in German, connected her to the Berlin Jewish community, for whom learning through the written word became a passion. Lending libraries, book groups, and reading rooms proliferated in these years, making access to expensive volumes possible. All this constituted the modern “reading revolution.” Previously, readers had been like Potowska in Poland, working “laboriously through … the Bible, over and over again.” Now they read all kinds of literature, for education and amusement as well as religious reasons. Reading became secularized and more critical.³²

In Berlin, Potowska “began to question” social arrangements “just as she had questioned Bible verses as a child.” In the process, she built her intellectual foundation, based on Enlightenment principles. “The only answer she came up with” as to why “vices of all sorts” and “public and private miseries” existed “was that all evil comes from two causes: ignorance supported by revelation and inequality supported by egoism and ignorance.” These precepts constitute core axioms of Enlightenment thought, which condemned revealed religion as superstition and held that progressive education and reform could eliminate social ills and unhappiness. Potowska absorbed these values during her years in Berlin, where Enlightenment ideals became especially important to the Jewish community, since they supported its equality and emancipation from ancient restrictions. She continued to believe in reason, progress, critical thinking, and secularism throughout her life. “Emancipation from every kind of bondage is my principle,” she frequently declared; “I go for the recognition of human rights, without distinction of sect, party, sex, or color.”³³

In addition to forging her basic philosophy in Berlin, Potowska found a new way to support herself. She created “a paper to perfume apartments.” Residents kept windows and doors closed all winter for warmth and needed to dispel the resulting unpleasant odors. The young entrepreneur sold her room deodorizer throughout the next decade: an 1838 piece in a New York newspaper advertised that she manufactured and merchandised “Cologne and other German waters” to bring pleasant scents to lodgings. This product afforded her, a young, single woman, a decent and inventive way to make a living. After describing this product, Potowska abruptly concludes her German reminiscences, saying only that since “she had nothing more to learn in Berlin,” she decided to leave.³⁴

Almost certainly she went next to Paris. At this point, her various interviews, given decades after the fact, become confusing. One says that she first sailed to England, got shipwrecked, and then returned to Paris during the Revolution of July 1830 because “she believed that something could be done in France for the emancipation of women.” But the July Revolution lasted only three days and raised no issues about women, so this account seems unlikely. A second interview declares that she went to The Hague, where she met with the King of Holland and convinced him to undo a woman’s imprisonment. Unsupported by any documents, which tend to exist in the Netherlands, this anecdote also seems improbable. The third account does not mention her going to France at all. But in 1856, when Ernestine Rose visited Paris again, she wrote that “I have been fifteen months in Paris before” and gave details of her experiences there during the Revolution of 1830. She probably traveled directly from Berlin to Paris sometime in 1829.³⁵

Potowska’s trip to Paris, far longer than that from Piótrkow Trybunalski to Berlin, would have been much easier because better roads and superior coaches existed between Germany and France. More than twice as large as Berlin, Paris had almost 600,000 inhabitants then. Its Jewish community, smaller than that of the Prussian city, was growing and rapidly becoming less traditional. The capital of the most developed nation on the continent of Europe, Paris remained vital to Western culture, art, diplomacy, and politics. Its city center included the Palais Royal, the Place du Carrousel, where dissidents had been guillotined during the 1789 Revolution, and the immense, prestigious Louvre Museum. “The Louvre, if not the most beautiful building in the world, is certainly one of the most beautiful in that small portion of it that I have had the pleasure to see,” Rose wrote on her 1856 European tour, adding that “the material of Paris, beautiful as it is” does not “so much interest me as the social, the moral, the progressive Paris.”³⁶

In her letters on Paris, Rose rhapsodized about the French. “I thought perhaps I was too young then to judge of such matters,” she wrote, recalling her earlier stay there, “but I found my ideas of the people were correct.” …

They combine the finest elements in human nature. The Frenchman is frivolous on trifles, but he is the philosopher on any subject of importance. The mass of the people work hard and live still harder, but they have the arts, the sciences, the beautiful, the elevating. No country so abounds in these elements, and no people on earth enjoy them as much as the French… . In the theatres, gardens, walks, museums, concerts, balls, they mix together, treat each other with becoming respect and fraternal civility.

