Sara Levy, a fascinating woman by all accounts, was for many years a rather minor figure in historical writing. Only in recent decades has her image gradually emerged. Scholars who include Sara Levy in their accounts typically present her as part of a remarkable group of educated Jewish women who were influenced by secularizing trends and led an acculturated lifestyle, deeply involved in the intellectual, cultural and social scene of their time. The prevalent assumption is that, with few exceptions, these women's acculturation came at the expense of their identification with Judaism: with their increasing participation in European culture and their deepening integration into German society, they purportedly became more and more estranged from the Jewish world.

In this chapter, I delve more deeply into the case of Sara Levy, examining untapped sources and reassessing her affiliation to this group of women. My goal is to reconsider to what extent she was an intrinsic part of this circle— how similar were her lifestyle and her way of thinking and acting to that of other women in this group. Examining the distinctive features of her life in comparison with the whole group yields, I believe, interesting results. It reveals the unexpectedly strong Jewish identity of this acculturated woman and illuminates the ways in which she maintained a solid bond with the Jewish community while integrating into German society and culture. Levy's case as depicted below provides a corrective not only to the strong emphasis often placed on the acculturation of this generation of modernizing women but also to the heavy attention given to the domestic sphere, especially when discussing manifestations of Jewishness among acculturating women in Germany. A particular aspect of Levy's obstinate allegiance to Judaism that emerges from the sources explored in this chapter is that hers was not merely a privatized Jewishness, confined to practices carried out at home, but involved aspects of a more public character. Born in Berlin in 1761 to the wealthy Itzig family, Sara Levy has been, for historians, exceptional indeed even at first sight as one of the few salonnières who remained within the Jewish community.

SOCIABILITY AND CONVERSATION were central features of eighteenth-century life among the educated classes and were closely connected with Enlightenment culture. Though not all forms of sociability practised in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be attributed to the Enlightenment or associated with enlightened goals—many, indeed, perpetuated and elaborated earlier practices—sociable communication both received a great boost from the Enlightenment and constituted one of its defining attributes. The scientistic character traditionally ascribed to the Enlightenment, with its central image of the enlightened intellectual as a detached, solitary observer of the universe committed to the search for objective knowledge, has been replaced in research on this era by an image of the Enlightenment as a world of discourse and of enlightened men and women as sociable individuals engaged in conversational exchange.

The importance accorded to interpersonal communication in the eighteenth century is reflected in the remarkable proliferation across Europe, including the German lands, of arenas in which people could socialize, enabling individuals of different ranks and backgrounds to intermingle. The array of discursive and cultural spaces that evolved during the Enlighten - ment to facilitate the circulation of ideas and opinions ranged from informal public places to institutionalized societies, encompassing coffee-houses, reading societies, learned academies, Masonic lodges, and—as discussed in the previous chapter—entire spa towns.

Like many of their contemporaries, modernizing Jews in Germany endorsed the significance of sociability as a factor that could contribute to personal and social improvement, and sought to participate in a variety of social contexts. Sociability and conversational culture were integral to the lives of the Jewish women in Berlin at the heart of this study, and they assiduously employed the means of communication available to them—helping, indeed, to shape and transform some of them. Previous chapters have shown how these women participated in the circulation of ideas among a cultured European public through reading, writing, and publishing, and how they implemented ideals of sociability and communication by exchanging letters and visiting the spas. This chapter will focus on another practice that served the same ends—the gatherings that took place in private homes, providing a setting for social interaction and cultural exchange among themselves, with other members of the Jewish community, and, significantly, with non-Jews.

DRESSED IN AN ELEGANT COSTUME and accompanied by her friends Esther Gad and Friederike Unzelmann, Fradchen Liebmann arrived at the Berlin opera house one evening in mid-February 1801 to attend a carnivalesque festivity which was taking place there. It was not the first time that Liebmann had attended a Redoute, the city's by then traditional masquerade ball. The previous year she had attended this exclusive celebration accompanied by Rahel Levin—who was absent from the 1801 Redoute as she was away in Paris. With marked self-confidence Liebmann mingled with non-Jewish guests and established contact with some strangers, amazing new acquaintances with her knowledge of several languages, including Italian and English. Her experience at the ball, she noted later, gave her great pleasure.

