From Anglo-First-Wave towards American Second-Wave Jewish Feminism: Negotiating with Jewish Feminist Theology and its Communities in the Writing of Amy Levy 9781463229450

Citation preview

From Anglo-First-Wave towards American Second-Wave Jewish Feminism

Judaism in Context

9

Judaism in Context contains monographs and edited collections focusing on the relations between Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture and other peoples, religions, and cultures among whom Jews have lived and flourished.

From Anglo-First-Wave towards American Second-Wave Jewish Feminism

Negotiating with Jewish Feminist Theology and its Communities in the Writing of Amy Levy

Luke Devine

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34 2010

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2010 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. 2010

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ISBN 978-1-61719-915-8

ISSN 1935-6978

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Devine, Luke. From Anglo-first-wave towards American second-wave Jewish feminism: negotiating with Jewish feminist theology and its communities in the writing of Amy Levy / by Luke Devine. p. cm. -- (Judaism in context ; v. 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Feminism--Religious aspects--Judaism. 2. Feminism--England--History. 3. Feminism--United States--History. 4. Levy, Amy, 1861-1889. 5. Authors, English--19th century--Biography. 6. Women in Judaism. 7. Jewish women--England. 8. Jewish women--United States. 9. Spirituality--Judaism. 10. Jewish women--Religious life. I. Title. BM729.W6D48 2010 296.3082'0942--dc22 2010039218

Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents.....................................................................................v Preface......................................................................................................vii Acknowledgments ...................................................................................ix From Anglo-First-Wave to American Second-Wave Jewish Feminism: Introduction..................................................................1 1 Amy Levy: Short Biography, Historiography, and Overview of Jewish Feminist Theology.....................................21 2 “A Prayer,” Midrash, and Second-Wave Jewish Feminist Spirituality and Theological Discourse.......................................63 3 Amy Levy’s Midrashic Poetry: “A Greek Girl” and “Magdalen”.....................................................................................97 4 Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs, Proto-Feminism, and Reform Judaism..........................................................................................137 5 Messianic Redemption, the Book of Judith, and the Megillah in Reuben Sachs................................................................171 From Anglo-First-Wave towards Third-Wave Jewish-Feminism: Conclusion....................................................................................195 Glossary .................................................................................................217 Bibliography ..........................................................................................223 Index.......................................................................................................261

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PREFACE As an undergraduate at the University of Gloucestershire, England, nearly six years ago, I came across the name Amy Levy while trawling the journals for articles on nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewry. I did not have time to read any further, but the title Reuben Sachs became imprinted on my psyche. Several months later I was a postgraduate at the University of Southampton. I had barely the money to enjoy a social life and spent most of my hours in the Parkes Library investigating the dusty shelves, and again, that name, Reuben Sachs, confronted me. Taking the opportunity to read the book, I was literally mesmerized. At first, I assumed, this novel was surely a work of anti-Semitism, but, I asked myself, why the idealization of Sephardic Jewry? Why the lionization of the beautiful heroine, Judith Quixano? I consigned myself to investigate further. Within days I was reading, and re-reading, Levy’s poetry, her other novels, such as Romance of a Shop, Miss Meridith, and again and again, Reuben Sachs. As an academic, I then turned to the latest historiography, thirsty for answers. To my surprise, the secondary literature did not confirm my own preliminary opinions, and I found myself concluding: “this is not the Amy Levy I know.” Indeed, the extant historiography said nothing of the influence of classical German Reformism, and even assumed Levy to be an atheist. In some ways I agreed, but, I reflected, was Levy an atheist, or merely unable to locate the divine presence in the religious institutions available to her in the Victorian Anglo-Jewish community (not so much atheist, rather, alienated)? Having read Levy’s poetry in detail, I was bemused as to why the recent scholarship neglected to explore Levy’s Jewish theological aspirations, and concerned that successive studies were dismissing her latent spirituality, even to the extent that Levy’s religiosity has been dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant. Unfortunately, however, I could not devote my time to the matter, as I was in the vii

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middle of a dissertation on Jewish ritual murder in mediaeval England. However, barely one year on, I was back at the University of Gloucestershire studying Levy as part of a Ph.D. thesis, which also focused on the founder of Liberal Judaism in England; no, not Claude Montefiore, rather, Lily Montagu. Being lucky enough to work with Melissa Raphael, I was soon enthusiastically reading the classic Jewish feminist texts by authors such as Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, and Marcia Falk, to name but a few. Raphael immediately suggested that Amy Levy’s writing was less anti-Judaic, and perhaps more inflected by German Reformism, than has been assumed, vindicating my earlier assumptions. Finally, I felt able to do justice to Levy’s biography, and to provide a much needed corrective to the historiography unable to make the link between Levy’s underlying spirituality and engagement with the Jewish tradition, and her endorsement of the protofeminist pledges of early German Reformism. Moreover, with Raphael’s expertise I was able to explore the Jewish theological dimensions to Levy’s poetry, and to make the conceptual link with Second-Wave Jewish feminism. Having finished the Ph.D., I began the process of rewriting and re-focusing my ideas into this book. Negotiating with Jewish Feminist Theology and its Communities in the Writing of Amy Levy is the result of my research of the last five years, but academia aside; I have never lost sight, on a personal level, of the value of Levy’s poetry. Indeed, as another soul who paces the midnight hours, I still read poems such as “The Promise of Sleep,” or “At A Dinner Party,” and am emotionally stirred; just as when I read “A London Plane-Tree,” I am looking for the Jewish subtexts, and when I read “A Wall Flower”: “To move unto your motion, Love were sweet; / My spirit rises to the music’s beat– / But, ah, the leaden demon in my feet,” I will always smile (see the bibliography for references). Indeed, identifying myself as an atheist for many years, having written this book, and spent endless days and nights researching Amy Levy, I now ask myself: “am I an atheist, or merely alienated”? Luke Devine Worcester, England August, 2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although I am able, as the author, to take credit for this book, it would not have been possible without the many people who have supported me through the process. Particular gratitude goes to Professor Melissa Raphael, of the University of Gloucestershire, England. Her friendship, advice, and encouragement, as well as her technical expertise and depth of knowledge concerning Jewish feminist theology, have been both invaluable and inspirational. My thanks also go to Melanie Ilic, Neil Armstrong, and Jason Lecureux; the latter being a wellspring of information on the Gospels and Christian theology. I must additionally thank Nadia Valman, who has written extensively on Amy Levy, particularly with regard to her advice on Anglo-Jewish women’s writing, Levy’s pessimism, and her alleged atheism. Gratitude must also go to Katie Stott at Gorgias, the University of Southampton’s Parkes Library for the continued use of their facilities and collections, and the archivist of the Amy Levy Private Collection (United Kingdom). Finally, this book is dedicated to Georgie Taylor.

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FROM ANGLO-FIRST-WAVE TO AMERICAN SECOND-WAVE JEWISH FEMINISM: INTRODUCTION Recently, English literary historians, Anglo-Jewish historians, and scholars of Victorian studies have unearthed the corpus of the Anglo-Jewish proto-feminist novelist, essayist, and poet Amy Levy.1 Her rediscovery, which began in the early-1980s, follows the latetwentieth-century move to publish the work of obscure fin-de-siècle women writers;2 the development of Jewish feminist studies and its aim to recover “herstory”: the lives and contributions of “hidden” Jewish women, and the emergence of Anglo-Jewish literary criticism.3 Despite the fact that studies on Levy are perhaps still em1 Levy may not have identified herself such, as the term “feminist” was not coined until the 1890s. However, retrospectively her activism on behalf of Jewish women warrants the label “feminist.” That late-Victorian women writers were forgotten until recently is widely accepted (Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 283 n1. See Gaye Tuckman and Nina Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 2 Virago Press have, for example, sought to publish obscure Jewish women writers. Likewise, the “Half-Empty Bookcase” has attempted to recover previously neglected Jewish books, the name being a metaphor for the books women might have published. 3 I am aware that terms such as “Jewish” and “feminist” are both unnuanced and general, so, unless otherwise clarified, “Jewish feminism” refers to the movement from the 1970s to the present. Similarly, I will attempt to avoid unnuanced terms such as “patriarchy” where possible. Jewish feminism can refer to work in the community, while Jewish femi-

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bryonic, they have enriched our understanding of Victorian feminism, textual representations of fin-de-siècle Anglo-Jewry, the New Woman phenomenon,4 anti-Semitism, social Darwinism, and Zionism.5 As the first Anglo-Jewish woman to attend Cambridge University, England, and the first Jewish woman in England to be cremated, it is surprising that Anglo-Jewish literary criticism has only recently acknowledged Amy Levy (1861-1889), although since her rediscovery her reputation has at least been reinstated.6 Her lifestyle, poetry, essays, and novels continue to pose controversial questions, including the debate over the reasons for her suicide. Similarly, her background is relevant to minority discourse, given her sex, assumed homoeroticism, ethnicity, religion, and physical

nist studies is normally academic (Lori Lefkovitz, “The View from Here: Reflections on the Future of Jewish Feminist Scholarship,” Nashim 10 (October 2005): 219). 4 The term “New Woman” was coined for the first time in 1894 in an article by Sarah Grand (Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 2; Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885-1914 (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 144). However, the term had been in circulation for many years. An account of a dinner on May 31, 1889 (which Levy attended) that appeared in The Women’s Penny Paper records that: “Mrs. Meynell, speaking on behalf of Poetry, remarked that poetry from the New Woman would have a very distinct note in the future” (quoted by Christine Pullen, “Amy Levy; Her Life, Her Poetry and the Era of the New Woman” (Ph.D. diss., Kingston University, 2000), 7). In short, “New Woman” refers to women’s appearance in the public sphere at the fin-de-siècle at the forefront of political causes, living and working independent of family and husbands, attending universities, travelling alone, joining intellectual clubs, by contrast to the traditional institutions of marriage, domesticity, and motherhood. 5 More recently studies have analyzed Levy’s writing in the context of late-nineteenth-century urban aestheticism, Sapphic (lesbian) discourse, and the culture of the flâneur (urban spectator). 6 Michael Galchinsky, review of Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture, by Cynthia Scheinberg, Victorian Studies 45, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 552.

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debilitations.7 As an acculturated woman, Levy existed between a gentile, Protestant host-culture and radically assimilated, affluent, middle-class Anglo-Jewry.8 A daughter of the emancipation, she was aware of the secular opportunities available to women, and of prevalent anti-Semitism. Indeed, she identified with her coreligionists yet could not fully accommodate her proto-feminist aspirations to the Reform Judaism observed by her family. Although she identified with both cultures, each tended to relegate her to its margins leaving her personally confused and alienated.9 The theology underpinning Amy Levy’s writing, the divine presence, or the God of Sinai, was initially quintessentially Jewish, even given the influence of Christian Evangelicalism and its anticeremonialism, anti-rabbinism, and anti-Talmudism in her writing.10 The existence of God is taken for granted, to be assumed rather than explored. In her later writing, however, Levy’s theological reflections became more immanentist as she struggled to locate the divine in the religious institutions of her day and the masculin-

7 Levy suffered from deafness, neuralgia, depression, and possibly lived in fear of syphilis. 8 I have borrowed the term “radical assimilation” from Todd Endelman’s study of acculturated Jewry. See his Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History: 1656-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); “The Frankaus of London: A Study of Radical Assimilation, 1837-1967,” Jewish History 8, no. 1-2 (1994): 117-54. 9 Iveta Jusova and Dan Reyes, “Edward Said, Reuben Sachs, and Victorian Zionism,” Social Text 87 24, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 38. 10 By Jewish feminist theology I refer to any Jewish feminist reflection that discourses on God as the basis of its values and practices through Jewish religious narratives (traditional or otherwise) and ideas (Melissa Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai? Reading Jewish Feminist Theology Through the Critical Lens of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to “Radical Orthodoxy,” eds. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion Grau (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 197. The Talmud is a compilation of the Mishnah (the oral tradition codified in 200 CE under the guidance of Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi) and the Gemara (the commentary on the Mishnah), codified, first in a Palestinian version (the Jerusalem Talmud), and then in approximately 500 CE in a Babylonian version. References normally refer to the latter edition.

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ist texts of the tradition.11 Her ideas on the personal and congregational application of her religion, however, were less defined, and bound up in contemporaneous Evangelical criticisms of traditional Judaism as law-bound, retrogressive, gender exclusionary, and unspiritual, and conversely, rabbinic themes including Midrash, Messianic redemption, the rejection of the New Covenant, and the negation of Jesus’ Messiahship.12 Moreover, although Levy outlined the dynamics of gender alienation in traditional Judaism and her own acculturated community, her writing was seldom practical, offering little in the way of resolution and little is known regarding her personal observance. Hence, we must rely on her writing to understand her religious and theological aspirations. Although Amy Levy replicated Protestant criticisms of traditional Judaism as narrow-minded, amoral, and legalistic, her fiction, despite similarities to conversionist novels portraying Jewish women as uneducated, oppressed by Jewish materialism, and under the stern control of legalistic fathers, did not conclude with the heroine embracing Christianity. Levy was aware of, and internalized through a Reformist context, conversionist criticisms of traditional Judaism’s response to the “Woman Question,” figuring the community as both retrogressive and “Oriental,” yet sought to combat growing secularization, rather than to abandon her faith. Amy Levy, by employing classically Jewish Reformist perspectives, challenged conventional Jewish perceptions concerning the accepted religious role of women.13 In fact, as we will see, Levy’s

11 Immanent as opposed to the radical separation of the holy and the individual in the tradition. See T. Drorah Setel, “Roundtable Discussion: Feminist Reflections on Separation and Unity in Jewish Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2 (1986): 113-18. 12 Social scientists have made a distinction between gender, the social construction of sexual difference, and sex, a biological condition, although sex itself is perhaps a social construct or performance. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 13 Although religious leadership was the exception as opposed to the rule for fin-de-siècle Anglo-Jewish women, Christian women had been involved in local church leadership for many years. See Olive Banks, Faces of

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writing is less anti-Judaic and more profoundly inflected by the religious concerns of early German Reform Judaism than has previously been supposed. Indeed, her writing constitutes a genre whose female subjectivity evidences a concern for justice and authority that prefigures numerous aspects of Second-Wave Jewish feminist theory and its spiritual, theological, and theoretical underpinnings. In her study of Jewish women as radicals in the period 1870-1930, Naomi Shepherd notes the mood in Europe: “The potential for rebellion, the desire for radical change among Jewish women, was all the stronger as they glimpsed for the first time the chance to rid themselves of traditional disabilities. … It led them into political activity; it also encouraged them to seek a relationship with men hitherto unknown in Jewish society.”14 Levy’s adoption of an ethically selective approach to the tradition, common to Reform and Liberal Judaisms, enables the retrogressive and gender discriminatory layers of the tradition to be marginalized, while the “modern,” egalitarian, and gender inclusive aspects are retained. Levy’s use of midrash, and gendered re-interpretation of Messianic redemption, critiques Anglo-Reform Judaism’s conservative response to the “Woman Question,” and seeks to broaden the definition of Jewish spirituality to incorporate acculturated women estranged from the tradition, and to locate God in the social and religious structures that make “his” presence difficult to know.15 In sum, Levy redefined for her contemporaries the role of the Jewish woman beyond the traditional stereotype of wife, mother, and educator of children. Instead, by merging themes of Christian Evangelicalism with quintessentially Jewish perspectives through the interpretive liberty of classical Reformism, her writing idealizes Jewish women as the agents of social, religious, and theological transformation, and challenges the masculinist theologies, liturgies, and sacred texts of the Jewish tradition. Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 14 Naomi Shepherd, A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), 6-7. 15 “Midrash” is not capitalized in reference to the hermeneutical method, as opposed to the corpus of literature.

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However, because so many scholars working in women’s studies lack expertise and interest in the theological dimension of women’s experience, examination of Amy Levy’s personal religious affiliation and spiritual aspirations has, until now, been marginalized. This hinders the study of her writing as the religious contexts that underpin her texts are missed. These oversights are not surprising, particularly as Levy’s religious subtexts are often concealed in poems that superficially conform to late-Victorian expectations regarding women’s poetry.16 Indeed, Jewish feminism has never claimed Levy as one of its own.17 This is problematic as women’s religiosity cannot be “subsumed into that of men,” as Anglo-Jewish theologian Melissa Raphael argues: From the rabbinic period to the present, and despite some recent changes to a degree permitted by men regarding women’s opportunities to study and pray, Orthodox male discursive, interpretive and practical dominance privileges masculinity as the primary likeness of God. It is masculinity that has been and remains generative of religious and historical knowledge, and authority and leadership in both the domestic and public religious spheres.18

Additionally, it is evident that the writing and activism of the Anglo-First-Wave has significance beyond the fin-de-siècle. Certainly, Victorian women writers, Levy included, often concealed political and religious subtexts in otherwise conventional poems. See Gill Gregory, “Adelaide Procter: A Poetics of Reserve and Passion,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Early Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, eds. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999), 355-72; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 17 The label “Jewish feminist” is applied to any man or woman influenced by First, Second, or Third-Wave Jewish feminism who remains loyal to a cultural, religious, political, or ethnic sense of being Jewish. 18 Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003), 1, 3. 16

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Amy Levy can be regarded as a pioneer of Second-Wave Jewish feminism’s critique of women’s role in traditional Judaism and the theological convictions that underpin it. These previously unacknowledged continuities, and their Anglo-Jewish foundation, seem particularly important as the key figures and locus of energy in Second-Wave Jewish feminism was American women whose scholarly perspective was the United States. Accordingly, the rise of Jewish feminism, and Jewish feminist theology, is often situated in 1970s America. This book challenges this assumption and demonstrates that the concepts underpinning Second-Wave Jewish feminist theology were developed, if only in embryonic form, by First-Wave Anglo-feminists, namely Levy.19 First-Wave (1792-1918) feminism, in this study, refers to the period of feminist activism between the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the suffrage campaign that resulted in women being granted the franchise in England in 1918.20 In this research, the term First-Wave refers to England, unless otherwise stated. The Second-Wave (1971-1984) denotes the period of feminist activism beginning in the late-1960s and lasting through to the mid-1980s. By contrast, this period refers to the United States (unless otherwise stated). Additionally, Third-Wave Jewish feminism (generally during the late 1990s and up to 2010), where mentioned, refers to the recent generation of Jewish feminists in the United States (unless otherwise stated).21 However, the periods are as much conceptual as they are historical.

See Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 11-12. 20 Other scholars will differ with regards to the exact dates, an analysis of which is beyond the scope and necessity of this study. See Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol Poston (1792; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). Only those women over thirty were entitled to vote, though in 1928 the age was reduced to twenty-one in England. 21 See Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, ed. Leslie Haywood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 19

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Jewish feminists, even now, continue to write from First and Second-Wave perspectives.22 How do aspects of Anglo-First and Second-Wave AmericanJewish feminism correlate? The years between the two periods of activism were particularly traumatic for Jews across Europe. Although Britain emerged victorious from the Second-World-War, the conflict took a devastating toll upon the nation and its colonies. Britain could no longer claim to be a world power. The balance of global power had shifted to the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War, which would last for another forty-five years, had begun. The aftermath of the conflict also revealed the horrors of the Shoah. While six-million Jews had been murdered, the survivors, many of whom were stateless refugees, attempted to migrate to Palestine. The possibility of a return to Palestine had been popular among some diasporic Jews since the nineteenth-century. Although Theodore Herzl infused Zionism with practical urgency in the 1890s, immigration to Palestine had been underway for several decades. The arrivals set up agricultural settlements and were funded by wealthy Jewish philanthropists. Their numbers were augmented in the 1880s by Jews fleeing the Russian Pogroms. In 1917, amid fears that American-Jews would encourage the United States to support Germany, and following Chaim Weizmann’s lobbying, the Balfour Declaration was announced by the British government, endorsing the creation of a Jewish homeland. Immigration to Palestine steadily increased, particularly after the Russian Revolution, and following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. During the Second-World-War, however, Britain sought to limit Jewish migration to Palestine. Following the Holocaust, Jewish refugees disregarded the British prohibition on immigration, and a number were consequently imprisoned. This apparent injustice led to widespread Jewish support for the creation of an autonomous state. Facing bankruptcy, and rapidly losing control of its Empire, Britain referred the issue to the newly formed United Nations. In Melissa Raphael, for example, recognizes both First and SecondWave perspectives in her writing. Likewise, the foundations of Rachel Adler’s and Judith Plaskow’s most recent writing can be traced to their work during the Second-Wave. 22

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1947, the UN recommended that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state, a UN controlled area, and an Arab state. As the British relinquished their mandate, the surrounding Arab states, defying the UN, invaded Israel. However, in 1948 David Ben-Gurion was able to announce the formation of the state of Israel, though, even sixty-years on, the region remains politically, religiously, and nationally unstable, as the descendents of previous migrations, and new immigrants, seek to maintain the Jewish homeland in the face of Arab incursion. The largest concentration of Jewish population in the world is in the United States.23 Immigration to North America exploded in the 1880s as successive waves of Ashkenazic immigrants arrived. Many settled in New York and quickly assimilated. These immigrants became integral to American life, and during the SecondWorld-War over 500,000 enlisted in the armed services. Prior to the conflict, American-Jews tended toward secularization, yet remained committed to the preservation of the Jewish people. However, the post-war years witnessed a revival of all Jewish denominations. In 1956, the Conservative movement claimed that its congregations had doubled, and that membership had tripled. Similarly, the Reform movement, which had 50,000 member families in the late-1930s, claimed to possess over 250,000. The numbers that Orthodoxy had lost were replaced by the several-hundredthousand European-Jews who arrived after the war.24 During the early-1950s, Jews migrated en masse to the suburbs. Accordingly, they assimilated the “respectable” values and attitudes of their nonJewish neighbors. Indeed, church attendance was a given for middle-class Protestant and Catholic suburbia. The cause of bringing

23 An overview of American-Jewry and its history is beyond the remit and space of this book, see Rufus Learsi, The Jews in America: A History (New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1972); David Englander, Britain and America: Studies in Comparative History, 1760-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History, ed. Michael Feldberg (Hoboken: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 2002). 24 See Nathan Glazer, American Judaism, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

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into existence a Jewish state also aroused the sympathies of American Jews, as did the Holocaust.25 By the mid-1960s, the resurgent interest in religion peaked, and many Jews, mainly secularist liberals, joined non-Jewish liberals in the cause of securing civil rights for the disadvantaged, primarily the African-American community. Many Jewish students participated in the Civil Rights Movement, and were later joined by older generations of Jews in their condemnation of the Vietnam War.26 It was during the early-1970s that the Jewish feminist movement, inspired by the more broadly defined Women’s Liberation Movement, came about. By contrast to the First-Wave, (secular) SecondWave feminism encompassed a wider range of concerns. These included overcoming legal and unofficial disabilities, gender exclusion in the workplace, sexuality, the family, reproductive rights (mass contraception), and lesbianism.27 Second-Wave Jewish feminism in the United States is often actually considered the first period of Jewish feminist activism. As an identifiable movement, grounded in academia, the agenda was set with Trude Weiss-Rosmarin’s article: “The Unfreedom of Jewish Women” written in 1970, and Rachel Adler’s (initially Orthodox) “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” in 1971.28 Subsequently, two national Jewish women’s conferences, sponsored by the North Bernard Martin, “American Jewry Since 1945: An Historical Overview,” in Movements and Issues in American Judaism: An Analysis and Sourcebook of Developments Since 1945, ed. Bernard Martin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 7-8, 10-12. 26 Martin, “American Jewry,” 14. See The Dynamics of American Jewish History: Jacob Rader Marcus’s Essays on American Jewry, ed. Gary Zola (New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2004). 27 See Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, 2 vols., eds. Stephen Norwood and Eunice Pollack (Oxford: Abc-Clio, 2008); Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, ed. Evelyn Torten Beck (1982; rpt. New York: The Crossing Press, 1984). 28 Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, “The Unfreedom of Jewish Women,” Jewish Spectator (October 1970): 2-6; Rachel Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halacha and the Jewish Woman,” Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review (1971; rpt. Summer 1973): 77-82. Weiss-Rosmarin founded and edited the Jewish Spectator with her husband. 25

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American Jewish Student’s Network, were held in 1973 and 1974, leading to the establishment of the short-lived Jewish Feminist Organization. These groundbreaking events spurred numerous feminist groups at grassroots level. The group Ezrat Nashim, or “help for women”; the name being a reference to the women’s section in the synagogue, which included such Jewish feminist activists as Judith Plaskow, Paula Hyman, Elizabeth Koltun, Martha Ackelsberg, and Judith Hauptman, issued a “Call for Change” to the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement demanding gender equalization in all areas of religion, and thus gained the support of the national press, and of American-Jews, who had themselves found acceptance through democratic, liberal ideals. In short, between the fin-de-siècle and the 1960s there were two World-Wars, the Shoah, and the state of Israel was established. Second-Wave Jewish feminism was an identifiable movement augmented by the impact of, for example, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and political lesbianism. Despite the contextual differences between the two historical periods of feminist activism, however, the problem of gender exclusionism in the Jewish community altered little in seventy years. By the nineteenth-century, following three millennia of women being idealized by traditional Judaism as wife and mother, the industrial revolution ushered in important social and sexual changes. Given men’s customary duty to undertake Talmudic study, Jewish women were often the major, or even sole, breadwinner of the family. Indeed, prior to the nineteenth-century it had been possible for women in England to undertake paid work at home. However, industrialization shifted employment outside of the home, introducing Anglo-Jewish women to the secular opportunities of Victorian society. In the traditional Orthodox community women were viewed as the hidden “Other” as they were not expected to regularly attend synagogue, and not obligated to perform time-bound religious tasks (mitzvot) as they interfered with domesticity.29 Although women were permitted to attend synagogue they had to remain behind a screen or mechitza curtain, or were sequestered to the gallery. They could not be counted in the 29

Mitzvah – commandment, or can imply “good deed.”

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prayer quorum (minyan),30 nor could they recite the blessings over the Torah,31 read from the scroll (aliyah),32 or study the sacred texts.33 In sum, women were excluded, not only from the leadership of the community, but from the aspects of Judaism that define traditional (male) identity. By the mid-nineteenth-century, however, these gender inequalities, augmented by the counter-attractions of secular society, and the rise of Reform communities, were contributing to women’s estrangement from the tradition. Accordingly, breaking away from the tradition, reversing this alienation, disregarding the legal minutiae of halakhah, and ensuring Jewish survival in modernity, became integral to Reform and Liberal Judaisms, and to some, Jewish women’s experience.34 However, rather than seeking to break away from the existing traditional community, as had been the aim of some Jewish women during the First-Wave, Second-Wave Jewish feminism, by contrast, sought equal participation in all denominations, including Orthodoxy. Hence, the intention shifted toward gendered reform of the existing denominations and their institutions, including halakhah. It is therefore unsurprising that SecondWave Jewish feminism revisited, and re-appropriated, what might be regarded as integral First-Wave concerns. This is particularly true, for example, of discourse concerning the alienation of female spirituality in the synagogue.

30 Classical halakhah has no interest in women’s prayer behavior with other women, so long as they do not interfere with the minyan. The minyan, traditionally, requires a quorum of ten males. 31 The five books of Moses, or can refer to the scroll containing them, and indeed, generally, all Jewish teaching. 32 Or aliyah la-Torah, aliyot (plural). The person who undertakes aliyah normally reads the blessings while a rabbi or cantor chants Torah. 33 Linda Gordon Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause: The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States, 1881-1933 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 4-5. 34 Although halakhah, halakhot (plural), and halakhic (adjective) refer to the corpus of law, both oral and written Torah, the term actually translates as “the way.” The opposite of halakhah is aggadah, the rabbinic literature which is regarded as homily or story, rather than legal.

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A key moment in Amy Levy’s novel, Reuben Sachs (1888), is a portrayal of an Anglo-Jewish Reform service on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). The Anglo-Jewish Reformers of the 1880s, despite the radical promises of early-nineteenth-century German Reformism, initiated only minor changes to ritual and decorum.35 Readers of this fictional account cannot fail to be struck by the heroine’s estrangement from the tradition: Judith Quixano went through her devotions upheld by that sense of fitness, of obedience to law and order, which characterized her every action. But it cannot be said that her religion had any strong hold over her; she accepted it unthinkingly. These prayers, read so diligently, in a language of which her knowledge was exceedingly imperfect, these reiterated praises of an austere tribal deity, these expressions of a hope whose consummation was neither desired nor expected, what connection could they have with the personal needs, the human longings of this touchingly ignorant and limited creature?36

Judith’s commitment to Reform Judaism is meritorious but superficial given that, as a woman, she is unable to understand the Hebrew liturgy, relegated to the gallery, and is spiritually unaffected. The reader is drawn to three further issues: the inability of women to actively participate in the synagogue, the prohibition on women studying the sacred texts, and the traditional association of women with gashmiut (physicality) rather than ruhniut (spirituality) and kava35 The Liberal movement developed from its Reform counterpart. Indeed, Claude Montefiore proclaimed the tenets of Liberal Judaism from the pulpit of the West London Reform Synagogue. Hence, the term “Reformers” has often been applied to the Liberal movement also. 36 Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (London: Macmillan, 1888), 9293. Reuben Sachs has subsequently been republished with additional material, see Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch, ed. Susan David Bernstein (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006).

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nah (spiritual intentionality).37 Rachel Adler’s classic Second-Wave essay, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” written eighty-three years later, draws similar conclusions regarding women’s alienation: The minyan – the basic unit of the Jewish community – excludes them [women], implying that the community is presumed to be the Jewish males to whom they are adjuncts. … To be a peripheral Jew is to be educated and socialized toward a peripheral commitment. This, I think, is what happened to the Jewish woman. … It was, thus, natural that Jewish men should have come to identify women with gashmiut (physicality) and men with ruhniut.38

The writer Cynthia Ozick, too, in 1979, describes her estrangement in the synagogue: In the world at large I call myself, and am called, a Jew. But when, on the Sabbath, I sit among women in my traditional shul [synagogue] and the rabbi speaks the word “Jew,” I can be sure that he is not referring to me. For him, “Jew” means “male Jew.” … When my rabbi says, “A Jew is called to the Torah,” he never means me or any other living Jewish woman. My own synagogue is the only place in the world where I, a middle-aged adult, am defined exclusively by my being the female child of my own parents.

37 The concern that mitzvot require kavanah recurs throughout the Talmud. 38 Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” 78-80, 82.

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My own synagogue is the only place in the world where I am not named Jew.39

The two periods of activism portray interrelated feminist concerns common to both waves of Jewish feminism; in these examples, particularly, the alienation of female spirituality in the synagogue. Though, to summarize, the Second-Wave was characterized by its aim that women be granted equal access to public and religious life, and that women be permitted to take up religious and communal leadership; significantly, these are aims that have their foundation in Anglo-First-Wave discourse. The methodology for this book is perhaps straightforward given that Jewish feminism has generally been a literary phenomenon. As such, Amy Levy’s writing: her novels, poems, and articles for the Jewish Chronicle, with comparable Second-Wave discourse, provide the evidence for conceptual continuity. Indeed, SecondWave Jewish feminism, as an academic movement, generally, is also notable for the production of novels, poetry, and essays. In short, the pen has throughout been the weapon of choice.40 This study and its woman-centered, gendered analysis, accordingly, presents a feminist challenge to the androcentric history of Anglo-Jewry that has become representative, and remains aware that: “The halakhic inadmissibility of women as most forms of witness, or as scholar or judge, as well as the exemption (or exclusion-in-effect) of women from most time-bound religious observances is closely connected to [their experience].”41 This does not mean, however, that gender

Cynthia Ozick, “Notes Towards Finding the Right Question,” in On Being A Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (1983; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 125. 40 See David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See Joan Wallach Scott, Feminism & History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 41 Raphael, The Female Face, 4-5. Although women are disqualified from being witnesses (B. Shevuot 30a), there are exceptions. Women’s testimony, for example, concerning whether they were raped when taken captive, is deemed believable if it is to their own disadvantage. 39

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reflects or implements “natural” or “fixed” physical characteristics to women and men.42 Using gender as a category in the analysis of Anglo-Jewish history, the key to feminist studies, illuminates the effect of modernity on Jewish domestic ideology, the feminization of religion, and the difference between men and women’s experience of emancipation and reform. The influence of feminist theory on Jewish studies continues to make these aspects of modern Jewish experience visible. Indeed, the uniqueness of Anglo-Jewish literary history is that it is the sole modern Jewish literary history in which women are not only active as intellectuals and writers, they are preeminent.43 Alternatively, Anglo-Jewish men, compared to their continental contemporaries, produced little polemical writing on issues such as emancipation. They preferred to stand for office or to use their wealth and influence rather than to write books. Equally, as regards to religious reform, Anglo-Jewish men were less inclined than the German Reformers to write on the matter, particularly as they had very little to say.44 In sum, this book offers “an alternative to the men-only story that has been transmitted as the history of … Anglo-[Jewry]”;45 and is a religio-historical reconstruction and comparative study of two periods of Jewish feminist activism. Moreover, the book follows recent literary critics to develop a new reading of modern Jewish literary history which focuses “its discussions of Jewish modernity – immigration, acculturation, emancipation, reform, socialism, Zionism, and feminism – not on the literature of Russian, German, American, or Israeli Jews, but on the literature of the Jews of England.”46 Earlier generations of literary critics paid little attention to the writers of the nineteenth-century, particularly Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2. Recent feminist research has tended to be gender-inclusive rather than woman-centered. 43 Michael Galchinsky, “The New Anglo-Jewish Literary Criticism,” Prooftexts 15, no. 3 (September 1995): 281. 44 Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 19, 24. 45 Galchinsky, The Origin, 22. 46 Galchinsky, “The New Anglo-Jewish,” 272. 42

INTRODUCTION

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women, and when they did notice them there was a tendency to dismiss them as unimportant or uninteresting. However, since the 1980s, critics have attempted to bridge the disciplines of Jewish studies and English literary criticism. Thus, feminist criticism turned from the examination of how male writers represented women to what women writers had to say about themselves. Similarly, critics of minority literatures have sought to revive and recover neglected and forgotten sources. Hence, the minority ceases to be a figure of someone else’s anxieties or a foil against the hegemonic culture, and becomes an interpreter of her own subculture’s story.47 In short, this type of research is not essentially novel. In the last few years the Victorian era has become the subject of particular interest for critics who see the onset of both modern anti-Semitism and modern Jewish identity articulated in nineteenth-century writing. Also, such research is part of a longer series of recent historical studies that have sought to document the differential experience of modernity for Jewish men and women.48 The historiographical review in the following chapter reveals current gaps in the field. Notably, the recovery of Anglo-Jewish women’s history is a recent phenomenon and has been, as Clare Midgley notes, beset by misconception: Women, while constituting around half of … [the] Jewish community in Britain, have not been the subject of proportionate attention from historians. … Jewish communal history has tended to present an idealized view of the “woman of worth,” the hardworking and virtuous housewife and devoted mother, while ignoring the lives of single women and playing down women’s economic contributions and organized activism. Nineteenth-century Gentile stereotypes of the overprotective Jewish mother, the Jewish “princess,” the exotic “Oriental” Sephardic Jewess, and the depraved immigrant prostitute Galchinsky, “The New Anglo-Jewish,” 272-73, 276. Nadia Valman, “Semitism and Criticism: Victorian Anglo-Jewish Literary History,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 235, 243. 47 48

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NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY have acted to further obscure the actual lives of ordinary Jewish women in Britain.49

Likewise, Michael Galchinsky argues: Literary critics’ neglect of the Victorian Jewish public sphere is comprehensible as simple ignorance, because the Victorian canon has definitionally excluded non-Protestant members of the British dominions – not only Jews, but also Gypsies, Catholics, Arabs, West Indians, and East Indians. Those scholars who have taken an interest in Jews have for the most part chosen to focus on Christian writers’ representations of Jews rather than on Jews’ own literary productions. Literary critics interested in the “Jewish Question” have tended to turn to the depictions of Jews by Walter Scott, Maria Edgworth, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, or George Eliot. The best of this criticism has argued that these representations are moments in English Christian writers’ negotiation of English national identity in a liberal state. But by focusing only on Christian writers’ vision of Jews rather than seeing these representations in relation to the literature written by Jews themselves, these critics have left out half the available dialogue on the Jews.50

Chapter one also reviews the Jewish feminist theological project to date, while chapters two and three focus on Amy Levy’s midrashic poetry, and demonstrate the influence of German Reform Judaism on her writing. I specifically centre on the poem “A Prayer” in chapter two, and then in chapter three, “A Greek Girl” and “Magdalen,” to reveal Levy’s reclamation of both Jesus and Mary Magdalene for Jewish and proto-feminist contexts, and her reinterpretation of Jesus’ ministry as a Jewish renewal movement. Chapter four analyzes Reuben Sachs, particularly the Reform thematic that underClare Midgley, “Ethnicity, ‘Race’ and Empire,” in Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction, ed. June Purvis (London: Routledge, 2004), 248-49. 50 Galchinsky, The Origin, 21. 49

INTRODUCTION

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pins the novel. I demonstrate how Levy uses the story to critique halakhah, the Jewish marital economy, women’s subordinate role in the community, and the alienation of female spirituality. Finally, chapter five examines Levy’s employment of the biblical narratives of Judith and Esther in Reuben Sachs, and also evaluates her gendered reinterpretation of Messianic redemption. The intention throughout the study is to highlight those aspects of First-Wave writing that prefigure Second-Wave theory, aware also that the “cultural studies” approach necessitates that representations of Jews and Jewish thought must be placed within their proper historical contexts.51

51

Galchinsky, “The New Anglo-Jewish,” 280.

1 AMY LEVY: SHORT BIOGRAPHY, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND OVERVIEW OF JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY Individual Jews probably visited England before the Roman occupation, yet the first settlement did not occur until after the Norman invasion.1 During the early years relations with gentiles were amicable. Although Jews maintained their own religious institutions they were involved in commerce, local and national politics through the monasteries, the Crown, and medicine. While the community was confined to distinct areas it was not ghettoized. As recent arrivals to England, the Jews were not part of the feudal hierarchy and were directly responsible to the king, who was overseer of their legal and financial rights. The monarch, while able to protect the community, could withhold the right to settle or trade. The status of the Jews in England was thus unstable. 1 See Cecil Roth, Essays and Portraits in Anglo-Jewish History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962); James Picciotto, Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History (London: Soncino Press, 1956); The Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Cecil Roth (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972); V. Lipman, The Jews of Medieval England (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1967); Louis Ginsberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909-1938); Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, 6 vols. (1895; rpt. Philadelphia: JPSA, 1956); Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols. (New York: Columbia UP, 1952-1983); Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Its History, trans. Charles Newburgh (New York: Bloch, 1911).

21

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Usury was the trade for Jews as the community was barred from other employment. Artisans were required to belong to a guild, but these were exclusively Christian, and agricultural trade required the owning of land and the hiring of Christian labor; both prohibited. Hence, money-lending, barred to Christians by Canon Law, was one of the few options available to Jewish entrepreneurs, and they obtained an unintentional monopoly. Jews responsible for collecting unpaid debts aroused resentment, more so given the wealth thereby acquired. Tales of Aaron of Lincoln’s financial dealings, for example, spread throughout Europe and his personal wealth was such that on his death in 1186 a special branch of the Exchequer had to be formed to deal with his estate. During the twelfth and thirteenth-centuries, anti-Jewish sentiment increased due to two additional factors: the ritual murder accusation and the Crusades.2 The charge of ritual murder, or blood libel, has appeared throughout the history of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. 3 However, the first accusation probably originated in Norwich, England, during 1144, recurring in York, Bristol, Bury St Edmunds, Gloucester, and Lincoln. Despite the unfounded nature of the charge, the allegation was widely believed among the Christian community given its dissemination by the Church to an already superstitious population. The Crusades further ignited antiJewish sentiment, and during preparations for the Third Crusade in 1190 the Jews of York were massacred.4

2 See Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World (New York: Atheneum, 1974). For an outline of mediaeval anti-Semitism see Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of AntiSemitism (London: University of California Press, 1996). 3 There is a difference between the terms, although many historians use them interchangeably. “Ritual murder” refers to the re-enactment of the crucifixion with a Christian child taking the place of Jesus, while “blood libel” came later and refers to the Jewish use of Christian blood for supernatural purposes. 4 See Richard Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (York: Anthony’s Hall Publications, 1974).

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In the Magna Carta of 1215, two clauses focus on Jews and money-lending.5 Indeed, by the mid-thirteenth-century the position of the Jews was becoming untenable, particularly given Church hostility toward money-lending. The Church had acquired astronomical debts, ironically the result of money borrowed to finance the building of cathedrals, churches, and monasteries. Royal pressure was also mounting as successive monarchs chose to tax the Jewish community to finance the Crusades. In 1253, the Mandate to the Justices issued restrictions on the Jews to limit JewishChristian relations. Jews were required to wear a badge of identification and were prohibited from accessing towns without the king’s permission.6 By Edward I’s reign, the Jewish community was widely impoverished as a result of the Crown’s taxation and the Church’s desperation to end usury. In 1275, Jews were forbidden to lend money on interest and encouraged to take up mercantile and agricultural trades. However, by 1290 Edward decided to expel the Jews with the backing of the Church and Parliament. Oliver Cromwell readmitted the Jews to England in 1656 and a small group of Sephardim from Amsterdam led by the theologian Manasseh ben Israel arrived.7 Numbers steadily increased as the Sephardim were gradually joined by their Ashkenazic coreligionists.8 As the Sephardim (Spanish and Portuguese Jews) had escaped the Inquisition, the Ashkenazim (Central and Eastern European Jews) were fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. The two, 5 These clauses were designed to protect minors and widows from Jewish debtors. 6 See J. Rigg, Select Pleas, Starrs and Other Records from the Exchequer of the Jews, 1220-1284 (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1902). 7 See Lucien Wolf, Manasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell. Being a Reprint of the Pamphlets Published by Manasseh ben Israel to Promote the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1649-1656 (London: Macmillan, 1901). 8 See Albert Hyamson, The Sephardim of England (London: Methuen, 1951); David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978). For a history of the Anglo-Sephardim see Moses Gaster, History of the Ancient Synagogue of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (London: Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, 1901).

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however, differed, particularly as the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars had brought a temporary halt to immigration, resulting in a balance between foreign-born and native Jews. Each had a particular dialect: the Sephardim: Ladino, and the Ashkenazim: Yiddish.9 The Sephardim were more affluent having been involved in the trading opportunities of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. By contrast, the economically disadvantaged Ashkenazim were devoted to the study of the sacred texts rather than commercial ventures. Synagogue practice and appearance were also different. Indeed, London’s Sephardic Jews went to their own synagogue, Bevis Marks. Yet, by the late-Victorian period, the two groups were more unified. Ashkenazic immigration had come to outstrip the Sephardim and across Europe and the Americas, the Ashkenazic population exploded. By 1815, of the 20,000 Jews in England,10 the Sephardim numbered less than 2000.11 As early as 1714, John Toland backed the naturalization of the Jews in England on the basis that all citizens should be equal. By 9 The Sephardim, aside from speaking English, Spanish, and Portuguese use Ladino, an intermingling of Hebrew and Spanish. Yiddish is a combination of Hebrew and German. 10 See Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of England, 1979); V. Lipman, Three Centuries of Anglo-Jewish History (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1961); H. Richardson, The English Jewry Under Angevin Kings (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1960); Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Atheneum, 1973); Joseph Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England (Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers, 1969); V. Lipman, Social History of the Jews in England, 1850-1950 (London: Watts, 1954); V. Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain Since 1858 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990). 11 By 1830 the Sephardic community of London was past its prime due to intermarriage, migration, and the marriage of its women to the Ashkenazi communities, by which it was outnumbered (Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry, new ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 34). In 1860, Sephardic hegemony can be said to have been broken, as of the entire Jewish population, eighty-six percent were Ashkenazim (Daniel Elazar, “Sephardim and Ashkenazim: the Classic and Romantic Traditions in Jewish Civilization,” Judaism 33, no. 2 (April): 147.

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1753, an Act of Parliament permitted foreign Jews to be naturalized providing they had resided in Britain for three years, though this was limited to the wealthy and property owners. Despite possessing economic and social liberty, Jews were still prohibited from political office due to the necessity of swearing the oath: “upon the true faith of a Christian.” A bill demanding emancipation was defeated in the House of Commons in 1830, yet the issue refused to disappear and further bills were presented, and defeated, in the House of Lords.12 In 1831, Thomas Babbington Macaulay announced his support for the removal of disabilities, and the effort to win municipal rights was brought to a successful conclusion with the Jewish Disabilities Removal Act. However, the political disabilities remained. Lionel de Rothschild, twice elected by the City of London, was unable to take his seat because of the oath. David Salomons, likewise, caused uproar by refusing the oath. By 1858, matters reached a crescendo during the Conservative administration of the Earl of Derby and Benjamin Disraeli. The Liberal majority of the Commons threatened to permit Rothschild to take his seat, despite the Lords forbidding his entry. Nevertheless, Disraeli, himself a Jewish convert to Christianity, pressurized Derby into a compromise through which each house could determine the form of the oath to be applied. Rothschild was finally able to take his seat.13 Subsequently, the Jewish presence in the legislature grew, to the consternation of the communal leadership, with embarrassing speed. By 1865 six Jews sat in the Lower House, augmented by two others during the 1865-1868 Parliament. Compared to the total proportion of Jews in the United Kingdom, they were overrepresented and it was assumed, by both critics and supporters of the emancipation, that Jewish MPs would become spokesmen for their 12 See Israel Abrahams and S. Levy, Macaulay on Jewish Disabilities (Edinburgh: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1909); M. Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain – The Question of the Admission of the Jews to Parliament, 1828-1860 (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1902). 13 See Abraham Guilam, The Emancipation of the Jews in England: 18301860 (New York: Garland, 1982). Full emancipation was not achieved until 1890, when the Jews were permitted to occupy the positions of Lord Chancellor and Lord Lieutenant for Ireland.

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coreligionists.14 The opposite was true, however, as Jewish members were generally committed to serving their constituents as citizens, not as Jews.15 It was following the political emancipation that Amy Levy was born. Born on November 10, 1861, in Clapham, a district of south London, England, located in the borough of Lambeth, Amy Judith Levy was the second daughter of seven siblings born to Isabelle (née Levin) and Lewis Levy.16 The Levys were an acculturated middle-class family whose Anglo-Jewish origins could be traced back to eighteenth-century Falmouth, in Cornwall. At the age of fourteen, Levy was sent to Brighton High School, Girls’ Public Day School Trust in East Sussex. Her publishing career began in the previous year when the poem, “The Ballad of Ida Grey,” was printed in the feminist journal, Pelican.17 At Brighton Levy became a pupil of Edith Creak, who, aged twenty-one, had just finished at Newnham College, Cambridge.18 Creak became Levy’s mentor and in 1879 she followed in her headmistress’s footsteps and became the first Jewish girl to matriculate at Newnham College.19 Levy did not, however, complete her degree course in classical and modern languages (including Greek and Latin), and she left in 1881 for unknown reasons, not having taken the Tripos.

In 1850 there were approximately 50,000 Jewish in England. Alderman, Modern British Jewry, 56, 63-64. See Geoffrey Alderman, The Jewish Community in British Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Daniel Gutwein, The Divided Elite: Economics, Politics and Anglo-Jewry, 1882-1917 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992). 16 Lewis Levy made his fortune through stocks and shares. The Levys were not possessors of “old money.” 17 Levy also wrote a review of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (London: Chapman & Hall, 1857) for the magazine Kind Words. 18 See A Newnham Anthology, ed. Ann Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 19 Sarah Marks was the first Jewish student at Girton College, Cambridge in 1876. The University Tests Act of 1871 opened up admission to Jews and Catholics. 14 15

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Undoubtedly, Amy Levy’s education at Brighton nurtured her proto-feminist aspirations. The school was founded by the feminists Emily and Maria Shireff and offered a strict program of academic training. It was at Brighton that Levy probably first experienced anti-Semitism. Indeed, she confided that a classmate’s family: “did not like to visit Jews, no Orthodox [Christian] persons did.”20 Whether Levy received any religious instruction is debatable, although there is evidence that from an early age she had a basic awareness of the Jewish tradition. Her analysis of the biblical David, for example, written for the children’s magazine Kind Words, demonstrates her familiarity with the Hebrew Bible, and she may have had Hebrew lessons.21 Amy Levy was never comfortable as an acculturated Jewish woman moving in Christian society.22 Many of her close friends maintained private anti-Semitic prejudices. Vernon Lee, writing to Bella Duffy, stated of Jews in Spain: “They are all Spanish, mostly handsome & intelligent & amiable, without any of the caricature and vulgarity of our Jews.”23 Similarly, Beatrice Webb, in her essay, “The Jewish Community,” stated that “The Jewish drive and ability to compete are … the most dangerous enemy of a harmonious society.”24 However, Levy could not accommodate her protofeminist aspirations to Anglo-Reformism, which during the 1880s, according to David Englander, was “deficient in doctrine, without rigor in ritual, and lacking spiritual warmth.”25 The majority of 20 Amy Levy, “Letter to Katie,” 9, in Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 225. 21 Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 15, 17. 22 See David Cesarani, “Dual Heritage or Duel Heritages? Englishness and Jewishness in the Heritage Industry,” in The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, ed. Tony Kushner (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 29-41. 23 Quoted by Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 203. 24 Quoted by Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 203. Levy was introduced to Lee (Violet Paget) and Webb, among others, through the Bloomsbury literary scene and the British Museum reading room. 25 David Englander, “Anglicized Not Anglican: Jews and Judaism in Victorian Britain,” in Religion in Victorian Britain, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 269.