A great deal of Rose’s affection for the French and Paris stemmed from her belief that the city embodied progressive ideals: “To me it speaks the language of universal brotherhood; it seems the capital of the world, the representative of mankind; its inmost heart vibrates for all times, nations, and grades… . [E]‌veryone finds his own element, and a sympathizing c[h]ord, which runs through whole humanity.” Her emotional tone came in part from having witnessed the revolution that prevented the return of absolute monarchy to France.³⁷

After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the victorious European monarchs, including the Russian czar, restored the Bourbon dynasty overthrown by the French Revolution. The king regained almost complete power—a legislature existed but was severely weakened. The white royal flag, with its gold fleurs-de-lis, replaced the revolutionary blue, white, and red tricolore. When the ultra-conservative Charles X ascended the throne in 1824, he tried to restore both the supreme power of the Catholic Church and absolute monarchy based on divine right. Mandating the death penalty for various acts of sacrilege, he began ruling by decree in early July 1830, dissolving the legislature and suspending freedom of the press. These acts sparked “les trois Glorieuses,” the three “glorious” days of revolution witnessed by the twenty-year-old Ernestine Potowska. Street fighting erupted in the center of the city, as Parisians erected barricades, raised the revolutionary banner, and sacked various royal buildings. “The Louvre was attacked by the people … and defended at the time by the Swiss Guards,” Rose recalled. “I remember to have seen that whole building, after that revolution, without one pane of glass in it.” Its collection remained undamaged, however.³⁸

As the royal army began to retreat and desert, the king and his son abdicated. Power shifted to the city of Paris, and the seventy-two-year-old Marquis de Lafayette took charge. A hero of both the American and French revolutions, Lafayette had gone into exile during Napoleon’s rule. In 1830, he was invited to become dictator but instead brokered a transfer of power to the king’s more liberal cousin, Louis Philippe d’Orléans. The two men appeared on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville in front of an immense crowd that included Potowska. They embraced while each held up a large tricolore. Lafayette called Orléans “the best of republicans” and Orléans promised to support “a popular throne surrounded by republican institutions.” The crowd responded with cheers of “Long live the Republic!” and “Long live Lafayette!” “In 1830 I saw Gen. Lafayette present Louis Philippe from … one of the central windows of the Hôtel de Ville,” Rose remembered, telling an interviewer that at the time she remarked to a friend that Louis Philippe, “as well as Charles X, will one day have good reason to wish himself safely off the throne of France.” Louis Philippe was overthrown during the Revolution of 1848. A few years later, Ernestine Rose wrote that “nations learn but very slowly, and the French” have “paid very dearly for allowing themselves to be deceived after 1830 by the recommendation of Lafayette.”³⁹ She always preferred republics over monarchies, however much they limited royal power or how liberal they appeared.

The French Revolution of July 1830 sparked the November Uprising in Poland, in part because the Russians planned to use the Polish army to try to overthrow the new French government. As Poles battled the Russian Empire, Ernestine Potowska decided to return to her native land to take part in the insurrection. A number of Polish women fought then; the most famous was Countess Emilia Plater, who organized a partisan unit of close to a thousand troops. She cut her hair short, wore a man’s uniform, and led her soldiers to a short-lived victory. Potowska herself did not succeed in reaching the battlefield. Traveling over 250 miles eastward to the German city of Koblenz, she was halted by Austrian troops supporting the conservative opposition to the Polish rebellion. If “she did not want to perish in an Austrian blockhouse,” she later declared, she had to turn back.⁴⁰

She did not return to France. She visited there many more times, but despite her love of the French, she never lived there again—and never explained why. Instead, she promised the Austrian authorities that she would go to London.

No matter where she lived, however, she remained a Polish exile for the rest of her life. In 1850, when she had been in the United States for fourteen years, she still referred to Poland as “my poor unhappy country, which has been prostrated, but I hope not lost.” Whether known as Ernestyna Potowska or Ernestine Rose, she continued to yearn for a successful Polish rebellion that did not come, although failed uprisings occurred again in 1848 and 1863. She never returned to Poland, either on her 1856 trip to Europe or on later visits to the continent, probably because of her discouragement over Poland’s continuing bondage to Russia. But she had escaped the disadvantage of having been born in “poor, crushed Poland.”⁴¹

Through her own efforts to challenge and defy existing conditions, she also freed herself from religion. As a committed atheist, she incurred far more prejudice than she did as a Jew, but she never regretted leaving “superstition” behind. In addition, she spent her life combating the injustice of women’s subordination and lack of equal rights. Unwilling to acquiesce to oppression and discrimination, she truly re-created herself from the person society intended her to be. Ernestine Potowska then made her next home in London, where she lived for five years. There “she found friends … who were as radical and liberty-loving as herself,” many of whom worked for women’s equality. She discovered a congenial belief system, taught by Robert Owen, who became her new, surrogate father/educator. And she met the man for whom she changed her name, her beloved and devoted husband, William Rose.⁴²