Earlier that month, Liebmann had attended an event celebrated in a quite different social circle: the Judenball, a ball organized by members of the Jewish community. At that time Liebmann was leading an active social life and cultivating numerous acquaintanceships in mixed society, and her ties to Jewish circles were becoming looser. Indeed, her decision to attend the Jewish ball derived precisely from a wish to maintain her connections with the members of her family and her religion: she insisted on attending the Jewish celebration ‘just so as not to exclude myself, since this winter there were so many picnics and dancing parties in our family in which I never participated, and at this ball I delivered these commitments en masse’. Somewhat to her surprise, she enjoyed the Jewish ball, even though her report on this event lacks the enthusiasm and cheerfulness that characterized the description of her experiences at the non-Jewish celebration.

Beyond the conclusions that may be drawn from this short account about the lifestyle of well-to-do Berlin Jews, which clearly included recreational pastimes such as family outings and dances which would not be typically identified with a traditional lifestyle, it is interesting to note the ambivalent attitude of an acculturated woman such as Fradchen Liebmann towards Jewish society—even its modern wing, to which her relatives belonged.

THE TWO PRECEDING CHAPTERS on letter-writing and reading have emphasized the active participation of enlightened Jewish women around 1800 in the field of literature as enthusiastic though critical readers of contemporary literary products. Their involvement with literature, however, was not confined to their consumption of written texts: it also included the process of creation, as authors of their own works. This chapter examines the literary activity of some of these women, discussing their attitudes towards authorship and what the crucial decision to publish their writings meant in the context of their time.

As female authors, these Jewish women of letters were part of a broader phenomenon in contemporary Europe. Throughout the eighteenth century and especially towards its end, a female writing culture was developing simultaneously in various lands. Although the pace and nature of this literary expansion differed from place to place, depending on specific local conditions, countries including Germany, France, and England all saw a dramatic increase in the number of women active in the field of literature—parallel, to be sure, to an analogous proliferation of male authors. Writing retrospectively, the author and feminist thinker Virginia Woolf noted and highlighted the entrance of women into the world of letters at that time, which she perceived as a momentous event of far-reaching consequences for modern human history. ‘Towards the end of the eighteenth century’, she wrote, ‘a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.’ Although Woolf was referring to the English context, her claim regarding women's growing participation in the book market is valid for other places in Europe as well. In Germany, too, women joined the ranks of writers in ever-growing numbers with their varied products, experimenting with different cultural and literary trends and adopting new themes and techniques.

For a long time this increased literary activity of women around 1800, like much of women's literary contribution in the past, remained largely hidden. Excluded from the literary canon dominated by a male hegemony, works by women authors in general were consistently forgotten by the reading public and by scholars at large. It is only in recent decades that many neglected women writers have been rediscovered and their works reprinted and subjected to new interpretations.

THE MANY LETTERS left behind by Jewish women who lived in Berlin at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth constitute, as we have seen, an important historical source for research into Jewish acculturation in Germany at the beginning of the modern era. They contain a great deal of information about the far-reaching social and cultural changes that occurred in their lives and in the lives of the German Jewish urban bourgeoisie during those crucial years of Jewish modernization. They also contain information on hitherto unexamined aspects of the process by which these women became integrated into non-Jewish European culture and society. One of the phenomena addressed in these sources that has not yet received sufficient attention is the practice of visiting spas.

Their letters tell us that these women often chose to spend the summer months at one of the spa centres of central Europe. These inland watering places, based around springs of mineral water reputed to have therapeutic properties, gained in popularity during the eighteenth century, especially in the latter decades, and began to attract an increasingly diverse clientele among the population in German lands, notably within the educated and the property-owning classes. As we will see, the spas offered many advantages alongside their original function as places of healing and recuperation: the semi-urban way of life which developed in these resorts over the course of the eighteenth century offered visitors a wide array of pastimes and enjoyments such as musical and theatrical performances, parties, and walks along the main boulevards and in more rural surroundings. For Jewish women in particular, the unique, liberated atmosphere of the spas offered a space in which they could widen their circle of acquaintances, integrate themselves into non-Jewish society, and take an active part in discussions on cultural and other issues. Thus the annual visit to one or more spas, which became a notable feature of bourgeois life, constituted an important component in the acculturation of the modernizing Jewish women discussed in this book. Visits to the spas indicated the adoption of modern concepts and values, such as the setting aside of a certain period in the year as dedicated to vacation and recuperation, to a change in daily routine, and to the care of body and soul.