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Levy’s adult life was spent writing in London and travelling around Europe. She published three poetry anthologies, with many of the poems simultaneously printed in magazines and newspapers.26 Her essays for the Jewish Chronicle and Woman’s World, particularly “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day,” “Women and Club Life,” and “Jewish Women and Women’s Rights,” are notable for their dedication to the emancipation of the Jewish woman.27 In “Jewish Women and Women’s Rights,” written in 1879, Levy argues for the necessity of women’s enfranchisement and access to paid professional work.28 Indeed, as Naomi Hetherington has noted: “The juvenilia of Amy Levy … track an individual path from feminist ideologies of the 1870s, centered on education and marriage reform and a widespread confidence that female suffrage was imminent, to the diverse and contested feminisms of the 1880s and 90s.”29 In 1886, Amy Levy published five articles on the Jewish community. “The Ghetto at Florence” perhaps highlights the reawakening of her Jewish heritage, although possibly reveals her desire to write more openly on Jewish issues. In the essay, Levy fashions a bond between herself and the oppressed Jews who once lived in the ghetto to criticize her own relationship to Jewish cul-

26 Amy Levy, Xantippe and Other Verse (Cambridge: E. Johnson, 1881); Amy Levy, A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884; rpt. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891); Amy Levy, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889). See also Cynthia Scheinberg, “Canonizing the Jew: Amy Levy’s Challenge to Victorian Poetic Identity,” Victorian Studies 39, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 173-200; Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005); Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27 Amy Levy, “Jewish Women and Women’s Rights,” Jewish Chronicle, February 7, 1879, 5; Amy Levy, “Women and Club Life,” Woman’s World 1 (June 1888): 364-67; Amy Levy, “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day (By a Jewess),” Jewish Chronicle, September 17, 1886, 7. Levy was a supporter of and even donated to the Woman’s Protective and Provident League (Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 313 n12). 28 Levy, “Jewish Women,” 5. 29 Naomi Hetherington, “New Women, ‘New Boots’: Amy Levy as Child Journalist,” Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 47 (2005): 254.

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ture and religion,30 and also explores the idea of collective Jewish consciousness. The article concludes with an acknowledgment of her own guilt that she had perhaps neglected her heritage: Are those human faces, or the faces of ghosts, that peer so wistfully through the grated lower windows? Is it the sound of human footsteps, or the sound heard in a dream, that echoes on the close, irregular pavement, that startles one from the gloom of unexpected angles and archways? It is only sentimentalists, like ourselves, that trouble themselves in this unnecessary fashion. There are a great many Jews here to-night, evidently quite undisturbed by “inherited memory.” … We ourselves, it is to be feared, are not very good Jews; is it by way of “judgment” that the throng of tribal ghosts haunts us so persistently tonight?31

“The Jew in Fiction” calls on writers to present a realistic appraisal of the Jewish community,32 as opposed to the idealized caricatures in novels such as Daniel Deronda,33 while in “Jewish Humour” Levy elaborates upon the “urban” character of the Jew. Her sense of being Jewish, she concludes, comes from her ability to understand the cultural feature of Jewish humor, and thus, converts will be unable to appreciate “the family feeling of the Jewish race.”34 “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day” offers a bleak feminist analysis of acculturated Anglo-Jewry, its “marriage market,” and Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 118-19, 124. Amy Levy, “The Ghetto at Florence,” Jewish Chronicle, March 26, 1886, 9. 32 Amy Levy, “The Jew in Fiction,” Jewish Chronicle, June 4, 1886, 13. 33 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1876). See Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960); Iveta Jusova and Dan Reyes, “Edward Said, Reuben Sachs, and Victorian Zionism,” Social Text 87 24, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 35-46. 34 Amy Levy, “Jewish Humour,” Jewish Chronicle, August 20, 1886, 910. 30 31

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the “shame” of spinsterhood. The article concludes that given their intellectual and social limitations, Anglo-Jewish women must either settle for mercenary marriage or seek fulfillment in gentile society.35 Indeed, Levy’s examination of the marital economy was not unrepresentative. Mona Caird, in “Marriage” (1888), also analyzes respectable marriage as a form of “woman-purchase.”36 During the 1860s and 1870s, most women regarded an equal marriage partnership as unusual and enterprising, yet by the 1880s and 1890s the concept of equality had become an integral feminist and Reform concern in England and Germany, as Rachel Adler notes: The first systematic argument that marriage and divorce for Jews could be effectuated by civil courts was made by the nineteenth-century Reform rabbi Samuel Holdheim. He argued that marriage is a civil transaction, no different from any other acts of kinyan, and as such falls under the rabbinic principle dina-d’malkhuta, which stipulates that the law of the secular state applies in monetary matters.37

Levy’s article castigates the “Oriental” Jewish community for its failure to respond to the feminist advances of society at large. As Nadia Valman concludes: “For Amy Levy, what binds Jews together also binds Jewish women down: in its refusal to countenance female economic and social autonomy, Anglo-Jewry contin-

Levy, “Middle-Class Jewish Women,” 7. Mona Caird, “Marriage,” in The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman (London: George Redway, 1897), 95, 99100. See Nadia Valman, “‘Barbarous and Mediaeval’: Jewish Marriage in Fin de Siècle English Fiction,” in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914, eds. Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 111-29. 37 Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (1998; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 258 n103. See Marriage and Impediments to Marriage in Jewish Law, eds. Walter Jacob and Moshe Zemer (Tel Aviv: Rodef Shalom Press, 1997). Kinyan is an act that formalizes a legal transaction. 35 36

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ues to be ‘a society constructed on … a primitive basis.’”38 “Jewish Children” is notable for its examination of Jewish susceptibility toward nervous diseases. In the article, Levy surmises that her own propensity towards depression and anxiety is a result of her ancestry: “The curious extremes of character which are to be met with among us, often, in the case of members of the same family, testify to our immense possibilities for both good and evil. Am I overstating the case in saying (and I say it in all sadness) that there is scarcely a Jewish family which does not possess its black sheep.”39 She laments: “The rate of mental and nervous diseases among the Jews is deplorably high.”40 Hereditary racial degeneration was a key development in fin-de-siècle thinking,41 and European physicians concluded that in the Jew: “great intellectual powers and cerebral debilities intersect.”42 Amy Levy is most renowned for her “Jewish” novel, Reuben Sachs.43 She had also written Romance of a Shop, and Miss Meredith, neither of which overtly analyzes Jewish themes.44 Reuben Sachs, on one level, by employing the perspective of fin-de-siècle degeneration theory, accounts for the terrible human price of modernization, expressed in the growth of “urban” diseases such as insanity, through a skeptical account of the emancipation.45 Unsurprisingly, the Anglo-Jewish press reacted angrily to the crass stereotypes of Jewish physiognomy, and to the damning presentation of uppermiddle-class Anglo-Jewry as a materialist, Oriental tribe. Levy committed suicide by charcoal asphyxiation in September 1889, Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 175. 39 Amy Levy, “Jewish Children (By a Maiden Aunt),” Jewish Chronicle, November 5, 1886, 8. 40 Levy, “Jewish Children,” 8. 41 Valman, The Jewess, 181. 42 Valman, The Jewess, 180. 43 See Meri-Jane Rochelson, “Jews, Gender and Genre in LateVictorian England: Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs,” Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 311-28. 44 Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889); Amy Levy, Miss Meredith (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1889). 45 Valman, The Jewess, 182-83. 38

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and it is possible that the condemnation of Reuben Sachs had some bearing. Such criticism was not, however, from non-Jewish quarters. The tributes written after her death by numerous litterateurs attest to the esteem in which Levy was held. As Oscar Wilde movingly stated: “The loss is the world’s, but perhaps not hers. She was never robust; not often actually ill, but seldom well enough to feel life a joy instead of a burden; and her work was not poured out lightly, but drawn drop by drop from the very depth of her own feeling. We may say it that it was in truth her life’s blood.”46 Indeed, Levy’s status is perhaps reflected by her circle of friends, many of whom were met during her visits to the Reading Room of the British Museum after November 1882:47 George Bernard Shaw, Karl Pearson, Eleanor Marx,48 Havelock Ellis,49 Olive Schreiner,50 Earnest and Dollie Radford, and Constance and Richard Garnett.51 46 Oscar Wilde, “Amy Levy,” Woman’s World 3 (1890): 52. Wilde refers here to Levy’s state of health. From an early age, aside from experiencing depression, she suffered with neuralgia and deafness. See Gail Cunningham, “Between Two Stools: Exclusion and Unfitness in Amy Levy’s Short Stories,” in Amy Levy: Critical Essays, eds. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 70-89. 47 See George Barwick, The Reading Room of the British Museum (London: Ernest Benn, 1929). 48 See Emma Francis, “Socialist Feminism and Sexual Instinct: Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy,” in Eleanor Marx (1855-1898): Life, Work, Contacts, ed. John Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 113-27; Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, The Woman Question (London: S. Sonneschein, 1886). Marx was the daughter of Karl Marx, and it is possible given her interest in the Jewish community, though there is no evidence, that she and Levy might have discussed “Jewish” issues. 49 See Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1977). 50 See Joyce Avrech Berkman, Olive Schreiner: Feminism on the Frontier (London: Edens Press, 1973). 51 See Deborah Epstein Nord, “‘Neither Pairs Nor Odd’: Female Community in Late Nineteenth-Century London,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 41 (1990): 733-54; Emma Francis, “Why Wasn’t Amy Levy More of a Socialist? Levy, Clementina Black, and Liza of Lambeth,” in Amy Levy, eds. Hetherington and Valman, 47-69.

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Following Amy Levy’s suicide, numerous obituaries and tributes were published.52 However, aside from two minor biographical articles that view her as a historical curiosity,53 little else appeared until the early 1980s.54 Linda Zatlin’s survey of Anglo-Jewish writers in 1981 reintroduced Levy and her corpus of literature to the reading public and academia.55 Zatlin’s research, nonetheless, is beset with factual errors, and gives little attention to the category of gender, which, according to Michael Galchinsky, is integral to the understanding of Anglo-Jewish texts.56 Accordingly, Galchinsky concludes that Zatlin’s appraisal of Victorian Jewish novels as “propaganda fiction” was premature.57 Edward Wagenknecht’s biography of Six Jewish Women, published in 1983, is equally discur52 See “The Tragedy of Amy Levy,” Pall Mall Gazette, September 25, 1889, 3; Wilde, “Amy Levy”; Ellen Darwin, “The Poems of Amy Levy,” Cambridge Review, January 23, 1890, 158; Harry Quilter, “Amy Levy: A Reminiscence and a Criticism,” The Universal Review 24 (1890): 135-49; Richard Garnett, “Amy Levy,” Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), 1041. See also my bibliography. 53 Michael Galchinsky, “The New Anglo-Jewish Literary Criticism,” Prooftexts 15, no. 3 (Sept, 1995): 272. See Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, “Amy Levy,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society 11 (June 22, 1926): 168-89; Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, “Amy Levy Poet and Writer,” Jewish Affairs (April 1961): 8-11. 54 Although Cecil Roth produced three volumes on Anglo-Jewish writers, he was embarrassed by how little there was to say (Galchinsky, “The New Anglo-Jewish,” 272). See Cecil Roth, The Evolution of AngloJewish Literature (London: Edward Goldston, 1937); Cecil Roth, “Wellsprings of European Literature,” Menorah Journal 25, no. 3 (1937): 340-49; Cecil Roth, “The Jew in the Literature of England,” Menorah Journal 28, no. 1 (1940): 122-25. For a bibliography of Anglo-Jewish writers see Edward Calisch, The Jew in English Literature: As Author and Subject (1909; rpt. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1969). 55 Linda Zatlin, The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981). 56 Zatlin wrongly argues that the Eastern European Jews lived in locked ghettos, and that Jewish immigration transformed London into a centre of international commerce (Todd Endelman, review of The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel, by Linda Zatlin, Victorian Studies 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): 95-96. 57 Galchinsky, “The New Anglo-Jewish,” 277.

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sive, dismissing Levy’s Judaism. He writes: “One can hardly believe, then, that Amy Levy found much spiritual nurture in Judaism, nor, though there is much religious coloring in her writing, in Christianity either.”58 Bryan Cheyette’s analysis of late-nineteenth-century AngloJewish novels, including Reuben Sachs, as a revolt against the literary apologetics written on behalf of Anglo-Jewry prior to the 1880s was, in light of earlier scholarship, groundbreaking. Prior to the late-1880s, Anglo-Jewish writers presented the community idealistically rather than realistically, with an eye on political emancipation, which was achieved in 1858. Instead, Reuben Sachs, Cheyette notes, critiques the alleged materialism and immorality of upper-middleclass Anglo-Jewry. The term, “revolt,” was initially coined by Lucien Wolf, who, in 1927, reflected back on the writing of the period.59 As Nadia Valman notes: Levy’s realist account of the Jewish transition to modernity, an account woven from conflicts of class, gender, and generation, constituted a challenge to Anglo-Jewry’s established public narrative of progressive integration into British social and political life – their “Great onward struggle.” It is then not surprising that Levy’s satirical writing has come to new prominence in the work of a generation of scholars similarly concerned with debunking the “Judaized version of ‘Whig History’” which has dominated Anglo-Jewish historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.60

58 Edward Wagenknecht, Daughters of the Covenant: Portraits of Six Jewish Women (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), 90. 59 Bryan Cheyette, “From Apology to Revolt: Benjamin Farjeon, Amy Levy and the Post-Emancipation Anglo-Jewish Novel, 1880-1990,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 24 (1982-86): 253, 260. See also Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). 60 Nadia Valman, “Semitism and Criticism: Victorian Anglo-Jewish Literary History,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 239.

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Nevertheless, although Reuben Sachs is undoubtedly a novel of “revolt,” it is perhaps unfair to lump Amy Levy’s writing with other anti-Semitic Jewish novels. Julia Frankau’s Dr. Philips: A Maida Vale Idyll, is, for example, a crass satire of radically assimilated AngloJewry.61 The anti-hero is a sinister Jewish doctor who murders his wife and revels in performing inhumane surgical procedures.62 Instead, Levy’s novel, despite its caricatures of Jewish physical degeneracy, develops a more nuanced appraisal of Anglo-Jewry that lionizes the Sephardim, and accounts for Jewish materialism as a product, not of racial degeneration, but of secularization. Two further studies appeared prior to the republication of Amy Levy’s Selected Writings in 1993 by Melvyn New.63 Sharona Levy’s Ph.D. thesis, despite revealing some important insights, such as that Levy’s aspirations were at odds with her mother’s, says little regarding her religiosity.64 Comparably, Deborah Nord’s account of Levy’s role in a “loosely organized [secular] community, or network, of other unmarried women in whom they saw their own ambitions reflected and affirmed,” is silent on the matter of religion.65 While of value, these studies neglect to account for the

Julia Frankau [Frank Danby, pseud.], Dr. Phillips; A Maida Vale Idyll (London: Vizetelly, 1887). 62 Frankau, despite her Jewish ancestry, distanced herself from the community. She even boasted that her husband’s fine qualities were due to his German stock and the absence of any Jewish blood. As an ardent imperialist, and thoroughly conservative, she enjoyed discussing the “unpleasant traits” of contemporary Jews (Todd Endelman, “The Frankaus of London: A Study of Radical Assimilation, 1837-1967,” Jewish History 8, no. 1-2 (1994): 135. See also Michael Galchinsky, “‘Permanently Blacked’: Julia Frankau’s Jewish Race,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 17183). 63 Amy Levy, The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993). 64 Sharona Levy, “Amy Levy: The Woman and Her Writings” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1989), 24. 65 Epstein Nord, “‘Neither Pairs Nor Odd,” 733. For comparable studies see Ana Parejo Vadillo, “New Woman Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siècle,” Women: A Cultural Review 10, no. 1 (1999): 22-33; Naomi Hetherington, “New Women, New Testaments: Christian 61

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categories of religion or race, both of which are bound up with Levy’s feminism. The publication of Melvyn New’s Selected Writings reintroduced previously forgotten short-stories and Amy Levy’s articles for the Jewish Chronicle, and revived interest in both her writing and biography.66 For the first time, novels which had been out of circulation were available in a single volume. Additionally, the helpful footnotes indicate the breadth of Levy’s research, although there is a distinct absence of elaboration on the part of the editor. In 1996, Meri-Jane Rochelson rightly acknowledged that Reuben Sachs is neither anti-Semitic, nor anti-religious, in her path breaking article for Women’s Studies: The place of Reuben Sachs in a feminist tradition has until recently been obscured. The critical history of the novel, in fact, attests to the ways in which critical categories, once established, can stand in the way of revaluations. Because Reuben Sachs has been viewed as a “Jewish novel,” its feminist implications have been largely ignored, and the rage embodied in the book has been defined simplistically as antisemitism, or Jewish self-hatred. But rather than self-hatred (or even hatred of Judaism), the novel presents a critique of the materialism of assimilated middle-class Jews.67

Importantly, Reuben Sachs could now be approached as a feminist novel. Also in 1996, Cynthia Scheinberg, one of the first scholars to critically analyze the “Jewish” aspects of Levy’s poetry, discovered that “Magdalen,”68 previously viewed as a critique of the Magdalen reformatory institutions,69 is underpinned by a crypto-Jewish subNarrative and New Woman Writing (Olive Schreiner, Amy Levy, Sarah Grand)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southampton, 2003). 66 See Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, “Amy Levy & ‘The J. C.,’” Jewish Chronicle, November 17, 1961, 13. 67 Rochelson, “Jews, Gender, and Genre,” 312. 68 See Levy, A Minor Poet. 69 For the works that assume “Magdalen” is a critique of the reformatory institutions for “fallen women” (prostitutes) see Emma Francis,

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text. Scheinberg argues that the narrator is not, as previously thought, a “fallen woman,” but Mary Magdalene, who as a reanimated scriptural figure resists all ties to Jesus and Christianity. Scheinberg concludes that in the poem’s exchange between Magdalene and Jesus, Levy deliberately chooses one of the most important incidents of Christian scripture,70 and thus destabilizes conventional Christian interpretation by reminding readers of the instability of Christian discourse when a Jew speaks beyond Christian epistemology.71 However, while Scheinberg is able to reveal Levy’s poetry, specifically the subtexts, to be a “Jewish” critique of Christian literary hegemony, a number of issues remain unresolved concerning this subtext. Indeed, Scheinberg says nothing of Levy’s denominational or theological aspirations and notes: “This theme of being at home nowhere is a theme Levy refers to repeatedly in her work, using it to describe her religious identity, her cultural identity, and her sexual identity.”72 Problematically, questions remain concerning Levy’s religious, cultural, and sexual identity that cannot be answered by assuming, as Scheinberg does, that she was an author who explored the concept of “minority,”73 and was an outsider to “Amy Levy: Contradictions? – Feminism and Semitic Discourse,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, eds. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999), 183-204; Angela Leighton, “‘Because Men Made the Laws.’ The Fallen Woman and the Women Poet,” Victorian Poetry 27, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 109-27; Kathleen Hickok, Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), 109-10. 70 See the Easter narrative of John 20:11-18 71 Scheinberg, “Canonizing the Jew,” 190-94. See also Cynthia Scheinberg, “Recasting Sympathy and Judgment: Amy Levy, Women Poets, and the Dramatic Monologue,” Victorian Poetry 34 (1997): 173-92. 72 Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion, 232. 73 Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion, 191. See also Joseph Bristow, “‘All Out of Tune in this World’s Instrument’: the ‘Minor’ Poetry of Amy Levy,” Journal of Victorian Culture 4, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 76-103; Karen Weisman, “Playing with Figures: Amy Levy and the Forms of Cancellation,” Criticism 43, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 59-79; Alex Goody, “Murder in Mile End: Amy Levy, Jewishness, and the City,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 461-79; Sarah Minsloff, “Amy Levy and Identity Criti-

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every community. Scheinberg’s book is a work of literary criticism and focuses on religious identity rather than theology. Her arguments are gestural rather than substantive and the terms employed, such as “Christian culture” and “Jewish identity,” are perhaps too broad.74 Iveta Jusova also reveals the “Jewish” subtext to Levy’s “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage”: It would be likely viewed by Levy’s Jewish readers as symbolic of the Victorian Protestant efforts to convert the Jews. … Considered in this context, Levy’s poem has embedded within its feminist framework the author’s denunciation of Christian efforts to appropriate Jewish history, and her remarks concerning the demise of the faith in God can be read as referring to the way in which Christianity has appropriated (and “killed”) the God of Sinai.75

Comparably, Jusova’s analysis says little of Levy’s religious beliefs; rather, Jusova reveals Levy’s comprehension of the host culture and its religious tradition. The assumption of Amy Levy’s “outsider” status also relates to what I would argue to be the fallacy of her homoeroticism. Linda Hunt Beckman’s Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, published in 2000,76 is the only book-length biography to date and is augmented cism: A Review of Recent Work,” Literature Compass 4, no. 4 (2007): 131829. 74 Joanne Myers, review of Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture, by Cynthia Scheinberg, Religion 84, no. 4 (October 2004): 675. 75 Iveta Jusova, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 139. 76 See also Linda Hunt Beckman, “Amy Levy and the ‘Jewish Novel’: Representing Jewish Life in the Victorian Period,” Studies in the Novel 26, no. 3 (1994): 235-53; Linda Hunt Beckman, “Leaving ‘the Tribal Duckpond’: Amy Levy, Jewish Self-Hatred, and Jewish Identity,” Victorian Literature and Culture (1999): 185-201; Linda Hunt Beckman, “Amy Levy: Urban Poetry, Poetic Innovation and the Fin-de-Siècle Woman Poet,” in The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bris-

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by its compilation, for the first time, of Levy’s remaining personal correspondence.77 Hunt Beckman deserves credit for undermining a number of fables, including that Levy was a teacher of poor Jewish children, a Clapham factory girl,78 and that she lived in a garret.79 Her assumptions, however, regarding Levy’s sexuality are perhaps unsubstantiated. As evidence of Levy’s homosexuality, or homoeroticism,80 Hunt Beckman argues that passion for men is all but absent from her poetry, and points to Levy’s adoration for headmistress Edith Creak.81 Alternatively, Christine Pullen argues that, more probably, Amy Levy adopted a male voice in her writing to obscure her female identity and to “speak like a man.” In fact, the only documentary evidence to imply Levy held romantic inclinations toward women is her praise for headmistress, Edith Creak, in her juvenile correspondence. This proves nothing as such idealization was tow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 207-30. For review of Hunt Beckman’s biography see Nadia Valman, “The Haunting of Amy Levy,” review of Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, by Linda Hunt Beckman, The Jewish Quarterly (Winter 2000/2001): 81-83. 77 Several essay-length biographies have offered little new, see Ana Parejo Vadillo, “My Heroine,” Women: A Cultural Review 12, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 340-46; Talia Schaffer, “Brief Life,” The Women’s Review of Books 18, no. 8 (May 2001): 20-21; Richard Whittington-Egan, “Amy Levy: A Tragic Victorian Novelist,” Contemporary Review 280, no. 1632 (January 2002): 4046; Linda Hunt Beckman, “Levy, Amy Judith,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 33, Leared – Lister, eds. H. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 553-55; Susan David Bernstein, introduction to The Romance of a Shop, by Amy Levy, ed. Susan David Bernstein (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006), 11-41. See also Vadillo, Women Poets. 78 Valman, “The Haunting,” 81. 79 Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 2, 4. 80 Although lesbianism (mesolelot) is not mentioned in the Bible, Leviticus 18 and 20 describe homosexuality as “an abhorrence.” The Talmud, however, twice discusses lesbianism and argues that it is in no way comparable to male homosexuality. Instead, lesbianism is analyzed as condemnable but not with punitive or legal ramifications. In sum, normative sexuality in traditional Judaism is heterosexual, initiated by the man, and confined to marriage. 81 Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 31, 87.

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common to Victorian schoolgirls.82 Recent scholarship demonstrates that relationships between women in the period were often intense and that poetry would be exchanged in order to celebrate years of friendship. Although women occasionally had sexual relationships these were accepted and even encouraged by families, society, and the Church. Relationships between women were actually a crucial component of femininity.83 Pullen notes how contemporary feminist scholars misinterpret the affectionate language used between Victorian girls.84 Furthermore, in her study of female love and romantic friendship, Lillian Faderman argues: “The limited definition of love between women as lesbian sex … is born in male fantasy. Even for women whose love for other females in all probability had a sexual component, lesbian love was a good deal more than lesbian sex.”85 Pullen concludes, using Levy’s correspondence, that not only would Levy have preferred to have been married, and to have had children, but also that she had been intimately acquainted with the eugenicist Karl Pearson.86 Although Pullen’s claims have been called into question, and despite the fact that lesbianism would become a feature of Second-Wave Jewish feminism, a lesbian hermeneutic may not be applicable to Levy’s religious writing.87 The fascination with Reuben Sachs, despite the growing acclaim of Amy Levy’s poetry, has continued into the new millennium. Emma Francis notes the “racial” elements of the story and its underpinning of social Darwinist theory:

82 Christine Pullen, “Amy Levy; Her Life, Her Poetry and the Era of the New Woman” (Ph.D. diss., Kingston University, 2000), 15, 17-18. 83 See Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007). 84 Pullen, “Amy Levy,” 17. 85 Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: The Woman’s Press, 1981), 18. 86 Pullen, “Amy Levy,” 9, 113. 87 See Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, ed. Evelyn Torten Beck (1982; rpt. New York: The Crossing Press, 1984).

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Levy is primarily exploring the vicissitudes of “racial” rather than “sexual” instinct, but the discussion does inflect the feminism of the novel and its account of sexuality. Despite his own premature extinction, Reuben’s philosophy includes a strong commitment to the survival and regeneration of the Jewish race. The novel makes it clear that an important aspect of Reuben and Judith’s mutual attraction is the appeal of race. … Part of the tragedy of the failure of their relationship, and of the thwarting of Judith’s sexual desires, is the thwarting of this racial instinct. Reuben knows, and the novel knows, that Judith, as a healthy, racially pure and superior Sephardic Jew, represents an opportunity for him to redeem and repair his own degenerate line, to contribute to the regeneration of the race, which he eschews in favour of material greed and social ambition.88

Nadia Valman has since elaborated on Levy’s eugenic discourse in her analysis of textual representations of fin-de-siècle Anglo-Jewish marriage, and in her more recent The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (2007),89 and also in “Amy Levy and the Literary Representation of the Jewess,” for the long awaited anthology Amy Levy: Critical Essays (2010), which, disappointingly, advances little new in the field, and seems to go over old ground.90 Indeed, the collection of essays offers very little in way of Levy’s latent spirituality, and persists in the use of stark polarizing terms such as “Judaism,” and the “Jewish woman,” and neglects to mention theology at all. Certainly, “Judaism,” even in the nineteenth-century, had many denominational communities and perspectives – Reform, Liberal, Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, mystical, and rabbinic – and the term “Jewish” comprises innumerable cultural, social, racial, geographic, and religious identities. The collection also contains numerous inFrancis, “Socialist Feminism,”122. See Valman, “‘Barbarous and Mediaeval’”; Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of the “Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations: 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 90 Nadia Valman, “Amy Levy and the Literary Representation of the Jewess,” in Amy Levy, eds. Hetherington and Valman, 90-109. 88 89

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accuracies; for example, T. Olverson argues that “As an AngloJewish woman writer, Levy was particularly well positioned to examine the difficulties involved in immigration and assimilation.”91 However, Levy was not an immigrant, she was a radically assimilated Anglo-Jewish woman born in England, she had little or nothing to do with the Jewish immigrants, Eastern or otherwise, during the late-Victorian period. True, she was well positioned to talk about assimilation, but certainly not immigration. Also, in the introduction it is stated: “Although Levy did not begin publishing work on Jewish themes until the last three years of her life.”92 This comment is entirely inaccurate given that Levy had published numerous poems on quintessential Jewish themes, such as in “A Prayer,” “A Greek Girl,” “Magdalen,” and in her analysis of David for Kind Words. Moreover, if these authors must persist with the assumption of Levy’s homoeroticism, a discussion of how her potential lesbianism might have affected her Jewishness, and her religiosity, is perhaps long overdue. Most problematically, Levy’s designation as a queer writer permeates the collection of essays, despite the fact that in the introduction we are reminded that “nothing certain is known” about Levy’s sexuality, and that the sexuality of her poetry “is not stable or consistent.”93 Nadia Valman concludes that Reuben Sachs, and its portrayal of a victimized Jewish heroine, replicates contemporaneous medical and anti-Semitic discourses concerning assimilated Jewry’s predisposition toward nervous illness. For Valman, the novel’s antiJudaism is infused with the language of social Darwinism and racial degeneration. Accordingly, Judaism is figured as a religion of nation rather than faith and through the lens of Victorian Christianity is represented as encumbered by ritual and devoid of spirituality.94 91 T. D. Olverson, “‘Such Are Not Woman’s Thoughts’: Amy Levy’s ‘Xantippe’ and ‘Medea,’” in Amy Levy, eds. Hetherington and Valman, 123. 92 Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman, introduction to Amy Levy, eds. Hetherington and Valman, 6. 93 Hetherington and Valman, introduction, 11. 94 Valman, The Jewess, 180-81. Naomi Hetherington argues that little has been said of Evangelical missionary activity and their propagation of Orientalist images of Jews and Judaism in contrast to elevated Christian

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Valman summarizes Reuben Sachs as “a secular, evolutionary narrative,”95 also recognizing that the novel reveals the deficiencies of Jewish religious practice: “Levy emphasizes once again the conformism and inarticulacy of the Jewish woman, unable to recognize her unfulfilled needs. But Levy is also making an implicit link between Judith’s mechanical (rather than self-reflexive) thinking and Judaism, the religion of externals.”96 As we have seen, there has been a tendency among scholars to dismiss Amy Levy’s Judaism or to avoid the issue, particularly as there is a scarcity of evidence. Linda Hunt Beckman speculates: “It would be useful to know more about the Levy family’s involvement with Judaic practice, whether the children received any religious training, and what relationship they had with the organized Jewish community. Although the basis for conjecture is not as full as we might wish.”97 Beckman concludes: “My research into Levy’s life leads me to downplay any direct religious influence.”98 Nadia Valman, in her review of Hunt Beckman’s biography, also notes: “The speculative nature of parts of this biography is a result of the unfortunate fact that most of Levy’s personal papers, including many letters, were destroyed by her family after her death for reasons unknown.”99 More recent biographical overviews refuse to elaborate on the subject, as Susan David Bernstein writes: “Little is known about Levy’s own religious instruction, although both Reuben Sachs and her essays published in the Jewish Chronicle, as well as some remarks in her letters to her sister and mother, make evident that she possessed at least a basic knowledge of Jewish traditions.”100 Bernstein prefers to analyze Reuben Sachs as containing: “vulgar, hybrid portrayals of acculturated Anglo-Jewry, a mixed womanhood, and the ways in which Jewish women writers appropriated this image. See “New Woman, ‘New Boots,’” 259. 95 Valman, The Jewess, 193. 96 Valman, “Amy Levy,” 94. 97 Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 15. 98 Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 304 n26. 99 Valman, “The Haunting,” 82; see also Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 285 n15. 100 Bernstein, introduction, 14.

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representation for a mixed audience by a writer caught by the inbetween condition of middle-class Victorian Jews.”101 We must therefore look to the fragments of evidence and to Amy Levy’s writing for answers. It is known that the Levy family attended the Reform Synagogue of Upper Berkeley Street in the borough of the City of Westminster, London, and her correspondence suggests that attendance was regular. She notes: “Being Friday, you can’t go – sorry,” in reference to Shabbat, and states: “How did everybody fast? … Did you miss your stalwart escort of last year,” alluding to Yom Kippur. She also says: “Please tell Mama that I went to Synagogue.”102 Certainly, synagogue attendance must have been important to Levy as she attended shul while in Germany: [A] beastly place it was. Zion unventilated& [sic] unrefreshed, sent forth an odour which made me feel [illegible] for the rest of the day. The place was crammed with evil-looking Hebrews … This afternoon we call on … some wealthy Hebrews of our “acquaintance” who, for Js [Jews], don’t seem half bad. I say “for Js” because the German Hebrew makes me feel, as a rule, that the Anti-Semitic movement is a most just and virtuous one.103

This comment has been read as Jewish self-hatred, and it is couched in admittedly derogatory terms, though it merely reflects Levy’s assimilation.104 Many acculturated Jews held such prejudices, as the negative Anglo-Jewish response to the mass immigration of Ashkenazic Jews at the fin-de-siècle would demonstrate.105 Levy’s unenthusiastic attitude toward German Jewry reveals the extent of 101 Susan David Bernstein, “Mongrel Words: Amy Levy’s Jewish Vulgarity,” in Amy Levy, eds. Hetherington and Valman, 144. 102 Quoted by Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 17. 103 Quoted by Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 110. 104 Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 110. 105 See Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876-1939 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979); Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1972).

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her own acculturation and how she stratifies Jewish identity between “foreign” Jews, the radically assimilated Jews of Upper Berkeley Street, and the idealized Sephardic Jews of Reuben Sachs. In her article “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day (By a Jewess),” written in 1886, Levy reveals her determination to establish that Anglo-Jews are “English,”106 and maintained throughout her life close friendships with other Anglo-Jewish women. Even her cremation reflects the melding of both acculturated and traditional custom, as Linda Shiren notes: The Jewish Chronicle of 20 September 1889 reports that, unlike in the case of Mr. Camillo Roth, “in the case of Miss Levy the body remained in the coffin.” Sacred in Judaism, the body is to be cleansed, not put on view, and buried as quickly as possible. Cremation is highly unusual, though done by request. Presumably, Levy’s body, washed first by women, remained in the coffin for cremation so that it would not be seen or handled by the men who would have cremated it. In other words, the obituary writer wants to assure the Jewish community that certain halakhic (legal) strictures were enforced in spite of a suicide and cremation.107

Amy Levy’s religious beliefs were, in fact, bound up with the classical Reformism of the period. Her proto-feminist aspirations, evidenced in her poetry and in Reuben Sachs, have their basis in the pledges made by the German Reformers of the 1840s. True, Levy’s writing often replicates the Evangelical tradition, including the idealization of the Jewess as an agent of spiritual redemption,108 but the incorporation of the Protestant host-culture was integral to classical Reformism’s assimilationist project. Additionally, Levy’s personal comments do not point toward atheism; she stated: “The 106 Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 286 n30. See Levy, “Middle-Class Jewish Women.” 107 Linda Shiren, review of Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, by Linda Hunt Beckman, Victorian Studies 44, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 151. 108 Valman, “Amy Levy,” 102.

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vaguely pious person, disbelieving & believing in Christ, is an anomaly beyond my comprehension. If you go in for vague belief, fling away the bible you ought to.”109 It is more that she had difficulty accommodating her own spiritual identity and locating the divine presence in the religious institutions available to her at Upper Berkeley Street. She accordingly sought “Jewish” inspiration, as we will see, in the familiar traditions of the host culture. In short, awareness of the social and religious context of Amy Levy’s writing and acknowledgement of her use of midrash, as will be shown in chapters two and three, has repercussions for how we read the texts, particularly as it places such texts within a Jewish or feminist tradition, rather than assuming the author to be a secular proto-feminist writing in a Christian culture, as had previously been the norm. The discourses of social Darwinism and materialism that underpin Reuben Sachs, for instance, are separable from the influence of contemporaneous Evangelical tropes concerning the inherent spirituality of women, and the criticism of traditional Judaism as encumbered by legalism. Indeed, re-reading Levy from a traditional theological perspective, as I do in chapter five, reveals the appropriation of several previously unacknowledged classically Jewish themes, including a gendered re-analysis of Messianic deliverance, and an awareness of the Talmudic association between women and redemption. In sum, this study argues that rather than being atheistic, Levy’s works demonstrate religious and theological alienation, and determination to reengage, however subjectively, with the tradition, and moreover, that the influence of Christian Evangelicalism is hardly surprising given the Reformist dimension to her writing. As a feminist historian of Anglo-Jewry, the following chapters bring together the fields of theology and literature in order to make an original contribution to unearthing the history of Jewish feminism in England. To substantiate my hypothesis I locate Amy Levy’s writing historically, within the context of Anglo-First-Wave feminism, and then conceptually as a genre that prefigures aspects of American Second-Wave Jewish feminist theological and religious 109 Amy Levy, “Letter to Miss Paget,” 28, in Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 261.

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theory. Although it may seem obvious that First-Wave feminism would pave the way for the Second-Wave, this is not the case. Jewish feminists of the 1970s were largely, if not completely, unaware of Amy Levy. Indeed, the links are conceptual more than they are inspirational or historical.110 In selecting the primary sources for this study, it was necessary to review the entirety of Amy Levy’s proto-feminist writing, along with the relevant secondary literature. Despite my criticisms of the historiography, much has been of value, as the footnotes and bibliography attest. Indeed, Melissa Raphael argues: “Knocking other theorists out of the field is a masculinist academic sport,”111 and equally, Judith Plaskow: “To approach texts critically is not to dismiss them.”112 Given the size of the corpus, and that much of Levy’s writing does not deal with religious, Jewish, or even feminist themes per se, I have been selective.113 The archives, however, have yielded little new as regards to Levy’s personal papers, particularly given that the majority of her private artifacts were destroyed by her family after the suicide. This has inevitably opened the door for all manner of conjecture. However, conversations with the archivist holding many of Levy’s papers (Private Collection, United Kingdom) has revealed some previously unpublished material, unfortunately of little relevance to this study, including the poem “Patriotism,” photos, and drawn caricatures previously unseen. The examination of Amy Levy’s texts requires awareness of the spiritual, religious, and theological contexts. It is no use to piAnn Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 10-11, 13. I have used Heilmann’s methodology for this book. In her study of New Woman writing she argues that elements of First-Wave cultural feminism (New Woman fiction) prefigure aspects of Second-Wave feminist theory. 111 Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003), 5. 112 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990; rpt. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 17. 113 Levy, Xantippe; A Minor Poet; and Reuben Sachs (London: Macmillan, 1888) are the primary focus, although A London Plane-Tree and “Jewish Women”; “Jewish Children”; “Jewish Humour”; and “Middle-Class Jewish Women,” are frequently referred to. 110

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geonhole them by applying blunt, unnuanced categories of analysis such as by labeling them novels of “apologia” or “revolt,” or to use essentializing terms such as patriarchy, feminist, Jewish, Jewish women, Christian. Acknowledgment of the influence of Reform Judaism is also insufficient. As we will see, there were considerable differences between Anglo-Reformism and the classical Reformism of the German branch of the movement that require clarification, particularly with regard to the “Woman Question.” Instead, I analyze these texts with awareness of the interpretive liberty of Reformist perspectives, and consideration that such perspectives invariably select and employ both traditional and meta-traditional sources. The classic Jewish feminist religious discourses of the SecondWave are vital to this study.114 Moreover, the Jewish feminist theological texts of the Second and Third-Waves are intrinsically relevant,115 as is Second-Wave discourse on the Jesus movement, its proto-feminist and Jewish origins, and first-century Judaism.116 Ad-

114 It is not possible to list all the classic Second-Wave texts here. This book, its footnotes, and bibliography reveal the extent of the literature. But, for example: Rachel Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” Davka (Summer 1971): 7-11; The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New York: Schocken, 1976); Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, eds. Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979); Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, eds. Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ (1984; rpt. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989); Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History & Their Relevance for Today (1984; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995); On Being A Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (1983; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995). 115 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai; Lynn Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a New Judaism (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995); Marcia Falk, The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival (New York: Harper Collins, 1996); Adler, Engendering Judaism; Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2004). 116 See Judith Plaskow, “Christian Feminism and Anti-Judaism,” Cross-Currents 33 (Fall 1978): 306-09; Judith Plaskow, “Feminist AntiJudaism and the Christian God,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7, no.

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ditionally, this book, as a history of Jewish feminism, and its traditional religious underpinnings, inevitably draws on a rich body of religious literature including the “Old” and “New” Testaments,117 Tanakh,118 Talmud,119 the Gnostic Gospels,120 and the Zohar.121 As will become evident, this study is testimony to the growing corpus of Jewish feminist literature and its interconnected cultural, religious, theological, ethnic, and ideological nuances. Having reviewed the Amy Levy historiography and source material with awareness of her spiritual and theological alienation from the institutions of her day that make God’s presence difficult to know, it is subsequently important to overview more recent responses to Jewish theological estrangement and attempts to develop Jewish feminist theologies since the Holocaust. Despite the fact that the Second-Wave of Jewish feminism began in the late-1960s, the constructive Jewish feminist theological project might be regarded as a work in progress, or perhaps shelved indefinitely. Even Judith Plaskow’s self-identified Jewish feminist theology, Standing Again at Sinai, reads more as an ethical sociology of community than as a theology.122 Her book is based on the principle of women as “Other” to the tradition: God, com-

2 (1991): 99-108; Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue (Chico: Scholar Press, 1982). 117 See Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, King James Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, n.d.). 118 The Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, includes Torah, Prophets (Nevi’im) and Writings (Ketuvim). See Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985). 119 See The Babylonian Talmud, 18 vols., ed. I. Epstein (London: Soncino, 1978). 120 For example, see Valentinus, Pistis Sophia: Opus Gnosticum, ed. Julius Petermann and trans. Moritz Schwartze (Beriloni: F. Duemmler, 1851). 121 See The Wisdom of the Zohar: an Anthology of Texts, 3 vols., eds. Isaiah Tishby and Fischel Lachower, and trans. David Goldstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Zohar translates as “Book of Splendor.” 122 See Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai.

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munity, and halakhah.123 For Plaskow, reform of halakhah is irrelevant, as the problem is inherent to Judaism’s interpretation of God. Accordingly, if God is male and humanity is created in his image, maleness is considered the norm and women are perpetual “Other.”124 Problematically, however, Plaskow neglects to explore the central theological aspects of Judaism, such as the meaning of being under judgment, and to be subject to God’s mitzvot. Rather, Plaskow attempts to justify Judaism to women on relational grounds. However, twenty years after Standing Again at Sinai, the daughters of the Second-Wave appear to be even less interested in theology.125 It is therefore not surprising that Melissa Raphael has concluded that Jewish feminism has emptied Judaism of theology. At least historically, Jewish feminist theology is a post-Holocaust construal that assumes, following Auschwitz, that Judaism can no longer be justified through classical faith in the God of Sinai, or by the Reform assumption that Judaism underpins the moral structures of Western civilization. By the close of the twentieth-century, Jewish feminist theology can only justify Judaism to women on the basis of its prophetic concern for social justice, of its being a spiritual connector between the foremothers of the current generation of Jewish women and their daughters, and as an imaginal and ritual focus for communal identity.126 The past two-hundred years have been characterized by the ongoing quest for an alternative to ha123 See Saul Berman, “The Status of Women in Halakhic Judaism,” Tradition 14 (Winter 1973): 5-28; David Feldman, “Women’s Role and Jewish Law,” Conservative Judaism 26 (Summer 1972): 29-39. 124 Judith Plaskow, “The Right Question is Theological,” in On Being A Jewish Feminist, 226-28. See Paula Hyman, “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition,” Response 18 (Summer 1973): 67-75. 125 See Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (New York: Seal Press, 2001). 126 Melissa Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai? Reading Jewish Feminist Theology Through the Critical Lens of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to “Radical Orthodoxy,” eds. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion Grau (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 200-01, 207 n27, 209-10, 214). See Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990).

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lakhic Judaism. To date, this has included secular Zionism, assimilationism, Reform, New Age,127 mystical, and other liberal alternatives. The concept of a feminist Judaism, however, is perhaps an oxymoron, particularly as some feminists view the tradition as irredeemably patriarchal, and attachment to it as unthinkable and retrogressive.128 Alternatively, traditionalists argue that feminism is an alien philosophy that contradicts Jewish self-understanding. Indeed, Jewish feminists have often resided in a state of self-contradiction, and have been left to choose between the aspects that define their identities.129 Thus, the creation of women’s groups and spiritual collectives composed of women without theological training has proffered little with regard to the creation of a feminist theology, that is, any para-doctrinal Jewish and feminist discourse upon God as the basis of values and practices.130 Susannah Heschel, writing in 1983, argues that theology can function on two levels: first, by critically examining a particular religious tradition, and second, by creating new interpretations of its meaning. Thus, Jewish feminist theology has analyzed the exclusion of women from the central texts of Judaism, its liturgy, language, and observances. Also, feminist theology, according to Heschel, has sought to develop new understandings of Judaism that will Ross, Expanding the Palace, 136-37. See Leonard Swidler, Women in Judaism: The Status of Women in Formative Judaism (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1976); Moshe Meisleman, Jewish Women and Jewish Law (New York: Ktav, 1978). 129 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 1-2. See Arthur Green, “Keeping Feminist Creativity Jewish,” Sh’ma 16, no. 305 (January 10, 1986): 33-35; T. Drorah Setel, “Feminist Reflections on Separation and Unity in Jewish Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2 (Spring 1986): 113-18. 130 Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 197. See Martha Ackelsberg, “Spirituality, Community and Politics: B’not Esh and the Feminist Reconstruction of Judaism,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2 (Fall 1986): 109-20. For the diverse issues approached by the SecondWave see The Jewish Woman; Nice Jewish Girls; The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, eds. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz (1986; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); The Jewish Family: Myths and Reality, eds. Steven Cohen and Paula Hyman (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986); Ichud Habonim, Sisters of Exile; Sources on the Jewish Woman (New York: Labor Zionist Youth, 1973). 127 128

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support feminist values, and provide Jewish women with the opportunity to participate in a full range of religious expressions. For Heschel, the problem of method is central to women engaging in the prospect of Jewish theology. Hence, the following questions arise: how can the sources of women’s exclusion from Judaism be uncovered? How can women’s spirituality be expressed through a Jewish religious language? And, how can the feminist perspective interpret, and even transform, the Jewish tradition? Theology thus brings the questions and problems of human experience to its analysis of specific religious traditions, which themselves are the product of the questions and readings of past generations. Neither theology, nor the most sacred texts, according to Heschel, can claim to be the explicit word of God. Rather, theological interpretations present the understandings of that word and will by a specific generation, transmitted, or mediated, to later generations. Heschel concludes that women have to become part of the interpretation, heritage, and commentary of the tradition, and hence, a missing dimension of Jewish spirituality will be restored.131 The SecondWave elicited numerable inclusionist responses, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the first theological aspect to be scrutinized was the male imagery of God inherent to the tradition. In 1979, Rita Gross argued that the omnipresent “He” in reference to the divine presence could be replaced by female pronouns and images. She concludes that the exclusively masculine imagery of God tells us nothing about the deity, but merely explains the androcentricity of the tradition.132 Gross, nonetheless, suggests that neuter language is insufficient to describe God, as it hinders the individual’s ability to speak to the deity. For Gross, therefore, Jews, both male and female, must begin to address God as “She”: “Everything that has ever been said or that we still want to say of hakadosh baruch hu [the holy one, blessed be he] can also be said of ha-k’dosha baruch he [the holy one, blessed be she] and con131

18.

Susannah Heschel, introduction to On Being A Jewish Feminist, 217-

132 See Rita Gross, “Androcentrism and Androgyny in the Methodology of the History of Religions,” in Beyond Androcentrism: New Essays on Women and Religion, ed. Rita Gross (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977), 7-21.

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versely, ‘God-She’ is appropriately used in every context in which any reference to God occurs.”133 However, similar to “he,” referring to God as “she” is equally limiting as it reduces the deity to human categories.134 In Judaism, only the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God, is the single developed female image of the deity, and represents: “women’s divine image, obscured as it has been by the sin of patriarchy, is engaged in a restorative struggle – the very process of tikkun.”135 Although the radically monotheistic Talmud and Midrash refer to the Shekhinah, generally without reference to the femaleness of the presence (except Kiddushin 31b),136 Kabbalah employs the term as the feminine element present in God adjacent to the masculine: “Holy One, Blessed be He.” As Rita Gross argues: The most profound, intriguing, and inviting of all Jewish theologies – the Kabbalah – teaches us that galut – exile – is the fundamental reality and pain of present existence. It teaches us that one of the causes of galut is the alienation of the masculine from the feminine in God, the alienation of God and the Shekhinah. Now the masculine and feminine have been torn asunder and the feminine dismembered and banished, both from the discourse about divinity and from the human community, such a tikkun is obligatory, is a mitzvah. When the masculine and feminine aspect of God have been reunited and the female half of humanity has been returned from exile, we will begin to have our tikkun. The world will be repaired.137

133 Rita Gross, “Female God Language in a Jewish Context,” in Womanspirit Rising, 173. 134 Karen Armstrong, A History of God: From Abraham to the Present: the 4000-Year Quest for God (London: Vintage, 1999), 464. See Rita Gross, “Steps Toward Feminine Imagery of Deity in Jewish Theology,” Judaism 30, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 183-93. 135 Raphael, The Female Face, 149. 136 The Hebrew Bible rejects the Near Eastern pantheon of gods. 137 Gross, “Steps Toward,” 234.

