JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

feminism
gel of the Night,” 1997), Un Itst Ikh Bin Dayn Nign (“And Now
I Am Your Melody,” 1998), and Shabesdike Shvebelekh (“Sabbath
Matches,” 2003).
Bibliography: A. Starck, “Interview with Mikhoel Felsenbaum,”
in: The Mendele Review (Feb. 15, 2004); idem, “A Critical Study
of Mikhoel Felsenbaum’s ‘Shabesdike shvebelekh,’” ibid. (shakti.
trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmrarc.htm); idem, “Shabesdike Shvebelekh: A
Postmodernist Novel by Mikhoel Felsenbaum,” in: J. Sherman (ed.),
Yiddish after the Holocaust (2004), 300–18; V. Tchernin, in: Shabesdike
Shvebelekh (2003), 9–12.
[Astrid Starck (2nd ed.)]
FEMINISM, both a political movement seeking social equities
for women and an ideological movement analyzing a
wide range of phenomena in terms of gender politics. Jewish
feminism in the modern era has played a significant and
transformative role in virtually every area of Jewish religious,
social, and intellectual life.
Jewish Feminism and its Impact Prior to the 1960s
Although modern Jewish feminist movements were inspired
in large measure by Enlightenment claims regarding human
equality and dignity, proto-feminist efforts to raise women’s
social and religious position can be found in many Jewish
communities prior to the 19th century. Tracing shifts in gender
ideology and in women’s actual status is difficult, however,
because of the paucity of sources written by women prior to
the 17th-century memoir by *Glueckel of Hameln. References
to women in male-authored documents, particularly responsa
literature and legal documents, give some evidence of sporadic
agitations for change in women’s status in Jewish communal
life and religious life. For example, numerous sources indicate
that in Germany and France between 1000 and 1300, a time
of high economic and social status for Jewish women, women
demanded increased involvement in religious life, including
the voluntary assumption of commandments from which they
were exempt in talmudic Judaism (Grossman).
Critical evaluation of the position of women within Judaism
also appears as part of Christian traditions of anti-Judaism.
In the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus, an anthology of 12th- and 13thcentury
Jewish-Christian polemic in northern France and
Germany, Christians criticized Jews for not including women
within the covenant: “We baptize both males and females and
in that way we accept our faith, but in your case only men
and not women can be circumcised.” In the Juden Buchlein
(1519), Victor von Karben mocks the refusal of Jews to include
women in a prayer quorum. This critique continued in the
notorious anti-Jewish text, Johann Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes
Judentum (1700), and women’s inferior status within Judaism
became a major theme among German (and some American)
Protestant (and some Catholic) theologians in the 19th and
early 20th centuries (J. Plaskow, K. von Kellenbach, S. Heschel).
The inferior status of women within Judaism was presented
in order to denigrate Judaism as “Oriental” and “primitive”
and to challenge whether Jews should be accorded emancipation
into European society. Jewish women’s inferiority was
also cited in Christian theological writings to argue that Jesus
treated women as equals whereas other rabbis of his day did
not, a claim with little historical grounding. Jewish apologetic
responses to such charges began in 19th-century Germany with
arguments that Judaism honors and elevates women’s status
in the home and community by exempting them from the religious
obligations of study and public prayer incumbent on
men. The nature of these charges and counter-charges made it
difficult to articulate Jewish feminist criticisms of sexism.
Jewish enlightenment and, later, socialist critics of Jewish
communal and religious structures often fought for women’s
rights, but feminists did not always ally themselves with secularism
and against religion as a means to improve women’s
status. With modern pressures to reshape both gender roles
and the status of minority groups, Jewish women had to await
emancipation as both Jews and as women to enter secular society.
While Jews were permitted entry into German universities
in the early 19th century, women were excluded until the 1890s.
At the same time, some European feminist organizations did
not admit Jews. Rather, early efforts at redressing gender imbalance
attempted to enhance women’s educational opportunities
and position within the Jewish community, creating
social service and charitable organizations run by women.
The *Juedischer Frauenbund (Jewish Women’s Organization)
was founded in Germany in 1904 by Bertha *Pappenheim and
strove to win voting rights for women within Jewish communal
affairs. Within the United States, Rebecca *Gratz founded
the 19th-century Sunday school movement that created new
roles for women in Jewish education. The tradition of Jewish
women’s *salons was significant not only as a new, neutral
space for Christians and Jews to meet, but as an emerging
culture of conversation and reflection on gender and Jewish
identity. Indeed, Jewish women intellectuals, from the 18th to
the 20th centuries, frequently found greater resonance within
Christian society, and were sometimes only reluctantly admitted
to Jewish intellectual circles; Martin *Buber, for example,
initially did not want to admit women to the Juedisches
Lehrhaus, the adult Jewish educational center he founded in
Frankfurt am Main in 1920 (Friedman).
Changes in women’s status within the synagogue came
slowly. In mid-19th century Germany, teenage girls were given
ceremonies of *confirmation along with boys in Reform congregations,
similar to ceremonies prevalent in churches, but
women still sat separately from men in the synagogue. Mixed
seating in the synagogue was first introduced in the United
States in 1851 in Albany, New York, and in 1854 at Temple
Emanu-El in New York City. It became common in the United
States after 1869 when many new post-Civil War synagogues
opened but did not spread to European Reform synagogues
until much later and then only tentatively (Goldman).
Conversely, modernity also saw the distinct spheres of
women’s traditional expressions of Judaism minimized or
eliminated by non-Orthodox Jews, such as *mikveh observance
(immersion in the ritual bath following menstruation
and childbirth), which declined radically in the modern
752 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6