A SALIENT FEATURE emerging from the personal testimonies left by the enlightened Jewish women discussed in this study is the prominent place of reading in their lives. These women had at their disposal not only the indispensable skill of literacy, shared by the ever-growing reading public across Europe, but also—thanks to the relative financial comfort which allowed most of these women to delegate housework to others—the necessary spare time to use it, and in most cases no children of their own to make additional demands on their time and attention. Thus they were able to make read ing a primary activity to which they dedicated a significant amount of time and effort.

An illustrative account of real craving for books—unthinkable in earlier centuries, especially among women—may be found in Henriette Herz’s memoirs. Reading figures as one of the central motives she chose to emphasize when recounting the events of her life, from her childhood until well into adulthood. In the autobiographical text which she started to compose in 1823 and never completed, Henriette typically depicted herself as a compulsive reader. ‘I stopped playing at a very early age, and earlier than might have been good for me, I turned to reading.’ Whenever other activities kept her away from books during the weekdays, she would make up for it on Saturdays and Sundays, and ‘with such speed and assiduity that in one day I could read through several parts of a novel and would constantly run to the lending library not far from our house to pick up more books’.

This urge to read did not wane as the years went by; reading continued to play a central role in her adult life, as it did in the lives of other enlightened Jewish women. It served as a source of knowledge no less than as a means of entertainment, and simultaneously fulfilled an important social function, being a prerequisite for social interaction in the modern world, the basis for cultured conversation, and a recurrent theme in learned correspondence.

JEWISH WOMEN IN THE READING PUBLIC—A REVOLUTION?

Henriette Herz's depiction of her intensive engagement with reading raises questions regarding the singularity of this phenomenon in the history of Jewish women.