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The marriage between God and Israel, the Shekhinah-bride, is thus transferred to the inner life of God as a holy union within the Godhead. The Shekhinah-bride is accordingly symbolized through feminine terms, such as queen, princess, daughter, mother, moon, matron, wisdom, faith, and the community of Israel. However, despite the widespread popularity of Shekhinah imagery, the concept has not been incorporated into the liturgy as an accepted balance to the traditional masculinity of God.138 Judith Plaskow notes that in mainstream Jewish thinking, God’s non-sexuality is integral to the moral order, though in Jewish mysticism, the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah use extensive sexual imagery, particularly in relation to the ninth (Yesod: foundation) Sefirah (emanations) through which all higher Sefirot flow into the feminine Shekhinah.139 This process is portrayed in phallic terminology and interpreted as the male procreative force active in the universe. Its marriage to the Shekhinah, the celestial bride, is central to the Sefirot. Therefore, the separation of the masculine and feminine aspects within God is a disaster key to the drama of creation.140 Hence, the reunion between the masculine and the feminine is the very meaning of redemption itself. According to Plaskow, it is not surprising, given the importance of sexuality to Kabbalistic interpretations of divinity, that the mystical tradition is the source of positive attitudes toward marital sexuality. The feminine aspect of the divine presence is also evident in prophetic Judaism. Isaiah, for example, refers to God as a mother (42:14, 66:13), and likewise, God appears in the Bible as a wet-nurse and as a midwife.141 Plaskow, on this and other counts, concludes that the Jewish feminist approach to God-language must incorporate women’s Godwrestling into the fullness of the Torah. This, she assumes, might Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 138-39. The Zohar appeared toward the end of the thirteenth-century and is generally attributed to Rabbi Moses de Leon (1240-1305). 140 See Tamar Ross, “Can We Still Pray to Our Father in Heaven?” in A Good Eye: Dialogue and Polemic in Jewish Culture, a Jubilee Book in Honor of Tova Ilan (Hakibbutz: Hameuchad Publishing House Ltd, 1999), 264-78. 141 The book of Isaiah may have been the work of three major prophets. Hence, it is often split into three sections for analysis: first (139), second (40-55), and third (56-66). 138 139

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be achieved by locating images that can evoke, and communicate, the experience of the divine presence to a diverse, egalitarian, and empowered community of Israel.142 Alternatively, Carol Christ, writing in 1976, before she became a Goddess feminist, compared the gendering of the divine presence to the status of women in Judaism. Christ argues (employing the themes of slavery and liberation from Exodus) that the emancipation of both the deity and women is dependent on an understanding of what it means to be in each other’s place. Moreover, liberation depends on the resurrection of an ancient dialogue between God and women. By employing the example of Elie Wiesel, Christ speculated that women changed places with God, and that he experienced life as shaped by his Covenant with man. The women of her story hope that if he experiences their suffering, he will transform the (patriarchal) world he created.143 As the women change places with God, however, they come to recognize a previously unacknowledged kinship with the divine presence that was marginalized by the patriarchal stories of God the father. The women subsequently learn that it is patriarchal history that has forced their alienation from the divine. Similarly, the human image of God, or his/her nature as both male and female, had been suppressed. Accordingly, women’s ability to liberate themselves from a world in which God is imprisoned makes them powerful, and with this newly found power, they are able to assist in the liberation of God. Christ’s theological discourse draws analogies with the “Messiah in chains” of the mystical tradition. Both Hasidic and Kabbalistic texts claim that in order for God to be delivered from bondage, human intervention is required. The imperative for divine liberation is common to Jewish mystical theology, and is expressed by God’s alienation from his female counterpart, the Shekhinah. Christ Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 122, 124, 188. As a child Wiesel’s life was shaped by the Talmud and he had hoped to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. However, after being a prisoner in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and experiencing the brutality of the Gestapo and the SS firsthand, he lost all faith in God. Wiesel concluded that God was in fact dead, although he later reclaimed his faith. 142 143

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concludes that these symbols can be reinterpreted to counter the patriarchal image of the deity. The renewed dialogue between women and God will thus be charged with yearning.144 Christ’s approach was, nonetheless, theoretical. She was not a Jewish thinker. However, Marcia Falk, for example, working within the Jewish community, was able to develop a liturgical-theology. Falk’s theological approach, both feminist and Reconstructionist, discourses on the prospect of universal spirituality, and concludes that relationship with the divine “is about a loss of otherness, a merging, a breakdown of boundaries and a (momentary) release into the Wholeness.”145 This perspective assumes natural, or non-personal, interpretations of the divine presence as either, for instance, rock, tree, or lion.146 Falk attempts to import images from earlier Jewish traditions in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere, enabling her prayers to retain a traditional flavor,147 while avoiding the issue of gender: I create and use new images – images such as eyn ha-hayyim, “well-spring or source of life,” nishmat kol khai, “breath of all living things,” and nitzolzot ha-nefesh, “sparks of the inner, unseen self” – to serve as fresh metaphors for Divinity. With these images and still others, composed of all the basic elements of creation – earth, water, wind and fire – I hope to construct a theology of immanence that will both affirm the sanctity of the world and shatter the idolatrous reign of the lord/God/king.148

Carol Christ, “Women’s Liberation and the Liberation of God: An Essay in Story Theology,” in The Jewish Woman, 11-13, 15-16. 145 Quoted by Adler, Engendering Judaism, 90. Reconstructionism was inspired by Mordecai Kaplan. See Neil Gilman, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990). 146 See Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “On Feminine God-Talk,” Reconstructionist 69 (Spring 1994): 49. 147 Adler, Engendering Judaism, 90. 148 Marcia Falk, “Toward a Feminist Jewish Reconstruction of Monotheism,” Tikkun 4 (July/August 1989): 53-56. 144

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Rachel Adler suggests that it might not be possible for Judaism to link with its past without affirming a personal God,149 leading to theological questions of gender. Falk’s blessings have been criticized for rejecting the universal formula, given that her berakhah (blessing) method counters traditional theologies of transcendence by collapsing God into community and nature. This replaces the rabbinically ordained formula, “Barukh atah Adonai Eloheynu melekh ha-olam,” “Blessed are you, Adonai/Lord our God, king of the universe.” By primarily addressing the community, Falk avoids having to address God as either masculine or feminine, although her critics deem it unacceptable that she had not directly acknowledged God, and neglected to recognize his kingship. Despite the disapproval, however, certain traditional blessings also fail to accommodate the regulations established by the Anoraim (post-Mishnaic authority). Both the wedding blessing and the tefillah (prayers) deviate from these rules.150 Falk’s liturgist-theology, most evident in her later work, The Book of Blessings (1996), which includes reworked, feminist daily, Sabbath, and Rosh Hodesh liturgies, has also been pioneered by Lynn Gottlieb.151 Gottlieb’s theological writing, similarly produced from a Second-Wave perspective, focuses on the Shekhinah, though also imports Canaanite and Native American liturgies.152 While Jewish feminist theologians, particularly Judith Plaskow, have preferred meta-halakhic approaches, traditionalists have, instead, argued that the discriminatory layers of the tradition can be removed to reveal an essential core of justice and equality.153 Ellen Umansky, for example, despite her Reform background, concluded 149 Adler, Engendering Judaism, 90. See Yochanan Muffs, The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith, and the Divine Image (Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2005). 150 Adler, Engendering Judaism, 91. 151 See Falk, The Book of Blessings. 152 See Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within. 153 Susannah Heschel, “Current Issues in Jewish Feminist Theology,” Jewish-Christian Relations 19 (1986): 27. See Blu Greenberg, On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition (1981; rpt. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983); Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998).

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in 1985 that in order for a feminist Judaism to be fully Jewish, it must also be halakhic.154 She acknowledges that halakhah is persistently androcentric, yet assumes it can be rectified by the accommodation of feminist perspectives.155 By contrast, Plaskow theorizes that the inequality of women in Judaism is a theological, rather than a halakhic issue, rooted in the phallocentric core of the tradition and its theological underpinnings: The need for a feminist Judaism begins with hearing silence. It begins with noting the absence of women’s history and experience as shaping forces in the Jewish tradition. Half of Jews have been women, but men have been defined as normative Jews, while women’s voices and experience are largely invisible in the record of Jewish belief and experience that has come down to us. Women have lived Jewish history and carried its burdens, but women’s perceptions and questions have not given form to scripture, shaped the direction of Jewish law, or found expression in the liturgy. Confronting this silence raises disturbing questions and stirs the impulse toward far-reaching change. What in the tradition is ours? What can we claim that has not also wounded us? What would have been different had the great silence been filled?156

Similar to Rita Gross, Plaskow concludes that the Otherness of women, and the androcentrism of the tradition, is expressed through God-language. According to Plaskow, the traditional God, who allegedly transcends sexuality, is known, however, through partial and selectivist masculine pronouns. Accordingly, the images that describe the divine presence are ascribed on the basis of male 154 Carol Christ, Ellen Umansky, and Anne Carr, “Roundtable Discussion: What Are the Sources of My Theology?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 126. See also Ellen Umansky, “Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology: Problems and Possibilities,” in Weaving the Visions, 187-98. 155 See Ellen Umansky, “Beyond Androcentrism: Feminist Challenges to Judaism,” Journal of Reform Judaism 37, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 25-35. 156 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 1.

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experience and convey hierarchical connotations that are distinctly male. Alternatively, the female images of the Bible and the mystical tradition structure an underground stream that underlies the inadequacy of Jewish imagery, yet fails to transform its predominantly male perspective. Religious symbols, Plaskow argues, communicate powerful images and denote how a community expresses its experience to the world. Thus, the maleness of God is not simply a matter of pronouns, but leads to the central question of Otherness. Consequently, the masculine defined liturgy is testimony against the participation of women in religious life, learning, and leadership. Plaskow concludes that radical transformation of the religious language, and recognition of the feminine aspect of the divine presence that can be incorporated into the Godhead, is required. Hence, new understandings of God, Torah,157 and Israel, along with new, gender inclusionist definitions of Jewishness, are necessary.158 While the Second-Wave was germane to the creation of a gendered theology, the actual project was highly amorphous. Jewish feminist theologians, even today, continue to disagree over proper subject matter, methods, categories, and sources.159 Problematically, Judith Plaskow’s theological discourses, and the work of other Second-Wave feminist theologians, have been limited by the range of Jewish feminist religious sources available, more so given the feminist propensity toward writing on personal, as opposed to communal, religious experience.160 To overcome the dichotomy between “women’s experience” and “authentic” Judaism,161 Ellen Umansky suggests that subsequent theologies will have to resonate with the Jewish sources, traditional norms, and See Eliezer Berkovits, Jewish Women in Time and Torah (Hoboken: Ktav, 1990). 158 Plaskow, “The Right Question,” 227-29, 231-32. See also Judith Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology,” in Womanspirit Rising, 198-209; Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, eds. Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 159 Adler, Engendering Judaism, xviii. 160 Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 209-10 n39. 161 The two categories are taken from Adler’s Engendering Judaism, xix. 157

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the fundamental categories of God, Torah, and Israel.162 However, some Jewish feminists have dismissed the tradition as too androcentric, and too negligent of women’s experience, to be deemed “usable.” Instead, alienated from the tradition, Jewish feminists have focused on the historical Jewish woman, more or less, who can, from the resources of her personal experience, and socioreligious circle, produce alternative models of God, and free readings of biblical and aggadic texts. This impetus, combined with the postmodernist refusal of normativity, has, arguably, rendered a normative Jewish feminist theology impossible to most Jewish women.163 Feminist theologians writing during the Third-Wave period, if we can call it that, have encountered similar problems to their Second-Wave predecessors, notably the issues of halakhah and authority. Judith Plaskow, for example, is still hesitant with regard to halakhah, given that it may not be possible to accommodate such a system to the feminist emphasis on relationship, while Rachel Adler argues that only a transformed halakhah can be truly feminist. Additionally, the challenges of the 1980s, such as T. Drorah Setel’s conclusion that Jewish feminism would have to overcome the hierarchical and dualistic aspects of the tradition, and Ellen Umansky’s insistence that a Jewish feminist theology would have to be a “responsive theology,” are yet to be adequately addressed.164 It is therefore not surprising that virtually all Jewish feminist theologians have been non-Orthodox, save Tamar Ross, Professor of Jewish philosophy at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv; perhaps the exception to the rule. Ross has attempted to address the theological isUmansky, “Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology,” 194. Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 201. 164 Judith Plaskow, “Calling All Theologians,” in The New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future, ed. Elyse Goldstein (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2009), 4. For Umansky, “responsive theology” would involve women locating their own voices and presence within traditional sources. She argues that the feminist theologian can only shape religious expression when she is made aware of what women’s religious experience has been. Accordingly, women must read between the lines, fill in missing stories, write new ones, and make guesses (“Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology,” 194). 162 163

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sues raised by the feminist critique of halakhah. Writing in 2004, she theorizes that Orthodoxy requires an inclusivist theology that acknowledges halakhah and Torah as cultural institutions, while still allowing them to represent the voice of God. Accordingly, halakhic change must appear as divine revelation.165 Nevertheless, perhaps the most significant theological discourse of the Second-Wave as it moved toward the Third was Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism; aside from Standing Again at Sinai, the only other self-identified Jewish feminist theology. I have not included Melissa Raphael’s Female Face of God in Auschwitz as this monograph, as a theology of the Holocaust, is quite different in scope, and not directly concerned with contemporary religious practice per se. Adler, whose formative influences were solidly Second-Wave, concludes that God, Torah, and Israel are insufficient categories for a feminist Judaism, particularly as feminists need to operate outside the traditional classifications. For Adler, God is present through the interaction between the lived experience of the community and the traditional texts. It is worth noting, however, that Adler is ambivalent as to the structure of her project: “Both theologies and narratives lend themselves to be claimed, recast, recontextualized by other interpretive communities. Moreover, theologies themselves are suspect when they are too complete, too clear, too coherent. Perhaps a God who hides (el mistater) and a correspondingly complex and elusive humanity are best reflected in the gaps – a riddling theology riddled with fissures.”166 This overview is, in some sense, the story of Jewish feminist theology so far. As we have seen, Jewish feminist theologians have opted to either wrestle with the tradition, or to define, and import, other traditions, leading to the inevitable question of whether such discourse is authentically Jewish. Nonetheless, the post-Holocaust and post or late-modern decline in the collective authority of the sacred texts of Western civilization, may yet render the development of Jewish feminist theology redundant. The tradition has been found wanting. Its exclusion of women has relativized its moral standing. As Melissa Raphael concludes: 165 166

See Ross, Expanding the Palace. Adler, Engendering Judaism, 88.

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The problem is … that Jewish feminist theology’s origin in modern egalitarianism and the postmodern pluralisation of truth, together with its focus upon the immediacies of women’s experience (a deliberate means by which to control the tradition by selecting from it at will and thereby allowing women to operate in a relatively autonomous religious space), has left women religio-intellectually marginalized, and experience of the heteronomous, nonordinary dimension of Jewish revelation has been all but precluded.167

Jewish women’s religious discourse will not rival the Torah, or the tradition, by simply insisting on its autonomy, or its moral displeasure with the gynophobia of the tradition. Furthermore, Jewish feminism’s insistence on equality of religious access will not be achieved by the reworking of gender relevant stories and rituals alone.168 Nor is it enough to challenge the claim that “Jews don’t do theology.”169 Perhaps the problem is that Jewish feminist theology, generally, is geared toward women achieving positions of leadership in the community, and to becoming full participants in Jewish study, ritual, and halakhah, despite the fact that these are not matters of belief about God per se.170 Additionally, a reading of the texts representative of the Third-Wave, such as Yentl’s Revenge and The New Jewish Feminism, reveals that for Jewish feminists, en masse, theology is obscure and of little immediate importance.

Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 198. Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 199. 169 Plaskow, “Calling All Theologians,” 3. 170 Plaskow, “Calling All Theologians,” 8. 167 168

2 “A PRAYER,” MIDRASH, AND SECOND-WAVE JEWISH FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE This chapter demonstrates the spiritual and theological continuities between Amy Levy’s First-Wave poetry and perspectives, although in embryonic form, that would come to underpin Second-Wave Jewish feminist theory. Indeed, “A Prayer” dissects the New Testament, the Jesus movement, and first-century Palestinian-Judaism through Levy’s unique appropriation of midrash.1 The midrashic subtext hidden within this “conventional” poem has remained undetected by previous scholarly research. Accordingly, this chapter reveals how Levy uses the interpretive liberty of midrash, and the midrashic imagination, couched within a classically Reformist perspective, to develop innovative proto-feminist discourse on the assumption that the Jesus ministry was a Jewish renewal movement, not a breakaway sect. Similar to the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Levy seeks to re-appropriate the figure of Jesus to critique Protestant Christianity, but also, distinctively, to broaden the definition of Jewish spirituality to include the aspirations of assimilated AngloJewish women alienated from the tradition and unable to locate the divine presence in the Jewish cultural and religious institutions of See Azzan Yadin, Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Gunter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996). 1

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their day.2 Levy’s First-Wave appropriation of midrash, and the spiritual and theological proto-feminist perspectives inherent to “A Prayer,” as we will see, prefigure Second and Third-Wave feminism’s use of this interpretative tool, demonstrating an AngloJewish foundation to the Jewish feminism that has followed the 1970s, which has generally been considered an American phenomenon. This is not to say that Second-Wave Jewish feminists were aware of Levy’s writing, the connection is conceptual rather than inspirational or historical.3 This is also not to say that Levy’s writing is the only example of proto-feminist Jewish writing or activism prior to the Second-Wave of the movement, or that my methodology is in some way unique. Indeed, Jewish feminist scholars have often located precedence for contemporary theory in the Jewish movements of the past. My original approach to Amy Levy’s poetry inevitably diverges from previous readings of “A Prayer,” and in the following chapter, “Magdalen” (my study is the first to examine “A Greek Girl” in detail), which have preferred to analyze these poems primarily for their alleged atheistic perspectives and their pessimism. This research, however, while recognizing the validity of studies that have examined these poems as pessimistic monologues, explores “A Prayer,” as we will see, within a Jewish Reformist context, seeing the poem as a midrashic reclamation of Jesus and the proto-feminist aspects of his ministry. Cynthia Scheinberg, however, suggests the “key” mentioned in the poem is a phallic image, while the “moan” implies sexual pleasure. She argues that the poem depicts a heroine who searches for a version of “love” that will replace Christian and heterosexual ideals. For her, “A Prayer” portrays the female speaker, not as Jesus, but as a Christ-like figure before the resurrection. The heroine consequently envisages a rebirth that will heal current suffering. Scheinberg concludes that “A 2 Many of Levy’s poems appear as dramatic monologues, romantic treatises, and even secular feminist discourses, when, in actual fact, they reveal, after deciphering, Jewish social, religious, and theological themes. 3 See Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Heilmann similarly argues for a conceptual link between New Woman fiction and Second-Wave theory.

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Prayer,” far from seeking a religious connection, requests of God the right to envisage a new type of love.4 Scheinberg, like myself however, analyzes “Magdalen” as a confrontation between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, although Emma Francis, Angela Leighton, and Kathleen Hickok read the poem as a feminist analysis of the “fallen woman” and the Magdalen reformatory institutions.5 Indeed, Iveta Jusova analyzes “Magdalen” as a poem in which a “fallen woman” addresses a former lover who has infected her with a venereal disease. She concludes that the poem “casts off faith in God as an intrusive Victorian institution.”6 Similarly, both Linda Hunt Beckman and Angela Leighton examine “Magdalen” as a work of deprivation and suffering.7 Leighton argues that Levy’s “pessimism … is a … philosophical attitude in the face of a morally senseless world.”8 Ana Parejo Vadillo likewise notes the philosophical pessimism in Levy’s poetry, and the influence of Algernon Charles Swinburne and his belief “that the self was created and defined by pain.” Vadillo also points to the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism in Levy’s work and his analysis of life as a “constant struggle for … existence.”9

Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 225-26. 5 See Emma Francis, “Amy Levy: Contradictions? – Feminism and Semitic Discourse,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, eds. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999), 183-204; Kathleen Hickok, Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), 109-10; Angela Leighton, “‘Because Men Made the Laws.’ The Fallen Woman and the Women Poet,” Victorian Poetry 27, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 109-27. 6 Iveta Jusova, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 7 Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 101. 8 Angela Leighton, in Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, eds. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 591. 9 Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 41. 4

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Alternatively, this chapter, and the next, argues that these poems, rather than being atheistic, are works of religious and theological alienation. Indeed, while “atheism” is generally regarded as the belief that there is no God, by “religious alienation” I refer to Amy Levy’s estrangement from the tradition and its masculine defined theology. True, Levy identified with the atheist poet James Thomson (B.V.). Their association, however, does not necessarily point to Levy’s own latent atheism, but rather to her sympathy for another “minor” poet. Joseph Bristow examines the influence of the author of The City of Dreadful Night in Levy’s poetry. Such was her identification with Thomson that she dedicated the opening poem of A Minor Poet to him.10 Levy had earlier written that he exhibits a “great human soul, horrible and sensitive in all its parts, struggling with a great agony.”11 The association, according to Bristow, captures the closeness between two strangers who share an “alien vision” of late-Victorian London.12 In “James Thomson: A Minor Poet,” an article written for the Cambridge Review, Levy describes Thomson as a “poor Scotchman, of humble origin … with every social disadvantage.”13 Certainly, she identifies with his Weltshmerz (world-weariness/pain), his social disadvantage, and his selfeducation, which defined his outsider status. More so, Levy sympathized with the double bind of the “minor poet.” Indeed, he was kept out of the canon, yet, it is the fact that his work was sidelined that gives his poetry its distinctive value.14 Additionally, Cynthia Scheinberg regards Levy’s statements about Thomson as “prophetic” when compared to her own “minority” status.15 10 Joseph Bristow, “‘All Out of Tune in this World’s Instrument’: the ‘Minor’ Poetry of Amy Levy,” Journal of Victorian Culture 4, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 93. 11 Amy Levy, “James Thomson: A Minor Poet,” in The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, by Amy Levy, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 506. 12 Bristow, “‘All Out of Tune,” 93. 13 Levy, “James Thomson,” 501. 14 Bristow, ‘“All Out of Tune,” 93-94. 15 See Cynthia Scheinberg, “Canonizing the Jew: Amy Levy’s Challenge to Victorian Poetic Identity,” Victorian Studies 39, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 173-200.

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The production of feminist midrashim has generally been a Second and Third-Wave phenomenon.16 Judith Plaskow uses midrash to reinterpret the Eve and Lilith story,17 Ellen Umansky retells the story of the sacrifice of Isaac from Sarah’s viewpoint,18 and Lynn Gottlieb writes of Miriam seeking healing and of Esther’s experience as a crypto-Jew.19 Naomi Graetz’s midrashim, however, See Nechama Aschkenasy, “A Non-Sexist Reading of the Bible,” Midstream 27, no. 6 (June/July 1981): 51-55; The Pleasure of Her Text: Feminist Readings of Biblical and Historical Texts, ed. Alice Bach (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990); Judith Baskin, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2002); Norman Cohen, “Miriam’s Song: A Modern Midrashic Reading,” Judaism 33 (1984): 179-90; A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994); Jill Hammer, Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2001); The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Community in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992); Deena Metzger, What Dinah Thought (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989). Notable First-Wave exceptions include Grace Aguilar, see Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, ed. Michael Galchinsky (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003). Aguilar argued that if Jewish men would allow their women access to education, they would, in turn, remain the domestic instructors of children. She concluded that ritual could be confined to the home, similar to the crypto-Judaism of the Inquisition. Her domesticated version of Judaism, however, couched in separate spheres ideology, is problematic for Second and Third-Wave feminists given that it precludes women’s access to religious leadership and the creation of formal institutions for women. However, her writing was perhaps a start; a first move toward the social valorization of the feminine. Her apologetic perspective frequently led to charges of being a Jewish Protestant, although her Talmudic midrashim are particularly innovative, making her the first AngloJewish woman to employ this hermeneutical tool. 17 See Judith Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith” in Religion and Sexism, ed. Rosemary Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 341-43. 18 See Ellen Umansky, “Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology: Possibilities and Problems,” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, eds. Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ (1984; rpt. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989), 187-98. 19 See Lynn Gottlieb, “The Secret Jew: An Oral Tradition of Women,” Conservative Judaism 30, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 59-62. See also Taking the Fruit: Modern Women’s Tales of the Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Jane Zones (1981; rpt. 16

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are particularly relevant. Her writing comprises reinterpretations or “contemporary Midrash,” that similar to the rabbinic Midrashim are metaphorical and not to be taken literally.20 Graetz neglects to define the traditional rabbinic technique, and instead employs aspects of the novel – extended conversation, characterization, evocative contextualization, and interior monologues.21 Amy Levy too, as we will see, produced inventive, exegetical, and eisegetical midrashim. Midrash, similar to Greek “exegesis,” involves commentary, elaboration, interpretation, exposition, and preaching of the Jewish biblical texts.22 The Hebrew root of the word “midrash” means “to search,” or to “root out,” or literally “inquiry or investigation.” Midrash is far removed from the historical and philological approaches which aim to discover the context through which a text is produced, or the meaning intended, and is similar to postmodernist readings. “Midrash” refers collectively to the works compiled between the second and twelfth-century CE containing sermons, lectures, comments, and commentaries. In the sixteenth-century, the Midrash Rabba was published, offering independent Midrashim on the Torah, acquiring near canonical status. The Midrash is not a coherent commentary on the Tanakh, but a compendium attributed to anonymous and named rabbis, containing complete and fragmentary texts. Midrashic collections contain multiple opinions and can be diametrically opposed. The formal authority of Midrash is, nonetheless, only tangential given the dominance of halakhah.

San Diego: Woman's Institute for Continuing Jewish Education, 1989); Sondra Henry and Emily Taitz, Written Out of History (New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1978). 20 The term “Midrash” is capitalized in its specific reference to the Midrash of the rabbis. 21 See Naomi Graetz, S/He Created Them: Feminist Retellings of Biblical Stories (1993; rpt. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2003), and Naomi Graetz, Unlocking the Garden: A Feminist Jewish Look at the Bible, Midrash and God (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2005). 22 See Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

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Historically, the rabbis produced Midrashim to explain parts of a biblical text that were confusing,23 or they may have filled in a missing scene, reinterpreted a text containing an unnecessary verse or phrase, or explained two contradictory passages. The boundaries are infinite as midrash can analyze a primary text from an original angle, or draw an unusual or previously unexpected conclusion. Indeed, any rabbinical commentary on a biblical text can be regarded as midrash. The overriding theme, however, is to make a biblical text relevant or to speak “to us in our idiom”:24 The activity and products of interpretation are known as Midrash, a noun formed from the verbal root “darash” … That root is not uncommon in Biblical composition as “seek out”; but post-Biblically it gets to mean “interpret,” or “explain,” and it may even be used … for one sage interpreting the view of another. Similarly it may be employed for interpretation of a document or a contract. … But the overwhelming use of Midrash is for interpretation and enlisting of a verse or verses of Scripture.25

Amy Levy, however, largely unfamiliar with the Hebrew texts, although aware of the New Testament through her elementary and university education, reinterprets the Gospels toward her own proto-feminist aspirations; broadening the definition of midrash (the rabbis also used midrash, on occasion, to interpret non-biblical texts). Since early German Reformism, the Gospels have constituted a source of Jewish history, and even given that Midrash was most widely employed between 400 and 1200 CE, midrash flourishes 23 See The Classic Midrash: Tannaitic Commentaries on the Bible, ed. Reuven Hammer (New York: Paulist Press, 1995); Jacob Neusner, Midrash in Context: Exegesis in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983); Jacob Neusner, Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986); Irving Jacobs, The Midrashic Process: Tradition and Interpretation in Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 24 Graetz, S/He Created Them, 1. 25 The Classical Midrash, 2.

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today mainly thanks to feminism.26 Through midrash, SecondWave Jewish feminism created, both orally and in writing, poems that explore and tell stories connecting history and religious experience.27 Midrash is a tool for exposing the androcentrism of the tradition, and for the reclamation of biblical women.28 Indeed, Amy Levy’s midrashim denote multiple ways of being Jewish that appeal to varying dimensions of Jewish selves by accommodating what different groups of Jewish feminists seek with regard to gender justice.29 The Midrashim attributed to rabbinic Judaism are either halakhic or aggadic (homiletical). Thus, Jewish feminist midrashim demonstrate an alternative to the rabbinic tradition. Amy Levy, estranged from the tradition and the androcentrism of the sacred texts, employs the Gospels as her proof texts, which inevitably contradicts rabbinic convention, and the system of thirteen textual tools often applied by the rabbis to interpret halakhah. However, the rabbis themselves often produced fanciful, metaphorical, speculative, and fantastic exegeses, including puns, and verse-byverse commentaries (exegetical Midrashim). Levy’s poems, similar to aggadic midrashim, permit interpretive liberty, and like classical midrashim, are homiletical, stray from the biblical narrative, offer prompts, remez (hints), derash (inquire/seek), involve sod (mystery),

Graetz, S/He Created Them, 1. See Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, ed. Carol Bakhos (Brill: Leiden, 2006). 27 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990; rpt. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 53-54. 28 See Muriel Rukeyser’s “Miriam: The Red Sea,” in Breaking Open (New York: Random House, 1973), 22. Other poems include Chava Weissler, “Standing at Sinai,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1 (Fall 1985): 91-92; Chava Romm, “Miriam Argues for Her Place as Prophetess,” in A New Haggadah: A Jewish Lesbian Seder, by Judith Stein (Cambridge: Bobbeh Meisehs Press, 1984). 29 Judith Plaskow, in Tamar Ross and Judith Plaskow, “The View from Here: Gender Theory and Gendered Realities: An Exchange Between Tamar Ross and Judith Plaskow,” Nashim 13 (2007): 214, 216, 228. 26

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and a passage may connect biblical verses.30 Reuven Hammer notes: Punning is commonplace in every literary (and oral) tradition, and that it should take place in midrashic teaching is in no way extraordinary. It would be missed if it were completely absent from rhetoric. … Taking a hint from dream interpreters, or slip of the tongue, one can split words and make them release special instruction – particularly if the word is something of a problem. The word hskt (hasket) occurs only once in Scripture; break it in two and you derive a lesson of how to proceed in study, that is, hs ktt (has, kattet), in the beginning simply listen, take in what the teacher teaches (has); thereafter (kattet) probe in depth, analyze and raise questions, and argue.31

Levy’s midrashim are personal projections. They do not begin with an unrelated sentence from Psalms, Proverbs, or Prophets, as in classical Midrashim. Whether or not she attempted to adhere to the classical method is debatable, although it is unlikely she identified her poems as midrashim given that she preferred the “purest University English.”32 “Jewish Humour,” written for the Jewish Chronicle, reveals Levy’s intention to develop Jewish subtexts in her poetry that are both accessible to assimilated Anglo-Jews and able to write midrash forward to accommodate Jewish modernity: The trappings and suites of our humour must vanish with the rest; but that is no reason why what is essential of it should not remain to us as a heritage of the ages too precious to be lightly lost; a defence and a weapon wrought for us long ago by hands that ceased not from their labour. If we leave off saying ShibboAddison Wright, The Literary Genre Midrash (Staten Island: Alba House, 1967). 31 The Classic Midrash, 6-7. 32 Amy Levy, “Jewish Humour,” in The Complete Novels, 524. 30

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Levy intended the linguistic marker of shibboleth to act as a modern literary method of crypto-Jewish dialogue, demanding shibboleth not as a metaphorical abstraction of transcended Hebrew character, but as an expression of Jewish identity.34 Levy’s reference to Judges 12 examines Jewish particularity from a positive viewpoint. Shibboleth is a marker of identity she hopes will allow Jews to recognize each other without appearing “Jewish” to non-Jews.35 Naomi Graetz describes her own midrashim as exegetical, subjective, and modern. The ability to produce midrash, for Graetz, satisfies an innate desire to relate to a text which flows with hidden meaning.36 Graetz does not, however, focus her midrashim on biblical verses per se, but on motherhood, rape, gossip, and the aging process. Accordingly: Whether such explanations are mere folk etymologies, or downright playfulness, is besides the point. The rabbis are not embarrassed by them, for even the Biblical authors resort to name and word plays. … Such a dialect reveals determination to convey the precise understanding of Biblical vocabulary to the auditors, for Torah study is never to be taken casually or in mechanical repetition. Environment influences speech, and who can say if deliberate witticism was or was not present?37

33 Levy, “Jewish Humour,” 524. The term refers to any word or phrase that distinguishes members of a group from outsiders. Shibboleth was a password used by the Gileadites (Judges 12:5-6) to identify the Ephraimites by their different pronunciation. Subsequently, shibboleth has been employed to identify a particular social, ethnic, religious, or cultural group. 34 Scheinberg, “Canonizing the Jew,” 189. 35 Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion, 210-11. 36 Graetz, S/He Created Them, 2, 5. 37 The Classic Midrash, 7. Tannaim refers to the rabbis contributing to the oral tradition codified in the Mishnah, as opposed to the Anoraim, for example, the rabbis of the Talmudic period who cited the Gemara.

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Certainly, Levy’s application of midrash speaks to Jewish women of her experience: assimilated, alienated, denied access to the sacred texts. Many of these women had undergone elementary education in Christian schools and were, unsurprisingly, more responsive to the host culture. For most Anglo-Jews the King James Bible, and its Christian interpretation, were the norm and better known than rabbinical exegeses.38 Accordingly, midrash does not necessarily inform what a particular biblical text means, but reveals how narratives are comprehended by a given community, and how certain texts have shaped societal values.39 Numerous Jewish identities have been constructed out of intercultural identification with Christianity,40 and as Jewish feminism tends to make women speaking subjects of their own experience, Judaism is often subjectified to personal context.41 Judith Plaskow, for example, acknowledges her debt to Christian feminists in Standing Again at Sinai, regarding them as “sister theologians.” Following the Haskalah, many acculturated Jewish women perceived Judaism as contrary to liberty and equality, instead looking to the progressive universalism of Christianity.42 Indeed, Second-Wave Jewish feminists have frequently used other religious traditions to redevelop themes that are complementary to Jewish identity.43 Adrienne Rich looked to semi-mythical Amazo38 Michael Hilton, The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1994), 125. 39 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 16-17. 40 Marc Krell, Intersecting Pathways: Modern Jewish Theologians in Conversation with Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 21. 41 Melissa Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai: Reading Jewish Feminist Theology Through the Critical Lens of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to “Radical Orthodoxy,” eds. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion Grau (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 211. 42 Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 8. 43 The Jewish Renewal movement uses both traditional and untraditional sources with the aim of reinvigorating Judaism. Members have

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nian women for inspiration,44 Rita Gross explored ancient Hindu Goddess traditions,45 while Susannah Heschel has persistently reiterated the value of the Gospels for Jewish women’s history.46 Even Naomi Graetz’s recent midrashim incorporate non-Jewish aspects, such as in “Vashti Unrobed.” Graetz concludes that this “proud woman” can serve as an exemplar for the Jewish people.47 Indeed, although the Torah tells the story of the birth of the Jewish people and contains the origins of the legal system, the assumption that it is the ultimate source of Jewish authority does not hold. Analysis of the New Testament by a Jewish woman, however, inevitably draws criticism that her conclusions will not be authentically Jewish. Alan Levenson argues that midrash enables an interpreter to “heal and make whole,” and puts an individual into dialogue with the tradition. He concludes, rather sweepingly, that by contrast to Christian scholars, Jewish authors do not use the Apocrypha.48 Nevertheless, confronted by an anthology of books written by, and including the Jewish people, in the New Testament, Levy heeded the call: “darsheni” (interpret me!). Michael Hilton notes:

augmented rituals with concepts from Sufism, Buddhism, and other religions. See Rita Gross, “Steps Toward Feminine Imagery of Deity in Jewish Theology,” Judaism 30, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 183-93; Rita Gross, “Androcentrism and Androgyny in the Methodology of the History of Religions,” in Beyond Androcentrism: New Essays on Women and Religion, ed. Rita Gross (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977), 7-21. 44 See Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), 149-50. 45 See Rita Gross, “Hindu Female Deities as a Resource in the Contemporary Rediscovery of the Goddess,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 46, no. 3 (September 1978): 269-91. 46 Susannah Heschel, preface to On Being A Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (1983; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995), xx. Many Second and Third-Wave Jewish feminists have studied Protestant theology, most notably Judith Plaskow and Melissa Raphael. 47 Graetz, Unlocking the Garden, 2, 171. 48 Alan Levenson, “Jewish Responses to Modern Biblical Criticism,” Shofar 12, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 106. The Apocrypha refers to those books excluded from modern Protestant Bibles.

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[Midrash] is often considered a Jewish method of exegesis, but in fact has over many centuries been used by both faiths, and formed a practical medium of debate. … It takes a text from the Bible, and interprets it in a loose way, often reading ideas and stories into that text. … The term does not mean that the text read literally proves anything. It means rather that the preacher or the writer is choosing a sacred text to back up or clinch his point. Such “proof” texts are popular today. They are used in churches and synagogues every weekend by preachers seeking to make a particular point.49

Both Jesus and Paul frequently employed midrash.50 The Sermon on the Mount is itself a halakhic midrashic exercise, while Paul’s letters justify his views with “as it is written,” followed by an extract from Jewish scriptures (Romans 9:13, Corinthians 1:19). Similarly, Luke’s account of Jesus’ childhood and personality might be regarded as midrash. Many comparable efforts were written and rejected by the early Christians, and as Hilton concludes: “The genre of midrash is a Jewish literature from a Christian world.”51 Amy Levy’s midrashim portray Jesus’ ministry as a feminist opportunity to renew Judaism, rather than as a schismatic movement seeking to develop a new community. Accordingly, as we will see in the following chapter, Mary Magdalene is reclaimed as a Jewish spiritual leader, equal of Jesus, and potential lover, and firstcentury Judaism is figured as representative of the Jesus movement,52 and as an alternative to the “legalism” of rabbinic Judaism which would gradually become normative after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Although set in the past, the midrashim have Hilton, The Christian Effect, 89. See Meir Gertner, Midrashim in the New Testament (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962); Michael Goulder, Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London: S.P.C.K., 1974). 51 Hilton, The Christian Effect, 96, 113. 52 See Samuel Sandmel, Judaism and Christian Beginnings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: A Parallel History of Their Origins and Early Development, ed. Hershel Shanks (London: SPCK, 1993). 49 50

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contemporary significance, particularly as the Reformers sought to distance themselves from the “bogus” authority of the rabbis. The midrashim analyze the pivotal moment between Judaism and Christianity: the “parting of the ways,” when two separate communities were born.53 As Alan Segal argues: “The time of Jesus marks the beginning of not one but two great religions of the West, Judaism and Christianity. … So great is the contrast between previous Jewish religious systems and rabbinism that Judaism and Christianity can essentially claim a twin birth.”54 There is a long tradition of modern scholars who have emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus. This initiative has involved over three hundred authors since the eighteenth-century. The Reformers, including Levy, concluded that the Gospels were not a product of mainstream Pharisaic Judaism, but a successful protest against it. The Jewish and Christian historical investigation of Jesus’ personal life frequently led to charges that traditional Judaism was encumbered by ritualism. Reform Jews explored the origins of Christianity to combat Christian theories of supersessionism,55 and to portray Jesus in his Jewish context as, for example, an outspoken liberal Pharisee. Therefore, his protests against the Pharisees can be seen as evidence of his inclusion in their sect, more so given that disputation is common to the Talmud and rarely a sign of opposition. Jesus’ emphasis on loving one’s neighbor, for example, is resonant of Hillel’s teaching. Additionally, as the Gospels were probably written after the destruction of the Temple, and the separation of Christianity and Judaism, and after the Jewish rejection of Jesus’ Messiahship, the evangelists had particular motivation to be biased against the conduct of the Pharisees. The early Christians, desperate for converts, were determined to show why people should choose them over and against Judaism. Amy Levy’s midrash, “A Prayer,” bound up in the Reform Judaism of the period, alludes to the rabbis rejection of popular Messianism, or more relevantly, Jesus’ status as the leader of a Jewish 53 The rabbis were particularly critical of the early Church’s desire to assign Jesus attributes they would only assign to God. 54 Alan Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986), 1. 55 Hilton, The Christian Effect, 130, 203, 207.

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renewal movement critical of mainstream Pharisaism. As Michael Hilton notes: None of this suggests that speculation about an imminent Messiah was an integral part of rabbinic Judaism. On the contrary, after the failure of Bar Kokhba, the rabbis had every reason not to put their trust in rebellious and charismatic leadership; and even earlier, in the first century, they may well have regarded with suspicion the popular messianism which encouraged and gave hope to so many unruly and even anarchic sects.56

Conversely, however, Amy Levy employs several rabbinic techniques. As she covertly criticizes the institutions of her day by analyzing the distant Jewish past, the rabbis had, for example, criticized Roman, and later Christian rulers, by reviling Esau. This approach may have been pioneered by the “pseudepigraphic” literature popular in the first-century, by which authors disguised contemporary events by placing them in the past. Accordingly, the rabbis, while not conscious of Christian models, developed techniques side by side to their non-Jewish contemporaries.57 We thus approach Levy’s midrashim bearing in mind: The Jewish people is a nation of fabulists. Jewishness is about knowing how to thread stories together on very long strings. Jewish religious thought is not solely an exercise in law or philosophy, but is often aggadic or narrative in form. … Imaginative, often allegorical interpretations of biblical texts and the use of universal motifs of folklore are an integral part of Judaism’s sacred and secular cultural tradition. … Theology is a

56 57

Hilton, The Christian Effect, 70. Hilton, The Christian Effect, 95, 98.

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NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY work of the religious imagination presented as an argument both supported by tradition and challenging tradition.58

“A Prayer” (1881) seems to have been Amy Levy’s first published attempt at midrash.59 The poem, written from a classical German Reformist perspective and thus permitted interpretive liberty, similar to classical Midrashim, is metaphorical and guides the reader through prompts, often avoiding literal descriptions. In short, “A Prayer,” by imagining a missing scene in the Gospels, is a dramatic monologue portraying Jesus’ time alone in the sepulcher prior to his resurrection. The midrash, by presenting this as the moment at which Jesus transforms from Jewish man to Christian divinity polarizes Christianity and Judaism through Pauline negation of the Mosaic Law, and reveals: The fact that Jesus was a Jew cannot be treated as an afterthought …, for that would distort fundamentally his ongoing significance. Whatever else one may say about him cannot be severed from this elemental, historical fact. To speak of Jesus in perfect tense is to reckon with the continuing import of the indissoluble datum that from his first breath to his last he was a Jew and that it never occurred to him to be anything else. That datum, however, only marks off the field within which the matter must be pursued farther, for he was not a generic Jew, a Jew for all seasons, but a particular Jew who occupied for a particular time, a particular place on the map of Jewish religion and culture.60

58 Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003), 161. 59 See Amy Levy, Xantippe and Other Verse (Cambridge: E. Johnson, 1881), 14-15. 60 Leander Keck, Who Is Jesus? History in Perfect Tense (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 22. See Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew (London: SCM Press, 1993); Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historians Reading of the Gospels (London: SCM Press, 1985); E. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1985).

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The narrator of “A Prayer,” figured as Jesus, questions the wisdom of the Christian God of “love,” responsible for eradicating his Jewish identity and separating him from his coreligionists: My God, I know not why; Here in the dark I lie, Lonely yet not afraid. … Great God which art above, Grant me to image Love.61

These comments polarize the Christian deity with the God of Sinai.62 The Jewishness of Jesus is assumed as prior to the resurrection he did not sanction the preaching of his ministry to the gentiles; his activism was solely directed at a Jewish audience: “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:6). Furthermore, in the Gospels, Jesus’ ministry rarely ventures outside of Jewish geographical areas, and in the presence of non-Jews he neglects to announce the arrival of God’s kingdom. Jesus’ religion was exclusively based on the Torah and his activism resonant of earlier Jewish prophets, such as Elijah, the champion of Israel’s God, and his follower Elisha.63 As Jesus states (Matthew 5:17): “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” “A Prayer” reminds readers that it is only after the resurrection, and his appropriation by Christian tradition, that Jesus orders: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Levy, Xantippe, 14-15. Rabbinic, biblical, Hasidic, and Kabbalistic notions of God range from the unknowable, to the light that perpetuates the universe, and to the encompassment of all being. Following the Holocaust, God has even been interpreted as complicit in evil. See David Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (London: John Knox Press, 1993); Karen Armstrong, A History of God: From Abraham to the Present: the 4000-Year Quest for God (London: Vintage, 1999). 63 According to the prophecy of Malachi, Jews await the return of Elijah as a precursor to the coming of the Messiah. His association with Jesus relates to their ability to perform miracles. 61 62

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Ghost” (Matthew 28:19; see also Mark 16:15, Luke 24:47).64 In the midrash, Jesus assumes that the God to whom he prays will respond. However, since arguing or debating with God is a particularly Jewish act,65 and there is no response, Jesus’ imprisonment in the sepulcher (“Lonely as in a tomb”) demonstrates the replacement of the God of Sinai with the unfamiliar deity of Christian tradition.66 Symbolic of two millennia of enforced Christian hegemony, Jesus’ monologue against the deity of the New Covenant bemoans the inevitability of his predetermined transcendental assignment: To live – it is my doom – Lonely as in a tomb, This cross on me was laid; My God, I know not why; Here in the dark I lie, Lonely, yet not afraid. It has seemed good to Thee Still to withhold the key Which opes [sic] the way to men; I am shut in alone, I make not any moan,

The Jewish criticism of Jesus in the New Testament that he broke the Sabbath and described God as his Father (John 5:18) does not hold up to scrutiny, particularly as all Jews of the period referred to God as Father and Jesus’ activism on the Sabbath did not equate to work. Even his trial by the Sanhedrin (Jewish court) is improbable as there is no law which states a person claiming to be the Messiah can be charged with blasphemy. 65 According to Melissa Raphael: “The critical interrogation of God is not foreign to Jewish tradition, and indeed constitutes much of the intimacy between God and Israel” (The Female Face, 5). See also Anson Laytner, Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition (Northvale: J. Aronson, 1990). 66 Levy, Xantippe, 14. A number of Levy’s poems refer to the Christian appropriation of Jewish history, although are not necessarily biblical exegeses per se. See “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage,” in Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch, ed. Susan David Bernstein (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006), 192. 64

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Thy ways are past my ken.67

Fulfilling the Gospel narrative, Jesus describes the carrying of the cross and being laid to rest, which acts as a dual metaphor for his mortal and divine suffering. Kept “in the dark” as to the God of the New Testament’s intentions (hence the capitalization of “Thee”), Jesus, as a Jewish man, is unable to appreciate his Christian mission. His confinement in the sepulcher results from the God of the New Testament’s “unnatural” desire to resurrect his otherwise dead body: “To live – it is my doom.”68 Indeed, bodily resurrection is more a Christian than a Jewish concept. In the Tanakh, the place of the dead, sheol, is the grave and there are few references to life after death. In Psalms 115:17 death brings cessation: “The dead praise not the Lord.” Although belief in resurrection was an article of faith for the Pharisees (though rejected by the Sadducees) and for the classical Judaism of the later rabbis, and is repeated in the liturgy (the second benediction of the Amida), the Reform movement leaves the possibility open, although has, when prompted, such as in the American branch of the movement, rejected the idea of physical resurrection. Similarly, Orthodoxy prefers to talk of the preservation of the soul rather than an afterlife or bodily reanimation.69 The following lines prompt the reader towards the feminist hermeneutic of the midrash. Amy Levy frequently used a male narrator to transcend her own sexuality, or to “speak like a man”:70 My God, I know not why; … It has seemed good to Thee Still to withhold the key Which opes [sic] the way to men.71 Levy, Xantippe, 14-15. Levy, Xantippe, 14. 69 The notion of an immaterial soul probably reflects Greek influence on Judaism from the second-century BCE onwards. 70 Christine Pullen, “Amy Levy; Her Life, Her Poetry and the Era of the New Woman” (Ph.D. diss., Kingston University, 2000), 18. 71 Levy, Xantippe, 14-15. 67 68

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Levy is able to explore her own “inner world” as if from an outside viewpoint,72 or from behind the mask of an assumed persona:73 Jesus. The “key” refers to “the key of David” (Revelation 3:7), and “the keys to the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:19). Jesus’ plight is analogized to women’s alienation from the tradition, as Jesus laments: “I am shut in alone, / I make not any moan, / Thy ways are past my ken.”74 His solitude demonstrates women’s exemption from study, and the suppression of his spiritual agency. He retains physicality, or gashmiut, internalizing rabbinic assumptions concerning women’s religiosity to, paradoxically, reject his Messiahship.75 “A Prayer” reminds readers of the fluidity of theological interpretation across the Jewish and Christian denominations.76 The midrash juxtaposes the “universal” New Testament God with the “particularistic” Hebrew deity, activating a cultural reversal as it is normally the God of Sinai that is cast as unloving.77 A prevailing Christian view emerged after the Renaissance that Judaism was responsible for a primitive conception of God. Georg Hegel concluded that the Jewish deity was a tyrant who demanded unquesPullen, “Amy Levy,” 18. Deborah Epstein Nord, “‘Neither Pairs Nor Odd’: Female Community in Late Nineteenth-Century London,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 41 (1990): 748. 74 Levy, Xantippe, 15. 75 Jacob Neusner, Messiah in Context: Israel’s History and Destiny in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). 76 In Exodus the tribal group of Israel directs its worship toward “the God of your fathers” (3:13-15), and in Exodus 3:1-22 he reveals his name as Yahweh, subsequently leading to the monotheistic nation of Israel. After the destruction of Judah a universal, international theology of a world-embracing God took shape to account for the removal of the nation’s institutions, gradually resulting in reliance on God’s ability to intervene on behalf of a faithful community (R. Clements, “The Community of God in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Leo Perdue (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005), 279-81, 283, 285, 289. 77 Nineteenth-century Catholic and Protestant denominations generally perceived God as “him” – a Being who is an-other reality added on to the human world (the Trinity refers to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). 72 73

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tioning loyalty to an intolerable law, while Emmanuel Kant regarded Judaism as embodying everything that was wrong with religion.78 This theological polarization, or dualistic concept, evident in the midrash, has again been analyzed by Second-Wave Jewish feminists seeking to deflect theological anti-Semitism. Judith Plaskow, for example, examines how anti-Judaism manifests itself through the subject of God. A contrast is frequently made between the wrathful God of the “Old Testament,” and the New Testament God of “love.”79 According to Plaskow, the idea of a vengeful, jealous, tribal deity, as opposed to the universal New Testament God, is an established stereotype that predates feminism. Hence, the contrast between “Old” and “New” implies law/gospel, people of the flesh/people of the promise, God of wrath/God of love, and carnal Jew/spiritual Christian. For Plaskow, the dualistic notion of two natures of God projects a tension between Judaism and Christianity. In the Old Testament, however, God is a deity of mercy and justice – aspects elaborated by rabbinic Judaism. Similarly, the God of wrath is present in the New Testament as a background threat: “He who does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:6).80 “A Prayer,” through its Reform mandate to reclaim Jesus, and to distance the movement from rabbinic Judaism, predates SecondWave interpretations that have sought to salvage the proto-feminist aspects of his sect. In these interpretations the cross is forced upon Jesus, and he does not willingly accept his fate, as in the midrash: This cross on me was laid; My God I know not why; Here in the dark I lie, Lonely, yet not afraid.81 Kant did however admire the second commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” 79 Plaskow places “Old Testament” in quotation marks as the term is not Jewish but Christian. 80 Judith Plaskow, “Feminist Anti-Judaism and the Christian God,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7, no. 2, (1991): 101-03, 106. 81 Levy, Xantippe, 14. 78

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Amy Levy’s interpretation is rooted in the Gospels. At Gethsemane Jesus prays: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Yet not my will but yours” (Matthew 26:39, 42). Indeed, Judith Plaskow argues that because Jesus was a Jew, his stance toward women represented an opportunity within first-century Judaism rather than the inception of a schismatic movement. Plaskow, like Susannah Heschel, also notes that the New Testament can be analyzed as a source of Jewish women’s history rather than as evidence of a radical alternative to Jewish attitudes, as it is within Christian feminist discourse. In the Gospels nothing is said of the peculiarity of Jesus’ inclusive attitude towards women. This suggests his approach may not have been so different from the attitudes of his contemporaries.82 Likewise, Levy’s midrash infers, by analogizing Jesus’ subordination to the literary stereotype of the suffering Jewess,83 that first-century Judaism, which includes the Jesus movement, stands in ethical authority over early-Christianity in its attitude toward women, as his plight is figured as a result of his imprisonment.84 Research on women’s status in first-century Palestine is a recent phenomenon, though as we will see in the following chapter particularly, Levy’s reading would have encouraged her to surmise regarding their role in Judaism during the New Testament period. Additionally, the submission of the Jewess came to symbolize the historic experience of the Jewish people in Victorian novels. In Estelle by Emily Harris, published in 1878, for example, Judith Plaskow, “Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (London: SCM Press, 1994), 124, 126. Leonard Swidler was the first commentator to describe Jesus as a feminist, see “Jesus Was a Feminist,” Catholic World 212 (January 1971): 177-83. 83 The idealized notion of the suffering Jewess was frequently employed in the nineteenth-century, particularly by those writers seeking to critique Orthodox Judaism. See Nadia Valman, The Jewess in NineteenthCentury British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 84 The term first-century Judaism is diverse and includes, most notably, the Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees, Zealots, and according to Levy, the Jesus movement. The Talmud notes twenty-four sects prior to the destruction of the Second Temple. 82

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the heroine, adopting the terms of Reform Judaism, outwardly expresses “womanly solicitude” for her “nation,” while in private contemplates rebellion against her father’s harsh religious law.85 Tal Ilan argues that the Pharisees did not enact specific rules against women or display misogynistic tendencies until after the destruction of the Second Temple,86 and that although the sages sought to prohibit women from studying the Torah: “The Rabbinic world admitted to a reality … which preserved in it the possibility.”87 Ilan concludes that the position of women during the compilation of the rabbinic codices was fluid. Using examples from the Talmud, she demonstrates that there were women who studied Torah, and only when they became many and perhaps constituted a threat was it deemed necessary that their studies be prohibited.88 Prior to Tal Ilan’s research, the Christian feminist scholar, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, analyzed the book of Judith (possibly written in the first-century BCE) as an example of the position of women prior to the Second Temple’s destruction. She notes the Pharisaic elements and argues that the book informs several aspects of women’s role at the time it was most widely read: Judith inherits and manages her husband’s estate, freely rejects a second marriage, and dedicates her life to prayer, ascesis, and Shabbat. Her authority is reflected in her ability to summon the leaders of the town and rebuke them (8:11).89 Similarly, Judith Plaskow argues that Jesus’ status as a feminist within some quarters of Christian scholarship, rather than simply as a Jewish man who treated women as human beings, rests on contrasting his behavior with his Jewish back85 Valman, The Jewess, 161-62. See Emily Harris, Estelle, 2 vols. (London: George Bell, 1878). 86 Tal Ilan, “The Attraction of Aristocratic Women to Pharisaism during the Second Temple Period,” Harvard Theological Review 88 (1995): 133. The First Temple was demolished in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. 87 Tal Ilan, Mine and Yours Are Hers: Retrieving Women’s History from Rabbinic Literature (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 169. 88 Ilan, Mine and Yours Are Hers, 169. 89 Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, 2nd ed. (1984; rpt. London: SCM Press Ltd, 1994), 115-16.

