Judaism

Although Jewishness is generally understood as a duty, a cultural commitment to the Jewish people, what function better characterizes Judaism, a religion with a complex legal and social system affecting every aspect of everyday life, is its ongoing process, the constant interaction between the past and the present. However, the changes in Judaism brought about by feminism resulted from alliances between Jewish feminists and religious movements committed to particular liberal principles.

In traditional Judaism the religious domain has been exclusively male, and even though not all male men study Torah, the pursuit of such study has for centuries been what defines the ideal male status. Embodiment is a crucial structure of gender; the unity of gender and sex is essential for traditional Jews. It is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform not only through compulsory heterosexuality, but also through a strict gender differentiation in religious matters and the daily duties of religion, maintained in dress code and in sexual roles as well.

Jews, considered the People of the Word, forbade that word's use to women. No women are recorded as consequential authorities in the canonical writings; on the contrary, as Judith Baskin (1994) stresses, the classical texts of Rabbinic Judaism constitute women as objects of male agency. This is corroborated by Judith Romney Wegner's exploration of the rabbinic portrayal of women's place that reveals "a system in which women's cultural image, social function, and legal status combine to perpetuate patriarchal norms that had governed Jewish and surrounding cultures for centuries" (1998, p. 73). Traditional Judaism thus has a strong investment in an ideal portrait of the Jewish woman, one that remains sexually normative and respectful of social traditions governing gender.

The hegemony of traditional Judaism was maintained even though Jews were dispersed after the fall of the Second Temple in the first century ce, and such hegemonic tradition only ended with the tremendous changes that stirred Jewry from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Jonathan Sacks argues that "the processes of emancipation, the confrontation with enlightenment, acculturation, and assimilation, brought about the metamorphosis of religious anti-Judaism into racial anti-Semitism, the transformation of Jewish existence into the Jewish problem and finally the crisis of Jewish self-definition" (1993, p. 2)

The transition of the European Jewry to modernity, during the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, was marked by diversity and profound divisions that fragmented Jewish communities' unity. Indeed, the aspiration to be part of society and to prove their loyalty and their obligation to preserve their own religious and cultural values placed Jews in a conflicting position, making it difficult to keep a balance between the dual allegiances. It is with a strong desire to evolve from a traditional self-governing community to a more integrated and assimilated citizenry that French, German, and English Jews made the necessary changes. French Jewish leaders, for instance, adopted in 1808 a consistorial system to centralize religious governance of Jewish life with the support of the French state.

This period of revolutionary changes also witnessed the emergence of the modern Jewish woman. Women responded to the challenges of modernity in different ways according to their social background. Those who participated in the secularization enthusiastically adhered to socialism and feminism. In Eastern Europe, the fight for social change was embraced by adhering either to socialism or to Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement founded in the early nineteenth century to establish a Jewish political independence. Zionism promoted a return to the land of Israel, but it only gained momentum with the Russian pogroms of 1881 to 1883 and the anti-Semitism pervading in France at that period and that escalated during the 1890s and 1900s with the Dreyfus affair: The young Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), was wrongly convicted of treason, and the judicial and political scandal that ensued profoundly divided the country until his rehabilitation. These events accelerated the formulation of a precise program by its leaders Judah Leib Pinsker (1821–1891) and Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). In Russia and Poland the Bund, the General Jewish Labor Union, also attracted scores of women, who represented about one third of its members, and holding positions of middle rank leadership.

Many Jewish women from the upper classes actively sought participation in Jewish society by transforming the traditional forms of Jewish charity. They combined them with new forms of philanthropy and social welfare promoted by their Christian counterparts. In the United States, and more particularly in Philadelphia, Rebecca Gratz (1781–1869) was able to establish with several other women the Female Hebrew Benevolent society for the local Jewish poor in 1819 and the first Hebrew Sunday school in 1838. Louise Rothschild played a similar philanthropic role in England. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish women's organizations proliferated among the Gentile elite on local and national levels.

