Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society.

Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society. By Iris Parush (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press. xix plus 340 pp. $29.95).

In 1876, a young Russian Jewish woman named Sarah Nowinsky penned a letter in Hebrew to her grandfather. "Dearest grandfather," she wrote:

   "Thou dost know if thou hast not heard, that the first days have
   fallen and new days have risen to fill their place, in which justice
   and fairness are meted out not to men alone but to women as well, and
   the adage: 'Anyone teaching his daughter Torah is as if he is
   teaching her promiscuity' has tumbled nevermore to rise along with
   all the prejudices and ancient edicts whose prime is long past; and
   the spirit of modernity has seized us too in its wings and demands
   learning and reason from women just as much as from men, and we must
   obey, if we wish to be numbered among the progressives, lest the men
   scorn and ridicule us and lest they nod their heads after us, they
   who hitherto alone plumed themselves on their reason and erudition,
   and if the meaning of my words is clear to you, you will no longer be
   surprised that I know the language of our people; for your
   granddaughter who desires that her dignity be in unison with the
   community of the intellectual men who move with the times, or should
   I rather say: the intellectual women who move with the times" (cited
   in Parush, 211).

Though she herself was particularly articulate, Nowinsky's learning, passion, and ambitions were shared by many young Russian Jewish women of her day. By the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Jewish women in Russia were maskilot [sympathetic with the Haskalah, the modern Jewish Enlightenment movement of the late nineteenth century], literate in the Russian language, educated in secular schools, with access to published matter that exposed them to modern philosophy, politics, and literature.

In Reading Jewish Women, Iris Parush seeks "to describe the role played by women readers in widening the fissures within traditional [Eastern European Jewish] society, and [to draw] attention to the unique contributions women made to the dissemination of the new ways of thought in the society of their time" (Parush, 3). In certain respects Parush succeeds admirably in this goal, offering scholars of Jewish culture, Eastern European society, and gender history a comprehensive look at the way Jewish women were depicted by and asserted themselves into maskilic [Jewish Enlightenment] culture of the day. What is more, she offers a powerful argument about the empowering nature of marginality within Eastern European Jewish society. Parush's study is, however, moored in the rather more literary than social realm, and in certain respects she presents a static view of modern Russian Jewish, and modern Russian Jewish women's cultures.

Parush's most valuable contribution is to offer a vivid picture of the way women's relationship to literacy, language, and reading was represented by maskilot and by their male peers. In so doing, she reexamines central texts of the Haskalah (foremost among them Hebrew-language memoirs and works of literature) from a new perspective, and unearths a number of documents that have heretofore been neglected (or ill treated) by scholars, including the letters of Sarah Nowinsky. In this accomplishment, Parush's work echoes that of other recent scholarship on women and gender in the Eastern European Jewish milieu, which, as a whole, has not only introduced us to new voices and historical figures, but helped us to reimagine the Haskalah and Jewish modernity more generally. (1)

Parush uses sources by and about Jewish women to make a general argument about the place of women, education, and literacy in Eastern European Jewish society. She argues that traditional notions about reading, texts, and gender inadvertently created Enlightened Jewish women. Because Russian Jewish girls were not expected to study Torah (as were Jewish boys), Parush argues, girls' education was less traditional than their male peers. Many girls were schooled in foreign languages and secular texts so that they might serve as effective breadwinners, thereby supporting their more studious husbands and sons. The acquisition of literacy and exposure to secular ways in turn encouraged many Jewish women to be sympathetic with modernization and cultural change. In Parush's words: "an exploration of women's marginalization serves to clarify not only how a society reproduces its social structures by creating marginal spaces, but also how marginal spaces form gaps in these structures--ultimately allowing change to occur" (Parush, xvi).

Alas, the causal links in Parush's chain are not always well documented. While it was indeed an ideal that Jewish boys should study traditional texts and Jewish girls should work to support these erudite labors, in fact economic necessities (as well, no doubt, as personal desire) ensured that this arrangement could not be realized by many, if not most, Russian Jews. What is more, the fact that girls could and did read maskilic texts did not necessarily make them maskilot--one can, after all, read with interest but not conviction. (2)

Perhaps a more important critique is that Parush's argument (and her work as a whole) fails to consider change over time and space. The role and function of reading, the nature of texts available to Eastern European Jews, and the contours of the Haskalah itself all changed considerably as the Jewish Enlightenment unfolded. What is more, the way Jews experienced and shaped the Haskalah, the cultural influences they experienced, the kinds of texts they could acquire, and the relative freedom they had to read and write also varied across the Pale of Settlement and in and beyond the Russian interior. So too did class markedly shape Jewish women's experiences in Eastern Europe (as elsewhere), determining the quantity of freedom, time, opportunity, and reading matter a young woman could possess.

Parush's study can also be criticized for artificially segmenting Jewish women readers of Hebrew, Yiddish, and European languages (what Parush lumps together as "Laaz" or the language of the state, an absurdly simplistic term given the complex linguistic politics of Jews in the modern Russian Empire), treating each in turn as if there was no overlap between them. Nineteenth-century Russian Jewish women, like Jewish men, were often literate in more than one language, and they displayed little of the political allegiance toward language more properly identified with the inter-war period.

These criticisms notwithstanding, Parush's study is a welcome addition to scholarship on the Haskalah and Eastern European Jewish society more generally. It offers a welcome counterpoint to the many works that assume the Haskalah was experienced by and of concern to men alone. And it introduces the reader to countless voices like that of Sarah Nowinsky, whose passion for language, and for change, is magnetic.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein

University of Washington, Seattle

ENDNOTES

1. See, among other works, Tovah Cohen, "Reality and Its Refraction in Descriptions of Women in Haskalah Fiction," in Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin eds., New Perspectives on the Haskalah (London, 2001) and "Min ha-tehum ha-prati el ha-tehum ha-tzibori: Kitvei maskilot ivriyot ba-me'ah ha-tsha esreh" (From the Private Sphere into the Public Sphere: The Works of Hebrew Maskilot of the Nineteenth Century), in Avner Holtzman and Shmuel Feiner (eds.), Yerushalayim shebe-Lita: Sever ha-yovel le-Sh. Werses (Jerusalem of Lithuania: Sh. Werses Jubilee Volume), (Jerusalem, 2002); Carole B. Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts, Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia (Cincinnati, 2000); Shmuel Feiner, "Ha-ishah ha-yehudit ha-modernit: mikreh mivhan be-yahasei ha-haskalah ve-hamodernah" (The Modern Jewish Woman: A Test-Case in the Relationship between Haskalah and Modernity), in Israel Bartal and Yeshayahu Gafni (eds.,) Eros eirosin veisorin: Miniyut ve-mishpahah be-historiyah (Sexuality and Family in History) (Jerusalem, 1998); Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley, 1997); Stampfer, Shaul. "Gender Differentiation and Education of the Jewish Woman in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe." Polin 7 (1994): 63-87 and "What Did 'Knowing Hebrew' Mean in Eastern Europe?" In Hebrew in Ashkenaz, edited by Lewis Gilnert, (New York, 1993).

2. For a more extended critique of Parush's arguments along these lines, see: Tovah Cohen, "'Information about women is necessarily information about men': On Iris Parush's Reading Jewish Women," Journal of Israeli History (2001), 22/1: 169-191.