A SALIENT FEATURE emerging from the personal testimonies left by the enlightened Jewish women discussed in this study is the prominent place of reading in their lives. These women had at their disposal not only the indispensable skill of literacy, shared by the ever-growing reading public across Europe, but also—thanks to the relative financial comfort which allowed most of these women to delegate housework to others—the necessary spare time to use it, and in most cases no children of their own to make additional demands on their time and attention. Thus they were able to make read ing a primary activity to which they dedicated a significant amount of time and effort.

An illustrative account of real craving for books—unthinkable in earlier centuries, especially among women—may be found in Henriette Herz’s memoirs. Reading figures as one of the central motives she chose to emphasize when recounting the events of her life, from her childhood until well into adulthood. In the autobiographical text which she started to compose in 1823 and never completed, Henriette typically depicted herself as a compulsive reader. ‘I stopped playing at a very early age, and earlier than might have been good for me, I turned to reading.’ Whenever other activities kept her away from books during the weekdays, she would make up for it on Saturdays and Sundays, and ‘with such speed and assiduity that in one day I could read through several parts of a novel and would constantly run to the lending library not far from our house to pick up more books’.

This urge to read did not wane as the years went by; reading continued to play a central role in her adult life, as it did in the lives of other enlightened Jewish women. It served as a source of knowledge no less than as a means of entertainment, and simultaneously fulfilled an important social function, being a prerequisite for social interaction in the modern world, the basis for cultured conversation, and a recurrent theme in learned correspondence.

JEWISH WOMEN IN THE READING PUBLIC—A REVOLUTION?

Henriette Herz's depiction of her intensive engagement with reading raises questions regarding the singularity of this phenomenon in the history of Jewish women.

BY LISTENING attentively to female voices rather than focusing exclusively on male historical sources, it has been possible to show that the Jewish women discussed in this study were neither simple bystanders in the enlightened world of their time nor yet mere mediators who facilitated the cultural activity of men (the main role often attributed to the salonnieres). The ample evidence presented clearly positions these women as both agents of culture and creators of culture: as intellectuals in their own right. Experiencing and expressing a nascent feminist consciousness, they actively opposed attempts to silence women, rejected demands for their selfabnegation, and contested the denial of independent female thought, striving instead to constitute themselves and other women as autonomous human beings. They joined the expanding public sphere that was developing in Europe, at times through formal literary activity, but also through less conspicuous practices such as conversation and letter-writing. They internalized ideas and values from the world of the Enlightenment, such as the acquisition of knowledge, the pursuit of happiness, the desire for self-improvement, and the critical stance, which in their case (as in that of other contemporary women) encouraged a feminist outlook. It is true that central currents of Enlightenment thought fostered anti-feminist ideas, helping to perpetuate women's subordinated position in society and culture by endorsing the ageold patriarchal tradition with modern claims; but there were other strands of Enlightenment thought that encouraged feminist positions and aspirations. We have seen how these Jewish women turned their own critical eyes on the social, cultural, and at times political reality around them, and drew on basic principles of the Enlightenment to support their claim to the right to participate, as women, in the advancement of public reason. In this spirit they applied gender criticism to the dominant discourse, calling into question the social and cultural norms that constrained women's lives, scrutinizing even the patriarchal institution of marriage, in extreme cases to the point of undermining its foundations. Although, as noted in the Introduction, the Enlightenment was not the only influence on the cultural world of these women, it is revealed as a vital element in understanding their thought and actions.

THIS study explores the activities of a fascinating group of Jewish women who lived in Berlin at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. They were among the first in Ashkenazi society to undergo an accelerated process of modernization, take an active part in European culture, and adopt early feminist positions on the role of women in society and culture. Based on the numerous sources they left behind— mainly personal letters, but also publications and other writings—this book describes various aspects of their involvement in the intellectual, cultural, and social scene of the time and discusses their thought, which, I shall argue, was nurtured in a crucial way by the Enlightenment.