JEWISH PRESENCE

Jewish communities have often totally or partially disappeared in many countries, but after the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel, communities were recreated or regrouped differently. Modern-day Jews, although now comprising a small portion of the world's population, are found all over the world. In Europe, communities extend from Portugal to Russia and from Norway in the north to Greece in the south. They have been a growing presence notably in Britain, France, and Canada, an increase that is often related to immigration from other countries. Despite their small numbers, Jews remain nevertheless culturally central in various countries in Europe and North America where the rescue of the rich Jewish cultural past is a phenomenon that has rapidly spread. Numerous Jewish museums have sprung up, and in Europe former Jewish neighborhoods have become tourist attractions and no longer are only Jewish groups targeted as potential visitors. Ruth Ellen Gruber affirms that beyond the educational role and the composition of a public face of Judaism, these initiatives are among the most significant tools with which Europeans seek to "fill in the blanks" (2002, pp. 126-127).

France and Great Britain have the two largest Jewish communities in Western Europe, France particularly, because of the influx of Jews from North Africa. In both countries there is a strong presence of Orthodox Jews, but liberalizing movements are increasingly attracting European Jews. Growing German Jewish communities have benefited from the influx of Russian Jews and have moved away from the closed community with its authoritarian leadership in place since the post-World War II (1914–1919) period until the 1980s. They have instead opened a range of small alternative synagogues formed with often small circles of artists, musicians, and others in the cultural Jewish sphere.

The revival of Jewish communities in former communist countries is weak and even dwindling, according to observers due to intermarriage, emigration, and near indifference to religious identity. The Jewish communities in Russia have been revitalized by the efforts of Chabad's presence in many cities safeguarding integrated Jews against total assimilation. Chabad, a Hasidic (the pious) sect, with its headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, is a unique and modern revival of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mystical Ultra-Orthodox Jews who have instituted as their mission the rescue of assimilated Jews.

The largest Jewish community outside of Israel is in the United States, where Reform and Conservative movements have gained supremacy over Orthodoxy. Thanks to these two movements, American Jewish women have entered intellectual areas that were previously forbidden to them. They have obtained the right to study and be ordained as rabbis and cantors, although prestigious congregations still do not hire women as rabbis. These changes have allowed them to don tallitot (prayer shawls) and put on tefillin (phylacteries), two rituals of public prayer strictly reserved for men in traditional Judaism. They have also changed the language of traditional liturgy to eliminate gender specifications.

Israel, caught between the masculinist Zionist culture and the European and North American liberal ideologies, is dominated by Orthodoxy, which remains the official religious representation. Although the family and mother still play a central role in the lives of Israeli Jews, many define themselves as secular.

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

According to a general consensus, no more than one third of Jews in North America are affiliated with a congregation; religious involvement is limited to use of denominational labels. The two major currents within Judaism are traditional Judaism as represented by the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, and Liberal Judaism, which comprises the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements and some Modern Orthodox communities.

Orthodoxy, defined by the strict observance of halakha (Jewish law), consists of groups of believers who have distinctive views and different approaches to religion: One such group consists of Modern Orthodox believers, who in their attempt to be active participants in contemporary society, have made academic provision for women in Jewish studies. Another such group consists of Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and around the world that voluntarily segregate themselves not only from non-Jews but also from what they regard as nonobservant Jews. Strict Orthodox Judaism requires a rigorous observance of the rabbinic laws. Gender scripts inform social roles and obligations. In these communities that value spirituality and stress male preeminence, there has been since the mid-1990s an effort to develop and adapt women's education, given that women have become the breadwinners of the family because their husbands devote themselves to studying the Torah. Every aspect of Orthodox women's life is centered on family commitments. It includes celebrating the Shabbat and the other holy days, sending their children to a Jewish day school, keeping kosher (dietary laws), dressing in accordance with the laws of tsniut (modesty), and the obligation to wear headscarves or wigs to cover their hair when married. Orthodox women also observe the commandment of taharat hamishpacha (the laws of family purity), rules that govern the separation of women from their husbands during the time of menstruation and for a week afterward. This monthly period of abstinence is followed by a ritual bath of purification in a miqveh. According to numerous Orthodox women, this ritual fosters respect of women's cycles and more importantly creates a community of women.

