The acculturation of nineteenth-century Jews, especially in western and central Europe and the United States, to the language, dress, and mores of the Gentile middle classes of their surroundings constituted a break (at first, nonideological) with a traditional Jewish mentality that had defined the Gentile as wholly Other. It also reflected an eagerness of the Jewish elites and then the masses to take advantage of the new economic, social, and cultural opportunities made available by Enlightenment humanism and the expansion of political rights. The process of assimilation also bespoke a new openness on the part of European and American elites to Jews as potential legal and social equals. As a process, then, assimilation may be divided into two components: acculturation, which depends on the behavior of the minority, and integration, which demands changed attitudes and behavior on the part of members of minority and majority alike.
As a project, assimilation was the official response of Jewish communal leaders in both Europe and the United States to emancipation and was expressed in communal policy. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, emancipation was placed on the general public agenda, but it took more than a century for the Jews of the various western and central European countries as well as the United States to secure fully equal political rights. (The vast majority of European Jews, those living in the Russian Empire, were not accorded equal citizenship until the 1917 Russian Revolution, and as we shall see in the following chapter, the dynamics of assimilation were quite different there.) Because of the intense interest in the “Jewish question” and particularly the debates surrounding the first emancipation of Jews in France during the French Revolution, Jewish leaders understood that citizenship was conferred with the explicit expectation that Jews would become like their fellow countrymen. Both those who favored and those who opposed Jewish emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century looked askance at contemporary evidence of Jewish economic and cultural particularity, which they described as moral and cultural debasement. Opponents of emancipation saw this particularity as inherent in Judaism or in the Jews. Emancipation should be deferred until Jews had changed, they argued. Proponents of Jewish emancipation, on the other hand, predicted that emancipation would lead to a thoroughgoing improvement in Jewish behavior because the alleged defects of the Jews, such as their superstitiousness and their dishonesty, resulted from persecution. Bring an end to persecution and Jewish behavior would automatically be transformed, they argued. As one writer of the French Enlightenment confidently put it in 1788, “we can make of the Jews what we want them to become.”6 With the cessation of legal discrimination and of restrictions on Jewish economic activity and the elimination of Jewish communal autonomy and self-government, the Jews would assimilate to their neighbors, differing from them only in the matter of their creed.
Without exception Jews of western and central Europe and the United States publicly accepted emancipation and welcomed the possibilities it offered, including opportunities for acculturation and social integration. One French Jewish communal leader, for example, took the occasion of the emancipation decree of 1791 to call upon his fellow Jews to help realize an idyllic future of social harmony, in part by sending their children to public schools: “Through this union in the schools, our children, as well as those of our fellow citizens, will note from their tender youth that neither opinion nor religious difference prevents fraternal love.”7 For the most part, Jewish voices dissenting from this expectation of the easy attainment of fraternity would not be heard until the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century the male Jewish elites who controlled Jewish communal institutions, and who were generally recruited from among the prosperous and the acculturated, exhorted their less upwardly mobile constituents to demonstrate either that the faith of the proponents of emancipation had not been misplaced (in the case where civic rights had already been granted) or that the Jews were now worthy of equal rights (in the numerous cases where emancipation had been partial or deferred).
Yet the Jewish project of assimilation differed somewhat from the Enlightenment version. Although Jewish spokesmen forecast a harmonious future of equality, they did not intend to disappear as a recognizable group into a homogeneous national society. In that respect they dissented from the hopes of many Gentile proponents of Jewish emancipation. As the historian Uriel Tal (and others subsequently) has pointed out, Jewish leaders defined the goals of assimilation as the acculturation and social integration of the Jews, ideally into the bourgeoisie, along with the retention of some form of Jewish identity based upon a shared religious culture and memory.8 They encouraged acculturation and the shedding of external markers of Jewishness but supported religious, educational, and philanthropic institutions that would maintain a sense of Jewish particularism within the larger society. Denying the possibility of conflict between religious and civic obligations, they also presumed that successful completion of this project of assimilation would eliminate the last vestiges of social prejudice against Jews.
The historiography of modern Jewry has documented the relatively rapid acculturation of the Jews of nineteenth-century western and central Europe and the United States along with their impressive upward social mobility. I will begin my exploration of the interplay of gender and assimilation by addressing the experience of these Western Jews because they became the model, for good and bad, of assimilation. They also defined the problems associated with both the process and the project of assimilation. To be sure, village and small-town Jews in western and central Europe initially resisted assimilation and maintained their traditional religious and economic patterns for several generations after the promise or reality of emancipation had transformed the culture and socioeconomic structure of their more urbanized kin. Local political and social contexts shaped a multiplicity of social and cultural patterns even among Jews of the West, who had been most affected by Enlightenment and emancipation. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the majority of western and central European and American Jews were city dwellers, assimilated in language and comportment into the local middle classes and succeeding as players in the capitalist economy. In the German states, for example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jews were poorer than their fellow countrymen, paying a disproportionately low share of taxes; by the end of the century, their higher tax contributions indicate they were more prosperous than other Germans.9 Taking advantage of educational opportunities, impressive numbers of Jewish men became doctors and lawyers. And, as is well known, in such major European centers as Paris, Berlin, and especially Vienna, Jews exerted a considerable influence as creators, critics, and consumers of high culture. Middle-class Jews thronged the concert halls and art galleries and regularly purchased the liberal newspapers, among whose editors and writers Jews figured prominently.10 The assimilation of Jews in Western societies in the past two centuries and the forging of a modern Jewish identity cannot be separated from the middle-class context in which these processes were embedded.
Jewish women assimilated along with their male kin, but they did so in different frameworks. The examination of women’s experiences reveals how gender shapes the process of assimilation. In the nineteenth century in western and central Europe and in the United States, whose Jewish population then derived primarily from central Europe, Jewish women’s gender limited their assimilation by confining them, like other middle-class women, to the domestic scene and thereby restricting their opportunities for education and participation in the public realm of economy and civic life. Unlike their brothers and husbands, middle-class Jewish women in Western societies confronted neither the workplace nor, until the twentieth century, the university. Because their social life occurred within their domestic context and the religiously segmented philanthropic associations considered appropriate for women of their class, they initially had fewer contacts with non-Jews and experienced fewer external challenges to their childhood culture than did Jewish men.11 Although the twentieth century offered new educational and employment opportunities for women, gender