Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

Seductive Secularization

In 1913 a Jewish girls’ school in Vilna called Yehudiyah, which provided supplementary education for girls aged seven to eighteen, published a publicity pamphlet in Yiddish that lamented the alienation of young Jewish women from Jewish culture and from the Jewish people. According to the anonymous author:

Once the Jewish daughter ceaselessly absorbed [Jewish] culture from the day of her birth. She was taught no Torah, but the spirit of the Torah already soared over her cradle. In our times, a girl receives no knowledge at all of Yiddishkayt [Jewishness]. The first song that she hears is not a Jewish one; the first letter she learns is not from “alef-beis”; the first little story she reads is of foreign life in a foreign tongue.… Years go by. The girl becomes ever more distanced from her people, from its culture, from its traditions, from its pride in its past, from its concerns in the present, from its hopes for the future.… And this is the result of such an education: the mediocre woman either heads toward apostasy…or she arranges her house in a non-Jewish way and yearns her whole life after foreign peoples.¹

This is a surprising statement to find in one of the most important centers of traditional Jewish life on the eve of the First World War. What does such a text represent? Were the Jews of Poland and Lithuania simply following the assimilatory path blazed by their central European kin some two or three generations earlier? Or was the author of this pamphlet indulging in the pessimistic discourse that has led critics of Jewish communities in all ages to portray their contemporaries as deviants from a glorious past characterized by learning and righteous behavior? What social phenomena were the pamphlet and the school it promoted attempting to address? […]

The socioeconomic and cultural contexts in eastern Europe facilitated women’s assimilation through their work patterns and access to secular education. Consequently, a greater proportion of Jewish women in eastern Europe took the lead in the process of assimilation than in the countries of western and central Europe and the United States, although the pace and dimensions of assimilation were less extreme. To be sure, even in interwar Poland, which acquired its independence after the First World War, a substantial segment, probably the majority, of Jews remained traditional in their self-consciousness and their religious observance until their murder by the Nazis. The women among the traditionalists, although they modernized their clothing in the interwar years, remained Yiddish-speaking models of religious piety, modest in dress, strongly committed to traditional culture, and still involved in commerce. In some wealthy Jewish homes where acculturation occurred relatively early, women replicated the conservative function that seems to have been typical in the West. Pauline Wengeroff gives poignant testimony of this phenomenon. Born in 1833 into a traditionally observant family, she married a Minsk banker and, in the first decade of the new century, wrote her memoirs to lament the ravages of radical assimilation in her own household (among her husband and sons) and to offer a portrait of traditional Jewish life of the past. Although she saw her own experience as female upholder of traditional practice against male assimilatory practices as typical of her circle, she seems to be highly unusual in the context of east European Jewry of her time.

Over the course of several generations, from the second half of the nineteenth century through the interwar years, a significant segment of east European Jewish women secularized and adapted to the culture of their respective social classes. In schematic terms, the women who abandoned tradition in whole or in part went from covering their hair with a scarf (tikhl) upon marriage to wearing a wig (shaytl) to choosing to display their own hair. Among converts to Christianity, women appear to have taken an increasingly prominent role. In Cracow, the center of Jewish life in Galicia, in the last fourteen years of the nineteenth century women constituted more than two-thirds of the 379 Jewish converts (see table). The conversion records of the Lithuanian consistory of the Russian Orthodox Church covering the years 1819–1911 provide information on 244 Jewish converts and reveal that from the 1860s on, women accounted for the majority of the converts. In the years 1900–1911 they were 65 percent of the converting group. The small number of Jews who converted solely because of religious conviction rather than for pragmatic reasons, such as to advance one’s career or, from the opposite end of the social spectrum, to stay out of jail, were all women. Like the men, most of the women converts came from the poorest stratum of Russian Jewry; they were, in the historian Michael Stanislawski’s words, “the destitute and the desperate.”² Since single women were far more numerous than single men among the converts, lower-class women, whose possibilities for marriage in the Jewish community were limited because of their lack of dowries, probably were converting to marry Christian men of the same social level whom they had met initially through economic contacts. While recognizing the danger of generalizing from such a small sample of the 69,400 Jews who converted to Russian Orthodoxy during the nineteenth century, Stanislawski suggests tentatively that the disproportionate representation of women among the Jewish converts in the latter half of the period points to the lesser success of women in accommodating to the “new social, economic, political, and cultural conditions than their brothers, husbands, and sons.”³ These limited conversion records, then, substantiate the assessment of Jewish educators of various ideological perspectives that women were less well prepared for their encounter with Russian culture once the barriers of Jewish segregation were lowered.

Jewish Converts in Cracow

Source: These statistics are taken from Meir Bosak, “Yehudei Krakov bemahazit hashniyah shel hameah hatsha-‘esrei” (The Jews of Cracow in the second half of the nineteenth century), in Sefer Krako, ed. Aryeh Bauminger, Meir Bosak, and Natan Gelber (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kuk, 1959), p. 109. I would like to thank Hillel Kieval for bringing this source to my attention.