Gender History of German Jews: A Short Introduction

By Stefanie Schüler-Springorum

This concise overview traces the Gender history of German-Jews from the early modern period to the present day and provides a unique perspective on both men and women as historical actors in the German lands. By adopting new perspectives on the German-Jewish experience, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum introduces and examines gender narratives and opportunities across a wide range of individual circumstances and during times of discrimination, persecution and deportation. While being directed against all Jews the effects of Nazi policy had remarkably different results, depending on gender, class, marital status, age and religious affiliation. The picture that emerges here of German Jewry in modern times is consequently more vibrant and nuanced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805392873

Stefanie Schüler-Springorum

Stefanie Schüler-Springorum has been Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism since 2011, Co-Director of the Selma-Stern-Center for Jewish Studies since 2012, and Director of the Berlin branch of the Center for Research on Social Cohesion since 2020. She also from 2001 through 2011 was Director of the Institute for German-Jewish history in Hamburg.

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CHAPTER 1

BEFORE EMANCIPATION

AFTER THE GREAT EXPULSIONS IN the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jews in Germany had only gradually been able to resettle. They did so primarily in rural areas and especially in the central and southwestern regions of the Old Empire, which were highly fragmented. Around 1750, about 85 percent of the sixty to seventy thousand Jews still lived in the countryside, where the vast majority eked out an extremely impoverished existence. Almost forty years later, a census in Prussia (excluding Silesia and West Prussia) revealed that there were 13,179 Jewish subjects, including, however, only 2,398 Protected Jews [Schutzjuden] with a settlement permit and public servants; 4,890 women were counted as widows and their daughters, and 1,939 as household servants. According to the authorities, only two-thirds of the 3,952 remaining men had a chance of making a living as merchants or scholars. The rest were considered impoverished and correspondingly at risk.¹

Restrictions on settlement and extensive occupational bans dating back to the Middle Ages left Jewish men and women with little economic room for maneuver. Mostly they worked as merchants and peddlers, in smaller numbers as moneylenders, and in probably very large, but difficult to quantify, numbers as servants belonging to both genders. Trading activities in or across the countryside, be they with livestock, money, or household goods, were always a risky business. The situation for these precarious forms of employment worsened in the course of the eighteenth century due to the increasing state regulation of economic life. As a result, the importance of Jewish commercial activity as a whole tended to decrease and Jewish mendicancy to increase. In other words, the social differences within the minority grew: While the Jewish poor wandered the country roads without the opportunity to settle, a small group slowly succeeded in establishing itself in the rapidly growing cities. In turn, it created job opportunities there for servants. Although we know little about their living situation, it is unlikely that it was very different from that of Christian domestic servants. Men worked as store assistants, messengers, or farmhands; women were employed in the household, where they were exposed to sexual assault and unwanted pregnancies.

For both sexes of any religion, however, becoming a servant was intended only as a transitional activity that would later enable them to establish their own households. Due to the many restrictions on settlement, however, this was much more difficult for Jews than for Christians. This is one of the reasons that Jews tended to marry relatively late. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, they married between the ages of twenty and thirty, although, as among the Christian population, there were clear class-specific differences. Children of very wealthy families tended to enter into marriage at a young age, as it usually served as an economic union between the two families.

For a minority, stable marital connections and their economic security were clearly the most important considerations. After all, it was the only way to ensure the survival of the group. This explains the traditional importance of marriage brokering within Jewish society, the option of marriage between second-degree relatives, and also the role of the dowry, meant to provide material security for the wife in the event of the husband’s divorce or death.

At the same time, the dowry of both women and men was the starting capital for a conjugal or working life together. Often the couple first settled down in the house of the in-laws, where the necessary business skills could gradually be learned. Only later would they set up their own households, which usually consisted of the nuclear family and the respective servants. On average, it was therefore smaller than typical Christian families.