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ground. According to Plaskow, in order for Christian writers to demonstrate that Jesus stood over and against his Jewish ancestry and environment, they select Jewish sources containing the most negative statements against women and present them as representative. However, problems arise for interpreters when they assume that the rabbinic literature is a product of the time of Jesus, when it actually came about after the destruction of the Temple.90 Plaskow concludes that the composite depiction of Jesus’ religious background that emerges in Christian feminist texts assumes that women were exempt from fixed prayer, restricted in public prayer, not allowed to study, men were forbidden to publicly converse with women, polygamy was legal, women were not allowed to divorce their husbands, were cultically impure during menstruation and after childbirth, and that the rabbis viewed them as light-minded, greedy, dirty, and gossipy.91 This portrait is contrasted with Jesus’ attitude toward women to make him appear deliberately rebellious. The approach of too many Christian feminists, for Plaskow, minimizes the positive sayings and legal rulings that sought to protect women.92 These commentators ignore Onah, the law that defends the sexual rights of women in marriage, and the Ketubah (marriage contract) which protects women against hasty divorce. Consequently, Jesus’ positive attitude toward women is depicted as unJewish, while Paul’s negativity concerning women’s religious agency is defined as a product of his Judaism:93 Addressing the anti-Judaism in Christian sources, because it is consciousness-raising for all parties, is probably the most important next step Christian feminists can take in dealing with the problem of feminist anti-Jewish interpretation. But sensitivity to anti-Judaism cannot of itself effect a transformation of See Michael Hilton and Marshall Gordian, The Gospels and Rabbinic Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1988). 91 See Krister Stendahl, The Bible and the Role of Women (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966). 92 See Virginia Ramey Molenkott, Women, Men and the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977). 93 Plaskow, “Anti-Judaism in Feminist,” 119-22. 90

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anti-Jewish attitudes. The long history of anti-Judaism will finally be transcended only on the basis of an appreciation of Judaism as an autonomous, changing, and diverse tradition. In the specific context of feminist New Testament interpretation, this means it is impossible fully to discuss or evaluate the Jesus movement in relation to women without knowledge of feminist approaches to first-century Judaism.94

In fact, as the midrash reveals, Jesus sought to renew and reform an old community, while Paul was in the process of creating a new one.95 The sources Amy Levy utilizes to construct her midrash are reflected in the Reform context of the poem, although Evangelicalism also sought to emphasize the humanity of Jesus rather than doctrine. The Haskalah produced a variety of emancipated Jewish personas for Jesus, including Reform rabbi, fallen prophet, martyr, Jewish socialist, suffering artist, Jewish nationalist, and revolutionary. Reclaiming his figure was a process through which modern Jews attempted to secure normalcy and a prominent place in Western civilization. The Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism movement), in particular, focused on the Jewishness of Jesus to provide an anti-Christian polemic and to create a modern Jewish identity.96 Thus, Levy’s analysis might seem typical, although uniquely, she appropriates the feminist aspects of his renewal movement to demonstrate that Christianity, not Judaism, is responsible for contemporary gender exclusionism. “A Prayer” implies that had the Jesus movement not been appropriated by Christianity, and had the movement become normative in first-century Judaism, his ministry might have averted the legalism, androcentrism, and gender exclusionism of later rabbinic Judaism.

Plaskow, “Anti-Judaism in Feminist,” 125. Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 81. 96 Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-2, 7-8. 94 95

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The Wissenschaft des Judentums extensively researched Pharisaism, first-century Judaism, and the origins of Christianity.97 Amy Levy’s reading, and we know that she read Abraham Geiger because she used his German versions of Jehudah Halevi’s poetry when translating for Katie Magnus’ Jewish Portraits,98 would have revealed to her that the rabbinate only emerged as an institution after the Temple’s destruction, and it was many years before their authority came to represent normalcy.99 Geiger concluded that Jesus, far from being original, was one of many liberal Pharisees. Accordingly, the liberal Pharisees attempted to democratize halakhah, while the Sadducees represented the narrow interests of a priestly elite.100 Although Geiger sought to defend early rabbinic law, he was critical of the Babylonian Talmud and questioned its influence. He claimed that while the Talmud could be retained it need not be regarded as an absolute authority. The midrash, indicative of the Reformers quest for the historical Jesus, and particularly resonant of Geiger’s discourse on the Jesus movement, is also informed by Levy’s probable reading of Hermann Samuel Reimarus.101 He argued that while Jesus criticized the Pharisees for their legalism, he defended their views on salvation and immortality. For Reimarus, Jesus was born a Jew, intended to remain so, proposed no new articles of faith, had no intention of doing away with Levitical cereDonald Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus: An Analysis & Critique of the Modern Jewish Study of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, 1984), 59. 98 Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 77, 295 n6. See Katie Magnus, Jewish Portraits (London: T. F. Unwin, 1888). Halevi, born in around 1080, was a Jewish philosopher. 99 Judith Plaskow, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003, eds. Judith Plaskow and Donna Berman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 90. 100 See Abraham Geiger, Urschrift und Ubersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhangigkeit von der inner Entwickelung des Judenthums (Breslau: Julius Heinauer, 1857); Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 101 Fragments of his work were released to the public between 1774 and 1778. 97

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monial law, said nothing of the Trinity, did not claim divine status, the Last Supper was simply a Passover meal, Jesus and all his disciples were Jewish, and that for his own part he only taught that Jews could be truly converted.102 The midrash reverses the assumption that Jesus’ positive attitude towards women is un-Jewish and Paul’s negative stance is a product of his Jewish ancestry. Those fin-de-siècle scholars desperate to keep Jesus within Judaism, Amy Levy included, were determined to retain a space between him and Paul. This meant portraying Jesus as either a misled Israelite or a teacher of Judaism, and Paul as the progenitor of Christianity.103 Her reclamation of Jesus, however, perhaps inevitably given the Reformist subtext, is bound up in Reform Judaism’s appropriation of Evangelical discourse, including its anti-rabbinism. Many nineteenth-century Christian writers sought to recover the feminist aspects of Jesus’ ministry, such as that he treated women with respect, and that he spoke to them of God.104 This process involved accommodating feminine principles to his character. Philanthropy, forgiveness, and sympathy, traits associated with Jesus, are integral to the cult of true womanhood. Indeed, although the right to vote, financial independence, and education were the central issues of First-Wave feminism, its history is bound up in the ideology of Protestant, often Evangelical, sectarian, dissenting individualism, expressed within an idea of the family, marriage, and sexuality that acknowledges women’s moral purity and influence, not only on the family, but also on the social order. The Protestant emphasis on domestic virtue blossomed into the cult of domesticity: women endowed the home with symbolic, transcendental qualities. The cult of true womanhood developed out of, but in tune with, the ideology of separate spheres. Contemporaneous Evangelicalism in England idealized women, who, posHermann Reimarus, “From the Wolfenbuttel Fragments VI and VII,” in The Historical Jesus Quest: A Foundational Anthology, ed. Gregory Dawes (Leiden: Deo Publishing, 1999), 57, 62, 64, 67-68. See W. Barnes Tatum, In Quest of Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). 103 Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 67. 104 See Clara Balfour, The Women of Scripture (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1847). 102

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sessing a “special” feminine nature, by their virtue of moral purity, patience, gentleness, and kindness, could be both protector and the protected, and usher moral regeneration through the exercise of their feminine skills and virtues in society.105 Olive Banks argues: The cult of domesticity became transformed into the ideal of female superiority, and the doctrine of separate spheres into the attempted invasion of the masculine world not simply by women, but, potentially even more revolutionary in its impact, by womanly values. Moreover, the process by which this change occurred was bound up … with the transformation of woman from Eve the eternal temptress to Eve the innocent victim. According to this new ideology, it was now the male who was naturally evil; the female was essentially good, and through her goodness and purity was able to redeem mankind from sin.106

The cult of true womanhood, the “feminization of religion,” and the notion of “female superiority” had gained widespread acceptance in England by the fin-de-siècle.107 Accordingly, Jesus’ tender demeanor was portrayed by Christian women writers as a product of his mother’s influence. Sara Hale, for example, states in Woman’s Record: “She was then prepared by her natural gifts, to imbue the opening mind of her divine son with those lofty aspirations, tender sympathies, which, as a man, he always exhibited. His human soul, derived from a woman, trained by a woman, was most truly womanly in its characteristics.”108 According to Hale, it is Jesus’ feminine characteristics that qualify him to be the savior of a male105 Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 4-5, 85-86, 89-90. See also, Martha Vicinus, A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). 106 Banks, Faces of Feminism, 90. 107 Banks, Faces of Feminism, 91. 108 Sara Hale, Woman’s Record: or, Sketches of All Disgruntled Women, from “The Beginning” till A.D. 1850 (New York: Harpers, 1853), 129.

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polluted society.109 Similarly, Jesus’ comment in the midrash, “I make not any moan,” is perhaps resonant of the middle-class void that women need not entertain opinions of their own.110 Accordingly, by figuring the Jesus movement as inherently feminist, his protestations against the God of the New Testament allude to midnineteenth-century sexual inequalities. Thus, according to Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jesus’ denigration of social and religious hierarchy parallels feminist criticisms of patriarchy as a system of domination.111 The title, “A Prayer,” is an ironic allusion to Matthew 21:22: “And all things that, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” Although Jesus prays for an earthly romance, encouraged in the Tanakh (marriage is regarded as the ideal state), and indeed divine immanence, he is ignored by the God of the New Covenant who denies, it is implied, the natural inclination toward reproduction: Since not mine is the bliss Of “claspt [sic] hands and lips that kiss,” Let me in dreams it prove. … Grant me to image Love.112

The silence of the deity sets up a contrast between the Jewish obligation to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), and Christian angst regarding sex. Virginity seems to have been rare among male Jews during the first-century,113 and according to Shalom ben Cho-

109 Rebecca Styler, “A Scripture of Their Own: Nineteenth-Century Bible Biography and Feminist Biblical Criticism,” Christianity and Literature 57, no. 1 (Autumn 2007): 80. Similar analysis was applied to Moses, see Harriet Stowe, Women in Sacred History: Sketches Drawn from Scriptural, Historical and Legendary Sources (New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1874), 54. 110 See Martha Vicinus, introduction to Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1972), x. 111 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), 137. 112 Levy, Xantippe, 15. 113 It was only the Essenes who practiced celibacy.

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rim, it is inconceivable that Jesus, as a rabbi, was not married.114 The midrash possibly implies that Jesus’ alleged celibacy is neither based on biblical nor theological sources, but is a product of later devotional communities. The fact that the Gospels say nothing of Jesus’ personal life probably suggests he was not extraordinary in his sexual expression. Accordingly, his celibacy might be taken to suggest he was married.115 Indeed, Jesus’ mortality and the negation of his Messiahship underpin the midrash. Thus, rejecting his resurrection (“To live – it is my doom”) calls his divine status into question.116 This approach is unsurprising given that the Reformers rejected particularistic interpretations of the Messiah, and preferred to talk of a Messianic age rather than individual. Both the historian Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger concluded that Jesus was a rabbi who taught Jewish ethics,117 was completely misinterpreted by later followers, and had little, if anything, to do with the rise of Christianity. Reform scholars writing about Jesus generally used his figure as justification for emancipation and acceptance in Christian society, or, to question the validity of the New Testament. By contrast, Amy Levy’s midrash is aimed at those Jews able to locate and decipher the subtext, or shibboleth. The midrash illustrates Jesus’ metamorphosis from Jewish man to Christian divinity, a process arguably initiated in the Gospels by the evangelists’ reluctance to employ Old Testament allusion after the crucifixion. Jesus’ moments alone prior to the resurrection: “Lonely as in a tomb,” present him not as a deity or spiritual figure but in a human context, which is vital to the midrash’s

114 Quoted by Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, The Women Around Jesus (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 87. 115 Joan Timmerman, “The Sexuality of Jesus and the Human Vocation,” in Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, eds. James Nelson and Sandra Longfellow (London: Mowbray, 1994), 94. 116 Levy, Xantippe, 14. 117 The rejection of Jesus’ Messianic status has been taken up by scholars of all denominations. See Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of AntiSemitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 64-95; Graham Keith, Hated Without a Cause? A Survey of AntiSemitism (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997), 37.

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reconstruction of his ministry as a Jewish movement.118 The humanity of Jesus has frequently been constructed and used as a cultural symbol. Consequently, the view that “Jesus Christ is truly human” has a changeable context. Every generation has projected its own values through a God-man. Jesus has been figured as the monarch of an imperial kingdom, a bishop shepherding his flock, a desert hermit, a divine physician, a teacher of conventional morality, a revolutionary, a celibate, and, in this instance, a feminist. In the midrash he rejects Christian spiritual “love” as vacuous.119 Even given the prospect of his incarnation, Jesus prefers to “imagine [mortal] Love” (as well as love for the God of Sinai, hence the capitalization of “Love”) – the loving relationship between a man and a woman being a model for the relationship between the Jewish people and their God: SINCE that I may not have Love on this side of the grave, Let me imagine Love. Since not mine is the bliss Of “claspt [sic] hands and lips that kiss,” Let me in dreams it prove. What tho’ as the years roll No soul shall melt to my soul Let me conceive such thing; Tho’ never shall entwine Loving arms around mine.120

The “side of the grave” Jesus refers to is the post-resurrection state, given that his entrance to the sepulcher follows the crucifixion. Thus, Jesus visualizes a conventional romance, which acts as a riposte to 1 John 2:15: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” The midrash deliberately concludes with Jesus’ unsophisticated plea that he might yet be permitted earthly love. His Levy, Xantippe, 14. Timmerman, “The Sexuality of Jesus,” 91-93. 120 Levy, Xantippe, 14. 118 119

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naivety is emblematic of contemporaneous Victorian stereotypes that women’s poetry should be hyper-romantic, pious, and nonsexual:121 Yet grant me this, to find The sweetness in my mind Which I must still forego; Great God which art above, Grant me to image Love,The bliss without the woe.122

His preference for worldly rather than spiritual fulfillment internalizes Evangelical criticisms of Judaism, through the lens of AngloReformism, as encumbered by ritual, though, as a romanticized feminist idealist (“Let me in dreams it prove”), Jesus’ imprisonment deprives him of the opportunity to remodel first-century Judaism and to avert later rabbinic Judaism.123 Hence, the Christian appropriation of his ministry is figured as the barrier obstructing Jewish reform. As we have seen, several aspects of Amy Levy’s midrash prefigure themes that are associated with Second and Third-Wave Jewish feminism, including the appropriation of midrash as an interpretive apparatus, the use of the Gospels as a source for Jewish and feminist perspectives, and for re-analysis of first-century Palestinian Judaism that marginalizes the gender discriminatory aspects of the tradition. Moreover, the midrash also highlights women’s inability to study the sacred texts, the marginalization of female spirituality, and acculturated women’s estrangement from the tradition. The Second-Wave of Jewish feminism, as an identifiable equal-rights movement, sought equal participation in the pre-existing Orthodox, Reform, Liberal, Reconstructionist, and Conservative denominations, although the Conservative movement was the main locus of activism. The Jewish feminist movement’s overall aims See Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, eds. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), 305. 122 Levy, Xantippe, 15. 123 Levy, Xantippe, 14. 121

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were as follows: generally, that women be granted equal access to public and religious life and that women be permitted to take up religious and communal leadership. Specifically, Conservative feminists sought an end to women’s disabilities in family halakhot, exclusion from the minyan, and questioned the mechitza curtain. Reform activists complained that women were still not being called up to read the Torah, and Orthodox feminists critiqued the exclusion of women from the study and interpretation of the sacred texts, and the inability of women to initiate divorce. Many of these issues were comparably integral to the First-wave period and are highlighted in Levy’s poetry. Reform Judaism marginalizes, and even rejects halakhah, so, by seeking participation and gender equality in all denominations, Second-Wave feminists, relinquishing the interpretive liberty afforded to the Reformers, were forced to revisit concerns, particularly with regard to halakhah, already elucidated in earlier proto-feminist discourse. Additionally, “A Prayer” implies that Jesus is seeking a physical encounter with a particular woman: “Since not mine is the bliss / Of ‘claspt [sic] hands and lips that kiss, / Let me in dreams it prove.”124 “A Greek Girl,” and “Magdalen,” reveal this woman to be Mary Magdalene. Amy Levy’s reading of this biblical character is a feminist hermeneutical case in point. Within the Gospels, Magdalene is a central figure as she is the first person to witness Jesus in his post-resurrection state, yet, her name rarely appears and Christian traditions portray her as a “fallen woman.” Accordingly, as the Reformers employed Jesus for liberal contexts, and to critique rabbinic Judaism, Levy reclaimed Magdalene as the progenitor of an innovative proto-feminist tradition and as an equal of Jesus in “his” movement, seeking to provide a “usable past” for contemporaneous reform.125 Comparable to other writers of the period, Levy sought to revise, from a woman’s point of view, stories told, at least traditionally, from the male perspective;126 a process also taken

Levy, Xantippe, 14. See Paula Hyman, “The Jewish Family: Looking For a Usable Past,” in On Being A Jewish Feminist, 19-26. 126 Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 300 n71. 124 125

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up by Second-Wave Jewish feminism.127 The fact that in the Gospels Magdalene appears more than any other woman and is a close follower of Jesus, and that she is present at the crucifixion and the resurrection, suggests the possibility to Levy that she was not only a grieving wife and widow, but a Jewish spiritual leader.

127

See Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai.

3 AMY LEVY’S MIDRASHIC POETRY: “A GREEK GIRL” AND “MAGDALEN” As we have seen in the previous chapter, “A Prayer” has its roots in classical German Reformism. Indeed, Amy Levy was particularly attracted to the proto-feminist pledges made by the early German Reformers, and also promised, though not delivered, by the AngloReformers. In 1836, several members of the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London demanded alterations similar to those adopted by the German Reform synagogues, resulting in greater decorum at the services. Consequently, in 1839 further requests were made concerning the length of prayers, the convenience of Shabbat services, the abolition of the second holy day, the possibility of sermons being delivered in English, and regarding a choir. These requests were rebuffed, and subsequently, the Reformers asked if they could open a synagogue closer to the West End. The Bevis Marks leadership refused and was ignored, and on April 15 1840 the West London Synagogue of British Jews was formed. The newly organized leadership took immediate steps to bring ritual in line with the German model. They supported the political emancipation, and hoped that British Jewry would accommodate Protestant congregational norms and abandon its claim to a separate national destiny.1 The links to the German movement were initially close as sermons were translated into English and a bibliocentric (focus on biblical rather than rabbinical authority) approach, along with the 1 Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry, new ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 57.

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abolition of the second day of festivals, was adopted. Thus, although the Ten Commandments had been absent from synagogue liturgies in the Orthodox community, the West London Synagogue reintroduced them in 1841. Anglo-Reform Judaism, from the outset, was guided by the morals and ethics of the Hebrew prophets, more so than the legal portions of the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses), yet still preserved the reading of the Torah from a manuscript, emphasizing the primacy of the first reading or more implicitly, the primacy of Judaism over Christianity.2 However, the newly issued prayer book, by contrast to the German-Reformers, did not include anything radical. The texts calling for the restoration of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah, for example, were retained. The German Reformers of the 1840s, including Abraham Geiger, the principle founder of the movement, analyzed traditional Judaism as an “Oriental,” primitive religion. Geiger concluded that the tradition had become stagnant as the rabbis obeyed whatever was passed down.3 The term “Oriental,” in the Victorian secular context, refers to the treatment of women in the East, as Linda Hunt Beckman notes: “Victorian feminists attempted to reform Western patriarchal attitudes by developing a discourse that targeted the East for particularly atrocious treatment of women while making comparisons between British and ‘Oriental’ men so as to shame the former into being more enlightened.”4 For the German Reformers, Orthodoxy was outdated, particularistic, and based on the legalistic “bogus” authority of the rabbis. According to the Reformers, Orthodoxy dichotomized the life of its members between an onerous, unaesthetic, complex, alienating religion, and an aesthetic, modern, host nation offering the benefits of secular education. For Riv-Ellen Prell, this left Orthodox individuals out of synch as their Judaism continually separated them from the Occi2 Michael Hilton, The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1994), 106, 108. 3 See Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Its History, trans. Charles Newburgh (New York: Bloch, 1911). 4 Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 304 n27.

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dent.5 In Germany, the Reformers specifically targeted the “Woman Question” as one of their central issues.6 Again Prell: “The proposals of classical Reform paralleled German feminist demands for ‘freedom from oppression’ and ‘their own exercise of critical judgment.’ Feminism and Reform both embraced the Enlightenment commitment to progress, democracy and universalism.”7 The focal issues were: women’s exclusion from the minyan, the exemption of women from all time-bound positive mitzvot incumbent on men,8 the segregation of the sexes,9 and the prohibition on women’s formal education.10 At the Reform Conference of 1845, held in Frank5 Riv-Ellen Prell, “The Dilemma of Women’s Equality in the History of Reform Judaism,” Judaism 30, no. 4 (Fall 1981): 419. The Occident: Westernized world. 6 See David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism: A Sourcebook of its European Origins (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1963) for an overview of the movement in Europe. 7 Prell, “The Dilemma,” 423. 8 In Jewish tradition there are three mitzvot exclusively assigned to women: Nerot (the lighting of candles), Challah (separating a portion of dough), and Niddah (ritual immersion at the end of a menstrual period). 9 The divider is intended to preserve modesty on the basis that an individual’s mind should be on prayer, not an attractive woman sat close by. In Orthodoxy, the concept of modesty, Tzniut, forbids sexual relations outside of marriage and requires that both men and women substantially cover their bodies. In the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community, women are further required not to wear bright colors, to cover their hair, and men may not, generally, hear women sing (kol isha). 10 The rights of women in traditional Judaism, at least prior to the nineteenth-century, were greater than they were for non-Jewish women. Halakhically, women have the right to buy, sell, own property, to draw up contracts, and to be consulted regarding marriage (numerous halakhot protect women from domestic violence and rape). Women are conferred particular respect and assumed to have been endowed with superior Binah (intelligence, intuition, and understanding) than men. Even theologically, while the traditional texts have frequently been criticized and even discarded by the adherents of feminist reform as too inhospitable to women, traditionalists have argued that the equality of men and women begins with God. By contrast to Christianity, Judaism maintains that God, despite the masculine language of the sacred texts, is neither male nor female. Accordingly, the divine presence possesses both masculine and fe-

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furt, Germany, Rabbi David Einhorn presented several proposals to permit gender inclusionism. He argued that women could be obligated to perform mitzvot reserved for men, that women could form a minyan, that women should be given legal independence in divorce, that the age of religious majority should be thirteen for both sexes,11 and that the morning prayer, during which Jewish men thank God for not having “made me a woman,” should be abolished.12 Although radical, these proposals were neither discussed nor confirmed, and only a proportion of German synagogues adopted them. The German Reformers, even given their critique of the tradition, were in actuality, less revolutionary than their rhetoric suggested. First and foremost they hoped that Judaism would “catch up” with the rest of Europe. It had not escaped their notice that across the Continent women were coming to dominate the social services, and in Germany, a fledgling feminist movement was developing.13 However, rather than developing a unique Judaism from the salvageable remnants of the tradition, the Reformers in England and Germany, and their synagogue services, came to resemble Protestantism. The music, designed to spiritually liven the services, was of Western origin, prayers were said as a group, and proceedings were calm and ordered. While these changes initially differentiated Reform and Orthodox services, they were not theologically or halakhically radical. By the 1880s, the Reform Synagogue on Upper Berkeley Street, London, had become a fashionable sanctuary for acculturated middle-class Jews unable, and unwilling, to accommodate the halakhic minutiae of Orthodoxy to their highly anglicized lifestyles. Synagogue attendance, similar to church on Sunday, was often more essential to family respectability than to spiritual fulfillment. minine traits. Apologists for the tradition have concluded that masculine terminology is applied merely for convenience, as God has no physical body and therefore no genitalia. 11 Although boys are given the Bar Mitzvah ceremony, no such rite existed, at least then, for girls. Levy refers to this issue in Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (London: Macmillan, 1888), 104. 12 In Reuben Sachs Levy, unsurprisingly, focuses on the sexism of the traditional liturgy, 49. 13 Prell, “The Dilemma,” 423.

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The Anglo-Reform congregation placed specific emphasis on decorum, permitted English prayers, a mixed sex choir, and replaced particularistic prayers, such as the call for a return to Israel, with universalistic ones. The services were shorter, English sermons were provided on Sabbath, being called up to read was abolished, and Orthodox notions of the Messiah were replaced by hope for a Messianic age initiated, not by an individual, but by the Jewish people. The service, however, remained little different from Orthodoxy. The modifications were a product of middle-class Jewry’s intention to appear anglicized, and of their awareness of Evangelical charges of ritualism at the expense of inner-spirituality. In fact, the influence of the German movement was minimal and only became noticeable in the 1930s. Orthodox complaints, on the grounds of Chukkat ha-goy (rabbinic prohibition on the importation of gentile practices) were cited against the organ, the adoption of gentile names, and the rabbis and cantors wearing gowns and ties. Nevertheless, the Anglo-Reformers were able to find in rabbinic and biblical sources precedents for these innovations.14 Though, as David Feldman argues, Evangelicalism was a primary influence: Notwithstanding this recognition that the influence of evangelicalism did not stand alone, the parallels between religious reform and the evangelical critique of Judaism are impressive. … By the 1830s, the majority of the Anglo-Jewish upper and middle class looked upon the revival of political reform in Britain as a movement likely to create a polity more rich with opportunity for Jews rather than one fraught with danger. But if these aspects of evangelicalism did “not take,” it is possible to highlight striking parallels elsewhere; above all in the emphases on “unmysterious” forms of worship and vital religion of the heart.15

Hilton, The Christian Effect, 10. David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62-63. 14 15

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The Reform practice of a professional leader or rabbi taking public prayer is, for example, taken from the Church. Stephen Sharot argues that reforms made by the Orthodox synagogues actually brought the Reform and traditional denominations closer together. The Jewish Chronicle commented that there was little difference between members as the leadership of both denominations acted in unison for the Board of Guardians, the Board of Deputies, and the Jewish Religious Education Board.16 Members presided at each other’s synagogues during award ceremonies, and there was little to differentiate ministers. Not only were their beliefs similar, they performed the same roles.17 The Orthodox service also moved toward the Church model. Newly built synagogues became larger, more elaborate, and architecturally mirrored the churches. The New Synagogue, for example, built in London in 1837, was far too big for the area’s requirements, and no part of the tradition states that such a building is necessary. The Chief Rabbi, likewise, adopted dress associated with Christian clergy, including a dark clerical gown with a white neck band.18 From 1850, Orthodox synagogues introduced choirs, English sermons, a reverential atmosphere, elaborate pulpits, and began using titles such as warden, guardians, reverend, and vestry. Even the terms “Reform” and “Orthodox” are borrowed from the Church.19 The Anglo-Reform leadership, representative of the up16 See Charles Emanuel, A Century and a Half of Jewish History Extracted from the Minute Books of the London Committee of Deputies of the British Jews (1910; rpt. Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009); V. Lipman, A Century of Social Service 1859-1959 – The History of the Jewish Board of Guardians (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959); Aubrey Newman, The Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1760-1985 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1987). 17 See Bernard Homa, Orthodoxy in Anglo-Jewry, 1880-1940 (London: Jewish Historical Society of Great Britain, 1969); Aubrey Newman, The United Synagogue, 1870-1970 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); Geoffrey Alderman, The Federation of Synagogues, 1887-1987 (London: Federation of Synagogues, 1987); W. Gunter Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1963). 18 See Hyman Simons, Forty Years a Chief Rabbi: The Life and Times of Solomon Hirschell (London: Robson Books, 1980). 19 Hilton, The Christian Effect, 142-45.

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per-class elite, remained affiliated to Orthodoxy, and members from both denominations maintained social ties.20 The Reform prayer book included only minor changes, and the wearing of prayer shawls and phylacteries continued.21 In fact, 1880s Reform Judaism failed to generate any sizable defection from the Orthodox community. Aside from Upper Berkeley Street, no other synagogues were founded in London in the period.22 Indeed, Reform Judaism impacted little upon the community and reflected the interests of an elite determined that the movement assimilate the host culture, including its bibliocentricism, anti-ritualism, and antiTalmudism. David Feldman concludes: In all but their decision to dispense with some customary holidays, the doctrinal innovations of Reform Judaism in Britain were notably moderate. … In Britain, reformers wedded themselves to the word of the Bible. This limited their innovations but it also led them to abolish the second day of festivals for which there was no scriptural authority; something beyond the agenda of European reform. This particular programme of change reflected the force in Britain of a bibliocentric critique of Judaism. … In Britain it was the evangelical bibliocentric attack on Judaism that was loudest and most persistent before 1860.23

Anglo-Reformism was a response to criticism from the non-Jewish world. The Reformers published elaborate bibliocentric critiques of the tradition, aware of charges of “rabbinism” and rejection of the

20 Stephen Sharot, “Reform and Liberal Judaism in London: 18401940,” Jewish Social Studies 41, no. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 1979): 213-14, 21718. 21 Phylacteries: two boxes containing scripture worn on the arm and head respectively. 22 See Peter Renton, The Lost Synagogues of London (London: Tymsder Publishing, 2000). 23 Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 63-64.

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“spirit.”24 Accommodating contemporaneous Evangelicalism, the Reformers concluded that ritualism had no basis in scripture, and that the rabbis, through halakhah, had corrupted biblical law. Accordingly, sermons delivered by Reform Rabbi David Marks during the 1840s condemned Orthodoxy as incapable of meeting the spiritual requirements of women, though conversely, few, if any, official changes to alleviate the status of women were made. Due to its low membership, the West London Reform Synagogue did not hold daily services. According to a religious poll, nine out of ten seats were unoccupied during a Sabbath service in 1891, and a visitor in 1895 could only count eighteen male worshippers.25 By contrast, the ladies gallery was full. In 1885, a minister concluded that without the women there would be little requirement for services. By 1896, the Synagogue invited its female members to discuss reforms, although did not give them the right to vote.26 Their regular presence was indicative of middle-class women, in general, during the period. These women had sufficient leisure time to attend, and many sought to emulate women’s increased role in Church affairs. The creation of Christian sisterhoods and the revival of the deaconesses provided new opportunities for unmarried women to be of service. Nearly twice as many women of all Christian denominations attended church as compared to men.27 Likewise, Jewish women assumed new religious roles. The Anglo-Jewish elite, which prided itself on being “British” and receptive to new ideas, reconsidered women’s role in the light of Victorian trends.28 As Stephen Sharot argues: “The high, sometimes predominant, proportion of female worshippers at the ReFeldman, Englishmen and Jews, 65. In 1886 the Bevis Marks leadership considered selling the Synagogue as attendances were so low. 26 Sharot, “Reform and Liberal Judaism,” 215. 27 Brian Heeney, The Women’s Movement in the Church of England, 18501930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 5. 28 Ellen Umansky, Lily Montagu and the Advancement of Liberal Judaism: From Vision to Vocation, Studies in Women and Religion, vol. 12 (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 36. See Todd Endelman, “Communal Solidarity Among the Jewish Elite of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 28, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 491-526. 24 25

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form synagogue is an index of the high degree of acculturation of the Reform congregants to Christian patterns of behaviour.”29 As men were absorbed in Torah study, providing one’s daughters with a secular education became a visible symbol of Jewish adaptability. Well-to-do families encouraged their daughters to acquire knowledge of foreign languages and literature. However, once these women recognized their capacity for knowledge, the justifications for their exclusion from religious study and their unequal participation in the community no longer seemed valid. Although the majority of these women chose to remain within the fold, many expressed dissatisfaction with their religious role.30 By the late-1880s, Jewish women were demanding greater access to public life.31 Their increased role in volunteer philanthropy and teaching had, according to Linda Gordon Kuzmack: triggered a search for equality in religious life. … They [women] could not have chosen a better time, for Jewish men were leaving the synagogue in droves, bored by long, incomprehensible services in Hebrew, dry sermons, and the need to work on the Sabbath. The loss of congregants, combined with the impact of Darwinism, the rise of secularism, and modern Biblical criticism, generated a debate over modernizing worship that filled Jewish newspapers and journals.32

As the men were turning away from the synagogue, Anglo-Jewish women were attending services and performing the charitable work. Indeed, since fewer men were visible, the activities of women became central to synagogue life.33 Sharot, “Reform and Liberal Judaism,” 215. Umansky, Lily Montagu, 27-28. 31 See Patricia Hollis, Women in Public 1850-1900 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979). 32 Linda Gordon Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause: The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States, 1881-1933 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 47. 33 Gordon Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause, 47. 29 30

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In Victorian England there was no official Jewish feminist movement, and until the Liberal Judaism of the fin-de-siècle, no recognizable institution with religio-feminist aspirations for women. This is not to say that Jewish women, similar to their gentile contemporaries, were not influenced by, or involved in, First-Wave feminism. Michael Galchinsky notes that the political emancipation of the Jews, and their liberation from England’s oppressive laws, suggested to Jewish women the possibility of an internal emancipation from Jewish gender exclusionism.34 Jewish women participated in national feminist movements to a greater degree than is normally recognized. Constance Rothschild Battersea, for example, was active in the International Council of Women and in 1901 was elected president of the National Union of Women Workers. Louisa, Lady Goldsmid, joined the Women’s Protective and Provident League and persuaded the Jewish Board of Guardians to assist in its attempts to organize women workers excluded by the tailors’ unions. Both May Abraham and Emily Routledge would later join the organization. By interacting with the community and their nonJewish peers, Jewish women participated in the new social services, socialist feminism, and equal rights activism. They were active in almost all of the major national feminist ventures, including trade union, suffrage, and welfare feminism.35 Consequently, Jewish groups emerged to mirror these organizations,36 such as the Conference of Jewish Women, which convened in 1902; the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage, founded in 1912; the Jewish Ladies’ Visiting Association, the Society of Jewish Maternity Nurses, and the World Council of Jewish Women, established in 1923. Accordingly, Jewish women realized, as much as their Christian contemporaries had, that careers did exist beyond the stereotype of wife and mother. They began to envisage a Bat Mitzvah (Daughter of the

34 Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 30. 35 See Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement 18901920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). 36 Gordon Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause, 1.

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Commandment), a seat in the synagogue alongside the men, and the possibility of a Jewish education. According to Olive Banks, late-Victorian feminism altered the perceived traits of women’s character without actually rejecting separate spheres: “The feminists changed, sometimes in highly significant ways, the view of women’s character and destiny without ever totally rejecting the basis of the doctrine, which implied not only a special feminine nature but also a grounding of that nature in women’s domestic and ultimately, her maternal role.”37 The cult of true womanhood developed alongside separate spheres: men were the stronger and harder sex, less emotional, and physically able to cope with the ruthless world of the market-place. However, as women required the protective walls of the home, they possessed maternal qualities. Their greater moral purity made them the ethical inspiration for their husbands and the moral guardians of children.38 As the “subordinate” being, women were delicately equipped by God and nature for their role in the home and family. Hence, the Church was the guardian of a basic conservatism rooted in the Pentateuch and enshrined in the Pauline epistles.39 Although this stereotype persisted, and was internalized by feminist activists, women’s spiritual role, by the 1880s, spilled over into public life. The woman’s movement in the Church rejected the doctrine of female subordination and automatic submission to husbands, fathers, and brothers. As women sought to overcome these restrictions, they became involved in philanthropy on an unprecedented scale. They also took up pre-professional positions in the Church.40 The cult of true womanhood was based on the Evangelical theology of Christian femininity outlined by William Wilberforce in the eighteenth-century. Women’s qualities of devotion and selfsacrifice were applicable to motherhood and homemaking. This ensured the division of labor and the divine ordering of nature. The emphasis on women’s superior religiosity, however, contradictorily, 37 Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 86. 38 Banks, Faces of Feminism, 86. 39 Heeney, The Women’s Movement, 6, 9. 40 Heeney, The Women’s Movement, 6, 19.

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sat alongside the traditions of her disobedience and original sin which explained her subjection to male authority. The Evangelical movement located this theology in Genesis, and in St Paul’s analysis in 1 Corinthians 11, and 1 Timothy 2. Nonetheless, the idea that women were more sinful than men, yet more pure, had to be resolved through distinction between the innocent, chaste, passionless middle-class Christian woman, and the depraved “fallen woman” of the street. Although Evangelical theology provided a conservative and limiting definition of femininity, it presented justification for women’s role in social reform as a natural extension of their maternal and spiritual duties. This case suited the Evangelicals as it confirmed, rather than confronted, contemporary expectations regarding women’s role.41 David Bebbington concludes that Evangelicalism did more than the feminist movement to expand women’s sphere: At a time when respectability (often reinforced by Evangelical arguments) closely circumscribed the role of women, church work was one of their few outlets. Although Sunday School teachers were overwhelmingly male in the early nineteenth century, they were chiefly female by its end. Philanthropy was a major channel for women’s energies. Missionary support work, the YMCA, Christian Endeavour and the Student Volunteer Movement all springing from Evangelical soil, contributed to what one writer called the “Epiphany of Women.” Women could even occupy official positions – as deaconesses in the Church of England from 1862, as preachers among the Quakers, the Primitive Methodists and the Bible Christians and as officers in the Salvation Army. It has been persuasively argued that Evangelical religion, despite its emphasis on the domestic role of women, was more important than feminism in enlarging their sphere during the nineteenth century.42

Sean Gill, Women and the Church of England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London: SPCK, 1994), 77-79. 42 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 2002), 129. 41

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Similarly, Olive Banks notes that Evangelicalism was integral to the development of a feminist consciousness, conservative in that it conformed to traditional constructions of femininity, but radical in that it expanded women’s role into the public sphere.43 In the Jewish community too, women’s commitment to organized philanthropy, which began in the 1840s, grew to accommodate the mass immigration of Eastern European Jews during the late-Victorian period. This included the formation of maternal welfare organizations and the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women. By 1902, the level of women’s voluntary work was such that the Union of Jewish Women was created to act as an umbrella organization. Although this was formed to be an “all-embracing sisterhood,” it was dominated by women from the Anglo-Jewish elite, and concentrated on providing educational training for middle-class women.44 The failure of Reform Judaism in nineteenth-century England, particularly regarding the “Woman Question,” can be attributed to many factors: Daniel Langton argues that the Reform movement’s paralysis was due to its meager response to biblical criticism. The Anglo-Reformers demonstrated no notable interest in biblical criticism until after 1860, when the Reform movement had already taken shape. Whereas the German Reformers provided a modern, scientifically informed alternative to Orthodoxy, Anglo-Reformism was not ready to approach evolutionary theory. According to Langton, Rabbi David Marks’ Karaite-like reliance on the Bible proved disastrous for Anglo-Reform.45 Riv-Ellen Prell argues that while the liberalism of the Enlightenment provided proto-feminist opportunities, it became problematic for the status of women in Judaism. By selecting the emancipation model to address the issue of gender, Banks, Faces of Feminism, 13-27. Clare Midgley, “Ethnicity, ‘Race’ and Empire,” in Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction, ed. June Purvis (1995; rpt. London: Routledge, 2004), 250-51. 45 Daniel Langton, Claude Montefiore: His Life and Thought (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2002), 72. Karaism is a Jewish minority that believes in strict interpretation of the scriptures without rabbinic interpretation. 43 44

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that is, by seeking legal equality, classical Reformism diminished the unique legal status assigned to women. Thus, as they became equal, they also became invisible as women.46 In fact, Anglo-Reformism failed on multiple levels: as the brainchild of the upper-class elite, it held no appeal to the immigrants, its Sabbath attendances for the late-1880s were the lowest for all synagogues, and most members attended only once a year, normally on Yom Kippur (a point made in Reuben Sachs). The majority of Reformers were dissatisfied with the movement’s limitations, and by the late-1880s they lobbied for the service to be shortened, for the prophets to be read in English, and for the prayer for the restoration of the sacrificial rite to be removed.47 In sum, little differentiated Reform from Orthodox services. It was into this context that Amy Levy wrote her midrashim, caught somewhere between reverence for the proto-feminist pledges of classical German Reformism, yet frustrated with the Anglo-Reformers conservative, even stagnant, approach to the “Woman Question.” “A Greek Girl,” published in 1884, is considerably longer than “A Prayer,” and takes the form of a dramatic monologue mourning the passing of a lover. Given the biblical references throughout, the reader can assume the midrash is alluding to the possibility of a romantic affiliation between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. An initial reading of the poem, however, suggests it is a critique of working conditions for women: Shines down into the dreary weaving-room, Where clangs the ceaseless clatter of the loom, And ceaseless deft maiden-fingers weave The fine-wrought web; and I from morn till eve Work with the rest, and when folk speak to me I smile hard smiles; while continually

Prell, “The Dilemma,” 418. For an overview of Reform Judaism in England see Reform Judaism, ed. Dow Marmur (London: Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, 1973). 47 Hilton, The Christian Effect, 146-47. 46

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The silly speech of maiden speech flows on.48

The underlying thematic, however, challenges the New Testament account of Magdalene’s status by reconstructing her role in Jesus’ ministry. This leads the reader toward the possibility of an erotic relationship between them. The title, “A Greek Girl,” references Mark’s Gospel in which a mother asks Jesus to remove the devil from her daughter (7:2630). The instance resembles Jesus’ first encounter with Mary Magdalene during which he exorcizes seven demons from her (Luke 8:2). The term “Greeks” generally refers to non-Jews in the New Testament, and Amy Levy possibly analogizes herself to their minority status. As Paul states (Galatians 3:28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” This universalistic approach might have appealed to Levy during the early-1880s given that she was immersed in gentile culture (in biblical times Greek had been the language of the diaspora Jew), and struggling with an identity crisis: alienated from the tradition (the Talmud frequently cursed Greek culture as the definitive pagan culture), yet aware of anti-Semitism, although by alluding to Greeks as non-Jews she is probably highlighting the fact that the Jesus ministry, despite being a Jewish renewal movement, is figured in Christian tradition as a non-Jewish sect that would eventually lead to the establishment of the early Christian community. It is not until the midway point of the text that we are to acknowledge the narrator as Magdalene: Thrice-blest [sic], thrice-crowned, of gods thrice-loved sheThat other, fairer maid, who tombward [sic] brings Her gold, shorn locks and piled-up offerings Of fragrant fruits, rich wines, and spices rare, And cakes with honey sweet, with saffron fair; And who, unchecked by any thought of shame, May weep her tears, and call upon his name, With burning bosom prest [sic] to the cold ground, 48 Amy Levy, A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884; rpt. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), 62.

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By neglecting to capitalize “gods,” Levy calls into question the divine authority of the Holy Trinity, the principal dogma of Christian theology. The scene, resonant of “A Prayer,” is the sepulcher, only this time from the perspective of those gathered outside. Magdalene, unable to divulge the romantic nature of her relationship with Jesus must join the other women “bringing sweet spices” (Mark 16:1, Luke 24:1) hoping to anoint the corpse. The frequent use of “thrice” identifies Jesus in his Christian guise. These terms symbolize Jesus’ appropriation for the Holy Trinity and the suppression of his Jewish identity. The God of Sinai, however, is conspicuous through the blatant jealousy directed at the “other, fairer maid,” who worships Jesus as a divinity.50 Presumably, the “fairer maid[s]” the narrator describes are Mary (mother of James), Salome (Mark 16:1), and Joanna, who followed Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem; and several unnamed women (Luke 24:10). The midrash, by revealing the importance of women to the Jesus movement, demonstrates First-Wave concerns, affiliated to Reform Judaism, calling for women’s increased access to gender exclusive areas of Jewish life. The references to the speaker’s “heart’s hunger” and “hungry heart” reflect yearning for immanent spirituality, apparently absent from the Jewish tradition.51 Although the notion of “heart” has obvious romantic connotations, in biblical symbology it refers to the soul or the spirit, and is regarded as the seat of life. Additionally, the appropriation of a “Christian” text by a Jewish woman illustrates the exclusion of women from Jewish education, the androcentrism of the Hebrew texts, and the inclination, perhaps more associated to the Second-Wave, to call for women’s participation in religious leadership. Indeed, the midrash Levy, A Minor Poet, 63. In the Torah, God is frequently portrayed as a jealous deity (Exodus 20:3-5, 34:14; Deuteronomy 4:24, 5:9, 6:15) – “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” 51 Levy, A Minor Poet, 64. 49 50

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employs the biblical icon of Mary Magdalene as a historical and authoritative basis for reform in the Anglo-Jewish community, prefiguring, if only in embryonic form, the recovery of “herstory”:52 the individual and collective history of Jewish women.53 This involves unearthing the biography of a forgotten Jewish woman, or a woman not conventionally regarded as Jewish, such as Magdalene, by providing her with a subjective voice. The iconography of Mary Magdalene was appropriated for numerous literary contexts during the nineteenth-century.54 In England alone, 147 sculptures and paintings were produced during the Victorian period, including erotic statues. Antonio Canova’s sculpture of 1796 was admired and copied throughout the period. The figure combines both eroticism and penitence due to the partial 52 The recovery of “herstory” is based upon Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking thesis for the study of women’s history. She argued that in Western literature women are designated as “Other” while men are the focal Subject (The Second Sex, ed. and trans. Howard Parshley (1949; rpt. New York: Knopf, 1972). 53 For example: The Folk Literature of the Kurdistani Jews: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Yona Sabar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue (Chico: Scholar Press, 1982). The Jewish feminist biblical project has significantly expanded since the onset of the Second-Wave, including most notably (this list is by no means exhaustive and does not include previously cited monographs): Alice Bach, Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1999); Athalya Brenner, A Feminist Companion to Genesis (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993); Athalya Brenner, A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993); Anita Diamant, The Red Tent (London: Macmillan, 2001) – this retelling of Dinah’s story is written as a novel; Ellen Frankel, The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1996); Judith Gates and Gail Reimer, Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story (New York: Ballantine Books: 1996); Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 54 John Angell James, Female Piety: or the Young Woman’s Friend and Guide through Life to Immortality (New York: Robert Carter & Bros, 1853) utilizes Magdalene as a Christian figure of fidelity and love, while Emile Zola, Madelaine Ferat (London: Vizitelly & Co., 1888), portrays her as a “fallen woman.”