The status of women remains an important issue in Orthodox communities, where women are pivotal in the perpetuation of the tradition but are denied a role in the spiritual realm. They are not instrumental in the synagogue leadership, they cannot be called to recite the blessing or read the Torah, and they are excluded from the minyam (a quorum of ten men required for public prayer). Their place in the synagogue is an assigned section separated from men by a partition (mechitzah). In response to the increasing feminist consciousness among Orthodox women, a movement called Tefillah Network, traditional women's prayer groups, developed in the early 1980s to afford women greater participation in public religious life. The movement has encountered strong opposition within the Orthodox community.

Reform and Conservative movements taken as a combined entity have a strong following in the United States and Canada but remain marginal in Jewish communities in France, Italy, and England. The first Reform Temple was founded in Germany in 1817 to retain loyalties of the rapidly assimilating German Jews and was introduced in North America by German Jews arrived during the 1830s and 1840s. Reform believers rejected the Orthodox views and the traditional practices of kashrut, the laws of purity, that had governed Jewish life and very importantly also rejected the matrilineal descent. The inclusion was facilitated by services conducted in English with mixed seating, mixed choirs, and coeducational Sunday schools as early as the mid-nineteenth century. The Reform movement has also the highest number of mixed marriages among its members. By the 1970s, Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ) championed numerous causes and fought for women's participation in all aspects of synagogue life, including serving as rabbis. Women rabbis have changed the rabbinate model and according to Deborah E. Lipstadt (2001), their growing presence in rabbinical seminaries has promoted curricular changes. They demanded the introduction of Jewish women studies and also to be trained to deal with more feminist subjects, such as domestic violence, breast cancer prevention, and body image. Their arrival in a male profession was not always easy, and very few indeed have been appointed senior rabbis of large congregations. Women cantors on the other hand did not encounter such opposition. By the late 1980s openly gay believers were accepted as members, and in 1990 the Union of American Hebrew Congregations began ordaining openly gay and lesbian rabbis. By the year 2000 Reform rabbis were allowed to officiate at same-sex weddings.

As a reaction not to Orthodoxy but to Reform, which was according to many increasingly considered to be abandoning too many of the tenets of traditional Judaism, the Conservative movement was founded in 1887 and experienced its greatest expansion during and after World War II. Conservative Judaism has occupied the middle ground of the three main Jewish movements, trying to adapt traditional Jewish practices to the modern world, but gradually it introduced many changes similar to Reform: mixed seating, mixed choirs, and bat-mitzvah ceremonies for girls. Starting in the 1970s and culminating in the 1980s, Conservative leaders committed themselves to gender equality, and under communal pressure from a group called Ezrat Nashim (helpers of women), they started to give women full participation in religious observance, to recognize them as witnesses before Jewish law, to allowed them to initiate divorce, and to permit them to study for the rabbinate and be ordained as rabbis and be trained as cantors. The Conservative movement welcomes gays but still prohibits same-sex commitment ceremonies. The Conservative movement is in the process of granting admission to rabbinical and cantorial schools to openly gay and lesbian students.

The Reconstructionist movement is small and mostly concentrated in Philadelphia. It represents an ideology that views Judaism as an evolving religion with an ambiguous position between Reform and Conservative. Its founding was the result of the split away from the Conservative movement in 1968. The movement that emerged, a Judaism without supernaturalism, owes its name to the radical thinker Mordecai Kaplan (1981), who was influenced by the sociologic doctrine of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). The movement granted complete participation to women and eliminated a male-dominated liturgy by rewriting the siddur (prayer book). It recognizes as being Jewish those children of mixed marriages in which the mother is not Jewish. It permits their rabbis to participate in civil marriage ceremonies between Jew and non-Jew. Women have been ordained rabbis since 1975, and openly lesbian students have been admitted since 1985.