The strong focus on commerce brought about a comparatively egalitarian gender division of labor. In principle, the man ran the business, but the woman assisted him on a much more equal footing than in many other professions practiced by Christians. Basic knowledge of economics and merchandise, bookkeeping and finance was expected of women as a matter of course. This, in fact, had a long tradition: In the late Middle Ages, women accounted for about one-third of all independent merchants in the Jewish community. The proportion declined significantly in the early modern period due to the increasing importance of the predominantly male long-distance trade. However, the money and pawnbroking business was still often conducted at home. When their trading husbands moved across the country or attended trade fairs, the women had to manage on their own during these absences, which sometimes lasted weeks or even months. It seems that the later much-invoked ancient Jewish family life took place rarely, presumably mainly on the holidays.

Female inclusion in breadwinning, it may be assumed, also made divorce more of a realistic option. In any case, it was permissible and not stigmatized in Judaism. Remarriage similarly did not pose any problems. However, there was (and is) a significant difference between the sexes here: According to Jewish religious law, only the husband can apply for divorce, while the wife must ask the husband for the divorce bill (get), which the latter can also refuse. This is why such cases often appear in the files of the rabbinical courts. It became even more problematic if the husband went missing and thus could not issue a get. In view of migration and persecution throughout Jewish history, this was not an uncommon occurrence—nor for that matter were husbands who had intentionally disappeared. The abandoned woman was not allowed to remarry and was often dependent on the welfare of the community. Similar to Christian merchant families, a widow, by contrast, could act on her own and operate as an independent businesswoman. Thus, for her, remarriage basically meant a loss of autonomy. While Jewish men, at least in theory, always disposed over money and thus had economic power, for women it depended on their respective marital status: The spectrum ranged from the completely dependent, penniless, and unmarried maid to the wife working in partnership with, but legally dependent on, her husband to the independently acting, (though not always) wealthy widow.

Unfortunately, few sources have survived that reflect these employment relationships from a female perspective. It is not by chance that Glikl von Hameln (1646–1724) is always cited as a reference. Male authors of ethical treatises around 1600 primarily emphasize male authority, as it was reflected in the man’s role as external representative of the family, that is, as seen by other men. Women were not allowed to take a dominant role here, while internally it was quite possible to work together in an egalitarian manner. The picture is rather different in the only (surviving) writing on the subject by a woman, the Meneqet Rivkah by Rivka Tektiner from the year 1618. Here, the woman is the undisputed ruler; she also represents the family to the outside world and is responsible for its social status. The husbands, by contrast, play only a marginal role and are at most equals. In comparison to the other ethical writings, the Meneqet Rivkah seems to have hardly been read. Nevertheless, it stands as an instructive example of at least the possibility of female self-esteem, which was precisely rooted in the equal contribution to the family income. The status of Jewish men, by contrast, was traditionally measured by their spiritual work (Richarz). This entailed their exclusive access, indeed obligation, to study the Torah and Talmud—to engage in religious learning.

Depending on social class and personal interest, this was something that was treated with varying degrees of seriousness. Often it was kept to a minimum, especially in the case of many a poor peddler. Women, on the other hand, were excluded on principle from both individual learning and religious sociability in the community. Full community members were usually married men with a certain income; women could achieve this status only as widows and even then did not receive electoral rights.

Under traditional Judaism, the hierarchy of the sexes was thus largely fixed in terms of religion, allowing the respective economic roles to be flexible or even reversed. A small minority of scholars were able to pursue their religious studies specifically because their wives were solely responsible for earning a living, which, in turn, meant that they also fulfilled a religiously important and highly valued task. By the same token, this system offered opportunities for advancement to poor young men who, if they were learned or at least seemed to have the corresponding potential, were considered ideal sons-in-law by wealthy parents.

All of this established the high value placed on male education in Judaism compared to Christianity. The ideal Jewish man was a man of learning; Jewish manhood was measured by erudition, not physical strength or livelihood. Of course, here, too, reality had little to do with this ideal, especially in the small rural communities. In principle, however, boys between the ages of five and thirteen learned to read and write in Hebrew and Yiddish in elementary school and received religious instruction, which could then be deepened in the religious schools, the yeshivot. Little is known about girls’ education. Presumably, some learned to read and write Yiddish at home, as well as the basics of household and business management from their mothers. They received no religious education and also inherited the performance of certain rituals from older female family members.

