Panel: EXPERIENCED INEQUALITIES AND SENSITIVITY TO INEQUALITIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY



1073.1 - THE ENGAGEMENT OF JEWISH "SALONIÈRES" WITH RELIGIOUS TOPICS AND IDENTITY IN LIGHT OF MULTIDIMENSIONAL INEQUALITIES

AUTHORS:
Damian J. (Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies ~ Heidelberg ~ Germany)
Text:
This paper examines the religious engagement of Jewish "salonières" around 1800 in the German-speaking world in light of multidimensional social and religious inequalities. During the Enlightenment and Romantic period, salons functioned as spaces for sociability, networking, and intellectual exchange. Remarkably, many prominent salons were hosted by Jewish intellectual women, who were often autodidacts. These women operated within a Christian majority society in which Jews faced legal, social, and religious discrimination. As both women and Jews, they transcended the boundaries of prevailing social and religious conventions and prescribed gender roles through their (semi-)public activities. They created spaces in which they experienced agency, engaged with influential figures - mostly men - from public and political life, and exerted intellectual and social influence. In doing so, they played an important role both in the broader Enlightenment and in the specifically Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. The Jewish intellectual women about whom we have records - among them well-known figures such as Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, and Dorothea Schlegel - explored religious topics and questions of religious identity. The conversion of some of them to Christianity must also be taken into account in the context of multiple forms of discrimination. Their engagement with religious topics and religious identity has so far remained underexplored in historical scholarship and research on salon culture. This paper - as part of an ongoing doctoral project - provides an exemplary analysis of how these Jewish intellectual women engaged with religious topics and questions of religious identity, and how, through their actions and thinking, they implicitly nurtured notions of equality.