The Revolt against Jewish Tradition Didn’t Benefit Jewish Women

In the 19th century, due to massive social and political changes, large numbers of European Jews abandoned their distinctive modes of speech and dress, seized new opportunities for economic advancement, and joined the growing middle class—typically jettisoning religious belief and practice in the process. But bourgeois values, Shulamit Magnus notes, also meant an ideal of husbands and fathers as sole breadwinners. Thus “running shops and commercial businesses” or “managing loans,” once normal activities for Jewish women, ceased to be so. Nowhere is this change made clearer than in the memoirs of Pauline Wengeroff, a pious Russian Jew whose husband, after their marriage, rejected his faith: