SOCIABILITY AND CONVERSATION were central features of eighteenth-century life among the educated classes and were closely connected with Enlightenment culture. Though not all forms of sociability practised in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be attributed to the Enlightenment or associated with enlightened goals—many, indeed, perpetuated and elaborated earlier practices—sociable communication both received a great boost from the Enlightenment and constituted one of its defining attributes. The scientistic character traditionally ascribed to the Enlightenment, with its central image of the enlightened intellectual as a detached, solitary observer of the universe committed to the search for objective knowledge, has been replaced in research on this era by an image of the Enlightenment as a world of discourse and of enlightened men and women as sociable individuals engaged in conversational exchange.

The importance accorded to interpersonal communication in the eighteenth century is reflected in the remarkable proliferation across Europe, including the German lands, of arenas in which people could socialize, enabling individuals of different ranks and backgrounds to intermingle. The array of discursive and cultural spaces that evolved during the Enlighten - ment to facilitate the circulation of ideas and opinions ranged from informal public places to institutionalized societies, encompassing coffee-houses, reading societies, learned academies, Masonic lodges, and—as discussed in the previous chapter—entire spa towns.

Like many of their contemporaries, modernizing Jews in Germany endorsed the significance of sociability as a factor that could contribute to personal and social improvement, and sought to participate in a variety of social contexts. Sociability and conversational culture were integral to the lives of the Jewish women in Berlin at the heart of this study, and they assiduously employed the means of communication available to them—helping, indeed, to shape and transform some of them. Previous chapters have shown how these women participated in the circulation of ideas among a cultured European public through reading, writing, and publishing, and how they implemented ideals of sociability and communication by exchanging letters and visiting the spas. This chapter will focus on another practice that served the same ends—the gatherings that took place in private homes, providing a setting for social interaction and cultural exchange among themselves, with other members of the Jewish community, and, significantly, with non-Jews.