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nudity and her holding of a crucifix. This image of the female body, vulnerable in repentance yet equally sensual, presented an appealing erotic formula to Victorian sentimentality. Subsequent imitations maintained the theme of an idealized nude,55 setting up a paradox through which Magdalene appears penitent, but remains nonvirginal. Conventional moralists argued that the loss of women’s sexual innocence represented complete depravity, rendering them unfit for respectable society.56 From this perspective, Magdalene has frequently been employed as an effective weapon against the female sex. Through her iconography, the Church was able to reject human sexual desire with women as its embodiment. Accordingly, the biblical image of Magdalene was deliberately adapted to negate her status as the woman who proclaimed the Easter Gospel,57 leading to the Western tradition in which Magdalene is figured as the sinful sister of Martha and Lazarus, and as the sinner who wipes Jesus’ feet (Luke 7:37). She is also associated with an anonymous sinner in Luke 7:47, and an unmarried Samaritan woman in the Gospel of John who is said to have had several husbands. Magdalene’s label as a sexually promiscuous woman has inspired Christians throughout the ages to care for, and castigate, prostitutes seeking their repentance and reform. Even her name has become a byword for “fallen woman.”58 By the nineteenth-century, the “fallen woman” equated to a moral disease which threatened the Christian purity of the family and home. Thus, Mary Magdalene came to symbolize the antithesis to Victorian domestic culture and the bourgeois masculine-defined image of the virtuous mother and wife.59 Christian writers sought 55 Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 341-42. 56 Rebecca Styler, “A Scripture of Their Own: Nineteenth-Century Bible Biography and Feminist Biblical Criticism,” Christianity and Literature 57, no. 1 (Autumn 2007): 76. 57 Haskins, Mary Magdalene, 96-97. 58 Esther de Boer, The Gospel of Mary: Beyond a Gnostic and a Biblical Mary Magdalene (London: T & T Clark International, 2004), 1-2. 59 Haskins, Mary Magdalene, 10-11, 319. Both Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983; rpt. New York: Crossroad, 1994), 139, and Susanne Heine,

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to re-present the figure of Magdalene as a challenge to the demonization of prostitutes by analyzing Jesus’ encounters with her. It is probable their work alerted Amy Levy to the possibility of reclaiming Magdalene for a Jewish context. Clara Balfour, in 1847, for example, praised Magdalene for remaining with Jesus until his crucifixion, despite the risk to her safety. Comparably, Sara Hale, in 1853, concluded that all the disciples were taught by her.60 Levy might also have been aware of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s presentation in 1885 at the Annual Convention of the National Suffrage Association which criticized the sexist nature of Christian theology. By reclaiming Magdalene, Levy deliberately chose a controversial figure at the forefront of the “Woman Question,” social, religious, and artistic debate.61 The focal point of “A Greek Girl” is the potential erotic relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Indeed, Martin Luther, as well as other prominent Church leaders, believed that sexual relations existed between the two figures. The assumption, however, tends to challenge Christologies that proclaim Jesus a

Women and Early Christianity. Are the Feminist Scholars Right? (London: SCM, 1987), 129, assume that Magdalene was Jesus’ closest female companion. 60 Clara Balfour, The Women of Scripture (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1847), 308; Sara Hale, Woman’s Record: or, Sketches of All Disgruntled Women, from “The Beginning” till A.D. 1850 (New York: Harpers, 1853), 130. See Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Sketches of the Women of Christendom (London: SPCK, 1889); Francis Augustus Cox, Female Scripture Biography, 2 vols. (London: Gale and Fenner, 1817); Mary Pryor Hack, Consecrated Women (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1880). Such works were augmented by landmark feminist biblical studies in the United States, culminating in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s, The Woman’s Bible, 2 vols. (New York: European Publishing Company, 1895, 1898). See also Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, “Interpreting Patriarchal Traditions,” in The Liberating Word: A Guide to Non-Sexist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Letty Russell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 58-70. 61 See Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of the Saints: Theatre, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

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sinless agent of universal divine action.62 By contrast, the midrash reveals: If his lips had prest [sic] My lips, but once, in love; his eyes had sent One love-glance into mine, I had been content, And deemed it great joy for one little life; Nor envied other maids the crown of wife: The long sure years, the merry children-band— Alas, alas, I never touched his hand!63

The negation of Jesus’ Messiahship or divine status, by his relationship with Magdalene, underpins the feminist perspective on his leadership and demonstrates reference to Amy Levy’s close reading of John 20:11-18. This account has been compared to the woman’s pursuit of her lover in the Song of Songs 3:1-5. Accordingly, the dialogue has provoked conjecture regarding the possibility of an intimate association. The scene is powerful given that the cast list is reduced. Although the other women and disciples are present in the garden they have been cut out by the gospel writer in order to stage a purely individual encounter between Jesus and his closest female follower.64 Magdalene is initially unable to recognize Jesus and he asks why she weeps (John 20:13-15). This moment reveals their previous closeness has been erased by his divine mission. Magdalene realizes the mysterious figure is Jesus and addresses him as “Rabboni” (John 20:16), reflecting her loyalty. The midrash states: “alas, I never touched his hand,” referring to the moment at which he asks her not to touch him as he has not yet ascended to his father (John 20:17). Through this rebuttal she is to infer that their relationship has altered, that any type of physical contact between

62 For a feminist analysis of Jesus’ association with erotic power see Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1993). 63 Levy, A Minor Poet, 63. 64 A. Wilson, Jesus (Sydney: Pimlico, 1992), 244.

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them is inappropriate, and that she must cease from worshipping him in a corporeal human sense.65 Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel notes that in Jesus’ call for “Mary” and her reply “My Master” there is delight and happiness that transcends a teacher-pupil relationship. This moment fulfills a basic human desire for eroticism which the New Testament overlooks. Christianity, with its anxieties about sex, has since used Mary Magdalene to satisfy the erotic requirements of, or to titillate, male worshippers. During the Middle-Ages she became the patron saint of the cosmetic industry, and in sixteenth and seventeenth-century paintings she is half-naked, admiring her own beauty. According to Moltmann-Wendel, within these illustrations, alongside the suppressed threat is an empty vanity and the frisson pleasure of prudish Christianity depicting the sensual aspects of life. Indeed, the imaginary disquiet in John’s Gospel enables readers to envisage Magdalene as the bride of Christ – as betrothed in spiritual union yet unmarried.66 The midrash also leads to the question of Mary Magdalene’s status in the Jesus sect. In the Gospels Jesus is shown to possess an egalitarian and positive attitude towards women. He has women followers and friends, he makes them recipients of his teaching, and assigns women roles in parables.67 In the midrash we are informed: “And I with other maidens in a line / Passed singing through the city to the shrine.”68 The women constitute a large and devoted contingent, yet, the warmth dispensed by Jesus to Magdalene points towards the eminence of her position: “With burning bosom prest [sic] to the cold ground, / Knowing, indeed, that all her life is crown’d, / Thrice-crowned, thrice honoured, with that love of his.”69 It is inferred that his love confers equal status, which since the resurrection has been denied to Magdalene. Her being pressed to the ground recalls the washing of Jesus’ feet in Luke Haskins, Mary Magdalene, 10. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, The Women Around Jesus (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 85, 87-88. 67 Haskins, Mary Magdalene, 30. 68 Levy, A Minor Poet, 64. 69 Levy, A Minor Poet, 63. 65 66

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7:37-38. The evangelists are careful to name Magdalene precisely, which sets her apart from several other women named Mary. In every account of the crucifixion, excluding John’s, she appears at the head of Jesus’ female followers. The prominence assigned to Magdalene has led to speculation that she herself was a spiritual leader. Foreshadowing Second-Wave perspectives that analyze how popular culture represents the Jewish woman, Levy explores the processes through which Christian tradition portrays Magdalene in order to provide a counter-hermeneutic. The rediscovery of Mary Magdalene the preacher has a long history, beginning with Hippopolytus’ reference to her as an apostle in the third-century.70 However, Amy Levy, prefiguring SecondWave Jewish feminism’s proclivity to draw inspiration from other religious traditions, locates authority in the Gnostic tradition. While it is impossible that she had access to the Gospel of Philip (as it was not located until after her death) which explicitly states that Jesus loved Magdalene more than the other disciples, and claims that he frequently kissed her upon the lips (48:32-34f),71 the Pistis Sophia was available as it had been purchased by the British Library in 1795 as part of the Askew Codex.72 Although Levy did not read Coptic, the Codex was translated into Latin in 1851.73 If she did not use Moritz Schwartze and Julius Petermann’s edition there were many other minor translations and articles published throughout the period. In the Pistis Sophia (Faith Wisdom) Magdalene appears as an inquisitive, intelligent woman, regarded by Jesus Moltmann-Wendel, The Women Around Jesus, 79. “The Gospel According to Philip: A Valentinian Anthology,” in The Gnostic Scripture, ed. and trans. Bentley Layton (London: SCM Press, 1987), 339. 72 The Askew Codex was discovered in 1773. The Bruce Codex containing the Books of Jeu and other Gnostic writings was acquired by the British Museum in 1842 and subsequently kept at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. The Berlin Codex was unearthed in 1896, and the Gospel of Mary was discovered in the same year as part of the Akhmim Codex. The majority of the Gnostic Gospels, including Philip, were unearthed in 1945. 73 Valentinus, Pistis Sophia: Opus Gnosticum, ed. Julius Petermann and trans. Moritz Schwartze (Beriloni: F. Duemmler, 1851). 70 71

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as his closest disciple. Her activism and close association with him are portrayed as a source of conflict with the other disciples, as he claims to regard Magdalene (and John) in higher esteem.74 Gnostic tradition, contrary to the early history of traditional Christianity, suggests that women such as Magdalene were spiritual leaders of the Jesus movement, and that supported by him she opposed Peter’s unwarranted sexism and the patriarchal stance adopted by other members of the group. This account corresponds with Levy’s midrash. “A Greek Girl” also seems to have been based on Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints. This Latin anthology was compiled in approximately 1260, printed in the thousands during the mid-fifteenth-century, and republished in 1878.75 The Italian chronicler provides biographical accounts of each of the saints, including Mary Magdalene, who is described as of royal descent. Jesus deeply loves her, raises her brother from the dead and cures her sister from illness. Most controversially, Voragine alleges that as Magdalene anointed Christ’s head, remained at the cross during the Passion, maintained a vigil at the sepulcher, and was the first person to witness Jesus after the resurrection, she was “an apostle to the apostles.”76 Voragine concludes that after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, Magdalene: “burnt with such love for Christ, and was so weary of the world, that she wanted never to set eyes on any human being again.”77 Amy Levy’s reading of The Golden Legend is supported by the fact that in A Minor Poet she follows “A Greek Girl” with “Magdalen” and then with “Christopher Found,” while in Voragine’s anthology the entry for Magdalene is directly followed by “St Christopher.” By highlighting Magdalene’s unacknowledged status in the Gospels, Levy provides a model for religious leadership. She possibly hoped the midrash would encourage Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Gospel (London: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896), 161, 230. 75 See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, ed. Alfred Aspland (London: Wyman & Sons, 1878). 76 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 165-66. 77 Voragine, The Golden Legend (1998), 172. 74

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the Anglo-Reformers to adopt the proto-feminist reforms outlined by the German movement. Levy had unearthed a “usable past” through which meaningful role models are located and given contemporaneous significance beyond the traditional stereotype of the Jewish woman as mother and teacher of children.78 Likewise, her defense of first-century Judaism reveals that the discriminatory elements of the tradition can be disregarded to unearth more foundational principles of justice and equality.79 As “A Greek Girl” concludes, Mary Magdalene’s journey through the city invokes memories of her past life as Jesus’ closest disciple: Oft in the streets or crowded market-place I caught swift glimpses of the dear-known face; Or marked a stalwart shoulder in the throng; Or heard stray speeches as we passed along, In tones more dear to me than any song.80

The reference to the market-place recalls his criticism of the Pharisees, the probable forbearers of rabbinic Judaism.81 In the Gospels

78 Paula Hyman, “The Jewish Family: Looking For a Usable Past,” in On Being A Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (1983; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 20, 22. 79 Melissa Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai? Reading Jewish Feminist Theology Through the Critical Lens of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to “Radical Orthodoxy,” ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion Grau (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 200. More recently, Blu Greenberg, On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), and Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998), have argued that the Talmudic rabbis, by contrast to other Jewish authorities, did strive to improve the legal rights of women. 80 Levy, A Minor Poet, 64. The speeches about which Magdalene reminisces are probably Jesus’ address to the laborers in the market-place (Matthew 19:28-20:16), and his healing of a man near the sheep market (John 5:2-9).

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Jesus describes them as coveting “the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogue, And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi” (Matthew 23:6-7). Indeed, Levy, given her reading of Abraham Geiger, would have regarded Jesus as a liberal Pharisee critical of mainstream Pharisaism. The concluding verse – “O cruel, cruel sunlight, get thee gone!” – noting Matthew’s Gospel,82 rejects Christian appropriation of the Jesus sect and acknowledges the fate of the Jewish people in exile: “And when he sowed, … Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered (13:3-6).” Although Jesus is not referring to the diaspora, the midrash re-contextualizes his speech to indicate the rootless existence of the exilic Jews. Throughout “A Greek Girl,” the negation of Magdalene’s leadership, resulting from the failure of the Jesus movement to remodel Judaism, is figured as a consequence of the New Covenant’s “triumph” over the Old. Magdalene, symbolic of women’s tangential status within Orthodox Judaism subsequent to the first-century, bitterly condemns Jesus’ metamorphosis, and by accommodating the rhetoric of Christian anti-Judaism, demonstrates her own yearning for blindness (“eyes, … closed in sleep”) recast as Jewish rejection of the New Covenant.83 The final lines signify the permanence of Jewish identity, although the ominous threat of assimilation is never far away: “How shall he know me from the other maids”?84 We have seen that the midrash contains several elements that can be analyzed from a Second-Wave Jewish perspective. Although Amy Levy examines the Jewish motifs of a Christian source, she draws attention to First and Second-Wave requirements that the community be transformed to accommodate the changing atti81 The assumption that the Pharisees prefigured rabbinic Judaism has recently been called into question, although Levy would not have known this. See Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee (London: SCM Press, 2003). 82 Levy, A Minor Poet, 64. 83 Levy, A Minor Poet, 64. 84 Levy, A Minor Poet, 64.

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tudes, experiences, and personal competences of women. Levy’s midrash demonstrates an alternative representation of Mary Magdalene – the genesis of an innovative tradition – based on the silence regarding her role in the New Testament and through what must have been her reading of the Pistis Sophia. The interpretation Levy develops is of a spiritual, intelligent Jewish woman who is a key member of Jesus’ renewal movement. Levy also prompts the reader toward Magdalene’s sexuality and erotic love for Jesus, which is elaborated further in “Magdalen.” She rejects their appropriation by Christian tradition through a re-reading of the New Testament, and by doing so demonstrates her own exclusion from the symbols, texts, and processes that define Jewish religious identity. Thus, “A Greek Girl” critiques the absence of women from Jewish spiritual leadership and scholarship, as well as the alienation of female sexuality, but in the process, lays the blame squarely with the Christian appropriation of the Jesus movement, which had previously been inflective of first-century Judaism, and, Levy surmises (she could not have known of current research which demonstrates the gender inclusionary aspects of first-century Palestinian Judaism), its possible gender inclusionary perspectives. Indeed, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza would later conclude that in order for historical research to reconstruct the Jesus movement it is necessary to analyze his ministry as a Jewish movement within a dominant patriarchal culture that sought to maximize the prowomen elements already present within first-century Judaism. Hence, the Jesus sect is best understood as an inner-Jewish renewal movement that presented an alternative to the dominant patriarchal structure, rather than an oppositional formation that rejected the values of Judaism.85 The midrash’s inventive, personalized account of Mary Magdalene’s life as a Jewish woman also provides an early model for Second-Wave efforts to locate the silences in traditional texts and to broaden the definition of Jewish spirituality to include the ex-

85

Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 107.

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perience and testimony of women.86 The critique that the early Christian community stifled Magdalene’s status as a Jewish spiritual leader has also been revisited during the Second-Wave.87 While Christian feminists have argued that Judaism eradicated the concept of the Goddess, and that Jesus was a feminist who liberated women from Judaism by establishing a gender equal religion, Second-Wave Jewish feminists, as we have seen, have sought to counter this unwarranted criticism by defending first-century Judaism. Similarly, Amy Levy’s pioneering approach attempts to reverse the Christian denigration of Judaism during the New Testament period by suggesting, almost prophetically, that first-century Judaism, in particular liberal Pharisees such as Jesus, did encourage women’s participation in communal and religious leadership. Indeed, evidence would come to illustrate that women did maintain positions of financial importance and did serve as leaders of the synagogue. Bernadette Brooten, writing in 1982, demonstrates that women founded Jewish communities, bore the title “elder,” possibly served as priestesses (or “mothers of the synagogue”), that not all first-century synagogues practiced sex-segregation, and that many women were attracted to Judaism and chose to convert, leading to the formation of female majorities in some communities.88 “Magdalen” is a pessimistic monologue, fraught with tension, centering upon Mary Magdalene’s romantic and erotic relationship with Jesus. The midrash, by continuing the focus on the resurrection account, again re-imagines the meeting between the two charSee The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003, eds. Judith Plaskow and Donna Berman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 71. 87 See Charlotte Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975); Judith Plaskow, “Christian Feminism and Anti-Judaism,” Cross-Currents 33 (Fall 1978): 306-09. 88 Brooten, Women Leaders, 32, 38, 41, 72, 99, 138, 147. Barbara Geller Nathanson, “Toward a Multicultural Ecumenical History of Women in the First Century/ies C. E.,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (London: SCM Press, 1994), 272-89; Ross Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions Among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 86

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acters described in John 20:14-17. The scene is replete with Jewish and Christian biblical symbols – sun, rose, thorn, flesh, blood, heart, stone, good, and evil – as they realize the futility of their love for one another, and the apparent victory of the New Covenant over the Old. The scriptural allusions, combined with the title, alert the reader to the religious and theological connotations of the midrash, and reveal Amy Levy’s growing awareness of, and willingness to employ, classically Jewish themes. Indeed, her growing reverence for the tradition is hardly surprising given that Abraham Geiger defended early rabbinic law and aspects of the Talmud. However, while “Magdalen” is based on the Gospel narrative, the midrash remains largely imaginative, elevating Magdalene’s status as a Jewish leader by using romantic imagery that juxtaposes Jewish and Christian symbology. Furthermore, the midrash boldly concludes that Magdalene, by contrast to Jesus, is capable of withstanding and rejecting the New Testament deity and the Christian appropriation of the Jesus movement, thus constructing an innovative proto-feminist tradition.89 The fact that this feminist reinterpretation has little or no historical basis is irrelevant given that the construction of Jewish history, specifically during the rabbinic period, was not historiographical but Midrashic. The rabbis assumed the infinite possibilities of the biblical texts and took passages that were troubling and wrote them forward. They applied to the Bible their own questions and located answers that demonstrated the perpetual relevance of biblical truth. Questions such as who was Adam’s first wife? Why was Abraham chosen to be the father of the Jewish people? Why was Dinah raped? These do not require historical investigation, rather, creative exegesis and literary amplification. Hence, the sages gave ancient texts relevance for the pre89 Cynthia Scheinberg, in her analysis of “Magdalen,” concludes that Levy uses Magdalene’s iconography as an “anti-typology”; a supposed Christian heroine who refutes Christianity and her ties with Christ. By analyzing the scene in which Jesus and Magdalene meet as representative of two distinct hermeneutics, Scheinberg argues that while Jesus observes the moment from within Christian symbology, Magdalene believes she is participating in a romantic interlude (“Canonizing the Jew: Amy Levy’s Challenge to Victorian Poetic Identity,” Victorian Studies 39, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 190-94).

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sent. The open-ended method of producing midrash which remains imaginative, playful, metaphoric, yet serious, is easily applicable to a feminist perspective and need not have any historical basis.90 From the onset of the midrash, Mary Magdalene laments the existence assigned to her in Christian traditions since the appropriation of Jesus’ identity. Experiencing confinement in a dark room she seeks refuge from the sun that in Matthew 13:6 scorches the rootless (Jews): ALL things I can endure, save one. The bare blank room where is no sun; The parcelled hours; the pallet hard; The dreary faces here within. Yea, all things bear, save only this: That you, who knew what things would be, Have wrought this evil unto me. It is so strange to think on still– That you, that you should do me ill!91

The use of the term “endure” relates to Matthew 24:13 in which the context implies to suffer patiently. The rhetoric of antiSemitism emphasizes how Jesus, “Not as one ignorant or blind [Jewish],”92 is responsible for betraying his ancestral religion, here figured as the Jewish woman he loves. The reference may also relate to Leviticus 21:18 – the law that blindness prohibits an individual from becoming a priest. Consequently, Magdalene’s “blindness”/status as a woman who is legally unqualified as a witness, and the “blindness of Israel,” through a combination of traditional90 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990; rpt. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 53, 55. 91 Levy, A Minor Poet, 65. 92 Levy, A Minor Poet, 65. In Matthew 15:14, Jesus criticizes the Pharisees: “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Paul also suggests that the children of Israel are blind due to their reliance on the “Old” Testament (2 Corinthians 3:14).

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ist legalism and Christian anti-Judaism, exempts her from assuming a position of leadership either within the Christian or the exilic Jewish community. The midrash continues with a fictional romantic liaison between the two figures, during which Jesus draws the “half-slipt [sic] shawl of dusky blue” around her neck.93 The shawl is also resonant of the Virgin Mary.94 I would suggest that Amy Levy employs the reference, first, to demonstrate that Jesus’ metamorphosis betrays Jewish women collectively (this traditional perspective rejects Evangelical notions of individual responsibility before God by portraying Jews as an assembly), and second, as an allusion to the Pistis Sophia in which it is often difficult to ascertain whether the author is referring to the Holy Mother or Mary Magdalene. The midrash reminds us that in the Gospels Jesus’ mother is unable to comprehend his unusual behavior (Luke 2:50), that she attempts to restrain his ministry, and that she regarded her son as “out of his mind” (Mark 3:21). Levy’s reference to the Holy Virgin may also have been an attempt to distinguish the Jewish mother of Jesus from that object of faith in Catholic devotion. Prior to her appropriation as a perpetual virgin, and as the Mother of God by the Council of Ephesus (431 CE), Mary had been “the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38); an archetypal pious Jewish woman. The scene employs the New Testament imagery of the thorn, flesh, and blood, while the rose is a further allusion to the Virgin Mother:95 And once my hand, on a summer’s morn, I stretched to pluck a rose; a thorn Struck through the flesh and made it bleed (A little drop of blood indeed!).96

Levy, A Minor Poet, 66. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1985). 95 The rose has been associated with the Virgin Mother in Christian tradition. 96 Levy, A Minor Poet, 66. 93 94

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Cynthia Scheinberg interprets the rose through its connection with the “thorn” and “bleeding.” Thus, Christian readers envisage the stigmata and crown of thorns, and Magdalene’s romantic moment is symbolic of Jesus’ suffering. Although he is concerned at her pain, the comment, “A little drop of blood indeed,” suggests that his reaction usurps the seriousness of the injury; hence the brackets. His excessive response of growing “pale,” offering “deep” sighs, and “broken voice” implies, according to Scheinberg, that the incident has more significance for him than her. Musing as to “God’s laughter,” Magdalene points to the ostensible foreknowledge of God, understanding herself as a pawn in the wider scheme of which only he and Jesus are privy. Hence, for Scheinberg, Magdalene’s suffering will remain only secondary to Jesus’, and her identity transformed into a symbol of Christian conversion.97 Even given the liberal climate of early-Victorian England, the conversionist societies, sanctioned by the Crown, were determined to proselytize the Jewish population en masse. The London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews specifically targeted women. According to David Bebbington, Evangelicalism is based upon four themes: “Conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the Gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what might be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Together they form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism.”98 It was hoped that spiritual Jewish women, or “Jewish Protestants” as they were labeled by Evangelicals, would form the vanguard of Anglo-Jewry’s conversion.99 The Evangelical movement venerated the Hebrew Bible, conferring special status on Jews, in particular women, regarding them as agents of transformation. They believed that the conversion of the Jews would precipiScheinberg, “Canonizing the Jew,” 193. Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 2-3. 99 Michael Galchinsky, “Engendering Liberal Jews: Jewish Women in Victorian England,” in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, 2nd ed., ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 211. See Nadia Valman, “Hearts Full of Love for Israel: Converting the Jews in Victorian England,” Jewish Quarterly, 182 (Summer 2001): 15-20. 97 98

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tate the Second Coming. Accordingly, Jesus’ sacrificial and redemptive character made him a religious icon that Jewish women could seek to “emulate.” The Jews, representative of the fallen nature of humanity, were supposedly held in spiritual stagnation by their reliance on the Talmud and the “false” authority of the rabbis. The conversionists, dominated by pre-millenarians, believed both in imminent Messianism and the literal reading of Old Testament prophecy. From 1829, the London Society began to actively seek converts in the capital,100 and even by the 1880s, the issue of conversion remained prominent, particularly as some Evangelicals perceived the adoption of Reform Judaism as a mere step towards the embracing of Christianity. The midrash takes on an entirely different context to Cynthia Scheinberg’s interpretation if we assume Mary Magdalene to be a spiritual leader and equal of Jesus. The line, “a thorn / Struck through the flesh,” alludes to Paul’s defense of his claim to be an apostle in 2 Corinthians: “Of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me.” His punishment, “lest” he “should be exalted above measure” (12:7), serves a reminder in the midrash that Magdalene not be permitted, by order of the God of the New Covenant, an equivalent role to Jesus.101 The metaphorical thorn of 2 Corinthians 12:7, which punctures the flesh in Amy Levy’s midrash, is an indicator that Magdalene cannot rise above her station, as only God can remove it (12:8). The biblical imagery of the thorn can also be applied to Jesus’ parable in which he speaks of the seeds being “sown among thorns” (Mark 4:18).102 Although this comment refers to Israel’s

Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 54. See Herbert Schlossberg, Conflict and Crisis in the Religious Life of Late Victorian England (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009). 101 Paul’s negative attitude toward women has frequently been attributed to his Jewish origins. In 1 Corinthians 11:10, his injunction that women should cover their heads is often figured by Christian feminists as the survival of a Hebrew legend. 102 The imagery of the thorn appears in the Old and New Testament, with references predominantly being negative. In a specifically Jewish context, thorns have been associated with the judgment of Israel in exile. 100

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spiritual exile prior to the diaspora, Levy may have envisaged contemporary Anglo-Jewish anxieties regarding assimilation. As Magdalene’s wound bleeds: “A little drop of blood indeed,” her unconverted Jewish blood is regarded as insignificant compared to the deified blood of Christ, demonstrating Levy’s reading of Romans 3:25: “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past.” As Jesus dresses her wound, he is momentarily reminded of his former existence as her lover: Pale grew your cheek; you stoopt [sic] and bound Your handkerchief around the wound; Your voice came with a broken sound; With the deep breath your breast was riven [sic]; I wonder, did God laugh in Heaven?103

Magdalene realizes the incident has entertained the God of the New Covenant, who is confident their romance will be curtailed. As in “A Greek Girl,” “Magdalen” refers to the disciples’ criticism of Mary Magdalene in the Gnostic Gospels given her close relationship with Jesus, and that she directly challenged the “sexist” members of the movement. However, the midrash goes further, as she brazenly castigates the God of the New Testament, symbolized in the figure of Jesus, for transforming her Jewish lover: Even if one had told me this, “A poison lurks within your kiss, Gall that shall turn to night his day”: Thereon I straight had turned awayAy, tho’ my heart had crack’d with painAnd never kiss’d your lips again.104

The thorn can also emphasize a lack of productivity, punishment, and worthlessness. 103 Levy, A Minor Poet, 66. 104 Levy, A Minor Poet, 66-67.

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The accusation that Magdalene’s kiss may “turn to night his [Jesus’] day” – the implication that her embrace might reawaken his Jewish ancestry – responds to Romans 13:12: “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light”; and Luke (17:24) “the Son of man be in his day.” As it is implied that Magdalene’s Jewish soul is ineradicable, the reader is to assume the same of Jesus: I think my heart has turn’d to stone, A dull, dead weight that hurts my breast; Here, on my pallet-bed alone, I keep apart from all the rest.105

The symbol of the heart of stone has various implications for Christian and Jewish imagery,106 and, comparable to traditional Midrashic techniques, Amy Levy’s midrash connects numerous texts including those of the Tanakh.107 “Magdalen” reveals a close reading of Ezekiel 11:19 in which the prophet, referring to idolatry, vows to “take the stony heart out of their flesh [heathens], and will give them an heart of flesh”; and Jeremiah 31:33 in which God maintains: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.” By linking the Nevi’im to the Gospels, the midrash projects a cultural reversal. Indeed, Levy employs the stone imagery in its relation to Jesus as the corner stone of the Church and as the stone that unites gentiles and Jews under Christianity (Matthew 21:42). Within Christian tradition the heart of stone has been applied to Jewish rejection of the New Covenant. Later prophets assumed that Moses’ receiving of the Ten Commandments, written in stone, was reflective of unresponsive hearts. However, as the narrator of “Magdalen” states: “I think my heart has turn’d to stone,” it is implied that Christian faith is symbolized by the stone rather than Levy, A Minor Poet, 67. The symbol of the heart is often used to emphasize human personality, although it can be employed as a complex metaphor. 107 The stone can be interpreted as eternal. God’s word is inscribed in stone and will not wear away, but can also represent lifelessness. 105 106

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Judaism, as Magdalene’s Jewishness in the midrashim has never been in doubt, and for that matter, neither has Jesus’ (despite his enforced transformation). Thus, Levy reverses Paul’s accusation that the Jewish Covenant is written on tables of stone by contrast to Christian spirituality – “fleshly tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3, Galatians 3:13-14). Hence, it is Christianity that symbolizes the unresponsive heart of stone.108 Additionally, in 1 Peter 2:5, true believers in Christ are referred to as stones. Accordingly, Magdalene’s confession that her heart may have turned to stone denotes the threat of her potential conversion. She withstands the transformation but it is a painful struggle which causes (in reference to her heart): “A dull, dead weight that hurts my breast.”109 For Cynthia Scheinberg, the different usage of the symbolism of the heart of stone does not exist in the apparent definitions, but in the term’s revision in Christian history to imply that the Jews are subject to such a label. This removes the possibility within Ezekiel’s prediction that they will be given a “heart of flesh.” Scheinberg assumes that when Levy has Magdalene ask: “Was ever known / A woman with a heart of stone,” she ironically draws attention to Magdalene’s Jewishness by using the specific language that condemns Jews in Christian discourse. Thus, Magdalene claims her identity as a faithless Christian, or more specifically a Jewish skeptic, re-contextualizing the allusion back to within a Jewish perspective.110 Alternatively, when Mary Magdalene’s speculates: “Was ever known / A [Jewish] woman with a heart of [Christian] stone,”111 Amy Levy is more likely critiquing the minor role assigned to women in the Gospels, and re-emphasizing that these female followers of the Jesus movement are Jewish and intended to remain so. Mary Magdalene, symbolic of the Christian figuring of Judaism as its pre-history, chooses in the midrash to isolate herself from 108 See Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986). 109 Levy, A Minor Poet, 67. 110 Scheinberg, “Canonizing the Jew,” 193-94. 111 Levy, A Minor Poet, 67.

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the other followers of Jesus. Her heart, the seat of life, yearns to retain its Jewish “flesh and blood” resonant of Ezekiel and Jeremiah: If my heart were not made of stone, But flesh and blood, it needs must shrink Before such thoughts. Was ever known A woman with a heart of stone? The doctor says that I shall die. It may be so, yet what care I? Endless reposing from the strife? Death do I trust no more than life.112

Luke, described as a physician in the New Testament, seems to be the doctor to whom Amy Levy refers. The diagnosis theologically alludes to his Gospel: “For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living” (20:38). Thus, Magdalene’s death excludes her from the New Covenant. As with the previous two midrashim, the speaker is skeptical of Jesus’ resurrection: “Death do I trust no more than life.” The midrash concludes with another attack on the God of the New Covenant, and the Christianized Jesus: I fain would see your face once more, Con well its features o’er and o’er; And touch your hand and feel your kiss, Look in your eyes and tell you this: That all is done, that I am free; That you, through all eternity, Have neither part nor lot in me.113

The comment refers to Peter’s criticism of Simon in Acts 8:21: “Thou hath neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God.” Magdalene’s defiance, despite her love for the Jewish Jesus, thus reverses Christian anti-Judaism that assumes the New Testament will replace the Mosaic Law, rather the 112 113

Levy, A Minor Poet, 67. Levy, A Minor Poet, 68.

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Jewish people will endure.114 Irrespective of Magdalene’s love for Jesus, her loyalty to her people is paramount. “Magdalen” prefigures the early-1970s debates within the Jewish feminist movement, principally those affiliated to Reform Judaism, as to whether the Bible perpetuates female inferiority. The midrash highlights the minor role assigned to Mary Magdalene in the Christian history of Jesus’ ministry. She is merely his assistant – an enabler to his whims – and by contrast to him not privy to the God of the New Testament’s intentions. Instead, she is mocked by the Christian deity: “I wonder, did God laugh in Heaven”?115 The Jewish woman as “enabler” has been revisited during the SecondWave. Aviva Cantor, writing in 1976, notes that Jewish women are expected to submit to men and to do whatever is necessary to ensure male power is secured. This involves women withdrawing from male domains and doing everything that is in the man’s interest. For Cantor, the Bible portrays women in various model enabler roles. Esther, for example, represents the altruistic-assertive woman – her strength is tolerable providing it does not connect with power. In becoming queen, Esther’s actions are necessitated by Mordecai, who thought it best.116 A number of themes evidently link Cantor’s thesis to the midrash. Magdalene is a potential enabler for Jesus; she remains a loyal follower, is present at the crucifixion, and attends the sepulcher, yet receives little credit for her role in his ministry. However, in the midrash it is Christianity, not firstcentury Judaism, or even the rabbinic tradition, that defines her subordinate role. This chapter, and the previous one, has demonstrated the classical German Reform context of Amy Levy’s midrashim, and that to produce the three poems, in the absence of a traditional 114 In “Lohengrin,” Levy implies that Christianity has failed and a return to the old “Jewish” order is required (A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), 58). See Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 228-30, for an overview. 115 Levy, A Minor Poet, 66. 116 Aviva Cantor, “The Lilith Question,” in On Being A Jewish Feminist, 44-45, 47.

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Jewish upbringing or education, and given the androcentrism of the tradition, she read the Gospels, and inspired by the interpretive liberty of Reform Judaism, and indeed midrash, heeded the call that a number of Second-Wave feminists would later hear – darsheni! Amy Levy overcomes the taboo of Jewish women studying the Christian texts for Jewish purposes, particularly given her awareness, which may seem obvious today, that all the main characters in the Gospels are both ethnically and religiously Jewish. Indeed, Levy’s midrashim are all the more understandable with acknowledgment of her accommodation of Anglo-Reform Judaism’s determination to assimilate the movement to the Protestant host culture, thus internalizing the anti-rabbinism, anti-Talmudism, anticeremonialism, and bibliocentrism central to Evangelical criticisms of Judaism as unspiritual, Oriental, and retrogressive. Moreover, even the Reformers considered the Bible to be written by humans under divine guidance, fallible to human limitations and errors, and open to change in the light of new discoveries. In short, the Reformers were determined, as we have seen, to distance themselves from the “false” authority of the post-biblical rabbis who had, allegedly, corrupted first-century Judaism, and to demonstrate the Jewish, egalitarian, and feminist principles of the Jesus movement. By adopting these approaches, the Reformers hoped to deflect Evangelical criticisms of Judaism as legalistic and ritualistic, and to exhibit the Jewish foundations of Christianity. The midrashim are, however, perhaps limited by their needlessly complex nature. Although they reveal and critique gender inequalities after initial decipherment, they say little of how reform might be implemented. Likewise, it is difficult to imagine how the majority of assimilated Jewish women, uneducated in the sacred texts, and uninterested in the Gospels, might have approached these midrashim. The midrashim, nonetheless, present classically Jewish approaches to theology. Amy Levy, although she struggled to locate the divine presence in Reform Judaism, and developed a more immanentist interpretation of the divine in her later work, assumed the Jewish people to be a community before God, and by accommodating the traditional doctrine that God is One, rejected the Trinity, Jesus’ incarnation as a divine figure, foreign gods, and even the prospect of a major prophet. The midrashim demonstrate the ultimate aim of the religious person to empty their psyche of any

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love for material things, allowing the believer’s heart to be filled exclusively with the love of God, as is commanded in the Shema (prayer recited morning and evening): “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and being” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The midrashim are reliant on theologically loaded terms such as “heart” and “soul,” and as with the prophets, right up to Moses Maimonides’ assumption that the intensity of the love of God can be analogized to erotic passion, the midrashim frequently employ romantic imagery with sexual connotations to underpin religious themes. Accordingly, Mary Magdalene is emblematic of the suffering of the righteous who receive God’s “chastisements of love.” Indeed, as a parent frequently punishes a child, so God, the Hebrew deity, can chastise those he loves (Proverbs 3:12). In the following chapter we will see how Levy discarded the complex midrashic approach for the novel, perhaps because she preferred to adopt a more direct, accessible, and extended medium of critique, replacing the traditional, aloof divine presence with Reform Judaism’s emphasis on divine immanence.

4 AMY LEVY’S REUBEN SACHS, PROTO-FEMINISM, AND REFORM JUDAISM The present chapter examines Amy Levy’s critique of halakhah in Reuben Sachs, and how these themes would come to prefigure Second-Wave discourse.1 As we will see, the movement of the 1970s and 1980s would also call for halakhic reforms to end gender discrimination in areas of divorce, familial and domestic economies, careers, women’s role as communal leaders, synagogue segregation,2 and mitzvot.3 Additionally, in the following chapter I examine 1 Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (London: Macmillan, 1888). For those unable to locate the original version see Reuben Sachs in The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, by Amy Levy, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 197-293; Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs (London: Persephone Books, 2001); Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch, ed. Susan David Bernstein (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006). 2 There is confusion in Orthodox circles as to whether the mechitza represents a law or a custom. There is also ongoing debate between Liberal and Orthodox synagogues as to what height the mechitza should be, and if there should be a divider at all. For a Second-Wave analysis see Mortimer Ostow, “Women and Change in Jewish Law,” Conservative Judaism 29, no. 1 (Fall 1974): 5-12. 3 See Rachel Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” Davka (Summer 1971): 7-11. I will be using Rachel Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halacha and the Jewish Woman,” Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review (Summer 1973): 77-82. See Paula Hyman, “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition,” Conservative Judaism 26, no. 4 (Summer 1972): 14-21; Cynthia Ozick, “Notes Towards Finding the Right Question,” in On Being A Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (1983; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 120-51; Blu Greenberg, On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition (1981; rpt. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society

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the novel’s association with traditional Midrashic and Talmudic discourses on the redemptive woman, revealing Levy’s gendered reinterpretation of Messianic redemption. Indeed, she employs both the Apocryphal book of Judith and the book of Esther as her authority, reflecting the bibliocentrism and interpretive liberty of classical Reformism, and thus providing a quintessentially Jewish foundation to her appropriation of Christian Evangelical notions of women’s designation as moral and spiritual redeemers.4 Reuben Sachs describes the failure of a potential romance between the heroine, Judith Quixano, and her suitor, the eponymous Reuben Sachs,5 who in another life we are to imagine might have been the Ashkenazic “traditional ideal, embodied in the pale, dreamy scholar.”6 Subsequent to the breakdown of their affiliation, Judith experiences a spiritual crisis that, as we know, was an experience not unknown to Anglo-Jewish women confronted with the attractions of secular and Protestant society, yet also determined to retain their ties to the Jewish community. For Levy, Judith’s predicament results from the gender alienation figured as a product of of America, 1983); Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History & Their Relevance for Today (1984; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995). For a list of feminist literature produced on halakhah during, and before, the 1970s see Aviva Cantor, Bibliography on the Jewish Woman: A Comparative and Annotated Listing of Works Published 1900-1979 (New York: Biblio Press, 1979); Ora Hamelsdorf and Sandra Adelsberg, Women and Jewish Law: Bibliography (New York: Biblio Press, 1980). 4 Evangelicalism should not be equated with any single Christian denomination given its wide-ranging influence across churches, individuals, and institutions (David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 1). See Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 5 The name “Sachs” possibly originates from the Jewish martyrs of the First Crusade. Their descendents called themselves Z. K. – zera kadosh (“from the seed of the Saint”), pronounced as Zak, which subsequently may have become “Sachs.” Whether Levy had a specific reason to use the name Sachs is unknowable, although the name did appear in other works by her. 6 Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003), 2.

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traditional “legalism,” which has, supposedly, rendered Judaism an archaic relic of antiquated religion, devoid of spirituality (kavanah), and in contradiction with modernity, particularly regarding the “Woman Question.” Unable to withstand the materialist impulse of her community without the moral guidance of personal religion, she marries the dilettante convert Bertie Lee-Harrison and is separated from her community. The Anglo-Jewish press, unsurprisingly, criticized the novel, even given that a proportion of the readership was affiliated to Reform Judaism. In January 1889 a Jewish Chronicle editorial described Reuben Sachs: There is another kind of Jewish criticism of Jews which has begun to be unpleasantly frequent recently. Jewish litterateurs, finding a ready interest in descriptions of Jewish life among the general novel-reading public, have gone to the point of renewing their acquaintance with Jewish society for a few weeks in order to obtain local color. On the strength of this, they produce superficial sketches of the aspects of Jewish manners that strike them unpleasantly.7

The review notes the satirizing of Jewish physical degeneracy and financial ambition within the novel. The Jews of Reuben Sachs are frequently described as “dark,” “unwholesome, sallow,” “untidy,” with “black eyes,” and as being “pagan” and “clannish.”8 Jewish World was equally angered: “Delighting in the task of persuading the general public that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity; she revels in misrepresentations of their customs and models of thought, and she is proud of being able to offer her testimony in support of the anti-Semitic theories of the clannishness of her people and the tribalism of their religion.”9 Unsurpris-

“Critical Jews,” Editorial, Jewish Chronicle, January 25, 1889, 11. Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 5, 15, 19, 24, 36. 9 “The Deterioration of the Jewess,” Jewish World, February 22, 1889, 7 8

5.

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ingly, Bryan Cheyette has labeled Reuben Sachs a “novel of revolt.”10 However, given the anti-Semitic stereotyping, a number of references to Christian tradition, and the shift in perspectives between the narrator, Judith, and Reuben, it can be difficult to ascertain the intended thematic(s) of the novel. For example, are the frequent “anti-Semitic” references the author’s opinion, or the views of the narrator? In fact, the novel is not a work of anti-Semitism, even if it often seems this way. Even its anti-materialism is not unique. Both Reform and Liberal Judaisms frequently criticized the so called heartless materialism of the acculturated community. Cynthia Scheinberg concludes that in Reuben Sachs Amy Levy attempted to create a neutral narrator, as she begins the book: “This is my beloved Son” from the Gospel of Matthew, which might suggest the storyteller has a connection with Christian literary tradition. Scheinberg also notes that by refusing to identify the narrator as Jewish or Christian, Levy creates a narrative identity that had no existence in Victorian England.11 However, Linda Hunt Beckman suggests that the anti-Semitic prejudice regarding Jewish physicality represents an attempt by Levy to show that her “Jewish novel,” rather than depicting reality, recognizes that authors imagine society as defined by the belief structure they inherit from the systems of representation made available.12 Unfortunately, the debate regarding the allegedly, though unfounded, anti-Semitic nature of Reuben Sachs has, until recently, served to distract from the protofeminist implications of the story. Indeed, Meri-Jane Rochelson argues that while Reuben Sachs has been viewed as a “Jewish” novel 10 Bryan Cheyette, “From Apology to Revolt: Benjamin Farjeon, Amy Levy, and the Post-Emancipation Anglo-Jewish Novel, 1880-1900,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 29 (1982-86): 260. See Nadia Valman, “Women Writers and the Campaign for Jewish Civil Rights in Early Victorian England,” in Women in British Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat, eds. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), 93-114. 11 Cynthia Scheinberg, “Canonizing the Jew: Amy Levy’s Challenge to Victorian Poetic Identity,” Victorian Studies 39, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 181. 12 Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 173.

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which expresses a combination of Jewish self-hatred and antiSemitism, in actuality, the book does not imply either prejudice or even a loathing of Judaism.13 By contrast to my own research, previous studies, whilst briefly acknowledging the influence of contemporaneous Evangelicalism, have analyzed Reuben Sachs from secular and even atheistic perspectives. This is not surprising given that these scholars have not been trained in Jewish theology. Emma Francis argues that the novel is a “scathing critique of middle-class mores,”14 while Nadia Valman contends that in Reuben Sachs traditional Christian antiJudaism is blended with the language of racial degeneration. She concludes that “Amy Levy’s feminism, then, is not so much Jewish as Christian.”15 Moreover, Valman argues that “using close analysis of Amy Levy’s narrative and poetic strategies, Cynthia Scheinberg and Emma Francis have argued respectively that Levy’s narrative voice defies identification either in terms of religion or in terms of gender.”16 Indeed, Reuben Sachs is underpinned by an evolutionary thematic. My research, however, diverges from these readings by also demonstrating the book’s Reformist perspective. This is not to say that Levy endorsed Anglo-Reformism, more that she was inspired by the proto-feminist proposals of early German Reformism, and was disappointed that the Anglo-Reformers had not enacted similar ideas with regards to the “Woman Question.” In the novel, Anglo-Jewry is portrayed as a dying race facing absorption into the host culture. The analysis of racial extinction highlights what Amy Levy believes to be Anglo-Jewry’s disregard for culture and breeding in favor of immediate social advance-

13 Meri-Jane Rochelson, “Jews, Gender and Genre in Late-Victorian England: Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs,” Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 311-12. 14 Emma Francis, “Socialist Feminism and Sexual Instinct: Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy,” in Eleanor Marx, 1855-1898: Life, Work, Contacts, ed. John Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 113-27. 15 Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 181, 191. 16 Nadia Valman, “Semitism and Criticism: Victorian Anglo-Jewish Literary History,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 244.

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ment.17 Hence, Reuben Sachs employs the rhetoric of late-Victorian feminism which insists that patriarchy and materialism work against the good of the race. This appraisal invests women with the ability to impel racial advancement. Fin-de-siècle writing was haunted by apocalypse and degeneration, and a common view emerged that racial degeneration was a product of modern civilization. Certainly, social critics were far more interested in commenting on society’s decadence rather than its progress.18 The theory of hereditary degeneration was given authoritative backing by social observers such as Alfred Marshall, G. Longstaff, H. Llewellyn Smith, and Charles Booth.19 In the novel, Judith Quixano, as a beautiful, intelligent, Sephardic woman has the potential to redeem Anglo-Jewry through union with the racially degenerate Reuben Sachs, thus repairing his damaged bloodline. This social Darwinist thematic was common to late-nineteenth-century novels. In Trilby, for example, the heroine could have been the salvation of the human race by ushering a period of regeneration into a decadent society.20 Similarly, Judith might have been Anglo-Jewry’s salvation. According to Nadia Valman, Levy’s hostile portrait of Anglo-Jewry is produced within the context of Judith’s struggle for self-fulfillment, making Levy’s representation of Jews inextricable from her feminist politics.21 Hence, the novel doubly conforms to Victorian stereotypes of Sephardic superiority and the propensity of Jews toward nervous diseases: both Reuben, who is “not wholly free from melancholy,” and his father, die young of heart conditions, Reuben’s doctor confesses that half his nervous patients are Jewish, Ernest Leuniger is inverted and anxious, “obliged by his state of health” to spend time in the country, Esther Kohnthal confesses that her father is in a Nadia Valman, “‘Barbarous and Mediaeval’: Jewish Marriage in Fin de Siècle English Fiction,” in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914, eds. Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 114-15. 18 Valman, The Jewess, 177, 193. 19 Laura Vorachek, “Mesmerists and Other Meddlers: Social Darwinism, and Eugenics in Trilby,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): 200. 20 Vorachek, “Mesmerists and Other Meddlers,” 202. See George Du Maurier, Trilby: a Novel (London: G. Bell, 1895). 21 Valman, “‘Barbarous and Mediaeval,” 115. 17

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“madhouse,” and the women speak in “rapid, nervous tones.”22 The novel, as we will see, written from a Reformist perspective, operates on three levels: to provide a religious and cultural critique of halakhah,23 to offer a social Darwinist explanation to AngloJewish secularization, and to present a gendered reinterpretation of Messianic redemption. Halakhah, regarded as a living tradition, consists of religious, criminal, and civil law, and acts as a guide for Jewish life.24 The root halach means “walk,” implying the “way” in which one should conduct oneself. However, for some traditionalists halakhah carries a higher obligation than mere conduct. The most obvious example of halakhah is the Ten Commandments, which includes prohibitions on theft, murder, polytheism, idolatry, false testimony, and demands respect of Shabbat.25 However, the halakhic codes go further and attempt to regulate the intricate details of personal and social existence. Accordingly, halakhah is concerned with practical issues grounded in theological assumptions that are not always immediately apparent.

Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 3-4, 12, 20. For relevant Second-Wave analyses of halakhah see Saul Berman, “The Status of Women in Halakhic Judaism,” in The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New York: Schocken, 1976), 114-28; Blu Greenberg, “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Law,” Lilith 1, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 16-19, 42-43; Biale, Women and Jewish Law; Judith Plaskow, “Halakha as a Feminist Issue,” The Melton Journal 22 (Fall 1987): 3-5, 25; Moshe Meiselman, Jewish Woman in Jewish Law (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1978); Chana Poupko and Devorah Wohlgelernter, “Women’s Liberation – An Orthodox Response,” Tradition 15, no. 4 (Spring 1976): 45-52. 24 Halakhic Judaism was criticized by the founders of Christianity for being concerned with the letter of the law and not its spirit. This analysis claims that rabbinic Judaism remained untouched by the social passion of the prophets. However, rabbinic Judaism is in fact rooted in the ethical principles of mercy and justice. For an alternative to the feminist critiques of halakhah see David Bleich, “Halakhah as an Absolute,” Judaism 29 (1980): 30-37. 25 Halakhah consists of 613 mitzvot. There are 248 positive mitzvot (actions to perform) and 365 negative mitzvot (prohibitions). 22 23

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The Talmudic rabbis suppressed all other branches of Jewish thought and halakhah become the accepted expression of normative Judaism. The law itself is a response to the antecedent tradition, and its modification can be allotted into three historical periods: the Tanniatic era (first to third-century CE), based on the teachings of the academies, provided the Talmud (following the Mishnah) which constitutes the foundation of all halakhah. During the consolidation of Christian and Muslim rule in Palestine and Babylonia (the post-Talmudic age) respectively, the two Talmuds, given the bulk of material, were extensively edited and codified.26 Hence, by the Middle-Ages the evolution of halakhic writing evolved into commentaries, responsa, and codes. During the earlymodern period, Jewish judicial authority became limited to certain areas of personal life. For mediaeval Jews, halakhah was unchanging and divinely ordained; it was revealed by God to Moses at Sinai. However, the Haskalah, science of biblical criticism, and modern religious philosophy undermined this supernatural basis. The question for the Reformers was no longer why God had ordained certain laws, but rather, had he ordained the law at all? Subsequently, objections were raised to some of the commandments on moral and ethical grounds. By the nineteenth-century, the Reformers were arguing that halakhah was in contradiction with the early rabbis, who had themselves insisted that development was integral. Abraham Geiger evaluated the tradition to decide which laws were necessary, which institutions and practices should be maintained, and which were redundant. This rationally and ethically selective approach to halakhah, diametrically opposed to the divinely sanctioned idea, was gradually replaced by a near total disregard for halakhah. For the Reform movement, it was not necessary to reformulate women’s status in legal terms, as halakhic transformation, the traditional method for altering religious practice, was not part of the program. Indeed, halakhic obligation was irrelevant to the Reformers, as religion was no longer concerned with the letter of the law. However, while the movement understood the legal disabilities of women 26 References to the Talmud, when used without qualification, usually refer to the Babylonian edition.

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within traditional Judaism, they never anticipated those they would face once Reform Judaism had been established. No alternative language existed to address the “problem of women.”27 Thus, Reform ideology and practice during the 1880s were polarized. Indeed, the Anglo-Reform service practiced segregation, and was mostly in Hebrew, despite the pledges to end gender exclusion and to hold services in the vernacular. In Reuben Sachs, halakhic gender inequality is the product of rabbinic Judaism, symbolized through characters such as the culturally antiquated Montague Cohen, and the Orthodox Samuel Sachses, who are regarded as “remarkable survival[s].”28 Montague is figured as an oddity, a religio-cultural dinosaur, legalistically committed to the ancient faith: Montague Cohen, Adelaide Sachs’s husband, belonged to that rapidly dwindling section of the Community which attaches importance to the observation of the Mosaic and Rabbinical laws in various minute points. He would have half-starved himself sooner than eat meat killed according to Gentile fashion, or leavened bread in the Passover week. … He was an anaemic young man, destitute of the more brilliant qualities of his race, with a rooted belief in himself and every thing that belonged to him. He was proud of his house, his wife and his children. He was proud, Heaven knows why, of his personal appearance, his mental qualities, and his sex; this last to an even greater extent than most men of his race, with whom pride of sex is a characteristic quality. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord my God, who hast not made me a woman.”

27 Riv-Ellen Prell, “The Dilemma of Women’s Equality in the History of Reform Judaism,” Judaism 30, no. 4 (Fall 1981): 422. 28 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 85.

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By the Second-Wave, Rachel Adler would similarly come to argue that the rabbis were the perpetrators of an unjust sexual hierarchy within halakhah that permeates social and religious life.30 Women are categorized with Canaanite slaves and children. All members of this type are exempt from time-bound positive commandments, including hearing the shofar (ram’s horn trumpet), praying with the lulav (palm branch), eating in the sukkah (booth), partaking in the three daily services, wearing tefillin (black box containing scripture) and tallit (the prayer shawl), and saying the Shema. Members of this category have been excused from the positive symbols that define a male Jew’s physical being, his myth, and philosophy. Instead, with very few exceptions, only negative commandments have been assigned to women. Accordingly, their Judaism is about negation and prohibition rather than affirmation: they must not consume nonkosher food, eat chametz (leavened foods) on Pesach (Passover), violate Shabbat, fail to fast during religious festivals, murder, steal, or commit adultery. Additionally, Adler notes, women’s testimony is inadmissible in a Beth Din (court), women are excluded from the minyan, and their ability to study is limited.31 Although much has changed over recent years, and despite the fact that women are obligated to perform certain time-bound mitzvot, such as to eat matzah (unleavened bread) during the Passover seder (arrangement), to hear Megillah (the book of Esther) on Purim, to drink the four cups of wine during the seder, and to obey nontime related positive commandments such as to honor one’s parents, the problem for many feminists is that women are excluded from the central religious obligations inherent to traditional Judaism.32 In Reuben Sachs, the sexist liturgy contributes to the alienation Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 48-49. In the traditional prayer book the blessing is “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not created me a woman.” 31 Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” 77-78. 32 See Martha Ackelsberg, “Spirituality, Community and Politics: B’not Esh and the Feminist Reconstruction of Judaism,” Journal of Feminist 29 30

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of female spirituality,33 as Esther Kohnthal laments: “‘When I was a little girl,’ cried Esther, still looking at her, ‘a little girl of eight years old, I wrote in my prayer-book: ‘Cursed art Thou, O Lord my God, Who hast had the cruelty to make me a woman.’ And I have gone on saying that prayer all of my life – the only one.’”34 During the Second-Wave, many feminists located the origins of modern gender inequality, even in non-religious situations, in Judaism’s classical texts. Rachel Adler condemns the Talmudic sages for viewing women as frivolous, as possessing insatiable sexual appetites, and requiring busywork lest they become adulteresses. She notes that all physical objects and experiences can be infused with spiritual purpose, yet, it is an equal truism that the physical, unredeemed by the spiritual, is a threat. Therefore, it is understandable that women came to be perceived as semi-demonic in the Talmud, and also in the Kabbalah. Female sexuality came to represent a temptation or a threat. Thus, conversing with women was said to result in lewdness or gossip, and women became unjustly classified with pigeonracers, gamblers, and other unsavory characters. For Adler, halakhah renders women “peripheral” Jews, and educates them towards a tangential commitment to Judaism. Although women’s mitzvot reinforce the family and the community, they do not cultivate a relationship between the individual woman and God. Accordingly, a woman keeps kosher because she and her family are required to eat kosher food, a woman lights Shabbat candles so that there will be light and peace in the household, and a woman attends mikveh

Studies in Religion 2 (Fall 1986): 109-20; Batya Bauman, “Women-Identified Women in Male-Identified Judaism,” in On Being A Jewish Feminist, 88-95; Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990; rpt. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991); Ruth Seldin, “Women in the Synagogue: A Congregants View,” Conservative Judaism 32, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 80-88. 33 A parallel prayer for women was inserted into the liturgy during the Middle-Ages: “Blessed be God … for having created me according to his will.” See Marcia Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings: Toward a Feminist-Jewish Reconstruction of Prayer,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3 (Spring 1987): 39-53. 34 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 193.

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so that her husband can have intercourse with her, bear children, and fulfill his own mitzvah to reproduce.35 Judith Quixano is a “peripheral” Jew.36 During the Day of Atonement service at the Upper Berkeley Street Synagogue she is unable to experience Judaism spiritually, and unable to comprehend the Hebrew liturgy, replicating the Evangelical criticism of the tradition as ritualistic and unspiritual. Judith also reinforces the negative stereotypes of women perpetrated by the early rabbis, and is unable to locate or experience the divine:37 Judith Quixano went through her devotions upheld by that sense of fitness, of obedience to law and order, which characterized her every action. But it cannot be said that her religion had any strong hold over her; she accepted it unthinkingly. These prayers, read so diligently, in a language of which her knowledge was exceedingly imperfect, these reiterated praises of an austere tribal deity, these expressions of a hope whose consummation was neither desired nor expected, what connection could they have with the personal needs, the human longings of this touchingly ignorant and limited creature?38

Inspiration for the reclamation of the individual and notions of divine immanence in Reform Judaism were ideas imported from Evangelical theology. The Reformers assimilated Protestant values Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” 79, 81. At the beginning of chapter seven, Levy intentionally misquotes Leviticus 16:30 to emphasize the gender exclusive nature of synagogue observance: “On this day shall He make an atonement for you, to purify you; you shall be clean from all your sins” (Reuben Sachs (1888), 83). She capitalizes “He” to denote the androcentrism (Levy would not have known the term “androcentrism”, but for want of a better word) of the tradition, as Leviticus 16:30 only refers to “the priests.” 37 Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” 77, 79. 38 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 92-93. 35 36

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to avoid charges of rabbinism, and to demonstrate similarity between the faiths. Hence, Reform Judaism would have to become a religion of the heart. Indeed, it was hoped that Jews would be deterred from conversion if Judaism could offer the same benefits as Protestantism. Reference to divine immanence recurs throughout Reuben Sachs. Esther Kohnthal refuses to attend synagogue and we are informed (note the capitalization of “Friend”): “She, poor soul, was of those who deny utterly the existence of the Friend of whom she stood so sorely in need.”39 Similarly, Johann Goethe’s epigraph at the beginning of chapter fifteen: Who ne’er his bread in sorrow ate, Who ne’er the mournful midnight hours Weeping on his bed has sate, He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.40

Devoid of spirituality, the women at the Day of Atonement service in Reuben Sachs gossip, distract the men, and show off the latest fashions.41 Even this minor role bears restrictions, including sex segregation,42 the inability to contribute to the minyan, the prohibition on reading from the Torah, and the bar on leading the congregation in prayer. Accordingly, the service, grounded in the letter of the law, demonstrates that practices in masculine spaces are assumed to be: “more noble, beautiful, important, eternal, primary or true.”43 The “Woman Question” was central to the Anglo-Reformers, as David Woolf Marks proclaimed in 1842: Women, created by God as “help meet for man,” and in every way his equal; endowed by the same parental care, with wonLevy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 93. Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 195. 41 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 90-92. 42 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 91. The family pew did not become a feature of the Reform service, except in the United States, until the twentieth-century. 43 Susan Sered, Love’s Work (London: Vintage, 1997), 10-11. 39 40

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NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY drous perceptions, that she might participate (as it may be inferred from holy Writ, that she was intended to participate) in full discharge of every moral and religious obligation, has been degraded below her proper station. The power of exercising these exalted virtues that appertain to her sex has been withheld from her; and since equality has been denied to her in other things, as a natural consequence, it has not been permitted to her in the duties and delights of religion. It is true that education has done much to remedy this injustice in other respects; yet does its memory live in the indifference manifested for the religious instruction of females.44

However, despite his championing of the “Woman Question,” Jonathan Romain notes that Marks was more interested in using the neglect of women as a means of criticizing Orthodoxy rather than as a cause in its own right. His inaction explains why so few changes, even by the fin-de-siècle, were made at the Reform Synagogue.45 Amy Levy too appears incapable of delineating practical ideas for reform, as Cynthia Scheinberg has pointed out, albeit in a different context: “She did not fully dismiss the possibility of an idealized Jewish spiritual identity. More specifically, … the problem was how to find a connection to a distinctly Jewish spiritual sensibility in a moment when any religious identity was increasingly contested, when traditional Judaism limited women’s access to Jewish education.”46 The mid-Victorian premise of separate spheres, grounded exclusively in women’s domesticity, was accepted by the conservative Reformers even in the twentieth-century, despite the extension of women’s “virtues” into public life. As Morris Joseph 44 David Woolf Marks, “David Woolf Marks on the Neglect of Women (1842),” in Reform Judaism and Modernity: A Reader, by Jonathan Romain (London: SCM, 2004), 248-49. This part-edited collection is the first comprehensive survey of Reform Judaism, its ideology and theology, since the movement’s inception in England in 1840. 45 Romain, Reform Judaism, 249. 46 Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 197.

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argued in 1893, summing up the Reformers inability, and unwillingness, to enact feminist reform: And this is woman’s part – the part for which Nature clearly destined her. Unsuited for the rough work of the world, illadapted to battle with men for supremacy in the political field, she yet wields immeasurable power in the quiet influence she exerts over her husband and sons. Let her not talk of women’s rights, for those are not rights which have to be won by wrong; and it is wrong to drive men out of their own sphere, nay, to deface the feminine character, gentle, placid, equable with the dust of political warfare. No; woman must look elsewhere for her vocation. Her sphere is that of lofty suggestion. Nobly aspiring, she must imbue man with her ideas, and act through him.47

Initially, Anglo-Reform was pursued by those also interested in political reform. They were impatient with the civil disabilities imposed on the pre-emancipation community, and with religious anachronisms. However, Anglo-Reform had no theological or intellectual basis, and its parents were not intellectuals or theologians, but communal discord and individual dissension. Moreover, although the Reformers were initially issued a herem (ban of excommunication), objections by the Orthodox community were quietly dropped in 1849, and for almost a century the history of AngloReformism was relatively uneventful. Change did not occur in England until the 1930s with the arrival of Reform Jews from Nazi Germany.48 As Amy Levy analyzes the alienation of female spirituality, particularly in the synagogue, Second-Wave Jewish feminists, likewise, have denounced women’s exclusion as incompatible with liberal values of equality and justice. Indeed, women’s inability to publicly recite the blessing, for example, is for Susannah Heschel, in47 Morris Joseph, “Morris Joseph on Women’s Influence (1893),” in Reform Judaism, 250. 48 Romain, Reform Judaism, xxii-xxiv.

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dicative of women’s exclusion from the key centers of religious life: the synagogue, Torah, and Talmud.49 Similarly, Rachel Biale, writing in 1984, notes that women’s exclusion in the synagogue arises from the traditional division between women’s prayer, which is deemed to be private and individual in content and time, and men’s prayer, which is codified in formula and scheduled. Although women have participated in set prayers, these have been voluntarily rather than obligatory.50 Certainly, if a woman were to read the Torah aloud in the synagogue, she would inadvertently be causing a sexual distraction, contravening halakhah during an important service. Accordingly, women’s role in the study of the Torah is traditionally viewed as that of “enabler” for men. A wife is obliged to ensure that her husband and sons pursue study.51 Problematically, while the German Reform movement began the process of including women in prayer by abolishing gender segregation (in AngloReform Judaism this did not occur until the introduction of the family pew in the following century), this dichotomy has only partially been overcome even during, and since, the Second-Wave. Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative Judaisms, for example, have sought to ordain women as rabbis in order to equalize gender responsibilities. For many conservative-minded congregations, however, the calling of women to read the Torah has been a recent phenomenon. Nonetheless, while egalitarian Judaisms integrate women as participants, they have failed to account for their distinctive gender experiences and concerns.52 Heschel argues that women seeking equality with men in religious life, to their detriment, have equated observance with the male defined role. As the central tenets of Judaism – study and prayer – have long been the reserve of men, the assumption that equality entails performing male roles serves to erase the historical particularities of the lives of women. For Heschel, if women voluntarily assume the obligation Susannah Heschel, preface to On Being A Jewish Feminist, xi. Special prayers for women (Tehinot – generally in Yiddish) have been composed for births and weddings. 51 Biale, Women and Jewish Law, 20, 26, 39. 52 Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 62. 49 50

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of praying three times daily, put on tefillin, wear the head covering and the prayer shawl, the insinuation is that the religious life of a Jew is that of an honorary Jewish man.53 Levy, like many of her Second-Wave successors, appears to assume that a Judaism formulated by women, or involving women in its interpretative and creative processes, would be more concerned with spiritual commitments than legal minutiae.54 Reuben Sachs, with little elaboration, analyzes the Bar Mitzvah, possibly alluding to the fact that women are not conferred the status of adults: “Did you fast all day”? he said, by way of opening the conversation. “I did. I was bar-mitz-vah last month. Is either of you fellows bar-mitz-vah”? “I am thirteen, if that’s what you mean,” said Lionel, with his most man of-the-world air. He considered the introduction of the popular tribal phrases very bad form indeed.55

The question: “Is either of you fellows bar-mitz-vah” (using an upper-middle-class term such as “fellows” in conjunction with “Bar Mitzvah” denotes the hierarchical connotations of the ritual) emphasizes the gender exclusionary aspects of the ceremony. The reading of the Torah in synagogue marks the stage at which male Jews attain religious majority on their Bar Mitzvah. Consequently, the scroll is held aloft and the congregation chants: “This is the Torah which Moses placed before the children of Israel.” Women are denied formal adult status in Orthodox Judaism, despite there having been sporadic instances of the ceremony throughout recent history.56 However, the Orthodox and Reform communities in Heschel, preface, xvi. See Plaskow, “Halakha as a Feminist Issue.” 55 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 104. 56 There were attempts to provide girls with a coming-of-age ceremony in Warsaw in 1843, and Lemberg in 1902. Also, Orthodox JewishItalians have been performing a type of Bat Mitzvah involving an entrance into the minyan since the mid-nineteenth century. In 1922, similarly, Mor53 54

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Amy Levy’s lifetime would have viewed the Bat Mitzvah as hevel (nonsense). The issue of women’s right to a coming-of-age ceremony has since been revisited by Second-Wave feminists.57 Rachel Adler has noted that male Jewish children are full Jews in potentio, and that even male Canaanite slaves, if freed, can become full Jews permitted to be counted in the minyan and able to perform mitzvot. By contrast, women can never grow up, be freed, or otherwise leave this category. Thus, women, as peripheral Jews, are barred from the symbols and acts that define the believing community.58 Indeed, Judith Quixano is a peripheral Jew. Her observance is nonessential and legalistic, and she too will never be formally deemed an adult. Judith’s spiritual crisis is a case in point – Anglo-Reform Judaism had failed to assign a religious function to the Jewish woman, and as such her repetition of prayers in a language she fails to understand, and her attendance at a synagogue that relegates her to the gallery, demonstrates that worship is an exclusive male reserve, as it often is in Orthodox circles. Cynthia Ozick’s experience of the synagogue is analogous. She notes that while society identifies her as a Jew, within the synagogue the term “Jew” implies an adult male. Thus, when the rabbi speaks of women he uses the tender expression “Jewish daughter,” a label defined by a parent’s hierarchical role: “‘Jew’ defines a person seen in the light of a culture. ‘Daughter’ defines a relationship that is above all biological. ‘Jew’ signifies adult responsibility. ‘Daughter’ evokes immaturity and a dependent and subordinate connection.”59 For Ozick, like Judith, the synagogue represents: “the only place in the world in which she is not defined a Jew.”60 In sum, Amy Levy guides the reader toward First-Wave and early German Reformist requirements for women’s increased acdecai Kaplan held a Bat Mitzvah ceremony for his daughter. The AngloReform Synagogue finally introduced a “confirmation” ceremony for thirteen-year-old girls during the 1960s. 57 See Cherie Koller-Fox, “Women and Jewish Education: A New Look at Bat Mitzvah,” in The Jewish Woman, 31-42. 58 Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” 78. 59 Ozick, “Notes Towards Finding,” 125. 60 Ozick, “Notes Towards Finding,” 125.

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cess to gender exclusive areas of Jewish life. Judith Quixano, as we have seen, is spiritually alienated, demonstrating that: “under patriarchy women are in galut. We are a community in exile from our womanhood and our divinity.”61 Although the Anglo-Reform leadership were prepared to champion women, and their influence, they were unwilling to confer official equal rights and to acknowledge women in civil and religious spheres. Accordingly, Levy has her heroine find limited spiritual respite not in Judaism, but in poetry: Poetry? Yes, she would try a little poetry. She had always enjoyed reading Tennyson and Shakespeare in the schoolroom. So she put the books under her arm, went back to her room, and crept into her little cold bed. She took up the volume of Swinburne and began reading it mechanically by the flickering candlelight. The rolling, copious phrases conveyed little meaning to her, but she liked the music of them. There was something to make a sophisticated onlooker laugh in the sight of this young, pure creature, with her strong, slow-growing passions, her strong, slow-growing intellect, bending over the diffuse, unreserved, unrestrained little pages.62

Judith’s inability to accommodate her troubled spirit to the Reform Judaism of the period is the cause of her spiritual crisis and the breakdown of her fledgling relationship with Reuben Sachs. In the absence of religious guidance both are susceptible to the materialist culture and immorality of acculturated life. Accordingly, Judith marries a rich, superficial convert and is lost to the community, while Reuben continues a political career that leads to his premature death. As we have seen, Reuben Sachs is classically Reformist in perspective, and critiques Anglo-Reform Judaism for being unwilling, 61 62

Raphael, The Female Face, 149. Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 199-200.

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and or unable, to match the potential radicalism of the German branch of the movement. Amy Levy, unsurprisingly, locates in halakhah, and the rabbinic tradition, precedence for contemporary socio-cultural examination of the “Woman Question” and the “Marriage Question.” Second-Wave feminists too have looked to halakhah as the cause of contemporary inequality, though these academic studies have been more nuanced. For Rachel Biale, the common denominator that exists among all mitzvot from which women are exempt is socio-cultural rather than legal-logical. Accordingly, the major mitzvot from which women are excluded, prayer, Torah reading, and Torah interpretation, are beyond the realm of, and inapplicable to, women’s domestic role.63 Cythia Ozick likewise argues that halakhah defines women as a subdivision of humanity, not within the main class itself, representing deviation from the male norm. Noting the tractate Nashim (“Women”), Ozick concludes that since there is no corresponding tractate for “Men,” all that does not apply to women is a male realm: men are the rule or norm and women the exception.64 Levy’s analysis reveals that for reform to be far-ranging, transformation would have to go beyond the narrow limits of the AngloReformers, and become more than a rejection of halakhah per se. Indeed, Reform would have to be socio-religiously all encompassing and fill the void left in halakhah’s absence; an undertaking beyond the limited ambitions of the conservative Anglo-Reformers of the time. Gender exclusionism in the traditional community relates to Tzniut: the concept of modesty which limits women’s public agency, the Talmudic dictum of kavod ha-tzibbur (the honor of the community), and Tumah (ritual impurity), which has been used to limit the religious obligations of women as menstruation renders “impurity.”65 “Impurity,” as per Leviticus 11-15, prohibits a person from touching anything related to God’s residence. The Niddah (menstruating woman), according to superstition, became a subject of Biale, Women and Jewish Law, 17. Ozick, “Notes Towards Finding,” 124, 126. 65 See Rachel Adler, “Tum’ah and Toharah: Ends and Beginnings,” Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review (Summer 1973): 117-27. 63 64

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amplified un-cleanliness during the mediaeval period. In many communities, women, occasionally on their own initiative, refrained from entering the synagogue during menstruation, did not touch or look at the Torah scrolls, or recite the circumlocutions for God’s name.66 A number of halakhot were designed to ensure men did not become sexually aroused during prayer by the presence of women. The early rabbis concluded that women’s participation in the synagogue distracts men, leading to the segregation of the sexes, the covering up of the woman’s body, and the prohibition on hearing the voices of women in the synagogue. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Reformers analyzed these restrictions as “Oriental.” Reform Judaism was a product of the Enlightenment’s commitment to liberalism, modernity, secularism, progress, and gender equality. During the 1840s, the German Reformers questioned the traditional religious treatment of women: Aaron Chorin described the inequalities as “barbaric,” Abraham Geiger called them “degrading,”67 and Isaac Mayer Wise referred to the tradition as “inconsistent.”68 The movement was aware of the necessity to reengage women given that across all denominations they outnumbered men;69 the often labeled “feminization of religion.” The Reformers analyzed the “Woman Question” as an issue beyond the legal terms of halakhah. Accordingly, they were determined to retain their independence from rabbinical authority (as the Evangelicals rejected Church authority). The primary focus on women’s liberation from halakhah also involved the debates regarding education. In Reuben Sachs, Judith Quixano received an elementary education. Her spiritual crisis, we are to assume, has resulted, not only from her alienation in the synagogue, and the want of moral guidance, but also from the absence of Jewish education, forcing her to turn to poetry for spiritual fulfillment: Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 177. Both quoted in W. Gunter Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1963), 252-53. 68 Quoted in James Heller, Isaac Mayer Wise: His Life, Work, and Thought (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1966), 570. 69 Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 128. 66 67

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The slow tears gathered in her eyes, and forcing themselves forward fell down her cheeks. Then there was, after all, something to be said for feelings which had not their basis in material relationships. They were not mere phantasmagoria conjured up by silly people, by sentimental people, by women. Clever men, men of distinction, recognized them, treated them as of paramount importance. The practical, if not the theoretical, teaching of her life had been to treat as absurd any close or strong feeling which had not its foundations in material interests. There must be no undue giving away of one’s self in friendship, in the pursuit of ideas, in charity, in a public cause. Only gushing fools did that sort of thing, and their folly generally met with its reward. And this teaching, sensible enough in its way, had been accepted without question by the clannish, exclusive, conservative soul of Judith.70

The Anglo-Reformers intended to restore the “original” spirit of Judaism that had allegedly suffered neglect, and to meet the needs of the new generation in response to missionary activity and assimilation. However, David Woolf Marks committed himself to the authority of the Pentateuch, despite having critiqued sections as irrelevant, such as the sacrificial system, or as barbaric, such as stoning rebellious children. Despite his pioneering role, Marks did not produce a Reform theology (the Anglo-Reformers were content to allow individuals to construct their own theologies, as Amy Levy to an extent does) and seems to have feared the supposedly thin line between reformation and anarchy.71 Hence, the AngloReformers response to women’s education was characterized by inaction.

70 71

Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 201-02. Romain, Reform Judaism, 212.

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Even by the Second-Wave, Rachel Adler was still able to note that teaching, the traditional method of transmitting religious knowledge for the Jewish people, was closed to women. Accordingly, those unable to learn are unable to teach, or express themselves spiritually.72 The meager mitzvot assigned to women are founded, generally, on physical undertakings such as cooking, cleaning, and childrearing. Thus, unable to counterbalance the material lifestyle, women are devoted to the physical considerations of deaths, marriages, dinners, money, and clothes. It is therefore inevitable that men should identify women with gashmiut and themselves with ruhniut.73 Judith Quixano too, “cold as a stone,” despite her intellect, leads a worldly, vacuous physical existence devoid of spirituality:74 She [Judith] was so young and strong, that even in her misery she could sleep the greater part of the night; but these last few days she had taken to waking at dawn, to lying for hours wideeyed in her little white bed, while the slow day grew. But to-day it was intolerable, she could bear it no longer, to lie and let the heavy, inarticulate sorrow prey on her.75

72 Since the early Second-Wave, Jewish feminists have sought to address women’s absence from the liturgy, see Naomi Janowitz and Maggie Wennig, Siddur Nashim: A Sabbath Prayer Book for Women (privately circulated for the women’s minyan at Brown University, 1976); Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings”; Marcia Falk, The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). However, even into the Third-Wave, Orthodox communities remain largely bound by halakhic boundaries such as “Kol hameshaneh mi-matbe’ah she-tav’u chachamin bivrachot lo yatza yeday khovato” – “One who changes the liturgy formulated/fixed by the Sages, does not fulfill his obligation” (Berachot 40b). Indeed, if one adheres to halakhah the central basis of prayer remains to an extent unchangeable. 73 Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” 80. 74 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 192. 75 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 197.

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Judith’s spiritual crisis is a case in point: she does not possess the knowledge with which to understand her religion so is forced to “fall down and worship at the shrine of the great god of Expediency.”76 For her this is a source of emotional anguish, while the acculturated men of the novel, generally, are shown to be devoid of spirituality. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the Reformers had altered the dynamic of the service, if little else. Certainly, the emphasis on the minister reduced the involvement of the congregants.77 Judith Quixano, reflecting the Reformers anti-ritualism, is able to distinguish between the material, figured as “rights” and “duties,” and the “spiritual,” symbolized as the love connecting a man and a woman. The Reformers, and their assimilationist project, appropriated Evangelical distastes for all forms of ritualism. Ceremonialism had been a perpetual “raw nerve” for the Protestants, and a continual reminder that Rome was within the gates.78 Both denominations rejected the authority of legislation that had no basis in the Bible.79 Thus, Judith’s spiritual crisis is couched in Evangelical ideas, incorporated by the Reformers, that religion should be personal, romantic, intense, and emotional: And if this doctrine applied to friendship, to philanthropy, to art and politics, in how much greater a degree must it apply to love, to the unspoken, unacknowledged love between a man and woman; a thing in its very essence immaterial, and which, in its nature, can have no rights, no duties attached to it? It was the very hatred of the position into which she had been forced, the very loathing of what was so alien to her whole way of life and mode of thought that was giving Judith

Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 219. Romain, Reform Judaism, 260. 78 Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 146. 79 Michael Hilton, The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1994), 130. 76 77

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courage; if she could not vindicate herself, she must be simply crushed beneath the load of shame.80

The intention of the early Anglo-Reformers to create an “intelligible” and “elevating” service, more decorous and more meaningful than Orthodoxy, and relevant to children, was difficult to implement. Problematically, the Reformers were undecided as to the practical shape of reform, and how the new services would improve on the old.81 Given the scarcity of opportunities for traditional religious study assigned to Jewish women in the lateVictorian period – the halakhic refusal to allow women the status of scholar – Judith relies on her limited secular education to alleviate her crisis and takes another step closer to her exile from the community. She turns to the British poetry of her childhood, including William Shakespeare,82 Alfred Tennyson, and Algernon Swinburne.83 Indeed, Reuben Sachs reminds that women are not to study Talmud as they are not to be part of Judaism’s intellectual and cultural endeavor. This enterprise is exclusively for men and based on the alleged different physical and spiritual nature of women. The early rabbis, generally, though not exclusively, viewed women as “da-ta kala” (“weak minded”), as intellectually inferior, psychologically different, and governed by uncontrollable sexual urges. According to Tova Hartman, writing during the Third-Wave, these differences are an excuse for women’s exclusion.84 This image can never be challenged, and women must internalize these truths about themselves. For Hartmann, the exclusion of women is Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 202-03. Romain, Reform Judaism, 258. 82 See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 83 These references are autobiographical given that as a child Levy listed Swinburne and Shakespeare as two of her favorite poets (Amy Levy, “Amy Levy’s Confessions Book Entry,” in Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy, 16). 84 Hartman is a founding member of Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem. This congregation is dedicated to increasing women’s participation and leadership within traditional prayer and halakhah. 80 81

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founded on a system of “dominants” and “subordinates.” The “dominants” have decided that women will take no part in the endeavors of the culture as they are unable to learn Torah. However, this “right” is a key component of the culture. The inability of women to study Torah, therefore, means women are excluded from the religious discourse of the tradition. Furthermore, they are prohibited from writing the culture and creating and recreating the tradition.85 Reuben Sachs is evidence for how the First-Wave was equally cognizant of Tova Hartman’s dominants/subordinates system. The novel shows how women’s exclusion from religious education and study of the sacred texts leads to their alienation from the tradition. In Reuben Sachs, women’s intellectual void is underpinned by the marital economy, and the necessity of marriage given the low status accorded to spinsterhood in middle-class families.86 Judith Quixano is “one of a vast crowd of girls awaiting their promotion by marriage.”87 The women of Reuben Sachs, through their lack of agency, economic dependence on men, minimal education, and their radical secularization, are portrayed as listless, immoral, vacuous creatures condemned to the marriage market as the only means of social advancement, as Nadia Valman notes: Here, the author [Levy] laments the destiny of the modern Jewess, who is taught to suppress “her healthy, objective activities, … her natural employment of her young faculties” and “to look upon marriage as the only satisfactory termination to her career.” In this she is governed by mercenary concerns, since Jews “have not been educated to a higher ideal of marriage.” Levy imagines Jewish women as unhappily imprisoned in the past, “beating themselves in vain against the solid masonry of our ancient fortifications, long grown obsolete and of 85 Tova Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation (New England: UPNE, 2007), 37, 40. 86 Naomi Hetherington, “New Woman, ‘New Boots’: Amy Levy as Child Journalist,” Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture 47 (2005): 263. 87 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 35.

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no use save as obstructions.” Jewish society, in this account, resists and impedes modernity; it is “more Oriental at heart than a casual observer might infer … a society constructed on … a primitive basis.”88

Accordingly, the novel, by invoking the conflict between liberalism and racial imperative, sexual instinct and capitalism, and between Western civilization and Oriental Jew,89 illustrates women’s demotion to soulless objects of male agency. Both biblical and contemporaneous marriage has been viewed by First and Second-Wave feminists as a commercial transaction. As Melissa Raphael argues, masculinity remains generative of historical and religious knowledge, authority, and leadership in public and domestic spheres.90 Denied personal agency, Judith Quixano’s fate is tied up with the marriage market: It will be seen that in their own fashion, and according to their own lights, the Leunigers had been very kind to Judith. She had no ground for complaint; nor indeed was there anything but gratitude in her thoughts of them. If, at times, she was discontented, she was only vaguely aware of her own discontent. To rail at fate, to cry out against the gods, were amusements she left to such people as Esther and Leo, for whom, in her quiet way, she had considerable contempt. But the life, the position, the atmosphere, though she knew it not, were repressive ones. This woman, with her beauty, her intelligence, her power of feeling, saw herself merely as one of a vast crowd of girls awaiting their promotion by marriage.91

88 Valman (including quotes from Amy Levy’s “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day (By a Jewess),” Jewish Chronicle, September 17, 1886, 7), “‘Barbarous and Mediaeval,” 112. 89 Valman, The Jewess, 185, 187. 90 Raphael, The Female Face, 3. 91 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 34-35.

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The lot of the unmarried woman is deemed particularly unenviable. Levy makes this clear in “Middle-Class Jewish Women of ToDay,”92 concluding that spinsterhood is degradation. Indeed, in Reuben Sachs we are informed of Rebecca Sachs: “She was unmarried, and hated the position with the frank hatred of the women of her race.”93 The culmination of the story, Judith’s loveless union with a false convert, is a result of acculturated Jewry’s secularization and ruthless drive for social advancement, even at the expense of the Jewish community. Whether or not spinsterhood was in practice any worse for Jewish than Christian women is doubtful, although Amy Levy assumes it is, possibly because Judaism and Jewishness centers around the family and the family table in ways that Christianity does not.94 For earlier generations of the Jewish people the role of mother and wife was the singular, “finest,” indispensable function through which a woman fulfilled herself. The biblical commandment “to be fruitful and multiply” was analyzed by the rabbis as a minimum of two children. However, in Reuben Sachs’ community, economic necessity and financial avarice have usurped conventional morality. The “Marriage Question” was applicable to all denominational communities. Mona Caird (1897) argued that it was impossible to sustain the contrast between the oppression of women in the East, and the elevation of women’s status in Western society.95 Similarly, William Booth concluded: “The lot of a negress in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many a pretty orphan girl in our

See Levy, “Middle-Class Jewish Women.” Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 47. 94 See Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). 95 Mona Caird, “Marriage,” in The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman (London: George Redway, 1897), 95, 99100. Levy attended the first Ladies’ Literary Dinner, chaired by Caird, founded to celebrate women writers (Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman, “Introduction,” in Amy Levy: Critical Essays, eds. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 4. 92 93

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Christian capital”?96 Levy’s “Oriental” Jewish community whose women live under “the shadow of the harem,” symbolizes, from a liberal feminist perspective, the “survival” of “barbarous” society.97 For Levy, the wrongs of Jewish society replicate those of the wider collective, as the commodification and social restrictions assigned to women are active in all commercial communities,98 though are supposedly most evident in her own. Reuben Sachs is one of many late-nineteenth-century novels to explore the marital economy. In Julia Frankau’s Dr. Phillips, for example, the Christian, Mary Cameron, is obliged to remain the mistress of Benjamin Phillips due to her perilous financial position,99 while in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth is economically dependent on the oppressive Henleigh Grandcourt.100 Amy Levy’s evaluation of the marital economy is harsh, and sweeping. By the Second-Wave, however, analysis had come to be more nuanced. Blu Greenberg, for example, seeking to reconcile feminism and Orthodoxy, examines the halakhot relating to divorce, specifically the law that requires the husband to issue a bill before the marriage can be terminated, effectively placing the wife under her husband’s control.101 For Greenberg, the “Marriage Question” also relates to the problem of assimilation and the numerical diminishing of the community. She concludes that women 96

113.

William Booth, quoted by Valman, “‘Barbarous and Mediaeval,”

97 See Patrick Brantlinger, “Nations and Novels: Disraeli, George Eliot, and Orientalism,” Victorian Studies 35 (1992): 255-75. 98 Valman, “‘Barbarous and Mediaeval,” 113. 99 See Julia Frankau [Frank Danby, pseud.], Dr. Phillips; A Maida Vale Idyll (London: Vizetelly, 1887), and for an analysis, Todd Endelman, “The Frankaus of London: A Study of Radical Assimilation, 1837-1967,” Jewish History 8, no. 1-2 (1994): 117-54. 100 See George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1876. Levy refers to the novel in relation to Judith’s marriage to Bertie LeeHarrison: “Bertie, as Gwendolen Harleth said of Grandcourt, was not disgusting” (Reuben Sachs (1888), 237). 101 Greenberg, On Women and Judaism, 6-8. See also Blu Greenberg, “Feminism: Is it Good for the Jews?” Hadassah Magazine 57, no. 8 (April 1976): 10-11, 30-34.

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must be educated and accepted as rabbis to minimize the attractions and opportunities of secular society.102 In Reuben Sachs, degeneration and extinction are never far away, and unsurprisingly the novel concludes with Judith Quixano’s exodus, as Leo Leuniger laments: “‘That is the price we are bound to pay for restored freedom and consideration. The Community will grow more and more to consist of mediocrities, and worse, as the general world claims our choicer specimens for its own.’”103 Her unborn child, however, would be halakhically Jewish, and the reader is left guessing whether they will rejoin the community. The Reformers were aware that the new religion would have to hold sufficient appeal to the assimilated community, who were more integrated to the outside world. However, the justification for change only came about due to lack of inspiration and low attendances, and had little to do with religious fervor. 104 In fact, as is revealed in Reuben Sachs, the majority of the assimilated community were apathetic to religion. Judith Quixano is physically beautiful and despite her lack of education possesses the seeds of a superior intellect and refined nature, and although she is not suited to the ethical and spiritual leadership of the community, we are to assume that she possesses the potential for spiritual superiority, and has been endowed with latent values superior to the materialist milieu she inhabits, and which will eventually engulf her: “But as for Judith Quixano, and for many women placed as she, it is difficult to conceive a training, an existence, more curiously limited, more completely provincial than hers. Her outlook on life was of the narrowest.”105 Judith, although she eventually succumbs to the attractions of her opulent milieu is not imbued with materialism, and this sets her apart from the other women of the novel. As we are informed: “JUDITH [Levy’s capitalization] rose early the next morning and put the finishing touches to her embroidery. It was her mother’s birthday, and she had planned going to the Walterton Road after breakfast with

Greenberg, On Women and Judaism, 9-10. Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 119-20. 104 Romain, Reform Judaism, 258, 260. 105 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 38. 102 103

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her gift. But Rose claimed her for purposes of shopping.”106 As Meri-Jane Rochelson argues: “Judith Quixano’s story is a cautionary tale against succumbing to the temptations of bourgeois life. By punishing Judith, Levy may in fact have been reminding herself as well as her readers that acquiescence, however tempting, exacts a high price.” Indeed, Judith is a “young, pure creature, with her strong, slow-growing passions, her strong, slow-growing intellect.”107 With her health, beauty, and “air of breeding,” coupled with her underlying “love of race,” Judith, “young and strong,” possesses attributes no longer valued by “modern commercial competition.”108 Moreover, the higher values of the Quixano family: her father’s reversion to the “ancestral pursuits,” his “unthinking piety,” his designation as “one of the pure spirits of this world,” and the scholar’s room striking Judith with “new force” and wistful, almost reverential, admiration, reveal Judith’s own dormant spirituality, couched in her noble ancestry and unacknowledged inclination toward scholarly pursuit.109 Judith, however, is ignorant of her own latent abilities and is denied expression, even corrupted, by the materialist culture she inhabits – “the unspoken gospel of her life” – and she neglects her father’s offer to return to the family home.110 Instead, she marries the dilettante, Bertie Lee-Harrison, and we are told, movingly: “But she was Joshua Quixano’s daughter – was it possible that she cared for none of these things [Wealth, power, success]”?111 Reuben Sachs, despite placing Judith Quixano on a moral and spiritual pedestal, makes little allusion to the possibility of women assuming the spiritual leadership of the community. The struggle for women’s ordination, generally, though not exclusively, would be taken up in the Second-Wave. Indeed, Sally Priesand was the

Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 68. Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 199. 108 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 75, 79, 122, 197. 109 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 79-80. 110 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 183, 232. 111 Levy, Reuben Sachs (1888), 233. 106 107

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first woman to be ordained by the Reform movement,112 and numerous Second-Wave monographs have sought to justify women’s role in religious leadership. Ellen Umansky, in 1981, began the rediscovery of Lily Montagu’s pivotal role in the formation of the Liberal Jewish movement,113 and in the following year, Bernadette Brooten’s study of women’s leadership in the synagogue prior to the onset of rabbinic Judaism provided a historical foundation for the ordination of women.114 Additionally, Rachel Biale’s Women and Jewish Law argues that improved education, training, and the ordination of women as rabbis, is a necessity. Biale concludes that women must become learned in halakhah, as it is the framework of traditional life. Accordingly, only those who can master the logic of halakhah can shape its future.115 Between 1973 and 1983, the Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative movements in America all ordained women as rabbis and the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) voted to approve the ordination of women. As we have seen, Reuben Sachs focuses on women’s education, the marital economy, and the alienation of female spirituality. However, the novel also demonstrates that although Amy Levy, in her essay writing, and secular novels, had been committed to New Woman principles and the expansion of women’s role beyond philanthropy, social work, and religion, she was also attracted to the Evangelical theology of women’s role as moral and spiritual redeemers. Judith Quixano is, or could be, an agent of ethical, racial, and spiritual regeneration. As Michael Hilton notes: “Debates about women’s role in the synagogue, women ministers, and inclusive liturgy mirror such debates in the Church, though the participants are sometimes unaware of the parallel Christian develop112 See Sally Priesand, Judaism and the New Woman (New York: Behrman House, 1975). 113 See Ellen Umansky, “Lily H. Montagu: Religious Leader, Organizer and Prophet,” Conservative Judaism 34, no. 6 (July/August 1981): 17-27. 114 Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue (Chico: Scholar Press, 1982). 115 Biale, Women and Jewish Law, 266. See Gerson Cohen, “On the Ordination of Women,” Conservative Judaism 32 (Summer 1979): 56-62; Hamelsdorf and Adelsberg, Women and Jewish Law: Bibliography.

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ments.”116 The novel, as we will see in the next chapter, encourages women, through Judith, to exercise their “natural” political freedoms and to spiritually vitalize Anglo-Jewry by expressing the rhetoric of late-Victorian feminism which invests women with the ability to effect racial progress against the degenerative forces of patriarchy and materialism. Indeed, in the literature of the period, “degeneration” was a masculine narrative, while “regeneration” became associated with the feminine.117

116 117

Hilton, The Christian Effect, 139. Valman, The Jewess, 193.

5 MESSIANIC REDEMPTION, THE BOOK OF JUDITH, AND THE MEGILLAH IN

REUBEN SACHS

Reuben Sachs, although notable for the Evangelical thematic that underpins the novel (developed from Reform Judaism’s association with Protestantism and from ethical and spiritual Reformism), also draws on the traditional Midrashic and Talmudic construal associating women with redemption (a product of the interpretive liberty of Reform Judaism and of Abraham Geiger’s conclusion that the Talmud and other aspects of the rabbinic tradition need not be jettisoned altogether). Indeed, as Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams stated of Amy Levy: “She knew the Jewry of her day; she was aware, inherently, subconsciously if you will, of the qualities that had gone to make up the glorious traditions of the Jewish people. She saw the void that stretched between the real and the ideal; and her soul, like those of the Prophets before her, burned in anguished indignation.”1 The term Messiah (Mashiach), meaning “the anointed one,” refers to a king or high priest who is anointed with oil as a sign of his induction to office. The word appears thirty-eight times in the Hebrew Bible, and twice refers to the patriarchs, six times to the high priest, once to the Persian, King Cyrus, and twenty-nine times in reference to contemporaneous kings, particularly David. Generally,

1 Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, “Amy Levy,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 11 (1928): 180.

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there is little or no eschatological undercurrent.2 The concept of a descendent of King David who will usher in a period of national redemption is found in numerous prophetic writings. The rabbis regularly used the word, Messiah, to speak of a redeemer, and they also labeled the age of redemption: “the days of the Messiah.” In Reuben Sachs, Amy Levy assimilates the Evangelical theology of women’s superiority to a gender inclusive vision of Messianic times through the heroine Judith Quixano, who symbolizes spiritual as well as racial regeneration. By the mid to late 1880s, Amy Levy had found new reverence for the sacred texts, perhaps locating her own proto-feminist aspirations in the tradition, or merely enjoying the interpretive liberty of Reform Judaism. The “reawakening” of her Jewish heritage in the mid-1880s perhaps inspired her to approach these texts,3 although such reverence, as we have seen, seems to have been latent for years. Moreover, the Reformers had, apologetically, continually attempted to justify alterations in relation to the tradition: An organ had been used in the Temple: choral singing was not new: responsive readings of the Psalms were ancient too: all the traditional codes stressed that prayers could be said in any language: the sermon was a well known part of Jewish tradition. … The regulations included “decent attire,” with special garments for rabbi and cantor. All conversation in the synagogue was prohibited: worshippers on entry were expected to sit quietly, as was the custom in the church. Young children were not allowed to attend the synagogue at all. Leaving one’s seat to kiss the Scroll, shouting or knocking at Purim, children … with flags at the Rejoicing of the Law – all these and similar colourful rituals were abolished. … A new concentration on the ethical values of Judaism accompanied the changes in rit-

Michael Hilton, The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1994), 67-68. 3 Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 118. 2

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ual: Protestant Christian claims to ethical primacy were countered with accounts of a moral … Judaism.4

By contrast to the Reformers, however, the novel is not universalistic. Bertie Lee-Harrison is frequently shown to be a dilettante: a false convert spiritually unaffected by Judaism and Jewishness. Levy did not reject social assimilation at all, as she regarded herself as English. For her, the problem was that the diminishing of religious values and the secularization of the community were leading to Anglo-Jewry’s extinction. Perhaps similarly to Grace Aguilar, she hoped that Jews could retain their religious identity through cryptoJewish dialogue, and be citizens in public life. Indeed, they both idealized the Sephardim. However, by contrast with Aguilar, Levy was concerned about the congregation, the estrangement of female spirituality, the liturgy, and the participation of women in communal life. The novel is underpinned by the Talmudic dictum that God will only send the Messiah to a generation that repents and is worthy.5 Anglo-Jewry, however, is figured as a ruthless tribe that has thrown off religious morality. Accordingly, the Messiah is not a war leader, but a peaceful figure who may be ushered in by prayer and moral regeneration, of the type that only Judith Quixano can bring, rather than by arms or historical action.6 Amy Levy’s subjective approach to the Messianic concept is hardly surprising, given tbat belief in the Messianic age remained central to fin-de-siècle Reform Judaism – a matter of immediacy – and the Anglo-Reformers were adamant that the Jews were duty bound to usher in this era. As David Woolf Marks argued:

Hilton, The Christian Effect, 149. Matthew 5:17 is the only New Testament quote in the Talmud. See R. Travers Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (1908; rpt. Clifton: Reference Book Publishers, 1966). The Messianism of the Talmud is itself a response to the doctrines of a successful Christianity; see Hilton, The Christian Effect. 6 Hilton, The Christian Effect, 74-75, 83. 4 5

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NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY Because of the three distinctive facts which the inspired seer of Judah inseparably connects with the advent of the Messiah, viz: the cessation of war and the uninterrupted reign of peace, the prevalence of a perfect concord of opinion on all matters bearing on the One and only God, and the ingathering of the remnant of Judah and of the dispersed ten tribes of Israel – not one has, up to the present time, been accomplished.7

The notion of the redemptive woman is found throughout the Talmud. The rabbis argued that of the ten measures of speech descended to the world, women took nine (Kiddushin 49b), that women possess more intuition (Shabbat 33b), that women are associated with the Shekhinah (Kiddushin 31b),8 that women have greater faith than men (Sifri 133), and that women have more advanced powers of discernment (Megilla 14b). Following the exodus from Egypt, the association of women with the deliverance of the Jewish people has been a prominent Midrashic theme. In the book of Exodus, for example, Miriam demonstrates considerable courage in saving her brother from the Pharaoh’s order that all newborn Hebrew males be executed. Regarded as a prophetess, she leads the women of Israel in song after the crossing of the sea and the escape from Egypt (15:20-21). The feminist Miriam is a woman who dares to be a prophetess and to recognize the validity of her own revelation.9 In the Midrash on Exodus 15:20, Mekhilta Shirata 10, II 81, Miriam is described thus: THEN MIRIAM THE PROPHETESS TOOK (Ex. 15:20). Where do we find that Miriam prophesied? She told her father, “You are destined to sire a son who will arise and save Israel David Woolf Marks, “David Woolf Marks on the Messianic Conditions (1858),” in Reform Judaism and Modernity: A Reader, by Jonathan Romain (London: SCM, 2004), 193. 8 Shekhinah in the rabbinic tradition refers to God’s presence in the world, not the feminine aspect found in Kabbalah. 9 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990; rpt. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 54. 7

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from the Egyptians.” Immediately A CERTAIN MAN OF THE HOUSE OF LEVI WENT AND MARRIED A LEVITE WOMAN. THE WOMAN CONCEIVED AND BORE A SON: AND WHEN SHE SAW HOW BEAUTIFUL HE WAS SHE HID HIM FOR THREE MONTHS WHEN SHE COULD HIDE HIM NO LONGER (Ex. 2:13). Her father rebuked her. He said to her, “Miriam, what has become of your prophecies”? But she held fast by her prophecy, as it is said AND HIS SISTER STOOD HERSELF AT A DISTANCE TO LEARN WHAT WOULD BEFALL HIM (Ex. 2:4). And “standing” always implies the presence of the Holy Spirit, as in the passages I SAW MY LORD STANDING BY THE ALTAR (Amos 9:1); THE LORD CAME AND STOOD THERE (1 Sam. 3:10) and CALL JOSHUA STAND YOURSELVES IN THE TENT OF MEETING THAT I MAY INSTRUCT HIM (Deut. 31:14). … AND MIRIAM CHANTED FOR THEM (Ex. 15:21). This verse indicates that just as Moses proclaimed the SONG for the men, Miriam did so for the women. “SING TO THE LORD, FOR HE HAS TRIUMPHED GLORIOUSLY” (Ex. 15:21).10

The generally recurrent motif within the tradition, however, is that of a deceitful yet redemptive woman. Accordingly, Rebekah tricks Isaac for the sake of Jacob (Genesis 27:5-13), Tamar deceives her father-in-law, Judah, into impregnating her (Genesis 38:15-16), Shiprah and Puah lie to the Pharaoh as to why they have not killed the Hebrew males at birth (Exodus 1:17-19), Miriam offers to call a nurse for the Pharaoh’s daughter, but instead calls the baby’s mother (Exodus 2:7-8), the Pharaoh’s daughter adopts and names Moses against her father’s will (Exodus 2:10), Rahab saves Joshua’s spies by lying to the King of Jericho (Joshua 2:4-6), and Jael mur-

10 Quoted in The Classic Midrash: Tannaitic Commentaries on the Bible, ed. Reuven Hammer (New York: Paulist Press, 1995), 122-23. The capitalization of many of the words is the editor’s and not my own.

