Emancipating the Jewess: Queen Esther’s Unfinished Business in Modern France

• In Event: Who Speaks for the Jews? Unconventional Claims about the Jews as Religion and Nation

Abstract

This paper examines mid-nineteenth century debates over the role of women in Judaism and in the modern French nation. Scholarship on gender differences in French Jewish thought and practice remains underdeveloped, and tends to see men and women as agreeing upon a division of labor. According to this view, male leaders and thinkers prescribed religious education for women in order to cultivate their roles as conveyors of Jewish identity and spirituality in the domestic sphere. Such an outlook assumes a united front of Jewish thought regarding the place of religion in the nineteenth-century French Jewish project of “regenerating” Jews as citizens. In fact, however, women’s ideas on the topic differed significantly. Julienne Bloch—daughter of Simon Bloch, founder of one of France’s most important Jewish newspapers, L’Univers Israélite—offers a fascinating counter example. In her regular column in L’Univers Israélite between 1855 and 1860, Bloch argued aggressively for radical changes to women’s roles, and advocated for the expansion of the feminine presence out of the home and into the synagogue and religious community.

In this larger context, this paper will explore the ways that Bloch’s profound commitment to French nationalism informed her reading of the Book of Esther and shaped her arguments for the religious emancipation of women from what she deemed their prison of passivity. The legacy of the French Revolution and its promises to the Jews strengthened her belief in the uniqueness of the French Jewish mission. Yet Bloch argued that Esther’s emancipation of women remained unfinished and that despite its contributions and qualities, France was preventing the Jews from completing the great task begun by their biblical queen. “Emancipation” for Bloch was quite flexible—she used it to discuss freedom from paternal tyranny, freedom from religious oppression, and also belonging to a modern state. For Julienne Bloch, the French Jewish emancipatory mission abroad and regenerative mission at home were incomplete if they did not encompass changes specifically for women. Bloch's writings serve as a case study for the polyvalent meanings of nation and religion for Jewish women in nineteenth-century struggles for emancipation in France and beyond.

author

• Katherine Eade Guenoun, University of Wisconsin-Madison