The women portrayed in this book were all born in what were then German lands, most of them in Berlin, in the 1760s and 1770s. A few, such as Rahel Levin, Dorothea Mendelssohn, and Henriette Herz, are familiar figures in Jewish history, primarily as leaders of the Jewish salons in Berlin; others, including Fradchen Liebmann, Sara and Marianne Meyer, Henriette Mendelssohn, and Esther Gad, are less well known, even though they belonged to the same social circles. Though never formally associated as a group, they were united by ties of friendship, a common background, and similar patterns of acculturation—namely, radical assimilation, eventually to the point of conversion and, for some, marriage to non-Jews. Raised in families belonging to the Jewish economic and intellectual elite that came to prominence in Berlin in the last third of the eighteenth century, although it had been visible in this and other European cities for some time, these young women were exposed to non-Jewish culture and society from their earliest years. Their families were influenced by secularizing trends in their surroundings and led an acculturated lifestyle, expressed variously in the abandonment of a distinctively Jewish external appearance, a gradual transition in both spoken and written language use from Yiddish to High German, regular visits to concerts and the theatre, and increased laxity in religious observance. Children of both sexes in these wealthy families were given a largely private education, not only in Jewish matters—in which boys typically received a more thorough grounding, girls a rather superficial introduction— but also in secular fields.

ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN outcomes of the age of Enlightenment for Jews in central and western Europe was the public debate that developed on the issue of civil emancipation towards the end of the eighteenth century. Seemingly contradictory ideas about the Jews that had gained currency following the religious wars of the seventeenth century determined the framework in which their situation was analysed and in which the granting of civil rights was demanded. On the one hand, the principle of tolerance required that an effort be made to improve the Jews’ civil status; on the other hand, the prevalent unfavourable image of the Jews as a purportedly morally defective nation required that this effort be matched by steps to bring about their moral regeneration. This approach was supported by the Prussian bureaucrat Christian Wilhelm von Dohm in his famous and influential book of 1781, Uber die burgerliche Verbesserung der Juden. This treatise prompted a public discussion on the question of Jewish emancipation in the German lands (and beyond), and shaped the debate on the subject over the next hundred years.

Among those who joined the debate over the civil status of the Jews in the wake of Dohm's book were not only German intellectuals and bureaucrats but also the maskilim. From the early 1780s, and especially after the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, when hopes of achieving civil rights intensified with the crowning of a new Prussian king, the maskilim drafted petitions and published reform proposals addressed on the one hand to fellow Jews and on the other hand to policy-makers. To their Jewish brethren they issued exhortations to prepare themselves for emancipation by abandoning what they perceived as misguided customs and prejudices and improving their moral character. From Christian rulers they asked for the exercise of the enlightened ideals of tolerance and equality in recognition of Jews as individuals worthy of the same rights and obligations as Christian citizens, and in redress of the historical injustice which had consigned the Jews to their current exclusion from civil and political society.

IN MARCH 1793 Rahel Levin received an excited letter from her friend David Veit in the city of Gotha. The reason he was so thrilled was clear: carrying a letter of recommendation from the writer Karl Philipp Moritz, and accompanied by his uncle, the Berlin banker Simon Veit, the Jewish medical student had been received very politely by the celebrated poet, writer, and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at his residence in Weimar. As the young Veit indicated in his letter to Levin, with whom he had established a close friendship in the years he had spent in the Prussian capital Berlin, in the course of his journey he had also had audiences with other famous men of letters: ‘I really saw them all, and engaged in quite extensive conversations with each one of them—Goethe, Wieland, Herder.’ Veit described in meticulous detail the short visits he had paid to these distinguished intellectuals and his impressions of each of them. His correspondent—the eldest child of Levin Marcus, a wealthy banker and jewellery dealer, and his third wife, Chaie—had no difficulty in recognizing the individuals he described, even though she had never met them face to face. Still only in her early twenties, she already displayed an impressive familiarity with the writings of these authors, to the point of being able to analyse their individual attributes. Sharing the contents of the letter with members of her family and friends, including ‘Mrs Veit’—Dorothea Mendelssohn, who was married to David Veit's uncle Simon, mentioned above—Rahel avidly read every word written by her friend about these luminaries of German culture, from his descriptions of their physique and dress to their utterances and their attitude towards their guests. Bitterly regretting that her woman's eyes were forbidden to enjoy these exciting sights and were expected to find satisfaction in ‘Berlin’s pavement’ only, she asked him to go on sharing with her the experiences of his journey.

Even in that first letter (of those preserved) from the many exchanged between Rahel Levin and David Veit, it is apparent that the initial impression of a man who sees, learns, knows, and transmits his knowledge to a woman who listens passively and receptively is an illusion.