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ders an enemy general seeking to enter her tent (Judges 4: 21).11 Indeed, Amy Levy’s heroine symbolizes the Talmudic context: “Biz’chut ma’shim tzid’kan’ee’yot sheh’ha’yoo b’oh’to ha’dor, nig’ah’loo Yisrael mee’Mitz’ra’yim” – “In the merit of those righteous women who were in that generation, the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt” (Sotah 11b). Therefore, the righteous women of every generation have the potential to redeem. Judith, meaning “Jewess” – the feminine form of Judah, like the biblical heroines preceding her, possesses the unacknowledged ability to redeem Anglo-Jewry through the contemporary language of social Darwinism. Her health, beauty, and intelligence make her the ideal mate for the physically and morally “degenerate” Reuben Sachs, offering AngloJewry the plausibility of renewal. It is in this sense that I use the term Messiah. During the first-century, many Jews assumed that God would not allow his people to languish under the pagan Roman Empire, and that he would intervene through human representatives. Since these Jews interpreted adversity as a punishment for infidelity on the part of Israel itself, it was believed that the Messianic advent would entail transformation, spiritual regeneration, and a reinvigorated faith in God that would evoke coming redemption. From the Maccabean revolt in 165 BCE to the Jewish wars of 66-73 CE, Palestinian Judaism witnessed many Messianic prophets and renewal movements, including figures such as Jesus.12 As Michael Hilton argues: “There were different views on the Messiah in first-century Judaism: his functions are not clear: he may use the sword or be non-military: he may bring in a Messianic age or he may not: he may be active or passive: he may be a judge or he may not. There is no clear doctrine.”13 During the early-seventh-century, the wars between Persia and Byzantium, followed by the Arab conquest of the Middle East, witnessed an intensification of Messianic expectation. By the Middle-Ages, belief in a personal Messiah was unani11 See Judith Baskin, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2002). 12 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women and Redemption: A Theological History (London: SCM Press, 1998), 15. 13 Hilton, The Christian Effect, 69.

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mous, although there was disagreement as to whether the Messianic age would be a natural or a supernatural event.14 Indeed, Reuben Sachs accommodates Messianic expectations. The doctrine of the “Messiah” is perhaps the most distinctive idea of classical Judaism. The prophets, integral to Reform Judaism, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, and Zechariah, associated the transformation of history with an exalted human leader who will rescue the Jewish people. Prophetic Judaism ideologically underpins Reform Judaism, and its bibliocentric approach, as Emil Hirsch notes: Modern scholarship has spoken and its voice cannot be hushed. It has shown that Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch; that Sinai is not the cradle of what is highest and best in Biblical Judaism … that the whole apparatus of priestly institutionalism is of non-Hebraic origin: the veritable “laws of the gentiles.” The Abrahamitic rite [circumcision], the dietary and levitical laws, … are not indigenous to the Jewish soil.15

The ideology of the Messiah is more an ideology of “hope,” perhaps evident in Judith Quixano’s pregnancy. Michael Hilton argues: Both Jews and Christians often make incorrect assumptions about messianism: Christians often claim the doctrine of the Messiah was a well known one in Judaism at the time of Christ: and Jews often assume that a Christian is one who claims Jesus was the Messiah. In fact “Messiah” was one of a wide range of terms and titles. In the world of English speaking Christians, the term today is associated with evangelist groups who preach a high degree of urgency and fervour: such fervour is paralleled in the Jewish world by the Lubavitch Chasidim who preach that the Messiah is about to arrive. Did early Christians believe

14 See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (London: George Allen, 1971). 15 Quoted by Hilton, The Christian Effect, 129.

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NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY Jesus to be the Messiah? It was only one of a variety of titles used. Scholars totally disagree on whether he called himself “Christ.”16

The novel suggests, as we will see, that only reinvigorated faith in God can usher in redemption and provide the moral and spiritual guidance necessary to combat the ruthless materialism of the upper-middle-class and their heartless rejection of religious and biological considerations. Judith Quixano’s potential as national redeemer has dual foundations in the tradition and in eugenic discourse: Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection applied to human criteria.17 Judith and Reuben Sachs share a racial empathy: “She felt the love of her race grow stronger at every word. … He praised her in the race, and the race in her; and this was conveyed in some subtle manner to her consciousness.”18 Her “perfect health” contrasts the degenerative, acculturated “ill-made sons and daughters of Shem”:19 “She was twenty-two years of age, in the very prime of her youth and beauty; a tall, regal-looking creature, with an exquisite dark head, features like those of a face cut on gem or cameo, and wonderful, lustrous, mournful eyes. … Her smooth, oval cheek glowed with a rich, yet subdued, hue of perfect health.”20 Judith’s suitability for reproduction is a case in point. Reuben fantasizes about: “Children on his hearth with Judith’s eyes, and Judith there herself amongst them.”21 Her Sephardic lineage is in direct contrast to the image of the ignoble Ashkenazi Jew.22 The myth of Sephardic racial hegemHilton, The Christian Effect, 71. Darwin himself did not believe in the accuracy of ranking human racial groups along a linear scale (Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 75-77). 18 Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (London: Macmillan, 1888), 122. 19 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 152. 20 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 20-21. 21 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 125; Nadia Valman, The Jewess in NineteenthCentury British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183. 22 The West End Jews of London were predominantly middle-class and radically assimilationist. This was in stark contrast to the crowded 16 17

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ony was widely popularized in the writing of Grace Aguilar and Benjamin Disraeli. Likewise, Jewish anthropologists personified the Sephardic Jew as “the equivalent of the Jewish ‘Aryan,’ a glorious figure, characterized by his nobility, breeding and poise.”23 However, Judith’s pre-eminence is suppressed by the Quixano family’s poverty. Joshua Quixano’s scholarliness is an obstacle to survival in modern London, while Judith’s milieu is driven by commercial rather than biological motivation. Amy Levy’s analysis of Jewish disintegration and regeneration is entirely representative of the politics of social Darwinism prevalent in Victorian England.24 Even the Evangelicals learnt to accommodate Darwinism.25 Judith Quixano and Reuben Sachs’ failed romance, perceived through a popular scientific perspective, suggests that the progress of civilization subverts the operation of natural selection. Feminist polemics unceasingly warned of the detEast End made up of the recent Eastern European arrivals. These Ostjudische (immigrants) were not acculturated to middle-class Anglo-Christian standards and resented attempts by Jews and Christian to socialize them (Michael Galchinsky, “‘Permanently Blacked’: Julia Frankau’s Jewish Race,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 173). 23 Quoted by Valman, The Jewess, 183-84. See Grace Aguilar, Collected Works, 8 vols. (London: R. Groomridge, 1861); Michael Ragussis, “The Birth of a Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and the ‘Secret Race,’” Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1994): 477-508; Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” & English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, or The New Crusade (London: Longmans Green, 1880); The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, ed. Tony Kushner (London: Frank Cass, 1992); Todd Endelman, “Disraeli’s Jewishness Reconsidered,” Modern Judaism 5 (1985): 109-23. 24 See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1983); Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Mid-Victorian scientists insisted that race was paramount, see Robert Knox, The Races of Man (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchford, 1850); Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869; rpt. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978). 25 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 2002), 207.

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rimental effect on the future of the race if women were prohibited from exercising their “natural” political freedoms.26 The idea of women as societal redeemers was a common nineteenth-century theme. The art critic John Ruskin, for example, had written in 1865 that the woman: “should revive; the harebells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes.”27 Ruskin noted that in the plays of William Shakespeare “the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman.”28 Feminist writers such as Ellice Hopkins similarly argued that as Christianity advanced, the inequalities between the sexes would rescind.29 Accordingly, some Christian women perceived themselves as instruments for the regeneration of society.30 Thus, Levy’s heroine represents not only a wider belief in the spiritual and redemptive nature of women, but also in the New Woman principle that intellectual women require independence. Reuben Sachs also draws inspiration from the books of Judith and Esther, setting aside those elements that undermine the redemptive premises of the novel. The Reformers frequently explored the biblical past to justify contemporaneous reform. These books predate rabbinic Judaism, and their use conforms to the “back to the Bible” approach that sidesteps the “bogus” authority of the rabbis. For the Reformers, the male chauvinism of the tradition was a legacy of rabbinic Judaism. Accordingly, women in the Bible, such as Rebekah, Deborah, and Ruth, for example, have been rehabilitated since the Second-Wave as primordial and powerValman, The Jewess, 184, 186. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1865; rpt. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1960), 139. 28 Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 93. Ruskin’s concept of a “sheltered queen” (Sue Morgan, “The Power of Womanhood: Religion and Sexual Politics in the Writings of Ellice Hopkins,” in Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House, eds. Anne Hogan and Andrew Bradstock (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998), 222), resonant of the separate spheres ideology, was gradually replaced by a liberal Christian belief that women should not be restricted to domesticity. 29 See Sue Morgan, A Passion for Purity: Ellice Hopkins and the Politics of Gender in the Late-Victorian Church (Bristol: University of Bristol, 1999). 30 Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 3, 12-13. 26 27

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ful, yet, equally accounted for as women whose significance has been suppressed by the rabbinic literature.31 The second-century Mishnah, regarded as the first major work of rabbinic Judaism, was a major source for subsequent Jewish thought. This first redaction of the oral tradition contains many halakhot regarding women. The tractates confirm women’s exclusion from reciting the Shema, wearing tefillin, and dwelling in sukkah. The primary effect of these halakhot renders women ineligible for positions of leadership. However, the Mishnah does not in fact imply that women lack intelligence. On the contrary, women are merely regarded as not having the capacity to fulfill the obligations of others. Judith Romney Wegner argues that women’s inability to perform certain religious rites is not due to their mental incapacity, youth, or un-free status. Yet, somehow, women retain the position of slaves and minor boys. Wegner notes that the exemption is never explained, and probably rests with the androcentrism of the sages. Women are viewed as enablers. Indeed, the sages possibly wished to prevent them from exercising an alternative role. Hence, they exempted women from mitzvot interfering with domesticity. Consequently, women were considered unable to lead within areas from which they are exempt.32 Therefore, by employing the Apocryphal book of Judith, and the story of Esther, Amy Levy located bibliocentric authority prior 31 Arnold Jacob Wolf, “The New Jewish Feminism,” Judaism 47, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 351. 32 Judith Romney Wegner, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 153-54. In his groundbreaking study of the Mishnah’s Order of Women, Jacob Neusner argues that the Mishnah does not reflect the reality of what women experienced or did, but the relationship of women to men as men defined it. Hence, the Mishnah’s focus is the control of those potentially dangerous incidences when a woman leaves the house of one man to enter into a relationship with another; see A History of the Mishnaic Law of Women, 5 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980). Since the Second-Wave, Neusner’s approach has become far more nuanced. How the Rabbis Liberated Women (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), reneges on some of the conclusions reached in Method and Meaning in Ancient Judaism (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979).

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to the androcentrism of rabbinic Judaism. This process of dissenting from the tradition as and when necessary (a central aspect of Reform Judaism) has since been exploited by many Jewish feminists. Judith Plaskow notes that Jewish history is in itself a history of Jewish women, and identifies Abraham and Sarah as her ancestors. She recognizes her own stake in the exodus from Egypt, and views both biblical and rabbinic history as part of a past that informs her own Jewish identity – a precedent to struggle with rather than to neglect.33 The biblical Judith seems to be the inspiration for Amy Levy’s heroine, Judith Quixano, particularly given that the Apocryphal book is regarded as a type of novel. Judith of Bethulia was appropriated for numerable contexts during the mid-nineteenth-century. Matthew Arnold’s Hebraism notes the mental consanguinity between the English, the nationality that created empire and enterprise, and Old Testament Jewry. In 1868, he argued in Culture and Anarchy that since the Reformation the English had conformed to a puritanical Hebraic ideology. Impelled by the work ethic, Hebraism’s aims were productive, ethical, and behaviorist. Consequently, the English had become a race of pragmatists unaccustomed to philosophy. By contrast, the Hellenist mind is reflective, meditative, and intellectual. For Arnold, if England was to come to terms with the modern world it had to become more Hellenist. Indeed, by identifying muscular Victorianism with ancient Israel, it was possible to imagine Judith as a model of patriotism in the Hebraic prehistory of England. Most mid-century Victorians perceived England as an Anglo-Saxon New Israel; hence, Judith was English. Numerous works appeared to confirm this, such as the anonymous Judith; or the Prophetess of Bethulia: A Romance from the Apocrypha (1849), and J. M. Neale’s Judith (1849), an allegory of the Crimean War. Three versions of an Anglo-Saxon poem about Judith were also reprinted, including L.G. Nilsson’s Judith (1848), A.S. Cook’s in 1888, and an American edition by T.G. Foster in1892.34 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, xx. Margarita Stocker, Judith Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 126, 128, 131-32, 261. See John Neale, Judith: a Seatonian Poem (Cambridge: 1856); Judith; or the 33 34

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In Reuben Sachs, and in the biblical narrative, both leading women share prestigious genetic backgrounds. Amy Levy’s Sephardic heroine represents “the veille noblesse of the Jewish community,”35 while Judith of Bethulia has an unparalleled genealogy longer than any other woman in the Bible. She is situated as the telos of sixteen male ancestors in Israel (her deceased husband’s ancestry is neglected, contrary to tradition). Both women represent the Jewess par excellence of their particular historical periods and are noted for their extreme beauty (8:7).36 To the nineteenth and twentiethcentury reader, Judith of Bethulia, as an Israelite woman, steps outside her expected role which requires that she remain in the domestic sphere as either wife or mother. She is observant of the law and dietary restrictions. While the city elders contemplate defeat, she is confident God will overcome and journeys to the enemy camp. Once alone in Holofernes’ tent she decapitates him, taking the head back to Bethulia as a symbol of Israel’s redemption.37 A feminist interpretation suggests that as the battle between Judith and Holofernes represents male versus female and godly versus ungodly, female victory symbolizes God’s triumph. However, the feminist basis is undermined as Judith’s defeat of Holofernes could seem to challenge God’s power. Thus, as she destroys a patriarchal authority in the form of the enemy, she inevitably challenges God’s Prophetess of Bethulia: A Romance from the Apocrypha (London: 1849); Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (1868; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). For more information relating to Judith’s influence on Western culture see Anne-Marie Dunbarle, Judith, Formes et Sens des Diverses Traditions (Rome: Institut Biblique, 1966); Thomas Craven, Artistry and Faith in the Book of Judith (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983). 35 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 32, 79. 36 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 20-21. 37 For an overview of the book of Judith see Lieke Bal, “Head Hunting Judith on the Cutting Edge of Knowledge,” in The Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 253-85; Catherine Randall Coates, “Holofernes’ Textual Impotence: Discourse Versus Representation in Du Bartas’ La Judit,” in Old Testament Women in Western Literature, eds. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (Conway: UCA Press, 1991), 108-26; Philip Esler, “Ludic History in the Book of Judith: The Reinvention of Israelite Identity?” Biblical Interpretation 10, no. 2 (2002): 108-43.

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rule. This perhaps explains why the story cannot afford to be feminist. The book stresses that it is not Judith but God who has murdered Holofernes: “by the hand of a woman” (16:6). Judith is figured merely as an instrument of patriarchal authority. That she belongs to God is confirmed by her chaste fidelity to him. Accordingly, when she frees her slave-maid, Judith provides her with something she herself does not possess: freedom of will. Judith is not independent, but remains the handmaid of the Lord. Certainly, while the account attempts to subordinate Judith to God through her chastity, such an attribute is compromised by the exploiting of her sexuality in order to seduce Holofernes into a position of weakness.38 Recent studies have provided a feminist hermeneutic through which a “Judith-centered” exegesis intentionally focuses the heroine away from the portrayal of a decapitator, instead accounting for Judith’s subjective reality.39 Accordingly, a feminist interpretation of the story, such as Amy Levy’s, need not centre on Judith’s deceit, her subservience to God, or the decapitation scene. In fact, these aspects of the story do not have to be mentioned at all. The book of Judith was probably written to address the concerns of the Jewish people in the second or first-century BCE. It is debatable as to why the rabbis excluded the story from the canon, but a possible reason could be that Judith represented a dangerous precedent for the community. As an independent woman, she confronts the town magistrates and takes the initiative by using sexual violence.40 In theory, she might have posed a social problem to the Stocker, Judith Sexual Warrior, 5-6, 8-10. Linda Bennett Elder, “Judith,” in Searching the Scriptures: Volume 2: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994), 456. 40 In the Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern literature warfare is emblematically male and violence is linked to masculine sexuality (Harold Washington, “Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible: A New Historicist Approach,” Biblical Interpretation 5, no. 4 (1997): 330). Honor and manhood entail the capacity to exert violence, while women are normally perceived as victims. There are exceptions however. Deborah leads Israel to war against the Canaanites (Judges 4-5), and Jael drives a tent-peg through Sisera’s head (Judges 4-5). 38 39

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established order of Jewish elders. Amy Levy chooses for her feminist heroine an icon already suited to a variety of contexts. The figure of Judith had been appropriated as a femme fatale, a civic patriot, a trickster, a woman warrior, and as a precursor to Jesus.41 From a Jewish perspective, however, the analogy is particularly relevant as the book reflects triumphal nationalism and reassurance that God will always protect his chosen people. Furthermore, Judith’s piety and rigorous observance prove their value, as her devotional regime provides the alibi for escaping the enemy camp after the murder of Holofernes. The story demonstrates the importance of religious faith, and is a parable about what it means to be Jewish.42 In Reuben Sachs the moral guidance of religion is vital to the survival of the Jewish people. Reuben himself negates and ignores Judaism, and is unable to suppress his materialism. He states: “‘It is no good to pretend … that our religion remains a vital source among the cultivated and thoughtful Jews of today. Of course it has been modified, as we ourselves have been modified, by the influence of western thought and western morality. And belief, among thinking people of all races, has become, as you know perfectly, a matter of personal idiosyncrasy.’”43 We are to infer that had he married Judith, recognizing the biological and spiritual imperative, his untimely death might have been averted. Reuben’s comment, nonetheless, has been read by scholars as an example of Amy Levy refusing to overemphasize the role she saw religion playing in fin-de-siècle Jewish existence.44 However, Reuben’s statement actually highlights her concerns regarding communal secularization and the decadent materialism of the upper-middle-class.45 This anElder, “Judith,” 455. Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior, 5. 43 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 117. 44 Iveta Jusova, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 170. 45 The West London Reform Synagogue was exclusively formed by individuals from the upper-class Jewish elite, most of whom were either wealthy business men or professionals living in fashionable parts of the West End. Membership largely comprised upper and upper-middle-class Jews (Stephen Sharot, “Reform and Liberal Judaism in London: 18401940,” Jewish Social Studies 41, no. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 1979): 213). 41 42

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xiety should not be underestimated, as Todd Endelman argues: “The cultural and intellectual horizons of middle-class Jews were limited, and hence they rarely ventured into the larger world to find enlightenment or drink at the fountains of higher culture. Indeed by comparison with other Western Jewish communities, AngloJewry was remarkably ill-educated and Philistine, taking little interest in literary and artistic matters.”46 The Anglo-Reform leadership persistently decried the materialism and spiritual lassitude of the acculturated community.47 In Reuben Sachs, Leo Leuniger’s pessimistic Darwinist analysis outlines the results of the community’s secularization, or “disintegration”: “That is the inevitability – at least as regards us English Jews – of our disintegration; of our absorption by the people of the country. That is the price we are bound to pay for restored freedom and consideration. The Community will grow more and more to consist of mediocrities, and worse, as the general world claims our choicer specimens for its own. We may continue to exist as a separate clan, reinforced from below by German and Polish Jews for some time to come: but absorption complete, inevitable – that is only a matter of time.”48

The decline of religious conviction, according to Leo, is followed by Jewish extinction through the social selection of the “choicer specimens” by gentile society.49 This theme is prevalent throughout the novel, and is also reflective of the Mishnah Sotah’s conclusion, of which Levy may have been aware, that redemption will come, aside from obeying laws, through trust in God. Additionally, the reader is informed: “Esther … poor soul, was of those who deny Todd Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History: 16561945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 92-93. 47 See Emma Francis, “Socialist Feminism and Sexual Instinct: Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy,” in Eleanor Marx, 1855-1898: Life, Work, Contacts ed. John Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 113-27. 48 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 119-20. 49 Valman, The Jewess, 182. 46

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utterly the existence of the Friend of whom she stood so sorely in need.”50 Esther Kohnthal, we are to infer, is unable to locate the divine presence in the Reform Judaism of the period, though is also alienated from the tradition. Johann Goethe’s extract in chapter fifteen reaffirms the need to re-engage these women.51 Reuben Sachs also draws on the book of Esther,52 who was the inspiration for Daniel Deronda’s heroine. By comparison to Judith of Bethulia, Esther too delivers her people from an Assyrian pogrom or genocide.53 The two figures have often been associated, particularly in the Victorian period, given their relevance to Reform analyses of Jewish Orientalism. As Reuben Sachs states to Judith Quixano in reference to Bertie Lee-Harrison, revealing how the convert views the community through an idealized lens: “He says you exactly fulfill his idea of Queen Esther.”54 In the biblical narrative, Esther becomes queen to the Persian king, Ahasuerus. Through this position she is able to rescue her people from Haman’s plans to annihilate the Jews. The presence of God, however, is absent from the book, and it was probably only canonized due to its nationalist sentiments. Indeed, the deliverance from Haman is still celebrated today through the colorful feast of Purim.55 While in the book of Judith the heroine is noted for her religious piety and nationalistic fervor, in Esther she is recognized solely through nationLevy, Reuben Sachs, 93. Levy, Reuben Sachs, 195. 52 Esther has been interpreted as a work of fiction and was probably written during the late Persian/early Hellenistic period. 53 Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior, 12. 54 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 114. 55 See Gene Tucker, “Esther, the Book of.” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, eds. Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 200. The inclusion of Esther in the Jewish scriptures remains a source of division among scholars (Joyce Baldwin, Esther: An Introduction and Commentary (Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1984), 51). Many early rabbis expressed disdain for the book given there is no sanction for the feast of Purim in the law. However, Simeon ben Lakish and Moses Maimonides recognized that the celebrations were popular. Such support guaranteed the story’s inclusion in the canon, and subsequently, the rabbis found a way to use Exodus 17:14 to prove that Purim was authorized – Haman was an Agagite and therefore an Amalekite – the enemy of Israel. 50 51

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alistic discourse. In Reuben Sachs, Esther Kohnthal, reinterpreting the biblical narrative from a proto-feminist perspective, provides an unsophisticated, yet compelling, personalized hermeneutic of the story: “Ah,” cried Esther Kohnthal, “I have always had a theory about her [biblical Esther]. When she was kneeling at the feet of that detestable Ahasuerus, she was thinking all the time of some young Jew whom she mashed, and who mashed her, and whom she renounced for the sake of her people!”56

From this viewpoint, the heroine, Queen Esther, suffers for the preservation of her people and forsakes her unnamed Jewish lover for the foreign king. Through this context, Reuben Sachs adopts an archetypal Eastern theme prevalent to the period. The lateVictorians subscribed to Orientalism, an attitude toward the Near East that simultaneously denigrates as well as eroticizes. The book of Esther conforms to this mythology. Ahasuerus, as a despotic Eastern potentate, holds absolute power. He expects female submission and has the ability to summon nubile virgins at his pleasure. As he tests them in his search for a new wife, Ahasuerus symbolizes the exotica of the harem, the epitome of Orientalism,57 creating an analogy with Amy Levy’s negative appraisal of the Jewish community. The Anglo-Reformers were aware that even by the end of the nineteenth-century the role of women in synagogue life had changed little, and, more importantly, that women, however dissatisfied, made up the majority of worshippers. The Reformers finally began to address the issue in the early-twentieth-century,58 though during Levy’s lifetime they were largely inactive with regard to the “Woman Question.” The biblical narrative of Esther, most probably, was originally intended to encourage exilic Jews that they might prosper in the

Levy, Reuben Sachs, 114. “Mashed” – fancied. Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior, 127. 58 Romain, Reform Judaism, 249-50. 56 57

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Persian realm, as Esther supposedly does.59 Unaware of her Jewish heritage, Ahasuerus selects her for his wife, although the Prime Minister, Haman, equally unaware of Esther’s Jewishness, plots to obtain a decree for the murder of the Jews. After persuasion from her cousin and foster-father, Mordecai, Esther warns Ahasuerus of Haman’s scheme and reveals her ancestry. Thus, Haman is executed and Mordecai is elevated to Prime Minister. Although according to Persian law the edict condemning the Jews could not be rescinded, Ahasuerus issues another order allowing for their defense. Esther Kohnthal’s theory regarding the biblical Esther and her forced marriage to the “detestable” Ahasuerus, illustrates Amy Levy’s development of an innovative proto-feminist hermeneutic that accounts for the heroine’s subjective agency.60 Similar to the women of Reuben Sachs, Esther’s obedience (2:10) condemns her to a comparable marriage market. Likewise, although she reveals the details of Haman’s plot, risks her personal safety by revealing her Jewish ancestry, and persuades Ahasuerus to allow for a Jewish defense (7-8), it is Mordecai who is elevated to Prime Minister (10:3). By contrast, she is denied subjective agency and condemned to a loveless marriage with a non-Jew. Indeed, Esther did not choose to marry Ahasuerus (2:8), she reveals her ethnicity when absolutely necessary (7:3-4), and only after pressure from Mordecai (4:4-16). Amy Levy’s employment of two popular biblical narratives is typical of fin-de-siècle Reformist discourse, and reflects her determination to locate biblical authority acceptable, and familiar, to the host culture. Moreover, the nationalistic thematic that underpins Esther and Judith is entirely in line with Levy’s social Darwinist analysis of Jewish degeneration and regeneration. The premise that the suffering of a whole people, here personified through Judith Quixano, can be brought together in the symbol of one individual 59 Sidnie White Crawford, “Esther,” in Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal / Deuterocanonical Books and the New Testament, eds. Carol Meyers et al. (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000), 75. 60 Levy, Reuben Sachs, 114.

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reflects what Christians continue to believe about Jesus. Furthermore, the Reformers, since the early years of the German movement, including Rabbi Samuel Holdheim, accepted the traditional Christian argument that by the destruction of the Second Temple, God had made known his will that ritual and civil laws were no longer valid, and that only the moral teachings should remain. Thus, the entire Talmud was to be considered a contingent not necessary, though on occasion employable for its specific moral sayings. The Anglo-Reformers were attracted to “higher criticism,” as it was known, as it provided the rationale for escaping outmoded legislation and ritual. The bibliocentric reliance on the Hebrew prophets, and their emphasis on ethical ideals, was common to Jews as well as Christians, and therefore acceptable in an emancipated environment.61 The employment of rabbinic themes, however, probably reflects Levy’s desire to counter the charge, frequently leveled by the traditionalists, that the Reform movement was developing a type of Jewish Protestantism. More than that, the innovative use of Judith and Esther prefigures Second-Wave reconstructions of biblical women’s history for contemporary audiences.62 Most appraisals of biblical women in the nineteenthcentury were produced by Christian writers. Paula Hyman, writing in 1975, argues for the necessity of providing a “usable past,” rather than the perpetuation of myths, that will supply meaningful

Hilton, The Christian Effect, 101, 128-29. See Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: Dial Press, 1976); Sondra Henry and Emily Taitz, Written Out of History (New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1978); Marion Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: the Campaigns of the Judischer Frauenbund, 1904-1938 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979); Gerder Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Mordecai Friedman, “Divorce Upon the Wife’s Demand as Reflected in Manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza,” Jewish Law Annual 4 (1981): 103-26; Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983; rpt. New York: Crossroad, 1994); Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook, eds. Ellen Umansky and Diane Ashton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). 61 62

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role models and a link to the present.63 Similarly, Judith Plaskow notes that it is vital to fill the silence and counter the invisibility regarding Jewish women’s past. In order for Judaism to be restructured in the present, she argues, it is necessary to redefine Jewish history. Accordingly, the Jewish necessity to reconstruct the past in the light of the present converges with the feminist drive to unearth women’s history within Judaism. For Plaskow, it is important to restore agency to women and to provide a fuller Jewish history for the sake of the community as a whole. She concludes that reclaiming women’s history reveals another world beneath the tradition; a world in which women are historical agents struggling with, and against, patriarchal society. Moreover, awareness of the neglected aspects of history challenges the supposedly normative texts.64 In sum, this chapter, and the previous one, have illustrated Amy Levy’s classically Reformist critique of halakhah. However, while the novel outlines gender exclusion in the community, Levy neglects to outline practical reforms, the analysis of halakhah is sweeping and un-nuanced, the Messianic thematic is vaguely defined, and her knowledge of Orthodoxy, perhaps unsurprisingly, is limited. Despite the employment of Midrashic and Talmudic themes, the majority of the novel is based on the Evangelical lionization of women as agents of divine transformation, and Evangelical criticisms of the tradition as spiritually retrograde and encumbered by ritual. These perspectives were assimilated by the AngloReformers, and were hardly original. Reuben Sachs perhaps asks more questions than it answers: did Levy endorse thoroughgoing reform of the tradition, or did she hope for proto-feminist change from within the existing Reform institutions, thus bypassing halak63 Paula Hyman, “The Jewish Family: Looking For a Usable Past,” in On Being A Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (1983; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 20. See Deborah Weissman, “Bais Yaakov: A Historical Model for Jewish Feminists,” in The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 139-48; Marion Kaplan, “Bertha Pappenheim: Founder of German-Jewish Feminism,” in The Jewish Woman, 149-163. 64 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 26, 31, 50.

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hah? Indeed, did she believe that the existing Reform movement was capable of alleviating women’s inferior status, or would she have preferred the formation of a new movement (like the Liberal Judaism of the fin-de-siècle)? Did Levy want complete gender equality or merely for women to be given access to the sacred texts and to enjoy increased religious participation in the synagogue (perhaps through compulsory Hebrew lessons)? As a final point, Amy Levy’s novel is bound up in the cult of true womanhood. However, Levy also developed New Woman discourse, and encouraged women to seek careers in areas previously considered unsuitable. As she writes in “Women and Club Life”: Demand, say the makers of that mischievous pseudo-science, political economy, creates supply. What has hitherto been felt as a vague longing – the desire among women for a corporate life, for a wider human fellowship, a richer social opportunity – has assumed the definite shape of practical demand, now that so many women of all ranks are controllers of their own resources.65

However, in contradiction to her single, independent, bohemian lifestyle, and her stark, altogether sweeping criticisms of the assimilated marital economy, she also venerated marriage. Certainly, “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage,” in a vision of pessimistic postfuturism, laments the falling away of the institutions of marriage and religion: Swept into limbo is the host Of heavenly angels, row on row; The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Pale and defeated, rise and go. The great Jehovah is laid low, Vanished his burning bush and rodSay, are we doomed to deeper woe? 65

Amy Levy, “Women and Club Life,” Woman’s World 1 (1888): 364.

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Shall marriage go the way of God?66

Levy’s writing, vague and sometimes contradictory, focuses on the “Woman Question” and Reform Judaism in her own, assimilated community. However, even as Levy was putting the final touches to Reuben Sachs, the seeds of change were being sewn in Germany. By the close of the nineteenth-century, Liberal Judaism was gradually overtaking the term Reform, and symbolizing a progressive, modern attitude toward Jewish practice and belief. In Britain, Liberal Judaism would be more radical, in both theology and practice, than its conservative Reform counterpart, though Levy would have already committed suicide by the inception of Lily Montagu’s Liberal Jewish movement.

66 Amy Levy, “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage,” in Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch, ed. Susan David Bernstein (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006), 192.

FROM ANGLO-FIRST-WAVE TOWARDS THIRD-WAVE JEWISH-FEMINISM: CONCLUSION The central aim of this book has been to explore the idea that aspects of First-Wave Anglo-Jewish feminism prefigure cultural, religious, and theological features of Second-Wave American-Jewish feminism. I have demonstrated how, despite the differing contextual and historical frameworks of late nineteenth-century and midtwentieth-century English and American Jewish feminism, discursive markers illustrate numerous parallel concerns. Indeed, I have studied Amy Levy historically, through an examination of her writing and activism as a function of First-Wave Jewish feminism, and conceptually, as a genre whose cultural, religious, and theological discourses prefigures aspects of Second-Wave Jewish feminism. While I am hardly the first scholar to trace the links between First and Second-Wave feminisms, I have provided fresh evidence of the conceptual links between the two periods of activism, and have drawn on First and Second-Wave Jewish feminist literature to demonstrate consanguinity. Thus, as an original contribution to the history of Jewish feminism, I have, further to other scholars work in this area, illustrated how many of the concepts – particularly spiritual and theological ones – that underpin Second-Wave discourse were first developed, if only in embryonic form, by proto-feminist writers, namely Amy Levy, during the late-nineteenth-century.1

1 See Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 10-13.

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In particular, this study has contributed to our understanding of the history of Jewish feminist theology by showing that its origins cannot be situated in 1970s America where its current forms were first published, given that Anglo-Jewish activists had also been engaged in both religious and theological writing since the late-nineteenth-century. Indeed, Amy Levy had in fact, long before the 1970s, picked up the pen and sought to challenge the androcentrism of the religious tradition and her denominational community. Additionally, this thesis has helped to reshape the biography of Amy Levy, as we are now aware of the classically early German Reform context to her writing, the theological undercurrents, and of her development of midrashic poetry, and we are also conscious of the scriptural, Talmudic, and Messianic thematics to Reuben Sachs. It has, however, not been the intention of this book to imply that Amy Levy was not of her time. Rather, her writing was clearly First-Wave and bound up in prevalent proto-feminist notions of women’s role as moral and spiritual redeemers (the cult of true womanhood), and the predominantly Evangelical Christian idea, assimilated by the Reformers, that women could be the agents of social and spiritual redemption. These discourses were also grounded in the anti-rabbinism, anti-Talmudism, and anti-ritualism prevalent in the Reform, and later Liberal, assimilationist project to accommodate Anglo-Jewry to the social, political, and religious norms of the host culture in order to prevent defection from the community. Many of the proto-feminist issues explored in Levy’s novel, essays, and poetry were revisited, and re-appropriated, as focal aspects of the Second-Wave. Indeed, revealing the AngloJewish underpinnings to the late-twentieth-century Jewish feminist movement is integral to the ongoing recovery of Jewish women’s history, as Judith Plaskow argues: We too cannot redefine Judaism in the present without redefining our past, because our present grows out of our history. The Jewish need to reconstruct the past in the light of the present converges with the feminist need to recover women’s history within Judaism. Knowing that women are active members of the Jewish community in the present, even though large sectors of the community continue to define themselves in male

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terms and to render women invisible, we know that we were always part of the community – not simply as objects of male purposes but as subjects and shapers of the tradition. … The Jewish community today is a community of women and men, and it has never been otherwise. It is time, therefore, to recover our history as the history of women and men, a task that will both restore our own history to women and provide a fuller Jewish history for the Jewish community as a whole.2

Throughout the book I have provided numerous cross-references to illustrate the ideological, spiritual, religious, and theological continuities between the two periods of activism. This process of “filling in the gaps,” according to Plaskow, is central to the feminist historical project: The great silence that has shrouded women’s history testifies not to women’s lack of historical agency but to the androcentric bias that has shaped historical writing. In seeking to recover women’s history, feminist historians have mined androcentric sources for clues to women’s lives and leadership, and interpreted and filled in the gaps and silences that erase women’s activity. They have made gender a central category of historical analysis, seeing it not just as a biological given but as itself subject to historical development and change. Feminist historians have moved from writing the history of women’s oppression or women’s contribution to significant movements or events as men define them to trying to understand women’s history in women’s own terms. Looking at history from a woman-centered perspective, they have tried to reconstruct independent women’s cultures developed within or over against the prevailing assumptions of patriarchal society. They have tried to shift our view of the past, to enable us to see how the

2 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990; rpt. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 31.

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Indeed, I have attempted throughout to see Victorian AngloJewry, and the Reform movement, generally, through the lens of Amy Levy. This study has, nonetheless, avoided assuming the Whiggish historiographical model through which history is rendered an inevitable teleological progression from oppression toward liberty and egalitarianism. Notably, Levy was a proto-feminist, and her writing was classically First-Wave and subject to all the political and conceptual limitations of the period. While Levy may have explored and developed perspectives more recently associated with Second-Wave discourse, she was not privy to foreknowledge of contemporary late-modernity or postmodernity. Additionally, the continuities between the two stages of activism have not, so profoundly, carried over to the most recent or Third-Wave of Jewish feminism (if we can call it a “Third-Wave” at all). The majority of the more recent feminist contributions have, despite some notable examples, including the writing of Rachel Adler,4 Naomi Graetz,5 and Tova Hartman,6 been socio-cultural and political, as opposed to religious or theological. In fact, the Third-Wave has been almost devoid of theology and references to the divine presence. The remainder of this conclusion explores the implications of these current trends, the marginalization of the non-ordinary dimension of Jewish revelation, and the religio-intellectual alienation

Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 37. See Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (1998; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). 5 See Naomi Graetz, S/He Created Them: Feminist Retellings of Biblical Stories (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2003); Naomi Graetz, Unlocking the Garden: A Feminist Jewish Look at the Bible, Midrash and God (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2005). 6 Tova Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation (New England: UPNE, 2007), 2-3. 3 4

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of women in the current Jewish feminist movement ;7 that is if, given its growing diversity, it can be labeled a coherent movement at all. For it is not that the discontinuities between the Second and Third stages of activism are because the feminist aims of the previous generation have been achieved. Jewish feminism is no closer to the creation of a normative Jewish feminist theology (such an undertaking may never be sought), and gender inequality will exist in some degree in all denominations of Judaism and in all Jewish communities, at least in so far as society as a whole is still marked by gendered inequalities of wealth, power, and authority.8 The Third-Wave has been markedly different to the Second in that contemporary feminists have sought to challenge the essentialist assumptions of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The Second-Wave supposition of a universal female identity, and the overemphasis on upper-middle-class white women’s experience as representative, has been questioned in the Third-Wave, and replaced by a more nuanced approach. Jewish feminism has contemplated its own blind spots, including the essentialist assumption of basic similarity between Jewish women irrespective of sexual and religious orientation, race, socioeconomic status, and geographic location. Feminist discourse has, as a whole, sought to move away from the prerequisite that all women are oppressed vis-à-vis men, and the notion that women are generally unified or univocal.9 Thus, rather 7 Melissa Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai? Reading Jewish Feminist Theology Through the Critical Lens of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to “Radical Orthodoxy,” eds. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion Grau (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 198. 8 The founding in 1991 of the Jewish Feminist Centre in Los Angeles, offering educational courses on Jewish feminism, has attracted large numbers of women seeking to express themselves spiritually. In the United States there are now over seven-hundred women rabbis across the Jewish denominations, and women have also become cantors. This was particularly significant for the Conservative movement given its adherence to halakhah. 9 Sheila Jelen, “Reading and Writing Women: Minority Discourse in Feminist Jewish Literary Studies,” Prooftexts 25, no. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 2005): 195.

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than focusing on the tradition, or Jewish culture per se, the most recent wave of Jewish feminism has appropriated such criteria as anti-racism, post-colonial theory, queer theory, notions of transgender, women-of-color consciousness, and eco-feminism, and writers have attempted to broaden the definition of biological/cultural sex, and to provide an altogether more contextual or self-defining approach. Notably, the First-Wave was characterized by women’s activism toward gaining political emancipation, and equal opportunities in education, the vote, the “Marriage Question,” and the right to pursue formerly gender exclusive careers. Accordingly, AngloReformism, and subsequently Liberal Judaism, generally sought a degree of separation from the tradition, and the rejection, or qualification, of halakhah. The ethos of the Second-Wave, nevertheless, was characterized by the drive for equal access in all Jewish denominations, and calls for more opportunities in the workforce, as well as the ending of legal and unofficial sex discrimination. However, the key issues for both periods were similar, including women’s access to authoritative interpretation of the sacred texts, sexual equality in the synagogue, the language and imagery of the liturgy, access to formal education, and women’s inclusion in the minyan.10 The Third-Wave, however, has declined to outline any single issue, unified cause, manifesto, or cohesive goal as indicative of its contemporary aims. This might be because there has been progress and reform in all Jewish denominations, including Orthodoxy.11 Therefore, there is a sharply different mood and teleology between adherents of these respective periods. Their feminist aspirations

While Jewish feminists have challenged the masculinist Godlanguage and theology of the tradition, all denominations have declined to alter the Hebrew liturgy, and there have been only modest inroads concerning images of God. Indeed, as the denominations have been subject to change, the tradition it seems has not. 11 The foundation of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance in 1997 has ensured that the agunah remains a public issue. Orthodox communities have also held Bat Mitzvahs, permitted girls to undertake a comprehensive Jewish education, and witnessed the establishment, despite opposition, of women’s tefillah (prayer) groups. 10

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have been addressed by the wider community, but not all, and reforms have been sufficient for some, but again, not all. Susannah Heschel has written prolifically during both waves of activism, though her writing is generally Second-Wave in perspective. She argues that the core problem for Jewish feminism is, or was, women’s subordination to male authority. Accordingly, the movement is no longer about gaining equality with men, as there is little more to be achieved by imitating male Jewishness, nor is it about defining oppression with non-traditional criteria considered more important than the tradition itself. Instead, Heschel notes, the point of feminism is to generate institutions and mental frameworks through which Jewish women can act as their own authorities, consequently determining for themselves the particular facet of their Jewishness that best expresses their identity. For Heschel, the product of the Second-Wave is that contemporaneous feminists have been given freedom of choice among the various traditions of Judaism, and can act as their own authorities,12 though that capacity is necessarily limited in Orthodox circles. Although it is difficult to discount the religio-feminist advances of the Second-Wave, particularly given that by 2001 over three-hundred women had been ordained as rabbis,13 it is evident that the concepts of Messianic redemption, a final judgment, and resurrection, all integral elements of classical Judaism already discarded as ethically or rationally unpalatable by modern liberal Judaisms, have also been jettisoned by Jewish feminist theology. Danya Ruttenberg’s comment in the introduction to Yentl’s Revenge (2001), a cultural anthology indicative of the Third-Wave, perhaps exemplifies this concern, particularly voiced by Melissa Raphael:14 “In some ways Judaism has become an entirely different religion.”15 12 Susannah Heschel, “Foreword: It’s Not About Equality – It’s About Who’s in Charge!” in Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (New York: Seal Press, 2001), xv-xvii. 13 The so called “glass ceiling,” however, continues to operate, and most congregations decline to appoint women as rabbis. “Tokenism” appears to be the norm. 14 See Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai.” 15 Danya Ruttenberg, introduction to Yentl’s Revenge, xx.

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Even Judith Plaksow’s Standing Again at Sinai, purportedly theological, rarely mentions the eschatological dimensions of Jewish thought, despite the fact that eschatological optimism has sustained Jewish religionists throughout Judaism’s history. Raphael notes that Jewish women’s religious thought will not attain the status of the Torah, the sum of Israel’s body of sacred knowledge, by alone insisting on its autonomy, equality of religious access, moral critique of the androcentrism of the tradition, and by the reinterpretation of gender relevant rituals and stories.16 On Being A Jewish Feminist, published in 1983, was the classic, and essential, celebration of feminist religious thought of the Second-Wave,17 and, generally, called for the necessary development of innovative feminist theologies. Yentl’s Revenge, by stark contrast, is noticeable for its avoidance of religion, and its focus upon Jewish social, cultural, and secular issues. Ruttenberg concludes that if Jews are to continue as a “light unto the nations,” the “rampant” classism of the community must be addressed, and likewise, the relationship between the European Jews and other people of color, including Jewish people of color, must be scrutinized. Additionally, for Ruttenberg, the particularistic notion of the “chosen people” must be reinterpreted in order to avoid the accusation of xenophobia.18 Problematically, however, Jewish otherness has, since the beginning, been integral to the Israelite mission, as Raphael notes: The two poles (if that is what they are) of modern and postmodern Judaism come together in their rejection of supernatural divine authority, which has, in their view, been at least compromised by the patriarchal nature of Judaism. As a result, Jewish feminist theology is barely or not at all founded in the transcendent obligations to the unheimlich dimension of the

Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 199. See On Being A Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (1983; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1995). 18 Ruttenberg, introduction, xxi. 16 17

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holy and the supernatural (rather than merely ethical) vocation of election attending such.19

Accordingly, postmodern Jewish historiography’s repeated declaration that Jewish history has numerous ethnicities and locations is indicative of the pluralizing, anti-redemptive stance of current Jewish feminist discourse.20 Ruttenberg argues that Yentl’s Revenge illustrates the diversity of young Jewish feminists, and the independent ability of women to be any type of Jew that they should determine.21 Thus, she suggests, Jewish feminism is no longer merely the domain of religion, and Jewishness can indeed be based upon ethnic and cultural distinctions.22 Accordingly, in the anthology, Sarah Coleman identifies herself as “a secular, or cultural, Jew,”23 Eve Rosenbaum celebrates her label as an apikores (an apostate or heretic),24 and Ursula Katan refuses to acknowledge the God of Judaism.25 This secularizing impetus, according to Tova Hartman, ne-

Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 200. Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 200 n8. See Michael Myers, Judaism Within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). 21 For representative examples of Third-Wave diversity see Carole Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2000); Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society, trans. Saadya Sternberg (Walton: Brandeis University Press, 2004); Wendy Zierler, And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Esther Schely Newman, Our Lives Are but Stories: Narratives of Tunisian-Israeli Women (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002); Susan Sered, Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 22 Ruttenberg, introduction, xx, xxiii. 23 Sarah Coleman, “Not Lost: A Jewish Feminist Atheist Meditates on Intermarriage,” in Yentl’s Revenge, 68. 24 Eve Rosenbaum, “The Word,” in Yentl’s Revenge, 95. 25 Ursula Katan, “To Open My Mouth and Speak What I Know,” in Yentl’s Revenge, 159. 19 20

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glects to acknowledge the religious spirit embedded in the traditional communities and their institutions.26 Tova Hartman argues that contemporary disregard for the religious experience has led to the creation of a noticeable gap between anti-religious Jewish feminists and their religious sisters. She concludes that feminism, so far, has not offered a positive spiritual framework that is able to contend with religious life. Moreover, feminism’s antagonism toward Judaism has blocked women’s path to developing a full understanding of those who have decided to stay within the domain of the tradition. Hartman notes that lives have been indelibly scarred by the void left by the absence of the tradition, which cannot be replaced by any modern source of meaning. For her, the remedy begins with an assumption not to exit the tradition. Rather, it is necessary to engage in it and to recognize its innumerable problems without apologia: We make a mistake, and indulge a prejudice, when we label those who stay as uneducated, spineless, blindly dogmatic, or slaves of false consciousness. We should, as feminists, stop assuming an imperative to exit the tradition. If we choose instead to engage the tradition – recognizing its jagged edges without either glossing them over apologetically or running away because they’re too sharp – we can then begin to expand our sense of what it means to live within a tradition.27

Certainly, the development of postmodernist Jewish feminist identities often leads to questions of whether “new” spiritualities, independent of the tradition, can be defined as Jewish at all. Melissa Raphael notes that postmodern religious identity can be inclusive and plural, though is changeable, dependent on the subject’s mood, and relevant to the perspective of the observer.28 Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism, 2-3. Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism, 3. 28 Melissa Raphael, “Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism, and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities,” Nova Religio 1, no. 2 (April 1998): 198. 26 27

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Of course, the post-Jewish identity of those who decide not to practice Judaism is not the same as the post-Christian identity of those who leave Christianity. For Raphael, there is no such thing as a truly post-Jewish Jew, as according to most rabbinical sources, Jewishness is ineradicable given that a Jew is defined by their birth to a Jewish mother. Furthermore, Jewishness is not merely a matter concerning the assent of intellect or faith, but is relevant to history, culture, and perhaps a certain temper of the soul.29 As we have seen in Reuben Sachs, when Judith Quixano is compelled to “marry out” there remains an over-plus of spiritual meaning in her life, independent of that of the Jewish community as a whole: Is life over for Judith, or at least all that makes life beautiful, worthy – a thing in any way tolerable? The ways of joy like the ways of sorrow are many; and hidden away in the depths of Judith’s life – though as yet she knows it not – is the germ of another life, which shall quicken, grow, and come forth at last. Shall bring with it no doubt, pain and sorrow, and tears; but shall bring also hope and joy, and that quickening of purpose which is perhaps as much as any of us should expect or demand from Fate.30

For Amy Levy also, Jewish identify is ineradicable. In Reuben Sachs, despite her separation from the community, the reader is informed that Judith will give birth. She and her offspring will live. Nevertheless, the secularization of the community, which has, generally, been underway since the Enlightenment, demonstrates that Jewish identity, far from being intrinsically durable, is culturally and socially eradicable. This is why the desacrilising effects of modernity, and postmodernity, remain a prominent issue for contemporary religious feminists. In 1990, the United States National Jewish Population Survey discovered that fifty-two percent of married 29 30

67.