Outside these denominational groups, a movement to establish gay and lesbian synagogues began in the early 1970s in New York and Los Angeles; as of the early twenty-first century there are twenty-five queer synagogues throughout the United States and Canada. Congregation Beth Simcha Torah in New York City, with 800 members, is considered the largest gay synagogue in the world. Queer Jews—lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender—have succeeded in making Jewish spaces for themselves, and gradually more liberal non-queer Jewish institutions are responding with a new inclusiveness. The emergence of the debate on the intersection of religion and queer sexuality and the questions about belonging and home in global Jewish communities is fairly recent. It especially took place after the release of Dubowski's "Trembling before G-d," which documents the lives of gay and lesbian Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. Unlike American queer Jewish communities, queer political movement in Israel has not centered on issues reclaiming Jewish spiritual identity and religious practices.

Judaism has incurred tremendous changes, evolving and redefining itself, and in the process ensuring its survival in the postmodern era. Although queer Jews openly serving as rabbis, Hebrew school teachers, and in other positions of authority and women's increased participation in a male-dominated Judaism acknowledge great changes in Judaism, nonetheless, nonnormative sexuality still remains prohibited by Orthodox Jews, and in general, women have yet to occupy a stronger level of leadership in Jewish institutions and communities.

see also Esther; Hokhma; Jewish Tradition, Gender and Women; Jewish Women's League; Judaism, Gender and Queering.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alpert, Rebecca Sue; Levi Elwell; and Shirley Idelson, eds. 2001. Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Baker, Adrienne. 1993. The Jewish Woman in Contemporary Society: Transitions and Traditions. New York: New York University Press.

Baskin, Judith. 1994. "Rabbinic Judaism and the Creation of Women" In Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bodemann, Y. Michal. 2006. "A Jewish Cultural Renascence in Germany?" In Turning the Kaleidoscope: Perspectives on European Jewry, ed. Sandra Lustig and Ian Leveson. New York: Berghahn Books.

Boyarin, Daniel. 1997. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley; London: University of California Press.

Cromer, Gerald. 1993. "Withdrawal and Conquest: Two Aspects of the Haredi Response to Modernity." In Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective: Religion, Ideology, and the Crisis of Modernit, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein. New York: New York University Press.

Davis-Kram, Harriet. 1980. "The Story of the Sisters of the Bund." Contemporary Jewry 5: 27-43.

Dubowski, Sandi Simcha. 2003. "Trembling Before G-d." Catholics for a Free Choice 24(1): 36.

Gachinsky, Michael. 1998. "Engendering Liberal Jews: Jewish Women in Victorian England." In Jewish in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Gruber, Ruth Ellen. 2002. Virtually Jews: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hayman, Paula. 1995. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Kaplan, Mordecai M. 1981. Judaism as a Civilization. Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. 2001. "Feminism and American Judaism: Looking Back at the Turn of the Century." In Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, ed. Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press.

Marmon, Naomi. 1999. "Reflections on Contemporary Miqveh Practices." In Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law, ed. Rahel R. Wasserfall. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press.

Romney Wegner, Judith. 1998. "The Image and Status of Women in Classical Rabbinic Judaism." In Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Sacks, Jonathan. 1993. One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity. Washington, DC: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.

Shalvi. Alice. 1995. "The Geopolitics of Jewish Feminism." In Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, ed. T. M. Rudavsky. New York: New York University Press.

Shneer, David. 2002. "Out at School: A Queer Jewish Education." In Queer Jews, ed. David Shneer and Caryn Aviv. London: Routledge.

Umansky, Ellen M. 1995. "Feminism and American Reform Judaism." In The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen. New York: New York University Press.

Wasserstein, Bernard. 1996. Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

                                        Rosa Alvarez Perez