Naturally, much depended on the respective social status of the family for both sexes. While the children of poor families had to work at an early age, those of the Jewish upper class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries received a secular education in addition to their religious education. Girls often benefited from the instruction of their brothers, which they received from private tutors. Since the Europe-wide network of the great court Jew families was primarily forged through marriage, the daughters played a central role. As a result, a certain degree of cultural, linguistic, and intellectual competence among them was stressed. They were also often involved in their husbands’ businesses, and were able to continue running them independently as widows. Esther Liebmann (1649–1714) in the seventeenth century and Chaile Kaulla (1739–1809) in the eighteenth century are examples of influential court Jewesses. While Esther Liebmann also worked successfully on her own for the Prussian king after the death of her second husband Jost in 1702, Chaile Kaulla, like so many exceptional women through the centuries, had the good fortune not only to be gifted but also to be the eldest sibling of much younger brothers. She learned at her father’s side already as a young girl and later ran his business so successfully that her first name became the ancestral name of the whole family. Her husband devoted himself in the traditional way to the study of the Talmud. At the end of the eighteenth century, this was almost anachronistic for their social sphere. After all, the few families of the Jewish upper class were the first to embrace the Christian milieu through education, clothing, and contacts—at least these are the ones we know about the most in this respect. In rural areas and small towns, contact with Christian neighbors was also very close, resulting in the many conflicts on record. There were almost certainly many moments of natural coexistence, although we know very little about them. At the same time, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of the Jewish population lived religiously law-abiding lives well into the eighteenth century. In the premodern era, Sabbath rest, dietary and purity laws, prayers, and holidays defined the day-to-day lives of Jewish men and women, as well as gender relations through the exclusion of women from Hebrew prayers. But here, too, it is important to make a distinction: In poor rural communities, many men were as ignorant of Hebrew as their wives. They simply repeated prayers without knowing their content and likewise relied on Yiddish pious literature. For this reason, the hierarchy between the sexes in the Jewish rural population was probably less pronounced in other areas as well. Both sexes were also devoted to various forms of popular piety—magical thinking, amulets, and so on—just as they existed in the Christian population. The enduring shock waves of the messianic movement of Shabbtai Zwi (1626–76) among European Jewry in the second half of the seventeenth century also suggest a deep-seated need for emotional and individual piety. It is probably no coincidence that Pietism, with its ideal of pious sentimentality, was also gaining ground in the Christian world. We do not know whether this model was as especially attractive to Jewish women as it was to their Christian counterparts. Nonetheless, it can be said that both Sabbatianism and similar later movements—Frankism and Eastern European Hasidism—had both male and female followers.

Among scholars, it is still disputed how far the erosion of rabbinical authority had actually progressed by the time a dynamic was triggered in the middle of the eighteenth century with the (Jewish) Enlightenment that would radically change the lifeworld of German-speaking Jewry. This process, however, clearly began on several levels at once. On the one hand, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the material situation of the minority improved and a small group managed a slow but steady rise to the middle and upper classes of the university and Residenzstädte (cities with noble courts). On the other hand, the boundaries with Christian neighborhoods became more porous and the outward signs of otherness began to disappear among particularly bold men and women. For instance, young men stopped shaving and married women became fond of wearing wigs instead of the traditional headdress. Although this development cannot be quantified, the eighteenth century witnessed an increase in the number of verdicts issued by the rabbinical authorities. The latter took up arms against both sexes—condemning joint visits to taverns by young Jewish and Christian men, as well as visits by Jewish women to Christian homes. When it came to women, stricter standards were often applied. As one tract from 1705 put it: Women must be more discreet than men and must not dress according to their whims and go out dressed like gentiles. And further:

These Jewish women are (first of all) indistinguishable from Christian women, resulting in men sinning when they look at them. Second, they cause hatred among the gentiles when they see that Jews are dressed more nobly than princes. Third, they cause hardship to their husbands by forcing them to buy them clothes that are beyond their means. The obsession with fashion