Raphael, “Goddess Religion,” 201. Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (London: Macmillan, 1888), 266-

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Jews had chosen non-Jewish partners. Subsequently, demographers, perhaps rather sensationally, predicted that the number of Jews in the United States would rapidly drop. As early as 1977, Elihu Bergman predicted that the American Jewish population would reduce from five-and-a-half million to less than ten thousand by 2076.31 In sum, the Second and Third-Waves of Jewish feminism have been a product of the modern, and postmodern, shift toward egalitarianism and the focus upon the immediacy of women’s experience.32 The individual feminist has thus come to stand in ethical authority over the content of the tradition.33 Accordingly, Jewish feminism, generally, has insisted upon its independence, its drive for equality of religious access, its challenge to the androcentrism of traditional Judaism, and the necessity of reinterpreting, and developing, gender-relevant rituals.34 Such criteria have, conversely, impeded the development of a Jewish feminist theology in so far as such might be an exposition of revelation. Additionally, a review of the current issues central to Jewish feminist discourse, as we have seen, suggests that the desire to produce a systematic, constructive theology is almost nonexistent, particularly given that such an undertaking is highly complex, involving intricate debates concerning, not only the gender of God, but also the nature and activities of the divine presence, and how the individual feminist relates to this deity and the traditions articulating its nature. The close of the Second-Wave was distinctly rejectionist, with feminist writers en masse having broadly rejected the tradition as irredeemably sexist and discriminatory. Both Judith Plaskow and Judith Romney Wegner suggest that little might be salvaged from the tradition.35 And yet, despite this generally bleak appraisal, the Third-Wave is not all bad news for religious feminists or the tradiColeman, “Not Lost,” 67. Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 198. 33 Susannah Heschel, “Current Issues in Jewish Feminist Theology,” Jewish-Christian Relations: A Documentary Survey 19, no. 2 (1986): 31. 34 Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 199. 35 Arnold Jacob Wolf, “The New Jewish Feminism,” Judaism 47, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 351. 31 32

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tion. Judith Hauptman, for example, in her 1998 study of rabbinic writing, notes that the rabbis, from within a patriarchal framework, undoubtedly tried to alleviate the biblical status of women. While they did not seek to alter women’s subordinate status, they attempted to introduce numerous corrective measures to ameliorate gender inequality and the vulnerability of women to men. This included the eradication of long standing abusive behaviors and the granting of previously unavailable benefits to women, particularly in relation to marriage and divorce. For Hauptman, the rabbis, not as feminists but as “helpers” to women, attempted to close the gap between the enlightened social philosophy of the prophetic tradition and the secondary position of women in the tradition, without critiquing the sacred texts. Thus, in the key areas of halakhah affecting women, many significant changes were implemented. Hauptman concludes that as in recent centuries law has developed toward the humane treatment of the underprivileged, so too rabbinic Judaism moved toward becoming a modified, benevolent patriarchy.36 This intra-Judaic struggle to negotiate the relationship between halakhah and ethics has dominated modern Jewish religious thought.37 Rachel Adler, synonymous with Second-Wave activism particularly, lived for many years as an Orthodox Jew, though later opted for Reform Judaism. She has partially retracted a number of earlier Second-Wave claims, yet continues to revere aspects of the tradition, and is committed to the preservation of the halakhic sysJudith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998), 4. See also Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Joel Wolowelsky, Women, Jewish Law, and Modernity: New Opportunities in a PostFeminist Age (Hoboken: Ktav Publishing House, 1997). 37 Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 204. See Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003); Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). In Israel women have been trained as halakhic advisors (Yo’atzot halakhah), particularly concerning the laws of Niddah and Tarahat ha Mishpacha (menstrual and ritual purity laws). 36

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tem. Adler insists that theology’s role is to enable the texts of the tradition, and the life of the religious community, to persistently reveal themselves to one another in order that the sacred meanings of both the texts, and experience, might be renewed. Through this process, she argues, God can become present. For Adler, therefore, a particular sacred text can be made accountable for theological questions and be redeemed by learning Torah from it. The concept of telling stories about the law is perhaps quintessentially Jewish, as stories produce law while being not themselves normative.38 Accordingly, Adler states: I am concerned not only with critiquing androcentric structures, categories, and motifs and constructing feminist theory and interpretation, but also with mending and healing Judaism by encountering, renewing and reclaiming the holiness in texts. The theological questions I ask of a text are designed to interrogate its moral universe, to hold the text accountable, and to redeem the text by learning Torah from it.39

Adler’s Engendering Judaism declines to analyze leading theologians such as Franz Rosenzweig and Eugene Borowitz,40 yet demonstrates an acute awareness that feminism will have to come to terms with: “theologies of transcendence [that] reject the human domain – the physical, the sensuous, the immanent – by relegating it to women.”41 Additionally, as we have seen in chapter two, Naomi Graetz has produced feminist midrashim, while Tamar Ross, writing from an Orthodox perspective, has reviewed the challenges feminism poses to the tradition in her Expanding the Palace of Torah. She concludes, while acknowledging the androcentrism of the rabbinic tradition, that the aspirations of the feminist

Adler, Engendering Judaism, xxv, 90. Adler, Engendering Judaism, xxv. 40 Wolf, “The New Jewish Feminism,” 354. 41 Adler, Engendering Judaism, 89. 38 39

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movement can be accommodated to Orthodoxy.42 Nonetheless, the Third-Wave, following on from the Second, has continued to be generally rejectionist as regards to the religious tradition. Indeed, writers working within the tradition are not the norm. It is not surprising that during the early 1990s, David Blumenthal decided to structure his theology of the Holocaust around a dialogue with Christian feminist theologians rather than Jewish feminists.43 In Yentl’s Revenge, Ryiah Lilith’s, “Challah for the Queen of Heaven,” for example, attempts to reconcile Witchcraft’s Pagan notion of the Goddess with Judaism. She identifies herself as both Pagan and Jewish, and argues that if she had not discovered Witchcraft, she might have avoided organized religion altogether:44 “In Jewish services, I feel connected to other Jews; in Pagan rituals, I feel connected to the Goddess; and in Jewish Pagan rituals, I feel at home and at peace. I don’t believe that that makes me less of a Jew; it simply makes me another type of Jew.”45 This approach is indicative of the Third-Wave reliance upon the immediacy of the individual feminist’s experience, and the propensity to stand over and above the tradition. The secularizing impetus of the Third-Wave causes division in Jewish feminism, as Tova Hartman notes: Feminism, while offering a cogent assessment of traditional religions’ many pitfalls, has not acknowledged the religious spirit embedded within traditional religious communities and institutions. This disregard leads to a kind of communication gap between antireligious feminists and their religious sisters, whose choice to remain so blatantly under patriarchal authority seems baffling. The nonreligious often cannot accept or perhaps do not perceive what in the eyes of many religious women is a simple, intuitive truth: feminism has not thus far offered a posSee Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2004). 43 See David Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (London: John Knox Press, 1993). 44 Ryiah Lilith, “Challah for the Queen of Heaven,” in Yentl’s Revenge, 110. 45 Lilith, “Challah for the Queen,” 111. 42

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NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY itive spiritual framework that stands up against the richly textured experience of religious life.46

Hartman seeks to reengage those feminists estranged from the tradition and argues: “This ‘reengagement’ with tradition is a process that I believe can be humanly honest and spiritually enriching.”47 Comparably, the legacy of Amy Levy is that she, aware of secularization and the counter attractions of Christian society, also sought to reengage Anglo-Jewish women alienated from the tradition. Hartman too iterates classically First-Wave concerns, particularly in her call for a subjective liturgy. She concludes that women require: “renewed and meaningful intimate connection with prayer, beyond its mandatory and/or social aspect.”48 Additionally, Tamar Ross argues that traditional Judaism can accommodate feminism: The cumulative understanding of revelation allows us to view the phenomenon of feminism itself – even if it appears to stem from sources outside of Judaism – as a gift from God. In this sense, assimilating feminism into Judaism is no different than the imbibing of Aristotelianism by Maimonidean rationalism or the absorption of certain ideas from Gnosticism and the Neoplatonic tradition by the Kabbalah, among other examples. What we are now beginning to know is being bestowed upon us. We are the beneficiaries of what has gone before us, as we grope toward a new light reaching out to us from God. Listening to feminist claims with sympathy and understanding need not be thought of as a deep violation of Jewish tradition. Instead, it should be regarded as a spiritual undertaking of the first order.49

Jewish feminism might well consider its reengagement with the tradition, and its androcentric texts, for in the past Judaism freHartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism, 2-3. Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism, 3. 48 Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism, 131. 49 Ross, Expanding the Palace, 10. 46 47

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quently assimilated the practices and philosophies of other cultures and religious traditions. Michael Hilton, for example, argues that “Judaism often developed and changed in response to Christianity.”50 Likewise, Hartman notes that modern Orthodoxy has assimilated Western ethics and nationalism.51 In a tradition as rich and diverse as Judaism, there are inevitably, again Hartman: “jagged edges,” although this need not be “an imperative to exit the tradition.”52 As Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg writes: “So I live with conflict. I live with it every day, in a thousand ways that pull me in one direction or another. I have come to realize that the conflict is a sign of health, not my confusion; the tension is a measure of the richness of my life, not of its disorderliness.”53 According to Melissa Raphael, feminism’s inquiry into how religio-social communities have both prevented and enabled women’s spiritual self-expression has yet to satisfactorily articulate the transformative immanence of the divine presence: the transcendent or mysterium tremendum. Yet, this thesis has argued that in a different way Amy Levy tried to do just that. Since then, however, Jewish feminists have been critical of binary dualisms that produce a hierarchy of experience and values, including the foundational theological concept of kedushah. Jewish feminism, in general, allied with a desacrilising nature of liberal individualism, has relegated the question of transcendence obsolete, gynophobic, and separatist.54 Accordingly, despite considerable effort to equalize the status of women in all Jewish denominations, the historicist, ethicizing Reform legacy of Levy’s “Judaism,” and of Jewish feminist theology, has left little room for intellectual inquiry into the possibility of God’s cosmic and historical self-revelation. Instead, the hermeMichael Hilton, The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1994), 2. 51 Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism, 10. 52 Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism, 3. 53 Blu Greenberg, On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition (1981; rpt. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 168. 54 Raphael, “Standing at a Demythologized Sinai,” 199. See T. Drorah Setel, “Roundtable Discussion: Feminist Reflections on Separation and Unity in Jewish Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2 (1986): 113-18. 50

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neutical, liturgical, and historiographical efforts of Jewish feminist religious studies have been directed at devising the ritual means, and historic grounds, for sexual equality in religion, and as Raphael notes, it is questionable as to whether this socio-religious scholarship has yet demonstrated how women’s Judaism might reveal God’s presence and will to Israel as a collective within the scheme of Jewish salvation. The Jewish feminist theological project has further inherited the post-Holocaust theological inclination to point to the absence of God from the victims. God is thus sexually, politically, and historically elusive to women.55 However, the recent anthology New Jewish Feminism, edited by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, is perhaps more encouraging.56 A section is devoted to “Women and Theology,” and while the contributors examine secular, cultural, and political issues, there is distinct focus on essential religious concerns such as women’s spirituality, access to, and interpretation of, the sacred texts, women’s rituals, and women’s leadership. This is not surprising as many of the authors are themselves rabbis. Nonetheless, the conclusions drawn are perhaps little different to the appraisals of Jewish feminist theology uttered during the 1980s and 1990s. As Donna Berman notes: The exclusion of women from traditional theological discourse within Judaism reflected a denial of women’s full humanity. The question for Jewish feminist thinkers and all those who seek gender justice in Judaism is, can we dislodge the manifestations of this denial and still have something that is recognizably Jewish? Or is sexism so intricately woven into the fabric of Jewish law and theology that it is impossible to separate out, rendering any attempt to eradicate it futile?57

Raphael’s The Female Face seeks to combat this absence for women. New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future, ed. Elyse Goldstein (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2009). 57 Donna Berman, “Major Trends in Jewish Feminist Theology: The Work of Rachel Adler, Judith Plaskow, and Rebecca Alpert,” in The New Jewish Feminism, 13. 55 56

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As we have seen, a sizeable proportion of Jewish feminists have been unable to reconcile their own beliefs with the androcentrism of the tradition. This underlying current is perhaps most aptly summarized by Jean-Paul Sartre’s conclusion that even if God does exist, he should be rejected as the concept of a divine presence negates personal freedom.58 Perhaps the quandary facing Jewish feminists is unsolvable. There are those whose feminist aspirations cannot be met by Orthodoxy, and Reform and Liberal Judaisms have often seemed equally, if differently, androcentric, or too watered down to be authentic versions of Judaism. For those unwilling, or technically untrained, to approach the sacred texts, new religious authorities and texts, are from a traditional viewpoint, not authentically Jewish, or in some cases, not Jewish at all. And what of Jewish feminist theologies: which sources should be applied, which model of the divine presence will be used, what will be God’s relationship with Jewish women? Indeed, is it possible, as Elyse Goldstein argues, that “we [are] witnessing ‘post feminist’ Judaism, where the gains of feminism are taken for granted as givens”?59 Thankfully, as a historian it is not my task to provide the answer to these problems. My task has been to demonstrate that the spiritual-political critique that founds Second-Wave Jewish feminism in America had been anticipated, articulated, and explored by at least Anglo-Jewish women writers during the First-Wave. Having concluded my book, there is perhaps one final question that requires some brief response. Namely, would Amy Levy still feel a sense of stagnation and alienation in the current AngloReform community? During her lifetime Reform Judaism was characterized by its inaction concerning the “Woman Question.” A few minor changes were introduced at the West London Synagogue, but segregation of the sexes remained, and many prayers were still spoken in Hebrew. However, by the 1960s men and women were permitted to sit together, girls were offered a coming of age ceremony or “confirmation,” women could be counted in a minyan, study the sacred texts, and be called to read Torah. The first 58 Quoted by Karen Armstrong, A History of God: From Abraham to the Present: the 4000-Year Quest for God (London: Vintage, 1999), 443. 59 Elyse Goldstein, introduction to New Jewish Feminism, xxv.

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woman rabbi in Britain was ordained in 1975. Nevertheless, while women could become rabbis they were still barred in synagogue from performing certain roles. By the 1990s, due to their increase in numbers and influence, women rabbis constituted a significant group of new religious leaders. Jonathan Romain notes that women in the British rabbinate gave “voice to a different perspective of Judaism and Jewish spirituality.”60 How closely that voice has been attended to and how authoritative their perspective has become still remains to be seen. On the one hand, in the light of Amy Levy’s concerns regarding the alienation of female spirituality, the prohibition on women studying and interpreting the sacred texts, and the sexism of the traditional liturgy, the advances of the Second-Wave would doubtless have given her cause for encouragement. What is more, it is painfully sad that Levy died mere years before the inception of Lily Montagu’s Liberal Judaism. Indeed, the Anglo-Liberal movement’s central aim was the equalization of the sexes in religious life, and while the Anglo-Reformers were conservative in their approach to the “Woman Question,” both Montagu, and Claude Montefiore, were determined to end gender exclusionism in the community, the synagogue, the liturgy, and regarding women’s religious leadership. On the other hand, however, Levy’s inability to locate the divine presence in either the religious institutions of her day or in the sacred texts might well have continued to be a source of her alienation from the tradition. Many female rabbis in Britain have been able to analyze the dynamics and implications of an androcentric tradition, and have recognized the necessity of developing feminist theology, but have been unable to offer radical answers in mainstream British communities. Although significant crossdenominational advances have been made concerning women’s equal participation in the synagogue (including in American Orthodox communities), the masculinist theological models of the tradition, much of its liturgical imaginary, and the domination of the

60 Jonathan Romain, Reform Judaism and Modernity: A Reader (London: SCM, 2004), 256. See Hear Our Voice: Women in the British Rabbinate, ed. Sybil Sheridan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998).

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halakhic process by a male Orthodox rabbinate, continues to be problematic for Jewish feminists, as it was for Levy. In short, the writing of Amy Levy is indispensable as evidence of Jewish feminist spirituality and theology at the fin de siècle, but also as a much needed corrective to the androcentric historiography of Reform Judaism that has generally been the hallmark of AngloJewish historiography.

GLOSSARY aggadah: (lit. “narration”) the (non-legal) sayings, legends, interpretations, and folklore of rabbinic literature. agunah: (lit. “bound,” “tied,” or “anchored”) a deserted wife whose husband cannot be located to grant her a get. aliyah: (lit. “ascending”) being called up to read the Torah aloud to the congregation, or can refer to immigration to Israel. almanah: widow. Amida: the central prayer of all four services: shacharit (morning), mincha (afternoon), maariv (evening), and mussaf (additional). Anoraim: rabbis of the Talmudic period cited in the Gemara. apikores: an apostate or heretic. Ashkenazim (plural): Jews of central and Eastern European origin. ba’al: husband. Bar Mitzvah: (lit. “Son of the Commandment”) a boy who has obtained legal and religious maturity on his thirteenth birthday. Bat Mitzvah: (lit. “Daughter of the Commandment”) a girl who has obtained legal and religious maturity on her twelfth or thirteenth birthday. berakhah: blessing. Beth Din: (lit. “house of judgment”) rabbinical court. Binah: (lit. “understanding”) Sefirah in Kabbalah associated to women and the feminine. In rabbinic Judaism Binah refers to intuitive ability exceeding that in men. Challah: ritual separation of a portion of dough. chametz: leavened food. Chukkat ha-goy: rabbinic prohibition on the use of gentile practices. darsheni: interpret me! da-ta-kala: weak-minded. derash: (lit. “exposition”) inquire or seek. Eshet Chayil: woman of worth or valor. chevrot: Ashkenazi fraternity. 217

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galut: exile. gashmiut: physicality. Gemara (Aramaic): (lit. “study”) commentary on the Mishnah. get: bill of divorce. goy: non-Jew. Haggadah: (lit. “telling”) book from which the seder service is conducted on Pesach. halakhah: (lit. “the way”) Jewish law, including the oral tradition and the Torah; halakhic: connected to Jewish law; halakhot (plural). Hanukkah: the Festival of Lights celebrating the Maccabean victory of 167 BCE. Haskalah: (lit. “cultivation of the intellect”) the Jewish Enlightenment. Havdalah: ceremony to mark the end of a holiday. herem: expulsion from the community. hesed: kindness. isha: woman. Kabbalah: (lit. “received tradition”) the Jewish mystical tradition. Kaddish: prayer recited in the daily services and by mourners. Kashrut: (lit. “fit” or “proper”) Jewish dietary law. kavanah: spiritual intention, particularly during prayer. kavod: honor, respect. Kavod ha-tzibbur: the honor of the community. kedushah: holiness. Ketubah: (lit. “document”) Jewish marriage contract. kinyan: an act that formalizes a legal transaction. kosher: food fit for consumption according to Kashrut. Ladino: Mingling of Spanish and Hebrew sometimes spoken by the Sephardim. lakahat: (lit. “to take”) to marry. lulav: palm branch. Mashiach: Messiah. Maskilim: followers or adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment. matzah: unleavened bread. mechitza: (lit. “divider”) partition in some synagogues which separates the sexes. Megillah: the book of Esther. menuha: haven. mesolelot: lesbianism.

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midrash: (lit. “inquiry” or “investigation”) Jewish biblical exegesis. Midrash (capitalized) refers to the body of rabbinic literature. mikveh: ritual bath used by a married woman after menstruation. minyan: (lit. “number”) quorum of ten required for a prayer service. In most Orthodox communities only males count toward the minyan. Mishnah: (lit. “repetition” or “study and review”) second-century CE rabbinic legal codes. mitzvah: commandment; mitzvot (plural). mohar: bride price. Nashim: women or wives. Nerot: the ritual lighting of candles. Niddah: a menstruating woman required to undertake ritual immersion. Onah: rabbinic sexual obligation a man owes his wife. Ostjudische (German): immigrants. Pesach: Passover (commemorating the exodus from Egypt). Purim: (lit. “lots”) Festival commemorating Jewish deliverance from Haman’s genocidal plans as told in the Megillah. remez: hints (particularly in Midrash). responsa: legal opinions written by the rabbis. Rosh Hashanah: (lit. “Head of the Year”) beginning of the Jewish new year. Rosh Hodesh: (lit. “Head of the Month”) the New Moon, or first day of the Hebrew month. ruhniut: spirituality. Saboath: God of the armies. Sanhedrin: supreme judicial body in ancient Jerusalem. seder: order or arrangement. Sephardim (plural): refers to Jews of Spanish or Portuguese origin. Sefirah: one of the ten stages of emanation of the Godhead in Jewish mysticism; Sefirot (plural). Shabbat: (lit. “rest” or “cessation”) the Jewish Sabbath, Friday evening to Saturday night; Shabbos (Yiddish). Shavuot: (lit. “weeks”) the Festival of Weeks. Shekhinah: Jewish mysticism describes her as the feminine aspect of the divine presence, although the biblical and rabbinic traditions refer to Shekhinah as the divine presence in the world.

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Shema: (lit. “hear”) refers to Deuteronomy 6:4 and is part of a prayer said twice daily: “Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One.” Shoah: (lit. “chaos,” “tragedy,” or “destruction”) term increasingly used to refer to the Holocaust (Greek: “the destruction of life by fire”), the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. shofar: ram’s horn trumpet. shtetl (Yiddish): Eastern European village. shul (Yiddish): synagogue. shuttaf: partner. Siddur: (lit. “order”) prayer book. Siddur Nashim: prayer book for women. sod: mystery in Torah interpretation. sukkah: booth. Sukkot: the Feast of Booths. tallit: (lit. “cloak”) prayer shawl. Talmud: (lit. “instruction” or “learning” or “study”) sixty-three volumes containing the Mishnah and the Gemara. The Babylonian version was completed in approximately 500 BCE and the Jerusalem version in the preceding century. Tanakh: The Hebrew Bible (thirty-nine books) including the Torah, Nevi’im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings). Tannaim: rabbis contributing to the Mishnah. tefillah: prayer. tefillin: phylacteries – small black cases containing biblical passages which are fixed to the head and arms by straps during weekday morning prayers. Tehinot (Yiddish): special prayers for women. tikkun: rehabilitation, repair. tikkun olam: (lit. “repair of the world”) the imperative to contribute to the betterment of humankind. Torah: (lit. “Teaching”) the Five Books of Moses, the Written Law. Tumah: ritual impurity. Tzniut: modesty. Yeshivah: (lit. “sitting”) traditional academy devoted to the study of the sacred texts. Yesod: foundation. Yiddish: the historical language of the Ashkenazim resulting from a fusion of primarily German and Hebrew, but also Aramaic, Old French, Old Italian, and Slavic languages.

GLOSSARY Yo’atzot Halakha: female law consultants. Yom Kippur: Day of Atonement. Zohar: (Book of Splendor) Kabbalah’s main text.

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Angell James, John. Female Piety: or the Young Woman’s Friend and Guide through Life to Immortality. New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1853. Antler, Joyce. The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century. New York: Free Press, 1997. Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism London: Rutgers UP, 1990. A Reader of Early Liberal Judaism: The Writings of Israel Abrahams, Claude Montefiore, Lily Montagu and Israel Mattuck. Edited by Edward Kessler. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2004. Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: From Abraham to the Present: the 4000-Year Quest for God. London: Vintage, 1999. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy, edited by J. Dover Wilson. 1868; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Aschkenasy, Nechama. “A Non-Sexist Reading of the Bible.” Midstream 27, no. 6 (June/July 1981): 51-55. Aveling, Edward, and Eleanor Marx. The Woman Question. London: S. Sonneschein, 1886. Bach, Alice. Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1999. Baeck, Leo. Judaism and Christianity. Philadelphia: JPSA, 1960. Baker, Adrienne. The Jewish Woman in Contemporary Society: Transitions and Traditions. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Bal, Lieke. “Head Hunting Judith on the Cutting Edge of Knowledge.” In The Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna, edited by Athalya Brenner, 253-85. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Baldwin, Joyce. Esther: An Introduction and Commentary. Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1984. Balfour, Clara. The Women of Scripture. London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1847. Balin, Carole. To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2000. Banks, Olive. Becoming a Feminist: The Social Origins of “First Wave” Feminism. Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986. _____. Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Barach Fishman, Sylvia. A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 1995.

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Stocker, Margarita. Judith Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Stowe, Harriet. Women in Sacred History: Sketches Drawn from Scriptural, Historical and Legendary Sources. New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1874. Stulman, Louis. Jeremiah. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005. Styler, Rebecca. “A Scripture of Their Own: Nineteenth-Century Bible Biography and Feminist Biblical Criticism.” Christianity and Literature 57, no. 1 (Autumn 2007): 65-85. Suffer Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Edited by Martha Vicinus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Swidler, Leonard. “Jesus Was a Feminist.” Catholic World 212 (January 1971): 177-83. _____. Women in Judaism: The Status of Women in Formative Judaism. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1976. Taking the Fruit: Modern Women’s Tales of the Bible. Edited by Jane Zones, 2nd ed. 1981; rpt. San Diego: Woman's Institute for Continuing Jewish Education, 1989. Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985. Taylor, Barbara. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. London: Virago Press, 1983. Teubal, Savina. Sarah the Priestess: The First Matriarch of Genesis. Athens: Swallow Press, 1984. The Absent Mother: Restoring the Goddess to Judaism and Christianity. Edited by Alex Pirani. London: Madala, 1991. The Babylonian Talmud, 18 vols. Edited by I. Epstein. London: Soncino, 1978. The Classic Midrash: Tannaitic Commentaries on the Bible. Edited by Reuven Hammer. New York: Paulist Press, 1995. The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003. Edited by Judith Plaskow and Donna Berman. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. “The Deterioration of the Jewess.” Jewish World, February 22, 1889, 5. The Dynamics of American Jewish History: Jacob Rader Marcus’s Essays on American Jewry. Edited by Gary Zola. New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2004.

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INDEX Aaron of Lincoln, 22 Abraham, 124, 182 Abraham, May, 106 Ackelsberg, Martha, 11 Acts, 132 Adam, 124 Adler, Rachel, 8, 10, 14, 30, 48, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 137, 146, 147, 148, 152, 154, 156, 158, 159, 198, 207, 208, 212, 223 critique of rabbinic Judaism, 146, 147 women as “peripheral” Jews, 14, 147 aggadah, 12, 217 Aguilar, Grace, 67, 173, 179, 223, 233 Ahasuerus, 187, 188, 189 Alderman, Geoffrey, 24, 26, 97, 102, 224 Annual Convention of the National Suffrage Association, 1885, 115 anti-ceremonialism, 3, 134 anti-rabbinism, 3, 89, 134, 196 anti-Semitism, 2, 3, 17, 22, 27, 83, 111, 125, 140 anti-Talmudism, 3, 103, 134, 196 Armstrong, Karen, 53, 79, 213 Arnold, Matthew, 182

Ashkenazim, 23, 24, 44, 138, 178, 217, 258 mass immigration, 44, 109 Balfour, Clara, 115 Banks, Olive, 4, 90, 107, 109, 225 Bar Mitzvah, 100, 153, 217 Bat Mitzvah, 153, 154, 217 Beauvoir, Simone de, 113 Bebbington, David, 108, 127, 138, 157, 160, 179, 226 Berman, Donna, 212 Bevis Marks Synagogue, 24, 97, 104 Biale, Rachel, 48, 138, 152, 156, 168 Blumenthal, David, 79, 209 Booth, Charles, 142 Bristow, Joseph, 37, 38, 66, 227, 238 British Museum, 27, 32, 118, 226 Brooten, Bernadette, 49, 113, 123, 168 Caird, Mona, 30, 164 Cambridge University, 2, 26 Cantor, Aviva, 133 Cheyette, Bryan, 30, 34, 41, 139, 140, 142, 228, 257 Chorim, Shalom ben, 92 Chorin, Aaron, 157

261

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Christ, Carol, 48, 55, 56, 58, 67, 258, 259 Christian anti-Judaism, 86 Church, 22, 40, 76, 102, 104, 107, 108, 114, 115, 130, 180, 234, 235, 237, 238, 245 Coleman, Sarah, 203 Conference of Jewish Women, 1902, 106 Conservative Judaism, 11, 94, 152, 168 Corinthians, 75, 108, 125, 128, 131 Crimean War, 182 Cromwell, Oliver, 23 Crusades, 22 cult of true womanhood, 89, 90, 107, 168 Cyrus, King, 171 Darwin, Charles, 178 David, King, 172 Day of Atonement, 13, 44, 110, 148, 221 Deborah, 180 Derby, Earl of, 25 Deuteronomy, 112, 135 Dickens, Charles, 18 Dinah, 113, 124 Disraeli, Benjamin, 25, 165, 179, 227, 230, 231 Du Maurier, George, 142 Duffy, Bella, 27 Edward I, 23 Einhorn, David, 100 Elijah, 79 Eliot, George, 18, 29, 165, 179, 226, 227 Elisha, 79 Ellis, Havelock, 32

Endelman, Todd, 3, 24, 26, 33, 35, 104, 165, 179, 186 Englander, David, 27, 231 Enlightenment, 99, 109, 157, 205, 218 Epstein Nord, Deborah, 32, 35, 82, 231 Esther, 138, 180, 187, 188, 189, 190 Evangelicalism, 3, 4, 5, 42, 45, 46, 87, 89, 94, 101, 104, 107, 108, 109, 126, 127, 134, 138, 141, 148, 157, 160, 168, 171, 172, 179, 191, 196, 226, 238, 239, 251, 257 definition, 127 idealization of women, 90 Eve, 90 Exodus, 55, 82, 112, 174, 175, 187 Ezekiel, 130, 131, 132, 229, 244, 246 Ezrat Nashim, 11 Falk, Marcia, 48, 56, 57, 147, 159, 232 female superiority, 90 feminization of religion, 16, 90, 157 first-century Palestinian Judaism, 48, 63, 84, 85, 87 as representative of Jesus movement, 75, 84, 134 First-Wave feminism, i, 1, 6, 7, 12, 15, 19, 46, 47, 63, 64, 67, 112, 154, 162, 195, 196, 198, 200, 210, 213, 237 definition, 7, 89, 200 Francis, Emma, 32, 36, 40, 41, 65, 115, 141, 179, 186, 229, 233, 234, 257

INDEX Frankau, Julia, 35, 165, 179, 233 Frymer-Kensky, Tivka, 56, 233 Galatians, 111, 131 Galchinsky, Michael, 2, 16, 17, 18, 19, 33, 35, 67, 127, 179, 233, 237 Garnett, Constance and Richard, 32 gashmiut, 13, 14, 82, 159, 218 Geiger, Abraham, 21, 88, 92, 98, 121, 144, 157, 234, 237, 259 Genesis, 91, 108, 113, 175, 254 Gnosticism, 49, 114, 118, 119, 129, 227, 246, 247, 255 God as evil, 79 femininity, 53, 54 masculinity, 6, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59 neuter language, 52, 56, 57 phallocentrism, 58 Goddess, 55, 74, 123, 204, 205, 209, 236, 247, 249, 253, 254 Goethe, Johann, 149, 187 Goldsmid, Lady Louisa, 106 Goldstein, Elyse, 60, 212, 213, 255 Gordon Kuzmack, Linda, 12, 105, 235 Gospel of Philip, 118 Gospels, 49, 69, 70, 74, 76, 78, 79, 84, 86, 92, 94, 95, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126, 129, 130, 131, 134, 238, 246, 257 as protest against mainstream Pharisaic Judaism, 76 as source of Jewish history, 69 Gottlieb, Lynn, 48, 57, 67, 235

263 Graetz, Heinrich, 92 Graetz, Naomi, 67, 68, 72, 74, 198, 208 Greenberg, Blu, 57, 120, 137, 143, 165, 211 Gross, Rita, 52, 53, 58, 74, 236 halakhah, 12, 15, 19, 45, 50, 51, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 68, 70, 75, 88, 95, 100, 104, 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 152, 156, 157, 159, 161, 168, 191, 199, 200, 207, 215 definition, 12, 143, 218 Hale, Sara, 90 Halevi, Jehudah, 88 Half-Empty Bookcase, 1 Hammer, Reuven, 69, 71, 175, 254 Harris, Emily, 84, 85 Hartman, Tova, 161, 162, 198, 203, 204, 209, 211 Haskalah, 73, 87, 144, 218 Hauptman, Judith, 11, 206 Hegel, Georg, 82 Heilmann, Ann, 7, 47, 64, 195, 237 herstory, 1, 113 Heschel, Susannah, 15, 48, 51, 52, 57, 74, 84, 88, 120, 137, 152, 153, 191, 201, 202, 206, 237, 246 Hetherington, Naomi, 28, 32, 35, 41, 42, 44, 162, 164, 224, 238 Hillel, 76 Hilton, Michael, 73, 74, 77, 86, 98, 160, 168, 172, 176, 211 Holdheim, Samuel, 190 Holofernes, 183, 185, 249 Hopkins, Ellice, 180, 245

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Hunt Beckman, Linda, 1, 27, 28, 29, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 65, 88, 95, 98, 140, 161, 172, 253, 257 Hyman, Paula, 11, 50, 51, 95, 120, 137, 190, 191, 226, 240, 255 Ilan, Tal, 54, 60, 85, 239, 250 International Council of Women, 106 Isaiah, 49, 54, 177, 226, 230, 236, 256 Israel, Manasseh ben, 23 Jacob, 175 Jeremiah, 130, 132, 177, 233, 254, 258 Jesus, 18, 22, 37, 63, 64, 75, 76, 78, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 110, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 176, 177, 185, 190, 226, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 243, 245, 249, 251, 254, 256, 257, 259 as liberal Pharisee, 76, 88, 121 attempt to democratize halakhah, 88 cross forced upon, 83 crucifixion, 92 feminine attributes, 90 metamorphosis from Jewish man to Christian divinity, 92 ministry as Jewish renewal movement, 63, 75, 79, 84, 87, 89, 92, 93, 112, 120, 122, 123, 131, 134

movement as alternative to rabbinic Judaism, 87 negation of Messiahship, 4, 76, 82, 84, 88, 91, 92, 116 plight analogous to women’s alienation from the tradition, 82, 84, 93 rejection of bodily resurrection, 81, 92, 93, 132 rejection of transcendental assignment, 78, 80 reverence for the God of Sinai, 93 Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, 109 Jewish association with nervous illnesses, 42, 142 Jewish Board of Deputies, 102 Jewish Board of Guardians, 102, 106 Jewish Chronicle, 15, 28, 29, 31, 36, 43, 45, 71, 102, 139, 223, 228, 229, 242, 243 Jewish emancipation completed in 1858, 25 Naturalisation Act, 1753, 24 Jewish feminist theology, 3, 7, 49, 50, 51, 57, 60, 61, 62, 196, 199, 201, 202, 206, 208, 211, 212, 213 accommodation of halakhah, 58 authenticity, 59, 61, 74, 204, 213 definition, 3 divine liberation, 55

INDEX God as present in the community and the tradition, 61 lack of structure to theological project, 59, 206 limited range of feminist theological sources, 59 liturgy, 56, 173, 200 necessity of innovative feminist theologies, 202 necessity of personal God, 57 radical separation in the tradition, 4 reliance on personal experience, 59 replacement of omnipresent “he”, 52 reunion of masculine and feminine, 54 theology of little importance, 62, 201, 211 Torah and halakhah as representative of God’s voice, 61 Jewish Ladies’ Visiting Association, 106 Jewish League for Woman Suffrage, 106 Jewish Religious Education Board, 102 Jewish Theological Seminary, 67, 168, 255, 256 Jewish women absence from the traditional liturgy, 159 alienation from the tradition, 12, 13, 14, 112, 149, 154, 166, 210

265 as agents of theological transformation, 5 as Other, 11, 58, 59, 232, 233 as semi-demonic, 147 association with Christian culture, 73 Binah, 99, 217 education, 157 exclusion from religious leadership, 12, 59, 181 exemption from time-bound religious observances, 15, 156 inability to study the sacred texts, 12, 15, 59, 94, 146, 150, 159, 214 inadmissibility as witnesses, 15, 125 increased role in volunteer philanthropy, 105 marriage market, 29, 164, 189 mitzvot, 99 redemption, 45, 46, 54, 171, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 183, 186, 196 spiritual superiority, 166 status in first-century Judaism, 85, 122, 123 stereotypes, 17 Jewish World, 139, 254 Joanna, 112 John, 37, 116, 118, 119, 124 Joseph, Morris, 150, 151 Joshua, 175 Judah, 175 Judges, 72, 176 Judith of Bethulia, 138, 180, 182, 183, 185, 188, 190 Jusova, Iveta, 3, 29, 38, 65, 185

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Kabbalah, 53, 54, 55, 147, 174, 210, 217, 218, 221 Kant, Emmanuel, 83 Kaplan, Mordecai, 56 Karaism, 109 Katan, Ursula, 203 kavanah, 14, 139, 218 Koltun, Elizabeth, 11, 48, 51, 143, 191, 255 Lakish, Simeon ben, 187 Lazarus, 114 Lee, Vernon, 27 Leighton, Angela, 37, 65, 94, 242, 258 Leviticus, 39, 125, 148, 156 Levy, Amy, passim “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage,” 38, 80, 192, 193 “A Prayer,” 18, 42, 63, 64, 65, 78, 79, 82, 83, 87, 91, 95, 97, 110, 112 “Christopher Found,” 119 “James Thomson: A Minor Poet,” 66 “Jewish Children (By a Maiden Aunt),” 31, 47, 242 “Jewish Humour,” 29, 47, 71, 72 “Jewish Women and Women’s Rights,” 28 “Magdalen,” 18, 36, 42, 64, 65, 95, 97, 119, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 133 “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day (By a Jewess),” 28, 29, 45, 163, 164, 242 “Patriotism,” 47

“The Ballad of Ida Grey,” 26 “The Ghetto in Florence,” 28 “The Jew in Fiction,” 29, 243 “Women and Club Life,” 28, 192, 243 acquaintance with Karl Pearson, 40 adoption of male voice in poetry, 39 adoration of Edith Creak, 26, 39 alienation from the tradition, 46, 66, 112, 138, 149, 163, 173, 214 alleged homoeroticism, 2, 38 anti-materialism, 140, 141, 173, 185 as irreligious, 43, 185 as pioneer of Second-Wave Jewish feminism, 7, 64, 94, 118, 122, 123, 151, 196 attempt to broaden definition of Jewish spirituality, 63 attendace of Reform Synagogue, 44 awareness of Jewish tradition, 27 birth, 26 Brighton High School, 26, 27, 225 concealment of religious subtext in poetry, 6, 63 cremation, 2, 45 criticism of Orhthodox German-Jewry, 44

INDEX critique of Christian theology, 79, 80, 81, 112, 124, 129 critique of halakhah, 137, 156 critique of marriage market, 30, 165 critique of rabbinic Judaism, 145 deafness, 3, 32 desire for marriage, 40 determination to keep Jesus within Judaism, 89 employment of rabbinic technique, 77 employment of shibboleth, 72, 92 experience of anti-Semitism, 27 failure to take Tripos, 26 idealization of Sephardim, 178 influence of Evangelicalism, 4, 45, 89, 148, 160, 168, 172, 191 influence of First-Wave feminism, 154, 192, 196 influence of German Reformism, 4, 5, 45, 76, 78, 83, 87, 88, 92, 95, 110, 120, 133, 135, 138, 141, 154, 171, 189, 191 influence of traditional Judaism, 3, 124, 134, 177, 191, 196 Jewish identity ineradicable, 205 Levy family, 26, 44 midrash, 18, 46, 64, 69, 70, 75, 78, 81, 92, 94, 110,

267 116, 121, 131, 133, 134, 189 midrashim as personal projections, 71 neuralgia, 3, 32 Newnham College, Cambridge, 26 racial discourse, 31, 40, 42, 142, 178, 179 re-appropriation of Jesus for feminist and Jewish context, 63, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 87 rejection of atheism, 3, 45, 66, 79 responsive to host-culture, 73 reverence for the God of Sinai, 3, 38, 79, 80, 82, 112 reverence for the sacred texts, 171, 172, 176, 177, 181, 187, 196 suicide, 2 sympathy for James Thomson, 66 theology, 3, 5, 49, 134, 149, 178, 215 uncomfortable in Christian society, 27 Liberal Judaism, 13, 103, 104, 105, 186, 192, 193, 225, 250, 253, 257, 259 Lilith, Ryiah, 209 Llewellyn Smith, H., 142 Longstaff, G., 142 Luke, 75, 112, 117, 126, 132 Luther, Martin, 115 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 25

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NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY

Maccabean revolt, 176 Magdalene, Mary, 37, 65, 95, 96, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 130, 131, 133, 227, 229, 237 as Jesus’ lover, 75, 95, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 126, 127 as Jewish spiritual leader, 75, 95, 96, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122 hatred of Christian God, 129, 130, 131, 132 iconography, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119 reverence for the God of Sinai, 135 Magna Carta, 23 Magnus, Katie, 88 Maimonides, Moses, 135, 187 Malachi, 79 Mark, 111, 112, 126, 128 Marks, David Woolf, 109, 149, 150, 158, 173, 174 Marks, Sarah, 26 Marriage Question, 156, 164, 165, 200, 255 Marshall, Alfred, 142 Martha, 114 Marx, Eleanor, 32, 141, 186, 233 Mary (mother of James), 112 Matthew, 91, 121, 125, 173 Mayer Wise, Isaac, 157 mechitza curtain, 11, 95, 99, 137 Messiah definition, 171, 172, 176, 177, 218 Messiah in chains, 55

Messianic redemption, 4, 5, 19, 46, 77, 92, 98, 101, 128, 138, 143, 173, 176, 201 Micah, 177 Midgley, Clare, 17, 18, 109, 245 Midrash, 4, 5, 53, 63, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 173, 174, 175, 198, 219, 227, 229, 235, 237, 239, 246, 253, 254, 259, 260 definition, 68, 70 feminist focus on motherhood, rape, gossip, aging process, 72 feminist midrash, 67 feminist tool for exposing androcentrism, 70 minyan definition, 12 women’s exclusion from, 12, 14, 95, 99, 100, 146, 149, 153, 154, 159, 200, 213, 219 Miriam, 67, 70, 113, 174, 175, 229, 233, 250, 252 Mishnah, 3, 72, 144, 181, 186, 218, 219, 220, 250 Moltmann-Wendel, Elisabeth, 92, 117, 118, 245 Montagu, Lily, viii, 168, 193, 214 Montefiore, Claude, 13, 109, 214, 225, 241 Mordecai, 133, 154, 189, 190, 233 Moses, 12, 23, 54, 91, 98, 130, 144, 153, 175, 177, 220 National Union of Women Workers, 106 New Woman, 2, 7, 35, 38, 40, 43, 47, 64, 65, 81, 162, 168,

INDEX 180, 185, 192, 195, 237, 238, 240, 241, 248, 255, 257 definition, 2 New, Melvyn, 35, 36, 66, 137, 243 Niddah, 156, 219 Orientalism, 4, 17, 30, 31, 98, 134, 157, 162, 163 definition, 98 Orthodox Judaism, 6, 11, 27, 41, 60, 84, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 110, 121, 137, 143, 145, 151, 153, 154, 159, 200, 201, 207, 208, 211, 214, 215, 248 Ozick, Cynthia, 14, 15, 137, 154, 156 Paul, 75, 78, 86, 87, 89, 111, 131 Peter, 119, 131, 132 Petermann, Julius, 118 Pharisaic Judaism, 76, 81, 84, 85, 88, 120, 121, 123, 125 Pistis Sophia, 49, 118, 119, 122, 126, 247, 257 Plaskow, Judith, 8, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 67, 70, 73, 74, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 96, 123, 125, 143, 147, 153, 157, 174, 182, 191, 196, 197, 198, 206, 212, 226, 247, 251, 254, 258, 259 examination of theological anti-Judaism, 83 political lesbianism, 11 Priesand, Sally, 167, 168 Protestantism, 3, 4, 18, 38, 45, 63, 74, 82, 89, 97, 134, 138, 148, 173 criticisms of traditional Judaism, 4

269 Proverbs, 71, 135 Puah, 175 Pullen, Christine, 2, 39, 40, 81, 82, 248 Purim, 146, 172, 187, 219 rabbinic Judaism, 4, 6, 12, 30, 41, 68, 70, 75, 77, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 95, 97, 101, 109, 120, 121, 124, 133, 143, 145, 156, 161, 168, 174, 180, 181, 182, 190, 206, 207, 208, 217, 219 alleged legalism, 46, 75, 87, 88, 126, 139 Radford Ruether, Rosemary, 3, 50, 73, 91, 92, 120, 176, 199, 249 Radford, Earnest and Dollie, 32 Rahab, 175 Raphael, Melissa, 3, 6, 8, 15, 47, 50, 51, 53, 59, 60, 61, 62, 73, 74, 78, 80, 120, 138, 155, 163, 199, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 211, 212, 247, 249 Rebekah, 175, 180 Reconstructionism, 56, 94, 152, 168, 233 Reform Judaism, 3, 5, 13, 18, 48, 58, 76, 85, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 109, 110, 112, 133, 134, 139, 144, 145, 148, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 166, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 187, 188, 193, 207, 213, 214, 215, 247, 248, 249, 250, 256 assimilation of Protestant norms, 45, 97, 100, 101, 102, 148, 160, 165, 190 bibliocentrism, 103, 180

270

NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY

critique of Orthodoxy, 98 critique of rabbinic Judaism, 76, 98, 121 failure of Anglo-Reformism, 16, 27, 98, 101, 103, 104, 109, 110, 150, 154, 155, 158, 161, 193, 213 interpretive liberty, 101, 172, 190 marginalization of halakhah, 95 proto-feminist pledges of German movement, 99, 100, 144, 157 similarity with Orthodoxy, 102, 151 Reimarus, Hermann, 88, 89, 249 Reuben Sachs, 3, 13, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 80, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 193, 196, 205, 240, 242, 243, 246, 250 as novel of revolt, 35 caricature of Jewish physical degeneracy, 35 portrayal of victimised Jewish heroine, 42 Quixano, Judith, 13, 138, 142, 148, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 172, 173, 177, 178, 179, 182, 187, 190, 205 racial discourse, 41, 141

replication of Evangelical criticisms of traditional Judaism, 42 Reyes, Dan, 3, 29, 240 Rich, Adrienne, 73, 74 ritual murder accusation, 22 Rochelson, Meri-Jane, 31, 36, 140, 141, 167, 250 Romain, Jonathan, 150, 174, 214 Romans, 129 Romney Wegner, Judith, 181, 206 Rosenbaum, Eve, 203 Rosenzweig, Franz, 208 Ross, Tamar, 48, 51, 54, 60, 61, 70, 123, 208, 210, 241, 250, 251 Roth, Cecil, 21, 24, 33, 251, 255 Rothschild Battersea, Constance, 106 Rothschild, Lionel de, 25 Routledge, Emily, 106 ruhniut, 13, 14, 159, 219 Ruskin, John, 180, 251 Ruth, 180 Ruttenberg, Danya, 50, 201, 202, 203, 255, 260 Sadducees, 81, 84, 88 Salomons, David, 25 Sarah, 182 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 213 Scheinberg, Cynthia, 2, 28, 36, 37, 38, 64, 65, 66, 72, 124, 127, 131, 133, 140, 141, 150, 233, 245, 252 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 65 Schreiner, Olive, 32

INDEX Schussler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 84, 85, 114, 115, 122, 123, 184, 190, 230, 252 Schwartze, Moritz, 118 Second-Wave Jewish feminism, passim achievements, 214 assumption of Jewish women’s similarity, 199 definition, 1, 6, 7, 200 emergence, 10 separate spheres, 89, 90, 107, 150, 180 Sephardim, 17, 23, 24, 35, 41, 45, 142, 178, 179, 183, 218, 219, 239 Shakespeare, William, 161, 180 Sharot, Stephen, 102, 103, 104, 105, 186, 253 Shaw, George Bernard, 32 Shekhinah, 53, 54, 55, 57, 174, 219 Shepherd, Naomi, 5, 253 Shiprah, 175 Shireff, Emily and Maria, 27 Shoah, 6, 11, 47, 49, 50, 61, 73, 78, 79, 138, 207, 209, 212, 220, 226, 229, 232, 249 Simon, 132 social Darwinism, 2, 40, 42, 46, 105, 142, 143, 176, 179, 186, 237, 258 Society of Jewish Maternity Nurses, 106 Song of Songs, 116 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 115 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 65, 161 Talmud, 3, 14, 39, 49, 53, 55, 63, 76, 84, 85, 88, 111, 128,

271 144, 147, 152, 161, 173, 174, 190, 220, 237, 253, 254 Tamar, 175 Tennyson, Alfred, 161 Third-Wave Jewish feminism, 6, 7, 60, 62, 64, 67, 74, 94, 159, 161, 195, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 206, 209 Thomson, James, 66 tikkun, 53, 220 Timmerman, Joan, 92, 93, 256 Timothy, 108 Toland, John, 24 traditional Judaism, 4, 7, 11, 39, 46, 76, 98, 99, 141, 144, 146, 150, 206, 210 lesbianism, 39, 40 Tzniut, 99, 156, 220 Umansky, Ellen, 57, 58, 59, 60, 67, 104, 105, 168, 190, 229, 232, 256 Union of Jewish Women, 109 usury, 22, 23 Vadillo, Ana Parejo, 28, 35, 39, 65, 257 Valman, Nadia, 17, 30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 84, 85, 127, 140, 141, 142, 162, 163, 164, 165, 169, 178, 179, 180, 186, 224, 247, 257 Vashti, 74 Virago Press, 1 Virgin Mary, 126, 258 Voragine, Jacobus de, 119 Webb, Beatrice, 27 Weiss-Rosmarin, Trude, 10 West London Reform Synagogue, 13, 44, 45, 46, 100, 103, 104, 148, 185 Wiesel, Elie, 55

272

NEGOTIATING WITH JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY

Wilde, Oscar, 32, 33, 259 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 63, 87, 88 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 7, 227 Woman Question, 4, 5, 32, 48, 99, 109, 110, 115, 139, 141, 149, 150, 156, 157, 188, 193, 213, 214, 225

Women’s Protective and Provident League, 106 World Council of Jewish Women, 106 Zatlin, Linda, 33, 231, 260 Zechariah, 177 Zionism, 2, 3, 16, 29, 51, 240 Zohar, 49, 54, 221, 256